We really want to avoid having to build “workers” or some other construction unit to build out of city improvements.  But at the same time, we’d like it to be more interesting than simply clicking “build road to city X”.

What do you think?

Tomorrow afternoon we anticipate releasing Elemental Beta 1G. This is the last of the Beta 1 series. 

To reiterate, our betas are not your typical beta. They’re effectively alphas in that there is very little “game” there. It’s mostly about getting early adopters and us talking together about game mechanics and giving each other ideas.

I’ve written this before but in a modern TBS game, it’s 80% engine/assets and 20% “game” (in other genres it’s more like 90% engine/assets and 10% game).  So the purpose of the beta 1 series has been to just let people (and us) try out different game mechanics.  You are getting to see the sausage factory up close which – for us and our beta group is a big part of the “fun” (in a perverse way).

We will have a detailed change log but it’ll be so insanely long that it’ll be hard to tell what the big new things are.

In no particular order:

• Random Maps (though still hard coded to small) are significantly better quality.
• New Screen: Choose your sovereign.
• New Screen: Create a new sovereign
• You get 50 points to spend on:
• improving your base stats (strength, intelligence, etc.)
• Choosing starting spell books
• Choosing your talents (brilliant, persuasive, hardy, diplomatic, seductive, etc.).
• You can get points back for giving your sovereign weaknesses (unlucky, insane, cowardly, etc.)
• Choose what your profession was prior to the cataclysm (mason, merchant, thief, adventurer, warlord, etc.)
• You can choose whether they’re male or female (see Lorina over there who is a sovereign I created).
• Decide what your sovereign looks like (skin, hair, clothes, equipment, colors, etc.).
• Give them a backstory (not functional yet).
• Official Kingdom Factions are in (Empire factions are NOT enabled)
• Altar
• Pariden
• Capitar
• Gilden
• Tarth
• You can create your own faction.
• New Screen: Create your own faction.
• Name your faction
• Choose what race the faction comes from (race really is superficial, think race as in humans)
• Amarian
• Aegeon
• Mancer
• Krax
• Spend points on strengths like Expert Traders, Heroic, Siege Masters, Industrious, etc.
• Get points back by giving your faction weaknesses (arrogant, supersticious, etc.)
• Give your faction its own look (i.e. create your own race)
• Much Better Performance (On a scale from 1 to 10 where 10 is outstanding and 1 is ridiculous, the last beta would have been a 2 and this beta is 4. To ship, we have to get to a 10).
• Much better memory handling.
• Updated UI
• Research Screen heavily updated.
• New Economic System
• Cities have 5 levels
• Outpost
• Hamlet
• Village
• Town
• City
• The base amount of money, research, spell learning and prestige is based on the city level.
• Outpost: 0
• Hamlet: 2
• Village: 4
• Town: 8
• City: 16
• Money is spent on upkeep based on the number of cities you have. The first city costs 0. The second city costs 1. The third city costs 2. and so forth.
• Improvements provide a specific benefit.
• A library provides 1 point of research per turn for instance.
• The number of improvements is tied to the City level:
• Outpost: 1
• Hamlet: 2
• ..
• City: 5
• Updated City Improvement Building system
• IN the beta, outposts get 25 sub-tiles, Hamlets 30…Cities 48.  However, we plant to change this to a flat N number and instead have the limiting factor be the radius from the Keep.
• We also plan (but not in this beta) to have certain types of improvements not require that they be connected to the keep. So a farm or a mine or a sawmill or whatever could be outside of town proper – unprotected but able to be used without having to “snake out” to it from your city.
• We also plan (but not in this beta) to let users queue up buildings outwards and not care if they have already been build. Need the radius modifier in first.
• Choosing improvements UI completely redone. Much much better.
• Certain improvements will automatically upgrade to better buildings at no cost when you have the necessary tech and city level.
• Unit Design Screen Heavily modified.
• One of the major design goals of Elemental is that the people for your armies are coming from somewhere. To that end, when you design a unit, you start with your template which is some guy you grab from town. That means each time you design a unit, the base template guy will look slightly different. Skin tone, hair, clothing, etc. Eventually even height and weight will be slightly different.
• The UI has been cleaned up dramatically.
