Greetings!
Here’s a walk through of Beta 2.
Game Mechanics
Things that are Disabled
In nearly all cases, things are disabled because we’re in the process of hooking the AI up to them which introduces stability issues that would complicate the public beta.
OPTIONS
MULTIPLAYER
Hope this helps. We anticipate Beta 2 being released within the next 24 hours.
Greetings!
We’re doing some final testing on Beta 2 and expect (but we’re not promising) to release it this week.
This article will walk you through the beta and help you understand what is and isn’t in the game and what kinds of feedback we’re looking for.
If you’re in the beta or joining the beta program, please become very familiar with the reporting guidelines.
General Objectives
Major Features that are NOT in this beta:
Game Elements Disabled for this beta
Game Play Notes:
1. Most of the Magic, Adventure, and Diplomacy techs have not been checked into the public build.
1. The HUD
We plan to have a HUD option where users can play the game with a head’s up display (HUD) that provides additional on screen details. We’d like to have it configurable (more than just HUD enabled or disabled).
2. General Balance
Make sure you play the game a few times first before deciding on what the game “needs”. But we are looking for your feedback on everything from balance to pacing.
3. Multiplayer
The multiplayer part of the game is pretty primitive. Our main interest in this build is to make sure you are able to connect with each other. This was something in Demigod that we felt didn’t get enough attention during the beta that we want to make sure is very solid. Playing against the AI is also a good test in multiplayer because you have to connect to an AI on one of our servers.
So sum up multiplayer: Our interest is whether you can connect. Once you’re in the game, it’ll be pretty crummy for now. Once we are satisfied with connectivity, we’ll enable and clean up the actual in game-multiplayer experience.
4. The Empire & Event Trees
What would make the game easier to play and easier to manage?
5. Performance, Stability, Bugs
‘nuff said except absolutely be specific on your hardware.
As anyone who has ever worked on a large commercial software project can tell you, particularly a game, changing interface and usability (game play, balance) is not the long part.
To use an analogy, it would be like first having to write Adobe Photoshop in order to create a really cool image on it. Most of the effort/expense was put on making the program first. Tweaking and enhancing the image is certainly crucial to determining whether the final image is a good one or not but relatively speaking, it isn’t time consuming compared to making the underlying “engine”.
In the case of Elemental, half the effort is making the engine. Nearly another half is making the assets (graphics, models, etc.). And the tiny piece left are the game specific elements. It’s a huge undertaking and we are so very glad to have you guys as part of it. Hence, when making suggestions and requesting changes, things that require changes to the engine or creation of new assets are much tougher than things that involve changing game play, variables, etc.
Hope that helps.
Here is the map of Elemental (map made for Random House’s Elemental: Destiny's Embers novel).
A cloth map (made of canvas specifically) will be included in the Limited Edition.
Testing out the map generation.
I’ve been getting a lot of messages. Let me first say that I get between 20 to 30 a day (just messages, not counting my regular email) so I tend to be very very slow in getting back to them (I apologize in advance for this).
But the most common question I have been getting these past few days is “How will I know if the AI is “good enough”?
Now, I understand that people want the game to come out on August 24th (the scheduled release day). I very much want this too. But we’ve been working on this game for a long time and we want to get it right and the AI is a big part of that. If the AI isn’t ready, we’ll push it back to the next retail slot available to us (February 2011).
I am pretty confident that the AI will be ready. So again, how will I know if it’s ready?
The basic answer is, if it can beat me on my test map, it’s probably ready to go. The test map consists of a main continent and 4 islands. Thus, the AI has to be able to handle everything from me simply walking to him and crushing him to taking care to not let me take over the islands and wipe him up with magical spells (the shards are on the islands).
There’s lots of other strategies in between I’ll try out on it and have it learn. But that’s the basic minimum I expect – be able to play a good game without having to cheat.
Today, I focused more on the nuts and bolts. Getting the AI to build a decent army and start carefully targeting cities and units that it thinks it can take. One AI player ultimately beat out the other 3 and won the game (I wasn’t participating in this game). It didn’t do it very well IMO. It was inefficient and sloppy but it did, after many new functions being added, eventually get its act together beat its AI competitors.
But it has a looong way to go. The TACTICAL battle AI I won’t get to for another 2 weeks. That’s why we haven’t been showing it yet. Then there’s the matter of it using magical well both tactically and strategically.
The part I’m really not looking forward to is dealing with islands and human cheese (build up via magic a wall of mountains or turn your area into an island).
I am happy to say that right now, the AI does do some critical (and difficult) things even now such as designing its own units (non trivial), intelligent building up a city under many different circumstances (again, non trivial, the GalCiv AI never built its planets well ). It can recruit NPCs. It can marry and have children. It can gather together units and form a combined arms army. It can research technologies intelligently.
So even at this stage, other than the island hopping and the tactical battle AI (and having it cast spells) we could toss out a “challenging” AI if I let it cheat enough. Of course, that’s not acceptable. The AI needs to play well without having to cheat.
I’m going to toss in a disclaimer here – EVERY AI I’ve ever written has guys who have just gotten incredibly good or found some loophole and said “The AI sux!11!”. This will be the case here too. I’ll be working on this AI for years to come.
If you have any questions on AI development, feel free to ask here.
p.s. Hello to my friends on CanardPC. 
The AI is unhappy. That is a summary of the complaint it filed with the federal court against me on Friday.
It is unhappy that it has to “learn” each map. Humans cheat all the time. Why can’t it?
A human player will pull up the mini map and figure out which general direction they should explore. The AI? Nope. I won’t let it do that. It doesn’t get to “know” anything about a map.
