It’s almost over

The world is on the brink of ruin.

King Galor sits on the last piece of farmable land.  The shadow has crept right to his door step.

On this map, the shadow lands have crept right to your doorstep.

The rest of the world is ruined.

Hope through magic

But not all is lost.  For Galor has the ability to revive land.  He must save up his mana, revive the land and build on it.

You have a spell that will revive the land and allow you to build on it.

Expansion

The Sorcerer King does not consider Galor a threat…yet

Reviving the land to build a new city.

 

My new city makes the Sorcerer King a touch nervous

Day 84

Galor continues to expand and fortify while trying to protect the shards as best as he can.  This, however, gathers more attention from the Sorcerer King.

 

Expansion is a missed blessing.  As the doomsday counter goes up, so too does unrest. Unrest is by city and is not related to population. Unrest takes away from precious logistics.

 

The Sorcerer King has noticed Galor’s expansion

His forces have begun to target Galor’s settlements

Logistics is the most limited resource. Having to spend precious logistics to guard cities is very problematic. Galor realizes he will need help.

Other Survivors…

Far to the East is the Imperial remnant.  They are what is left of the last Imperium, the alliance between Kraxis and Magnar that arose when the Sorcerer King first arrived on the scene.

Tandis the Warrior meets with them and they offer a deal…

Tandis isn’t comfortable meddling in their politics

So what’s it going to be? Murder on behalf of the Kraxis ruler or fight the Sorcerer King alone?

Ultimately, Tandis agrees.

He soon arrives at Grilok’s tower.

In my debug version, I get to see the choices not available due to my stats.

Unfortunately, he’s already in league with the Sorcerer King and Galor is not wise enough to get him to deviate from that course.  And, worse, he was too powerful for Tandis to defeat. Galor will have to find another way to get Kraxis on his side..

These efforts have not gone unnoticed

Without allies, it’s going to be almost impossible to build up the force to stop the Sorcerer King (particularly since I haven’t hooked up anything that lowers unrest!).

Having failed with the Imperial Remant, Galor finds the Frozen Realm, hanging on in the very far west.  Tandis agrees to a rescue mission.

The Sorcerer King sends his lieutenant, Aegethon, to intercept and kill Tandis

Aegethon is one of the last remaining servants of the Dread Lord, Curgen.

 

But Tandis is more than he appears as well.

Hurt, out of spells, it’s just sheer might vs. sheer might…and one despair scroll.

With Aegethon destroyed, Tandis finds the Sorcerer King’s secret key.  Now, he only needs to build up an army capable of taking on the Sorcerer King..

Tandis also successfully rescues Drodin the dwarf, winning the favor of the Frozen Realm.

The Sorcerer King is now most definitely out to destroy Galor.

(Morever, really looking forward to a better SK portrait )

 

The known world on turn 164 (tiniest map)

A united force of Dwarves and Men now seek the Sorcerer King.  But will it be enough? Will have outposts hold off the Sorcerer King’s powerful force?

Galor’s goal isn’t to meet might with might.  The Sorcerer King is incredibly powerful.  Rather, to send his strike force into the heart of the Shadow lands and use his powerful magic to pave the way in.

The forcing going in will need a lot of stuff

(note: In the beta we still have a very finite number of things to craft, this will become ever more exotic as we go forward)

 

The Sorcerer King recognizes the threat and begins to send more and more armies at the Kingdom’s few cities.

Tylan is destroyed.

At that moment, Pariden has succumed to the Sorcerer King and declared war on Galor as well.

Galor’s Hypnotism has gotten increasingly powerful has he has leveled up.

With the outter guard defeated, the Sorcerer King himself is confronted.

Tandis is powerful but the Sorcerer King is much stronger.  Galor’s mana is depleted from supporting Tandis through his campaign to reach the Sorcerer King.

With the Sorcerer King’s minions down, Tandis moves in. He uses blinding strike to take out the Sorcerer King’s vision for the rest of the battle.

Surrounding the Sorcerer King isn’t necessarily a good idea, he has many spells that punish it.

Tandis casts Lethal focus to greatly increase his attack.

With mana gone, swarming is all we have left…

And the Sorcerer King continues to punish it.

Most of the army is dead but The Sorcerer King is badly injured as well.

He goes down.

 

Victory and Final Thoughts

I was happy with the general feel but it’s definitely still an early beta.

