Elemental makes use of a brand new 3D engine developed specifically for PC strategy games. Its multithreaded design along with dynamic LOD (level of detail) allows for it to look great on a wide range of hardware.

To see and understand why Elemental can look good on low end hardware and yet benefit further from higher end hardware see for yourself how the dynamic LOD works:

Look very very closely here.  This isn’t one 3D object. This is dozens of 3D objects. The engine determines how powerful your hardware is and based on that can choose to display objects based on that.

As more objects come into view, certain “less important” objects start to fade away:

Did something change?

Look closely. Did something change?

How about now?

As a result of the object-based system that Kumquat provides, the graphics look identical at a casual glance and yet, the polygon count is dramatically less in the third image.

And users with very low end hardware can simply play using the sprite based output (cloth map mode):

Because Kumquat is a PC-only graphics engine, it can make a different set of trade offs than the traditional cross-platform engine. Namely, it can assume players have a considerable amount of memory (1 gigabyte is the minimum total system memory to play a Kumquat based game – very little on a PC but twice what a current generation console has).  Thus, a given game object can be made up of many sub-objects (which use more memory) but can be dynamically turned on or off based on 3D hardware instead of having to load up lower-quality 3D models.

After the Cataclysm, much of the accrued knowledge of the world was lost. One of your priorities will be to find scholars who can recover this lost knowledge.

Elemental doesn’t have a traditional technology tree. Instead, it has 5 research categories (the Kingdoms and the Empires have different categories). When enough research has been done, a breakthru in that category is made and the player is presented with possible technologies to learn at that point. 

When choosing a category, a given technology is color coded (green, yellow, red). Green means that technology will be available upon the breakthru being made.  Yellow means it might be available. Red means it will possibly be available. In addition, there are certain technologies that are so rare that they are not displayed until the time of the breakthru.

Each new level of a given category takes more research to achieve than the previous. Hence, players have to be mindful of what technology they choose, particularly when deciding whether to pick up a rare technology that becomes available.

Acquiring Knowledge

There are two primary ways of acquiring knowledge in Elemental.  The first way is to construct improvements to your city that attract scholars. The second is to actually recruit famous scholars, inventors and other specialists as you find them.

Constructing Studies

Recruiting NPCs

Elemental is a turn-based strategy game that takes place on a world that was once filled with magic but now finds itself recovering from a great conflict known as “The Cataclysm”. In this post-cataclysm world, only a handful of of beings are capable of casting spells. These beings, known as Channelers, have begun to set up realms across the world.

As one of these Channelers, you are the sovereign of a Kingdom or an Empire.  The Kingdoms are realms set up by sovereigns who channel magic through the power of life.  The Empries are realms set up by sovereigns who channel their magic through the power of death.  As their realms expand, the environment changes based on which source their magic comes from.

Across the world are strewn the four basic elemental shards of power (Earth, Air, Fire, Ice). Controlling these shards allows a given sovereign to cast ever more powerful spells.

In addition to magic, players can research technology, design units, go on quests, negotiate treaties, build a family dynasty, recruit heroes and much more.

Amassing Power

As one of the few channelers in the world, you have the capability of sacrificing some of your essence by imbuing champions in your realm with the ability to cast magic as well. On the one hand, this decreases your ultimate individual power capability, on the other hand, your champions can become powerful enforcers of your will across the world.

More than 4X

While amassing resources is a critical part to building a successful realm, the world of Elemental is filled with neutral beings of various forms who can be recruited to your side.  Moreover, players can quest to obtain key artifacts, weapons of great power, and critical knowledge. Having the biggest army is not necessarily the best path to victory. There are many different strategies that change from game to game.

In Galactic Civilizations, Sins of a Solar Empire and Demigod, the difficulty levels of computer players were either hard coded or very hard to access for players.

In Elemental, the difficulty levels are in an XML file called CoreDifficultyLevels.xml

The game will read from the different difficulty levels and display them in game. Players can create new difficulty levels themselves if they’d like by changing this file.

In Galactic Civilizations, I only had 3 real variables to play with (and were all in a .h file).  They were the AI intelligence, the AI money ratio, and whether the AI had FOW cheats. 