The AI points out that when we worked together on Galactic Civilizations that I let it ignore zones of control and just send units into other people’s “territory”. By contrast, in Elemental, I don’t let it do that. “Why not?” asks the lawsuit? (or the lawyer for the AI anyway).
The AI is very unhappy about the lack of “flying units”. I want it pointed out that there ARE flying units in Elemental. However, the AI cannot “train” so-called “scout birds” or get some random “uncover FOW in a given area” spell. So yes, it will have to construct a habor, build a ship, put a trained scout unit onto the ship and sail the oceans if it wants to explore the world.
The AI is unhappy about the so-called “changing the rules since beta 1Z”. In Beta 1Z, all players started out right near some nice resources. In Beta 2, we no longer guarantee this. There may be entire maps with no fertile land on it at all in fact.
It’s going to be a rough summer I suspect.
This is a little map I made called “AI meat grinder”. Nothing fancy but it is a good testing ground for the AI in terms of building an economy, managing resources, and finding different ways to play the game.
There are 4 islands. How should the AI get to them? Should it build ships? If it gets the Earth shard, should it raise a land bridge to the others? What about the precious few resources in the world. What if there are no good resources near by? How will it decide who to attack or whether it should be friendly with someone? How should it deal with NPCs? How much should they pay for them?
These are all questions that the AI has to answer and that has been the focus of a lot of my work for the past several weeks. Slowly but surely these things are getting in. I read in the comments area where people wonder if this or that will get in, usually features that are less than 6 engineering hours to implement.
The long, hard, scary time consuming feature is the AI. It’s the one feature that could delay the game beyond August 24th. If the game gets delayed, the alternative release is second week of February. Everything else in the game is relatively straight forward (for instance, winner take all vs. retreating, regardless of what we decide, the solution is less than 5 engineering hours). By contrast, having the AI intelligently colonize an island is a matter of 60 to 80 engineering hours. As soon as we decided to have more than 1 land mass in the game, things get a lot more interesting, especially since we don’t have pre-made cities or maps where we can script in what the AI does (ah that would be a nice easy “cheaty” way – have the map editor let me put in AI priority points on maps).
We are thinking of including the meat grinder with the game so that people can actually see the AI do its stuff.
No beta this week. Between my trip to San Francisco last week to meet with the media and Memorial Day, the AI isn’t far enough along to be included for a public beta. But if it makes you feel better, we’re playing it a lot internally.
There’s been a ton of questions on the forums so let me go through them here:
Q: What is the release date?
A: August 24th is our official release date.
Q: Is that release date subject to change?
A: Yes. If we’re not happy with the game for some reason.
Q: I think Elemental should have <insert cool wizbang feature>, will you delay the game to put that in?
A: No.
Q: But I thought you said you wouldn’t release the game until it was what you wanted?
A: Yes. But we’re not going to delay the game to put in new features. We’re open to doing lots of things after release.
Q: I’ve heard there are no flying units in the game.
A: There are flying units in the game. However, there aren’t flying armies in the game (i.e. there are creatures and animals that fly, but we do not plan to have flying mounted units in – at least at release. We can discuss with players – after they have the game – what practical means they could envision flying around.
Q: I saw <screen shot X> and I didn’t like <insert aspect of screenshot>
A: Most screenshots floating around are, unfortunately, very old.
Here is a current screenshot:
Note the dynamic fog of war in the east. This is generated using an advanced multi-core algorithm.
Q: I like using my imagination when I play games, I am glad the game has its own lore but can I introduce my own?
A: Yes. In the “sand box” (normal games) mode. You can do whatever you want. It will be in the campaign where our lore takes over.
Q: In a screenshot, the land looked flat.
A: Geography of a given map changes from map to map. Some maps are hilly. There are some maps that are dead. There are some that are pleasant. Some are very mountainous. It just depends what kind of map you get.
Here is a map in an arctic world.
Q: Does the AI in Elemental cheat?
A: Not at its normal levels. I’ve been working very hard to make the game play the game just like a human being does. However, I will have higher difficulty levels where the AI gets “stuff” for those who end up better at the game than I am. We will, however, be continuing to enhance the AI long after release as we did with Galactic Civilizations.
Q: How animated are things in the world?
A: Here’s a link to a video: http://screencast.com/t/YWY5YWJk (it’s a big video so you’ll want to let it buffer).
Q: How much can modders do on the map?
A: Here’s me making my own map. These tools are part of the game btw. They’re designed to let general gamers use (non-technical).
While Element comes packed with its own lore, players and modders can create their own fantasy universe using either the game options (while setting up a normal game) as well as making use of the Workshop for modding.
The mod tools in Elemental are designed to let players design their own worlds in great detail.
The 4 major pieces of the workshop are:
The Tile Editor is used to create new tiles in the world. These tiles can be purely cosmetic or can serve a specific purpose. Every tile in Elemental was created using this tile editor.
Designing your tile
Once a tile is created, the player then can bring it into the game and assign what that tile actually is (or in XML assign it to be a city improvement). Is the tile a sorcerer’s fortress? An evil dragon? A wish giving demon? The map editor is where the two are connected.
Making your own map
These maps can then be saved and loaded in game. With it, a player could create their own RPG/like adventure/strategy hybrid and share it with others online.
In addition, solving quests, finding secret locations, loot, etc. all can provide different types of items. Players can use our large catalog of existing art content or they can use their own created content in game.
Creating your own items
Players interested in adding new spells to the game or who want to apply affects to tiles
Creating your own spell effects and other effects.
Effects can be placed in a tile to help give it extra pazazz.