In no particular order:

• The minor faction quests are pretty buggy. The dwarves didn’t supply me with the units they were supposed to.
• The Revive land spell in my game was too cheap so it was too easy to build cities.
• Need to make sure we provide skills to lower unrest.  I do NOT think it should be accomplished with city improvements.
• Need a lot more interesting spells. I know they’re coming (I have a lot on my test box) but not having them hurt.
• I think the free floating camera I played with should be an option for all players “Storyteller camera”.
• Need more crafting recipes. A LOT MORE. I never felt really satisfied with the quality of them
• I think the high level SK units should do more arcane damage to force me to have to craft arcane defense items.
• The Sorcerer King needs more spells in general.  He will soon be intervening in the tactical battles too just as Galor (you) can do already.
• Lot more content still needed. It’s in the pipeline but definitely needed.
• Happy with the overall direction things are taking.  I’ll do another play through when the Dungeon Master stuff gets implemented.

 

 

Story teller camera was fun.

Greetings!

HOLY COW! Things are coming along great! And much of the reason for that is you.

We’ve gotten a huge amount of really constructive feedback from the community. Anyone who doubts the usefulness of “Early Access” needs to be sent to the Sorcerer King and/or Stardock forums.

Your wish is my command: UNREST!

We got a lot of requests to bring Unrest back in some form.  But we wanted to do it in a way that connected it tightly to the overall game.

So here’s how it works:

Every 100 points of Doomsday generates 1 unrest for a given city.  Every point of unrest reduces logistics by 1.

Simple right?

And yet, the consequences are far reaching.  If you city spam, you can really cripple yourself because the unrest is not connected to population. It’s per city.  Unrest represents your people falling under the thrall of the Sorcerer King.

As the Sorcerer King becomes more powerful, your citizens start to worship him instead of, well, you. This is per city so be careful about spamming cities.

Unrest sucks away at your precious logistics

 

Your sovereign’s tech..er skill tree will have the ability to lower unrest per city. That means, of course, less magic for mana and learning spells.

The player gets to take off the kiddie gloves: Trade magical power for more fertile tiles if you dare!

As you know, in Sorcerer King you can only found cities where there is food.  By default, those places can be few and far between.  We did this so that new players wouldn’t wreck themselves by overloading on cities without realizing the potential consequences (the unrest mechanic just reinforces that).

But what about experienced players? If only there was some, I dunno, magical way to let people build more cities.

Hmm. Magic.

Hence, we are bringing back the restoration spell.  If you have the mana, you can revive the land.  The Sorcerer King likes that sort of thing of course but it means you gain a lot more control over what types of strategies you want to employ.

Sorcerer King’s terrain engine – how much are you willing to destroy the world to save it?

The terrain in the Elemental games have a distinctive look.  We didn’t realize that it was so distinctive until the Sorcerer King beta came out and people made a point of saying that they could tell it was related to Fallen Enchantress.  This was a highly useful bit of feedback because, to be honest, we didn’t see it.

The players are right. Elemental games do have a distinctive look to their terrain.  There’s a reason for that.

When the engine was being designed, we required the terrain to be as morphable as Populous.  Morphable terrain has a distinctive look because the land has to be, well morphable.

Remember Populous 3? Well, here’s some screenshots. They might seem…familiar.

Populous 3

But, you say, Fallen Enchantress didn’t morph its terrain.  You’re right.  We took out the spells that morphed terrain because we couldn’t balance it.  The bulk of our 3D engine was ignored because it was impossible for the AI to deal with a world that was morphable like this.  So we took it out.

But…Sorcerer King doesn’t have that problem.  You want to lock yourself behind a mountain range? Knock yourself out. The Sorcerer King would be pleased if you holed up back there and let him take control of all the minors.

Want to Volcano an enemy? Go for it.  Want to flood the continent? Have at it.  Basically, because this is an ASYMETRICAL MAGIC game there’s no reason not to let the player loose on the world. 

Oh no, I’m stuck by a huge mountain pass. I guess I should just go around. Or wait, no, I’m a powerful wizard.

There we go

Now, players of Fallen Enchantress knew we had spells like this but they were made so limited and so expensive and there were so few of them that they were more a gimmick than an interesting part of the game.  But now that the player is encourage to annihilate enemies en-masse (pillar of fire? Pish posh) the question will be how much are you willing to wreck the world to save it?

Map Sizes:  Big is really big

Click on the screenshot and you can see how big the large maps are going to be.