• New Screen: Magical Studies.
• Based on what spell books you have, you can “purchase” certian spells. You purchase these with spell points.
• Spell points are earned in your towns.
• For the beta, we have a cap of 50 total spell points. Eventually, this cap will be based on beta tester feedback.
• Spells all currently cost 50.
• Magical System In
• Spells require a combination of Mana + control of shards (Earth, Fire, Water, Air). Many spells only require mana. But the most powerful ones or ones specific to a doing a certain thing (like raising a mountain) will require control of a particular shard.
• Beta 2 (the multiplayer beta) will determine a LOT of the spells that go in because we expect (and consider it part of beta testing) for users to engage in the cheesiest tactics they can possibly think of. 
• New Combat System
• A “Unit” may contain multiple individuals (A “party” of soldiers has 4 individuals in that unit)
• An Army contains multiple units
• Elemental doesn’t “stack” in the traditional sense. It integrates. You can put your soldiers, peasants, clubbers, heroes, etc. all in one army and they fight together as a single “unit”.
• Each individual fights in battle.
• A combat turn is made up of 10 rounds. The combat SPEED of the unit determines how many attacks it gets during that turn (maximum combat speed is 10 – 10 attacks in a single turn).
• When a unit within an army attacks, the individuals in that unit all do their attack round.
• First strike goes to the side with the highest initiative (highest combat speed) with the attacking side getting a bonus to its initiative roll.
• We have decided on “Hit Points” because we didn’t like “strength”. Thus, it’s Attack, Defense, Hitpoints. 
• We are looking at adding magical attack and magical defense.
• The may not be necessary to itemize out like that as spells and weapons can and will do “electrical damage” and “arcane damage” and “fire damage” and such but ultimately it comes from the same finite hit points and unless they are protected from a specific type of damage by a sorcerer or an item they’ll simply take it.
• This is something that beta testers will be involved in deciding.
• Heroes level up with each level providing 5 points to spend on improving attributes.
• We are NOT happy with the road building system. Help us make it better.
• Quests (these are still pretty rough as we just go the plumbing in)
• Quests triggered by an event
• Quests triggered by researching a tech
• Quests triggered by going over a quest tile on the map
• Quests can be multi-step (i.e. go here, do this, then return here, then go there, etc.)
• We DO have a kill the rats in the basement quest in.
• Dynasties are now in.
• We’ve temporarily cheesed it so that you just marry a gal (or guy) randomly after N turns. 
• Eventually you’ll have children.
• Those children will eventually grow up.
• When children grow up, you can marry them off to other factions
• Female children go to the other faction but their children have a 67% chance on growing up of joining her family’s faction.
• All children, when grown up, become Champions (heroes, we haven’t decided on the official nomenclature, heroes, champions, etc.).
• Because The Empire isn’t enabled, you cannot currently breed your children to Trogs and Urxen and end up with hideous looking children.  We plan to allow this however in the final version the game despite the horror.
• The Dynasties are pretty cool.
• There is a new sound track for background music. It is still very early but should help show where we’re going with this.
• When a sovereign loses a battle, he is sent home to his nearest city.  Our plan is that sovereigns do not die until their final city is taken UNLESS they are attacked (or attack) on land of the opposite arcane alignment (life/death magic influenced land). If you’re sending your sovereign into battle into the Fallen territory (or vice versa) and lose, it’s over but that’s a case of the player making a very deliberate decision/risk assessment.  You cannot be assassinated.
• Edge scroll should be in
• Negotiations basically is not done yet. The AI will pretty much always reject deals. So don’t worry too much about diplomacy yet.

IMPORTANT NOTES:

This beta is going to be buggy and incomplete. There’s lots of obvious stuff that just doesn’t work yet or is just plain broken. Bear with us as a lot of “stuff” has come together in the past few weeks from the various groups.

What we are looking for are crashes in particular and memory leaks. When the game crashes, if you can send us as much information as possible (particularly the crash location) that would be great. 

See this post: https://forums.elementalgame.com/364285 to get started.

