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.

Once upon a time there was Master of Magic

Back in 2008, Stardock was just finishing up its work on Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor.  We had been in negotiations with Atari to acquire the Master of Magic rights (to the point that we actually own the domain www.masterofmagic.com).  We had a game design all planned out for it complete with Halfings, Gnolls, High Elves, the works.  To be safe, we were not going to stray very far from the original design other than to add multiplayer and updates the units to modern 3D. 

When negotiations with Atari didn’t work out, it was decided we would create our own fantasy world that we called Elemental.  Early on we had a fairly straight forward conversion table:

• Klackons = Quendar
• Ironeers = Dwarves
• Resoln = Nomads
• Urxen = Orcs
• Altar = High Men
• Pariden = High Elves

Cities had 8 classes of buildings (Infrastructure, Industry, Commerce, Military,  Religious, Academic, Husbandry, and Naval).  And each race would have its own unique buildings in each category along with different bonuses to Workers, Farmers and Rebels.

Naming Convention

The game was to be called WAR of MAGIC.  But for trademark concerns, it was decided we would put the name “Elemental” in front.  This would prove to be ironic because in the long-term, people remember War of Magic as “Elemental” and not War of Magic.  As had been said in forums over the years, there would never have been a Elemental II. It would have been War of Magic II.

The original mockup for War of Magic

Design Divergence

War of Magic started getting the scope creep to end all scope creep.  We decided we would have huge, real-time battles.  We decided to have player designed units. The city improvements would be player designed as well, expanding out onto the map and having an editor where players could design their own very unique improvements.  Spells too would be designed by players in game.

This probably seems insane now but a game called Spore was coming out and we were enthralled about the idea of handing over the content creation to players.

Unfortunately, our engineering/art ambitions were beyond our ability to deliver, especially on the hardware of the time.

War of Magic

We tried all kinds of things to reduce the hardware scope which resulted in an art-style that was, unique but not necessarily appealing.  Player unit design required us to give up on the dramatically different race differentiation and the city design concept ended up completely changing the way the cities were made.

In the end, War of Magic ended up nothing like Master of Magic.

War of Magic is released

When War of Magic came out, people were very disappointed that it was buggy, bland, and nothing like Master of Magic.  It is a disappointment that haunts us to this day.

It ended up getting “meh” (3/5) reviews and we were so disappointed with it that we decided to give the two planned expansion packs to it for free to early adopters.

The expansions that never happened

Originally, we had two expansion packs planned.

• War of Magic: Fallen Enchantress
• War of Magic: Legendary Heroes

We would later then make a game called War of Magic II: Empire of Sorcery (and we have the domain to this too www.empireofsorcery.com).

One of the outcomes of War of Magic was that we brought on Derek Paxton (Kael) who had made the popular Civilization mod, Fall from Heaven to re-design War of Magic.  Not surprisingly, he didn’t want this new game associated too strongly with War of Magic so it would become a stand-alone game with a much bigger scope.

Branding confusion

Unfortunately, everyone knew the game as Elemental.  We learned a valuable lesson on branding – people will refer to your game based on the most unique word in it.  We ourselves referred to War of Magic as Elemental all the time just like we call Sins of a Solar Empire “Sins”.    So most people just think of the game as Elemental and not War of Magic.

So what would we call future games?

We looked at the branding debacle Star Wars had come into: Star Wars: Episode 3 – Attack of the Clones.  We didn’t want that.

Otherwise we’d have Elemental: War of Magic – Fallen Enchantress.

This is a problem we still have.

It was decided, ultimately, that it would be referred to as Fallen Enchantress.

Fallen Enchantress

With Fallen Enchantress, we looked at what the underlying engine we had built could do well and what parts it couldn’t do well. Derek Paxton designed a fantasy game that would satisfy most players.  We were still learning the ropes of what makes a good fantasy 4X title with this one. Fallen Enchantress was given away to all the early adopters of War of Magic.

Fallen Enchantress greatly tightened up the design and made it a generally well received game.

Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes

We took what we learned from Fallen Enchantress and made an expansion pack called Legendary Heroes.  Like Fallen Enchantress, it was free for early adopters of War of Magic. It was also sold as a steep discount to those who had bought Fallen Enchantress.

One thing that I wish we had done differently was not release it as a “expand-a-lone”.  Stand-alone expansions are an ugly hold-over of the retail days and not something we plan on revisiting any time soon. 

Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes took a pretty decent game and made it into a really good game

After Fallen Enchantress

In June of 2013, we had a hit.  FE:LH was well received. People really liked it. It was, by any standard, a really good game.  So what do we do? This is where branding gets in.

The name, for instance, is a problem for us.  We had already decided to name it Fallen Enchantress long before Derek “Fall from Heaven” Paxton joined us.  What if he someday wanted to make a Fall from  Heaven game? Having two series with “Fall” in the name was problematic.  This is an issue we haven’t resolved.

As a practical matter, Stardock wants to keep the good will and success of Legendary Heroes going.  I.e. a strong 4X builder with player designed units, vast worlds, wild lands, etc.  For all of 2013 and 2014 Stardock has continued to update Legendary Heroes with new DLC and new free updates.

Sorcerer King

In 2013, Stardock acquired the publishing rights to the Star Control (www.starcontrol.com) series.  What we really liked about Star Control (2) was the story and interaction with the different aliens while working against a powerful enemy.  It had been a long time since anyone tried to do something like that.

At the same time, a lot of really interesting 4X fantasy games had come out from other publishers. This would mean that a lot of gamers would already be familiar with the basics of a 4X fantasy. 

Thus, the idea for Sorcerer King was born: Let’s make a 4X game where the bad guy had already won and was now trying to become a god. Only you could stop him and to do so you would need to gather up the defeated remnants that you had previously competed with to stop him. 