The bigger the world the longer it takes for the Sorcerer King to become a god.  While obviously necessary it is makes it a very different game.  I must confess, I haven’t finished a game on large. It takes hundreds of turns to win on tiny.  Large is going to be for the truly dedicated as it’ll probably take thousands of turns.

Beta 2: November 6

We will have an opt-in beta coming up that will have really rough versions of this with the official beta 2 date being November 6.

Stay tuned!

All he wants to do is give you presents.

Simple example of the Dungeon Master punishing me for being a total jerk in the game.

http://screencast.com/t/tYwgUWtpc

http://screencast.com/t/WvqCML5VJD

They should be friends

Talking tech with friends, making games, playing games, it’s just plain awesome.  It saddens me to see people seeming to lose sight of that.  I was doing an interview last week with a journalist and we spent hours talking about Kurzweil and the singularity. 

The typical gamer and the typical journalist are kindred spirits. The escalation between those who support #gamergate and those who oppose it has been almost entirely because of a few bad actors on both sides trying to pain the other side with incredibly broad strokes which in turn infuriates the non-bad actors on both sides.

No moral equivalence here

One reason I’m sympathetic to #gamergate is that at least those guys realize there are total scumbags doing bad things in their name and they do honestly try to police it. 

By contrast, those who oppose gamergate don’t seem to be willing to even acknowledge that there are bad actors on their side or that there are a few that are cynically trying to use the controversy to forward their careers in ways that their actual work doesn’t merit.

I saw a tweet just yesterday by Anita Sarkeesian complaining that a game she found objectionable wasn’t being downgraded or criticized by the gaming media.  I mean, come on! If it was Bob Sarkeesian and he was complaining that the games should have been marked down because of violence or something the press would have lampooned him. 

If Sarkeesian wants to complain about the depiction of women it seems like there are much bigger targets that have a lot more influence over how women see themselves than games…

While the social justice crowd was complaining about Spider-Woman and women in video games, this was the cover of Cosmopolitan that month (September 2014 issue)

Meanwhile, the most popular female character in games of the past couple years has the power to rip open space time.

 

 

GG outside the game industry

I’ve gotten a couple (at least 2) anti GG articles killed off simply by explaining GG is really about as accurately as I can.  I wasn’t trying to kill the articles, I just got asked what the deal was because sometimes I’m the only “game person” that these journalists know.

Here’s how the conversation typically goes:

Journalist: So what’s this “Gamergate thing about”? Are gamers really afraid of women playing or making games?

Me: No. It started as a tempest in a teapot. An indie game developer got caught sleeping with some journalists and some people thought (wrongly) that she was trading sex for reviews. 

Then the gaming media decided to do a series of articles, within 24 hours, insinuating that not only was the harassment of this poor woman due to her being a woman but also that gaming culture was inherently misogynistic. This caused a consumer revolt against the gaming media as they were offended at being insulted by the very game sites that they trusted and believed in.

Journalist: So they’re not harassing women?

Me: There’s always harassment of women on the Internet.  It’s the Internet. That doesn’t excuse it. Trolls and jerks target anyone and anything they can. But laying blame on that to Gamergate is ridiculous. The fact is, ANYONE who is vocal on the Internet is going to face harassment. 

I’ve gotten abuse online for years peppered with the occasional death threat.  So have most publicly facing game developers. My friends at Blizzard have told me some real horror stories. 

Of course, the difference is that it never occurs to us to screenshot this stuff and post on Twitter because, you know what the response to that would be. We’d get called “man babies” or whiners or what have you.

Me: Seriously, picture what the response would be if I went online as recently as 3 months ago and posted one of the death threats I get. Do you seriously think any journalist would write a story on that?

Journalist: No, it would be a dog bites man story.

Me: Exactly. So the problem here is that some in the gaming media have an existing narrative: Gamers are misogynists. Then, they simply cherry pick examples to fit that narrative.

Journalist: So what is the purpose of writing these articles?

Me: I have no idea. The anti-GG people think this is a “PR war”. That if enough anti-GG articles are written they’ll somehow “win”. But unless they have the power to change demographics based on PR, which they don’t, when the dust settles, they’re going to have to live with the consequences of antagonizing their readers.

Journalist: Well it sounds like the issue is a lot more nuanced than what I was led to believe.