WHEN should the game be fun?

Realistically, Beta 2 should have the game mechanics sufficiently far enough that it should be “fun”.  We will not go to beta 3 until the beta group consensus is that it is ready to progress to beta 3 in terms of “fun” and reasonable stability.

WHEN can I get into the beta?

Officially the answer is Beta 2 which won’t be until mid next month.  However, if you have pre-ordered (or plan to pre-order) we may open the beta for one day this next Thursday and let everyone who has pre-ordered the game up till then in so that if we have to delay beta 2, users aren’t having to keep waiting and waiting because we want to get their feedback in before we go to beta 2.

WHEN is the game supposed to come out?

We are looking at late Summer.  If we’re done sooner, it’ll come out sooner (probably not) if it takes longer for it to be what we want, it’ll get delayed. I want to make sure we’re all on the same page here: This game matters a lot to us. We’ve been thinking about Elemental for a long time so we want to make sure it’s just right. We self-fund our own titles so there is no “publisher” to pressure us. 

That said, based on our internal builds (which includes the full engine that users will get in beta 3) we’re looking at end of August as being fairly safe. If people compare Beta 1D (December) to this beta (2 months later) I think they’ll see how dramatically things have changed. 6 months is a long time but we’ll see.

BETA Screenshots:

Warner Todd Huston has written a statement of conservative values that I found very interesting.  Here it is below.

The Huston Statement 

Since our political climate has long since drifted from the first principles of our founding and since we now face a crisis threatening to tear down our American moral center we commit ourselves to re-establishing our American character.

We believe that our Constitution and the principles espoused in the Declaration of Independence form the best guide by which to nurture our American character and provides a firm bedrock upon which to build a government.

We as Americans believe:

That as individuals we have the right of self-determination, to be free of overweening involvement in our lives by government at all levels from local, to state, to federal.

That as free men we must strongly assert that we are responsible for ourselves, our family, and our property and that others owe us nothing but to observe our rights as we observe theirs.

That our liberties depend on our civic virtue and that it is up to each of us to become informed citizens.

With these God-given liberties in mind, that our representatives must strive to keep government out of the lives of the people to the greatest extent practicable and that they should honor the principles of limited government as handed down to us from our founders.

And we assert that adherence to these principles will act as a beacon of freedom to the world, that we should actively promote them abroad giving succor to all those that would follow in our footsteps, and that we should not lend legitimacy to foreign bodies or nations that retreat from them.

We affirm that:

Private property is sacrosanct

The market-based economy free of government meddling must be preserved

Employees must be free of compulsory associations

Governments must be accountable to the voters not to judges and unions

Communities have the right to draft standards without federal approval

Education is a local responsibility solely under local and state control

It is freedom of religion, not freedom from religion

And that our Second Amendment rights are God-given and cannot be infringed

Additionally, we as Americans also reaffirm that legislation is the rightful duty of our constituted bodies of representatives and not the venue of capricious judges. Ruling from the bench is no better than the ill-considered tyrannies from the throne from which we so long ago rebelled.

Finally, let us understand these principles to be an affirmation of our American character one that has made our nation the richest and strongest nation in human history. Any force, whether domestic or foreign, that wishes to materially alter this character is an enemy to our nation and one that should not be treated lightly but faced squarely and with resolution.

I sometimes wonder what the various greenie sites I visit would think when they realized that I was using their info on how to build a green home to construct a 22,000 square foot house that is, technically green.

Last week we got bumped due to the ImpulseTV launch and the Sins of a Solar Empire update (both happened on Thursday which was our beta update).

So this Thursday we expect to release beta 1G.

Questions?

Q: Will it be fun?

A: No.

Q: Will it at least not cause my eyes to bleed?

A: No. It will still cause eye bleeding.

Q: What about the root kits? Does this beta get rid of the root kits?

A: No. Our malware requires the root kits to be installed.

Q: Does it at least quit uploading my .XLS files to a server in China?

A: Yes. It now only uploads .XLSX files and now it’s to “the cloud”.

Q: Okay then what IS new in this build?

A: Lots.