The AI intelligence ratio was how often the AI got to use the “smart” algorithms versus the “normal” algorithms. The smart ones took up a lot more CPU but produced much more intelligent result (they are the halmark of what we used to refer to as the “SDS/AI” back in the OS/2 days).

In Elemental, we have a few more variables to play with such as whether the AI gets to use combat magic, how many points the AI gets to add to their sovereign (compared to the human player) and their starting funds.

What’s nice about a data driven difficulty system is that players can create their own difficulty levels as they see fit very easily.  One of my favorites (that I would do in my personal builds of GalCiv) was to give the AI a ton of money but make it absolutely stupid so that I was just trying to make my way through hordes of poorly designed ships and terrible unit strategy.

With Elemental, I could see players creating all kinds of interesting scenarios because (and this should be remembered because it’s important) the keys are not file based. That is, you don’t have to put things into coredifficultylevels.xml. The game simply looks in directories based on the keys. So you could literally create a new difficulty level in a file called BobsSuperCustomLevels.xml and hand them out.

One AI promise from me personally to you guys

The AI in our games is only as good as I am. The better I get at the game, the better the AI will get.  So while I’m working hard to make sure the AI in Elemental is good, know that it will keep getting better long after release.  In the Starcraft 2 beta, I started out in Copper. Now, I’m in the Platinum league. Practice makes perfect.

Getting ready for beta 2. It’ll either be this Thursday or the following Thursday. Last week I was visiting journalists on the west coast showing off Elemental so i didn’t get to work on the AI and some other pieces of the game that I think need to be a bit further along before beta 2 starts.

The modding tools won’t be part of beta 2 (they come with beta 4 which is expected to start sometime in July).

Now, the richness of the included modding tools is not because we’re anti-DLC.  There will be plenty of expansion packs for Elemental in the years ahead.  But we strongly believe that the community itself may find lots of interesting things to do with the world of Elemental (and beyond) if we provide consumer-level tools to do cool stuff.

If you think that screenshot above is neat, wait till you see the video since all of that is animated too.

I’m 40th in the Platinum League in Starcraft 2.  I am hoping to get into the top 10 before the beta ends. We’ll see.

I’m on the plane back from a media tour in San Francisco where I demoed Elemental and talked on a wide variety of issues.  This next week I recommend keeping an eye on the Elemental site as most of the coverage will come around there.

A few quick highlights in no particular order:

Re DRM:

I talked to Chris Remo at Gamasutra at length. I explained to him that our anti-DRM policy isn’t because we’re a bunch of hippies. In fact, I told him that if Stephanie (my PR minder who was about to become horrid) wasn’t there, I’d be trying to harvest his organs right then and there. As a greedy, cold blooded capitalist, my job is to maximize profits and I do that by trying to maximize sales. Piracy pisses me off emotionally and if I thought requiring retinal exams would increase my sales I would. But reality is, piracy is an overblown excuse. 

Re Steamworks vs. Impulse::Reactor:

I may prefer Valve to Microsoft as a the gate keeper to digital distribution on the PC but you know what’s better than Valve as a gate keeper? Having nobody as a gate keeper.  The problem is that right now, there’s no real alternative to Steamworks. The publishing market is divided into three groups. The indies who want to sell their stuff in as many places as possible.  The titans who have the capacity to exist within themselves (think EA and Blizzard) and the guys who basically could care less if the PC became a closed platform because they see it as just another place to sell their cross platform stuff. 

The main advantage of Impulse::Reactor is that it doesn’t require a game developer to bundle a third party store with their game which is a pretty big deal. 

Re Elemental:

Elemental is a strategy game that exists in an RPG world. The thing is, Elemental’s release is the beginning of the adventure, not the end.  We plan to keep working on Elemental for the next year or more after release. There’s just so much there we can do, especially with the modding tools and such.

Re Consoles, iPads, etc.:

Huge markets. My main issue is that the games I like to make the most require a lot of memory (by console terms). Elemental uses a gig of RAM to deliver its world. I can’t do that on a 512MB console and I’m not willing to sacrifice the game for cross-platformness.