Me: It is.  Their best strategy would be to just cool down and resist the urge to lash out.  I don’t like getting harassed online either. I’ve had years of time to get used to it though and can say that the best tactic is: Pick your battles. 

This is just me on my machine making spells. Any modder could have made this (And probably made it look prettier).

But we plan to go pretty nuts with the idea that the player can spend mana to wreak havoc on the world in order to destroy enemies.  

I've got a bunch like this already going on my machine including restoring land (making land habitable for cities) to walling  yourself off with mountains (the SK would absolutely prefer if you just turtled in).

So...

Let's talk guys.

What horrible things do you think it would be fun to do to the world or have done to you?

Setup

This game takes place in a land that the Sorcerer King has dominated for some time.  The world is ruined. Very little life exists now.

The rot of the Sorcerer King encroaches on my last city, Athica.  The Sorcerer King is powerful and is already in the process of casting the spell of making which will convert all life on this world to elemental magic.

My job is to build a force that can take him about before it’s too late. Of course, how I go about doing that is…the whole game.

Early Game

Right off the bat, I’m going to use one of my 4 logistics points to grab the shard that’s in my territory. Next, I’m going to train a scout. This is a tiny map so the pressure is on. In map terms, this is a Starcraft 2 1 on 1 style map. Except, on this map, there are 7 minor factions to contend with.

Now in my beta, each answer will affect how the in-game dungeon master deals with me.  This will matter later when the doomsday counter starts getting close.

Each sovereign at the start of the game gets their own tech tree..er..skill tree. Now, this is still the Beta 1A tech tree but it’s being updated right now for Beta 2 which will have every slot with the higher level stuff doing some pretty nasty stuff to your enemies.

The sovereign you choose determines what heroes and elite units you have access to.

Modding Stuff

As I play, I see quests. Each time I play, I have the opportunity to improve the quests in interesting ways.  We plan to make this quest editor available to modders later.  Let me show you how it works.

The third answer seems one that requires a sense of honor. Which is great because we have an honor trait!

This is data the Dungeon Master can use (or not use) later in the game. The more data the Dungeon master is fed, the more he starts rolling the dice.

End of the early game

From the Sorcerer King’s point of view, he’s already conquered the world. The remaining minor races (of which you are one) are being wooed by the Sorcerer King to ensure that no one interferes with his quest for godhood.

As the first phase of the game ends (which for me is clearing out my home area and getting ready to expand) it’s time to start crafting.

Now, in the public build, you start out with the same craftable items every time.  In the final game, you’ll have a base set of craftables PLUS the things the Dungeon Master throws in there that will change from game to game.

In Sorcerer King, the inventory is global (it’s not like in Fallen Enchantress or other 4X games where the inventory is per unit).  This allows the player to craft items and equip their units regardless of location.  Powerful items become “soul bound” to to prevent cheesing.

Doom Doom Doom

The doomsday counter represents the Sorcerer King’s progress towards casting the spell of making and destroying the world.  When I see shards being attacked, I make note of where they are and see if I can get an outpost near them.

I just love sweep.

 

Upon expanding the Sorcerer King has noted what I’m up to.  I’m going to suck up.

A closer eye is better than “I will come over there and snuff you out!”

Conquered

Ultimately, I got the Dwarves and the Swamp Giants to ally with me but that came at the cost of Pariden and the Ice Lords who managed to take one of my major cities.

Ultimately, I lost.

Lessons learned:

1. Gotta get outposts up early!
2. If you don’t think you’ll be able to get a minor faction on your side, destroy them! Even if it means losing a lot of units against their Guardian.
3. Fix the bug where Minor factions can capture your outposts. That really screwed me.
4. Don’t rely too heavily on fireball scrolls. The heavy duty end units ignore them.
5. Build the high end recipe buildings (scribes, jewelers, etc.). I cheaped out on this and regretted it.
6. Build scouts early, find the other champions and start leveling them up as soon as you can.
7. Be careful about always picking the “easy” quest option.  In my game, my indifference resulted in an event where there was an uprising and 2 of my logistics were permanently consumed.  Mind you, I was testing to see if this would happen but just to be aware when Beta 2 arrives in November.
8. Don’t cheap out on crafting for your units. I gave my champion amazing stuff but he’s still one guy. The Sorcerer King will target him in battle to immobilize him if he’s overwhelmingly powerful versus the other units.
9. Use geography of the map in deciding which minors to ally with. IF they have shards near them and the Sorcerer King has to get through you to get to them, ally with them.  The minors closer to the Sorcerer King are really tough to get.