Q: Can you be more specific?

A: Yes.

Okay fine. Here are some high level details:

• The Dynasty system framework is in. That is, you get married, have kids, and can arrange marries.
• You can get spells.
• The initial customization screens are in. So you now choose your sovereign or can create your own, choose your faction, or create your own, and can use points to customize your sovereign and facgtion.
• The basic quest system is in.
• All of the above are still very basic (i.e. the system is in but the assets will be continually added over the next several months).
• Stability should be considerably better (I hope). Memory usage should be quite a bit better.
• Altar tech tree is in (and they all use it).

Of course, the above involves hundreds of new small features and changes so it will seem quite a bit different.

Q: So when will it be fun?

A: It should be fun by Beta 3.  Buggy but fun.

Q: When is Beta 3 due?

A: April.

Q: What comes next?

A: Beta 2. The Multiplayer beta. That’s in March.

This Thursday we WILL have beta 1G of Elemental.

Anyway, one of the things that I am finding more enjoyable than I realized when we were designing it is the unit design because of the way it UN-abstracts what raising armies means.

In Elemental, when you design a unit, you literally grab a random peasant from your cities to train. That means that each guy will look a little different from the other.

So you take this guy and you then have to decide what you're going to equip him with. That equipment may be cheap in resources but high in training time or maybe it's cheap in training time but high in resources.  These two ingredients determines how quickly your unit is produced.

The reason I'm finding this really enjoyable in our internal betas is because now players get to see the sophistication of different civilizations in action.

The Romans, for instance, couldn't just crank out legions of troops because they had access to iron. Barbarians had access to iron too. They were able to produce legions because they had a sophisticated civilization capable of producing the various pieces of equipment and then training their soldiers how to use it.

And as we'll see later, other factors are equally important when talking about training: Leadership and the effects on morale in battle, effective use of weapons (combat speed), and so on. 

The point being, in Elemental, you really do have a clash of Kingdoms (and Empires) where it's not just about cranking out 50 of the same unit but having to make a lot of interesting choices on what types of units to build, how to equip them, etc.

This techie looking dialog will probably look nicer by release but it isn’t going to go away.

The reason? Transparency to players.

One of my big pet peeves in games that allow tactical battles is that even though they always promise you that you don’t HAVE to fight every tactical battle, you know, deep down, that if you don’t, you’re going to take losses you shouldn’t have.

As the AI guy on Elemental, I want to make sure that the AI handling is about as good as a human player at the auto-resolve stuff.  With the details dialog, we can see what actually happened after the battle.

We get a lot of questions on how moddable Elemental is.  The best way I can answer that is to tell you what our objectives are.

Elemental is a game built on our new Kumquat engine.  Our previous games were developed using an engine we referred to as Pear.

Because it’s our engine, we are free to distribute it in whatever way we want.  Experienced modders can hopefully chime in the comments area to explain to others the importance (in terms of modding) that we own the whole engine and thus are under no constraints.

So let’s walk through some frequently asked questions:

Q: What kinds of mods would you expect modders to be able to make with Elemental (Kumquat)?

A: I would expect someone to be able to create pretty much any type of game with it. More specifically (more realistically) I would imagine there being mods that let people make total conversions to games of the same genre (i.e. A space strategy game, a Civilization type game, a Master of Orion type game). 

Q: What kinds of mods do YOU, Brad Wardell, plan to make?

A: I want to make a Temple of Apshai type mod.

Q: What are the tools we would need to know to mod?

A: We have chosen Python as our scripting language.  Post release we plan to keep full time developers to be dedicated to exporting more and more APIs from Kumquat to expose them to Python. 

In terms of UI, we use DesktopX.  All the .dxpacks in Elemental (and Galactic Civilizations) are made using DesktopX.  It’s a free download. DesktopX version 4 is in development presently. You can find the .dxpacks in the screens directory.

In terms of graphics, we use .PNG files for static images (the game literally reads in .PNG files from the gfx directory).

In terms of models and animation, we use Intel’s Havok. We also have a tool we’ll be releasing that makes Havok files work with Elemental.  These are all free. What you make your models and other 3D assets in is up to you. We use Maya and 3D Studio (depending on artist preference).