For replayability, we would make sure that there was a lot of complex, unscripted interaction between the various players, random maps, random quests, and all manner of other content that would make sure each game was a new 4X adventure.  We had played a lot of game called FTL and saw how each game does feel very different based on the way it does its quests.

Ironically, the design is adhering a lot more closely to some of our original designs. Each faction is very different. Each unit has lots and lots of special abilities.  And ironically, the UI design is much more similar to the original concept we had all those years ago.

Star Control: Isn’t he cute?

Have you played FTL? If not, get it! Great game!

Sorcerer King: How do you make quests entertaining? Why, hire writers from Cracked.com to write them.

Sorcerer King in action

The Elemental Relationship

So how are all these games related?  War of Magic, Fallen Enchantress and Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes all follow a pretty straight forward path.  You could call Fallen Enchantress a sequel to War of Magic even though it is dramatically different (but then again, Star Control 2 is very different from Star Control 1).

I can’t answer the branding questions.  What I can say is that the War of Magic series (however they’re branded) will continue its own path (War of Magic – > Fallen Enchantress –> Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes –> X?) and Sorcerer King will have its own path. 

Knowing that the word “Fall” or “Fallen” is out of the question for future titles in the War of Magic path, feel free to make your own suggestions.

One of the major new features of Sorcerer King is the Dungeon Master.

Essentially, the Dungeon Master is the AI behind the game making sure that things stay interesting and different from game to game.

In coding terms, the Dungeon Master is a big fat state machine that you feed with your actions.  Here’s how it works:

First, I create a narrative resource.  In this case, I’m making one called Indifference.

I am putting a _ in front of the name (_Indifference) because if we later decide to have some place where we show these DM resources I’ll filter based on the first character being a _ in the resource type. If it becomes really popular, we’ll just add a new XML key but we’ll see.

Next, I create a quest that might include an option that results in some indifference.

If I pick the answer that has indifference, I can have it give the player a “reward”

Thus if the player chooses this, 1 indifference is added to their hidden “resources”.

Now, when I create DM events, I can have options that look for indifference.

So in this case, if the player has done a lot of “indifferent” things you can trigger on that.

Similarly, you can even create events that are triggered specifically on that with a % chance attached.

Mind you, everything I’m doing here is something you’ll be able to do (we’re not going to hand out the editor until the game’s released, however as we are constantly updating it).

Connect this to the Steamworks and suddenly players can start building a richer and richer game experience.

In the meantime, we will continued to have Cracked.com writers doing the hard work of writing the quests (seriously).

Greetings!

Getting a ton of questions regarding minor races.

Here’s the scoop:

You and the Sorcerer King are trying to woo the “remnant factions” (minor races).  Each time you succeed, you gain favor with them. When enough favor has been gained, they will ally with that player.

If they ally with you, they will be attacking the Sorcerer King on their own as well as giving you units. In addition, you can outright ask them for help

Each minor race can provide different types of help. All of them will give you access to their unique units.  Some have powerful magic that can take points off the doomsday counter. Others have potions and still others have unique spells that only they have that they’ll share with you.

Each game, what the minors have will change slightly. That is, you won’t get the same potions or spells or ingredients every time. They have their own fairly vast library of “stuff” that is unique to that race.

As a practical matter, you won’t be able to ally with everyone. They have grudges with one another.  For example, the Swamp Giants have a problem with Pariden as Queen Procipinee kicked them out of their ancestral lands.  Hence, if you’re friends with Pariden, it’ll be much harder to be friends with the Swamp Giants.  The quests and conversations you have will differ based on what you’ve done in the game as well as who you’re friends (or enemies) with.

Greetings!

We’re very excited to have you with us on Sorcerer King.  We hope you’re having as much fun playing the beta as we are having making it.  This post will go over the road-map between Beta 1 and the final release of the game so you can see where things are.

Milestone #1: Sorcerer King BETA 1 [October 2014]

1. Crafting is in
2. Outposts attack enemies in ZOC and can be upgraded
3. Minor factions are on map but don’t do anything
4. Wizard sovereign is in
5. City improvements determine available base units
6. Default small maps are in.
7. Trained units can be equipped with crafted items (even Bailey! <g>)

Milestone #2: BETA 2 [November 2014]

1. Minor factions ally up with either you or the Sorcerer King based on what the player (or SK) does.
2. Minor factions give player access to their unique units that cost 0 logistics
3. Sorcerer King will begin casting spells into tactical battles
4. Priest, Warrior, Guardian sovereign added
5. Sovereign customization in
6. Summoning Spellbook added
7. Pretty Quest screen added

Milestone #3: BETA 3 [December 2014]

1. HighDPI UI support (>2K/4K display enhancements)
2. Warlord, Tinkerer sovereigns added
3. Dungeon Master world system added (Everything you do in the game feeds data to the DM that may come back to help or hurt you later, variables will be listed in the Quest screen)
4. Hall of Fame added
5. In-Game status reports on how you’re doing in various interesting way
6. Large map support added
7. Random Map generation added

After Beta 3, it’s content, content, content.  More monsters, units, spells, abilities, quests, balance, bug fixing, etc.

Cheers!

Greetings!

We should probably add this to the FAQ but people have been asking how the various Elemental universe games relate to each other.

To recap:

2010: Elemental

2012: Fallen Enchantress

2013: Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes

2015: Sorcerer King

All the games exist in the same world but at different times.

Elemental took place 100 years after the Cataclysm and dealt with the War of Magic.

Fallen Enchantress deals with the rise of Ceresa and her undead armies.

Sorcerer King takes place much later AFTER Ceresa's defeat and a much more powerful enemy coming in and destroying everyone.

In the BETA, you play as the son of Relias. You have the Forge of the Overlord which is where the crafting comes from.