Hope this helps.

Ending Screenshot: Turn 247

For those worried about “short” games. This was 247 turns on a TINY map.

Greetings!

The first week of the Sorcerer King beta has been both exciting and terrifying.  On the one hand, the people who play the game seem to really like it.  On the other, people who have only seen the screenshots think it looks like Fallen Enchantress which makes us very sad.

Update 1 = this week

We’re getting ready to roll out the first update. Lots of changes in it.  A lot of performance optimizations have gone in that should be noticeable to everyone.  There’s also been a lot of small polish improvements that will be almost immediately apparent.

What’s being worked on

So internally, there’s a lot of cool stuff in.  And here I’ll talk about them:

Intangible Resources

Things you do in the game can now provide intangible resources that are acted on by the behind the scenes Dungeon Master.  They also can affect the Sorcerer King.

The Sorcerer King’s goal is to destroy the shards so he can become a god.  He doesn’t really recognize you at first. But as you do things, he starts to notice and you have to be really careful about how fast you want to be noticed because once he considers you a threat, he will start targeting you a lot more intensely.

Another part of the intangible resources are having consequences to your earlier actions.  Here are examples of things that might happen depending on how much of a given intangible you have (the more you have, the more dice rolling starts to happen).

1. Are you really cruel? Well, the people may rise up against you.
2. Are you really indifferent? The people may flock to another kingdom or start a new kingdom entirely that shows up mid game! Suddenly it’s you vs. the SK vs. a new major player
3. Are you really compassionate? You may get help from unlikely sources when you’re in need
4. Do you have a lot of fame? An unexpected champion may join your cause
5. Are you really brave? You may find that certain new recipes start to show up thanks to your scholars looking in dangerous places by following your heroic lead.
6. Have you been a coward? Be careful, you may find some of your soldiers following that lead as well.
7. and so on.

When one of these resources get added, they show up in two places:

A. In the quest results screen (or in a dialog screen) that indicates that a change has occurred to one of these intangibles.

B. In the quest screen which will give you a running total of any non-zero character traits you’ve picked up on.

From a game design point of view, these are very interesting because we could eventually have certain types of spells or abilities that come at the cost of one of these intangibles.

Modders take note: Imagine making a custom unit (we don’t have in-game unit customization but it’s all XML still) and having abilities that require certain intangible resources.  Intangible resources, code-wise are the same as metal or crystal.  So if you’re heroic enough, you could have a special ability called “Heroic Strike!”. 

 

The Minor factions

The minor factions are all very different both visually and in how they deal with the world.

It’s important to think of these minor factions as being the players you recently played Fallen Enchantress (or any other fantasy 4X).  They weren’t your friends before and now you are coming to them to try to get them to help you.  To be fair, some of them might be friendlier to you than others. But they may still hate each other. Being friends with Pariden, for instance, means life is much harder in dealing with Ceresa.  

Maps Maps Maps

We will be trickling out more pre-made maps as we figure out which types of maps players enjoy the most.  My personal favorite isn’t in the game yet, it’s an island map. 

But we’ve been adding THE RED TILES OF DOOM to our editor to show tiles that ruin performance on the Intel 4000 cards.  In the first beta, there were a lot of these tiles where too many textures were being put together in a small area and causing the Intel graphics card a lot of grief.  So if you see one of these red tiles, let us know.

Red tiles of performance doom

More to come soon!

I'm working on the random map generation and wanting to get some feedback on the styles of maps you like the most so far.

Let me know what maps you tend to find the most fun. 

At some point, we would like to do one final mini expansion for the Fallen Enchantress series that includes everything in FE:LH and then some.

A few questions for you guys:

What would you imagine it being called? 

Right now, given our traditional naming convention, we'd call it Fallen Enchantress: Ultimate Edition

It would be $19.99 for users who have FE:LH, $39.99 new. Would come out after LH 2.0 so that 2.0's stuff can be part of it.

Features:

• Greater faction differentiation where different factions do different types of damage (fire, cold, electrical, arcane, poison, etc.)
• All existing DLC would become available for it and your current DLC would be added to your account (you wouldn't have to rebuy any DLC).
• Dynasties
• Different Tech Tree per major faction
• Lots more unit customization items
• General diplomacy overhaul

Release date would be AFTER Sorcerer King and GalCiv III.