To organize all these pieces together, we use XML which tells the game what .dxpack to use or what .PNG file to use or what Havok files to use.  We do not hard code any paths into the engine so you could put them wherever you want.

Q: When should we start modding?

A: That would be Beta 5 which is scheduled for this Summer.  It will be during that time that we start to release our own example mods.

Q: What are some example mods you would make?

A: We would try to cover the full range with our samples.  Here are some specifics of what we plan to provide during Beta 5 and after release.

1. Adding your own maps to Elemental to share via the metaverse (ImpulseReactor’s virtual shared drive system)

2. Adding your own items, spells, technologies, buildings, city improvements and share via the Metaverse.

3. Adding your own races (our example will probably be elves or dwarves or something based on player feedback).

4. Creating your own 3D assets and putting them into Elemental.

5. Using your copy of Elemental to make a totally new TBS game (GalCiv like or MOO like or Civilization like or HOMM like or MOM like or whatever).

6. Using your copy of Elemental to make a totally new type of game TBS (my sample, which will be public domain when released, is the aforementioned Temple of Apshai).

7. Using your copy of Elemental to make an action or RTS game.

Obviously, how much is done here depends on how successful Elemental is commercially so these aren’t promises as much as what we are planning to do.  We used Pear from 1997 through 2007.  Kumquat will be with us probably for the next decade at least.

Relevant Screenshots:

DesktopX is our tool of choice for creating screens. Powerful, easy to use (once you get used to it) and battle tested. You can even export your creation as gadgets.

Elemental will include the Kumquat Tile editor for letting people create their own 3D scenes using 3D assets made by others. For modders, it means that the “pipeline” organization is provided by the tools. You don’t have to coordinate lots of different people to get a mod done, you can each contribute to a pipeline and use as you wish.

 
Modders can create their own 3D models in whatever program they want and then export it to Havok’s format.

Artists use either Corel Draw or Adobe Illustrator to create as many assets as possible in vector format. This way, as hardware improves, we can update our games years later with free new, better graphics. This was most obviously seen in GalCiv II: Twilight of the Arnor. It’s a technique we highly recommend.

Hope this helps.  We’ll be talking a lot more about modding this Summer.

Six hears ago, IBM released the best portable laptop I’ve ever used. The ThinkPad X40.

It was only about 2 and a half pounds, quite fast (especially at the time), had a full sized keyboard with a 12.1 inch display.

It had only one weakness. Its pathetic 4200RPM HDD. A drive that has definitely not aged well.

I benchmarked it the other day:

ThinkPad X40’s original 4200 RPM drive.

Ignore the burst speed. Look at the average read speed. 6.6 MB/sec.  Let me put that in perspective, a desktop PC from the same era could expect to do around 40 MB/sec.  That’s 6X faster.

Obviously, today, that speed is really embarrassing and more specifically, it makes an otherwise highly useful laptop useless because if you want to use even remotely new software, it just takes forever to deal with (not to mention, picture dealing with virtual memory on such a machine).

So I’m putting in my new SSD drive tonight.

Update....

Here is the ThinkPad X40 updated with a SSD:

53 MB/sec.

Now, that may not seem that fast but remember, the limiting factor here (Besides the fact that it's not even SATA but rather PATA) is the CPU. 

We're talking an instant 8X faster experience.  So instead of taking 240 seconds to boot (4 minutes) it would boot in 30 seconds.

Except it's actually better than that because of the random access time of 0.2ms vs 61ms.  Or put another way, random seek went form being nearly a 10th of a second to instantly. 

Net result, instead of it taking 5 minutes to boot it now takes 10 seconds in real world conditions. It's now a very usable netbook type device except the upgrade only cost $100 or so.

I couldn’t help to poke a little fun at the people who are always claiming that PC gaming is dying.

Elemental, PC only.

Starcraft 2, PC only.

Civilization 5, likely PC only.

WoW: Cataclysm, PC only.

That’s just a quick sampling of course.  But a pretty good year to be a PC gamer.