Re Can NEW (i.e. non-sequel) turn-based PC-only strategy games thrive:

Yes. Our demographic is highly selective. But if you deliver a good game, you will see the sales.

Re Random House:

Having Random House’s Del Rey writing team develop the fictional lore of Elemental definitely made a big impact on the game’s design. I think users will very much like the way the game almost feels like an RPG even though their “role” is to be king (or queen).

Originally, Elemental was going to have continuous turn combat. That effectively meant real-time. Ultimately, after playing around with it, we decided to implement turn based (simultaneous turns based on combat speed) with tiles.

The evolution of tactical combat in Elemental owes a lot to the beta program.  9 Months of public beta testing of the game engine with corresponding debates has led to some important changes that would not have happened otherwise. 

A lot of the discussion resulted in us thinking about the game in ways we didn’t think of before.  Specifically, how do we address game design issues that have plagued our genre for decades now? If you’re a strategy gamer, you know them well.

For us, the challenge of tactical combat has been about giving the player as much control as possible over how long tactical combat should last.  This ultimately led to the realization that the funnest way for us turned out to be to have the strategic elements of combat very clear and well defined.

Elements of Tactical Combat

In no particular order these are the things that matter:

• Combat Speed. Your combat speed determines how many “moves” / attacks you get during a particular turn.  In the begging of Lord of the Rings, what makes Sauron such a bad ass is that he can attack so many units at once. He has, in game turns, an incredible combat speed.
• Morale.  Unit morale matters but for fun purposes, we try to keep it straight forward. Units have High Morale (25% combat bonus), Normal Morale (no bonus), Low Morale (25% combat penalty), and Panic (you don’t control them). It provides a whole new avenue for us to play in.
• Terrain. This is where the tile based part mattered for us (and for the AI). Some terrain, obstacles, and tiles simply provide better offensive and defensive bonuses, Controlling them matters.
• WINNER. TAKE. ALL. This is the part where we want to hear your opinions. We do ask that you keep an open mind on what we ultimately go with.  My opinion is that the attacking player has the onus to finish the battle in N turns. After N turns, the attacker morale starts to go lower and lower at which point the defender can come out and make mince meat out of them.  The question is, what should determine what N is?  Or should we allow retreating? Should we allow draws?  I’m against retreats or withdraws because it’s one of those things that allows the game to drag on. It’s a strong personal preference of mine that two men enter, one man leaves. (Your heroes will tend to escape though).
• Combined Arms. Archers have range. Mounted Warriors have great combat speed. Foot soldiers tend to have better weapons and defenses.  It means putting together your army matters a lot. It also is important to us that players understand precisely why they won or lost a battle.
• Thresholds. Players can set the tactical battle threshold in the menu. That is, they can say it requires 10 units on each side before it’ll actually go into tactical battle.  At any point, players can have a tactical battle auto-resolve.

Remaining Questions and issues:

1. Controlling the length of a tactical battle.  We believe that users should have a lot of control over how in depth they want their battles to be. Should a tactical battle finish in less than a minute or should they last 2 hours? How do we make it so that players can control this?
2. Randomization vs. Richness. I won’t lie to you, we have a trade off in front of us and it’s a big one.  We can randomly generate the battlefields in tactical combat OR we can have it pick from a series of pre-made tactical battle maps.  The randomly generated ones won’t be as interesting but they’ll more accurately reflect the local terrain.  I’m preferring the pre-made ones because we can add some spectacular strategic when we’re crafting them and have hundreds to pull from.

Not only does Delta have WiFi on its flights, but power outlets.  This is heaven.

(written on the plane)

I don't know what to call this but the marketing people will come up with something I'm sure.

Elemental will quietly use lots of cool graphical features to make the game still look good on older hardware.

This is a screenshot of Elemental on a low end ATI mobile card.

While someone looking at it can tell the difference between this and the glory of the latest hardware, it's surprising subtle to casual users.

https://draginol.stardock.net/images2009/ElementalScreenshotMay2010_1130D/image.png

My attitude is thus: If I can't play Elemental on my 4 year old laptop on the plane, then it's dead to me but when I get home and play it on my super mega GTX 480 mega machine and have it look awesome, well screw it then.