OT: Starcraft II and Elemental

[WraithLord]

Supposedly SC II was released yesterday (probably only in the US). Anyone here got his hands on a copy?- Any first impressions?

And, bonus gossip quesions, any impressions or thoughts on Elemental?

Last, Does anyone know whether a good FTBS is cooking up somewhere. Something in the caliber of MOM, MOO, AOW or Dominions?- Or put in other words - a game that's worth waiting for? :D

[RadicalTurnip]

I've found that strategy games have plummeted in popularity recently, much to my sadness. Planning on getting SCII tomorrow, so I may come back and tell you then.

Usually, I don't hear about games, my friends do, and then they get me to play them, so...no luck on this front.

[AdmiralZhao]

SCII is alright. The single player campaign is laughably bad, but the MP is enjoyable if you like tight, competitive games. MP plays very fast, and does require a lot of clicking, so I wouldn't recommend it unless your mouse hand is spry and you enjoy learning hotkeys. I also would not give them any points for innovation; this is basically SCI with some slight improvements to units, abilities, and graphics. As usual, the matchmaking service is great and consistently delivers interesting opponents in 1-10 seconds. I also expect great things from the mod community, which should shortly be rolling out a ton of other games built with the starcraft engine.

[LDiCesare]

Elemental is still a beta and lacks decent ai and a user interface to manage units before I could start enjoying the game. Or providing useful feedback about most game mechanics and balance, actually.

[WraithLord]

My hands can no longer stand the punishment of click intensive games. This is all I needed to hear. The day they'll release a TBS starcraft - well that's a worthy fantasy...

Elemental, hopefully would have a soul, the way MOO, MOM and dominions have. I have a bad feeling about that though.

Hehe, and while I'm fantasizing I may hope for dom-III source to be released and dom-IV created as a free source project - or better yet for IW to get bored with their new project and develop the next installment of dominions :p

[Fluffypaw]

SCII is alright. The single player campaign is laughably bad, but the MP is enjoyable if you like tight, competitive games. MP plays very fast, and does require a lot of clicking, so I wouldn't recommend it unless your mouse hand is spry and you enjoy learning hotkeys. I also would not give them any points for innovation; this is basically SCI with some slight improvements to units, abilities, and graphics. As usual, the matchmaking service is great and consistently delivers interesting opponents in 1-10 seconds. I also expect great things from the mod community, which should shortly be rolling out a ton of other games built with the starcraft engine.

Sounds like SCII is exactly what I expected from it. More of the same in a bit more polished and revised form.

Would you care to elaborate a bit more on what's bad about the campaign?

Fluffypaw

[Doo]

Elemental is shaping up to be good. The idea's shown so far are good. I especially like the gameplay mechanic of researching "adventure" and then being able to take on more rewarding quests at locations on the map; it sounds cheesy but its a new aspect to turn based strategy.

At this stage the developer admits there is more to do to get it to release quality which is encouraging and positive. Unless they have been doing stuff (balancing ect.,) that is not in the beta then I doubt it will be ready by the current release date. I also believe that they have done work that is not in the beta so fingers crossed.

I don't know what a "F-TBS" is but Sword of the Stars is great, I purchased the complete collection yesterday at half price. I had hoped be able to direct you all to a sale but its apparently ended.... Still its a great TBS with pausable real time battles that are fun to play.

http://www.impulsedriven.com/sotscomcol

*edit* Oh! FANTASY-TBS! Well if you don't believe in aliens then SotS is "fantasy" ;)

[AdmiralZhao]

Well, perhaps I shouldn't be too hard on the campaign. They have some neat levels (a volcanic planet where lava regularly floods the low ground, a high UV planet where conditions change radically between night and day). And it is all very professional; it is not like there are any technical flaws in the missions. But they are not the all our slaughter-fest, macro heavy, total war missions that I know and love from BroodWar. Rather they tend to be fairly simple and easy, and the experience reminds me of playing Plants vs Zombies, i.e. somewhat enjoyable in a brain-dead, time-wasty sort of way.

What really gets me though are the cut scenes. So many cut scenes. So much awful dialog and so many cliches. So many shoulderpads. It's like they can only do so many characters/settings, or perhaps like Warhammer/Warhammer40K; every character type or aspect in one setting (WoW) has to exist in the other setting (Starcraft) whether it makes any sense or not. So we have protoss temples that look like Night Elf temples, and Prince Arthas as Prince whatever of the Dominion, and what is quite literally a dwarf running your upgrade center.

And why is Kerrigan wearing heels and lipstick? And why is she personally fighting on the front lines? Is this really what I fought the Broodwar for? I don't know. I just wish they had done something better/more creative with 10 years and who knows how many million dollars.

[DonCorazon]

I pre-purchased Elemental, despite myself, after finding the Gal Civ game dry, like a mathmetician trying to describe jazz with algebra equations.

I can get Elemental to run on my laptop, but can't see the map so I can't say much about it other than its time to get a new laptop.

[Doo]

My laptop is close to five years old now and runs the Elemental beta. Its sluggish but apparently this will be fixed by the final release.

The game was touted to be playable on the most basic netbook, I hope it lives up to this claim or I will have to buy a new computer... :(

[Foodstamp]

Elemental is not living up to any of the hype. The modding beta starts tomorrow. Hopefully it will offer something, but they have already toned it down as well making it xml driven instead of python.

[WraithLord]

I pre-purchased Elemental, despite myself, after finding the Gal Civ game dry, like a mathmetician trying to describe jazz with algebra equations.


:lol this really hits the :target:
very well put

[Dimaz]

WL, to your first question, about other fantasy TBS games. There is one, Eador (www.eador.com), that I play for a year already. It was made by a small team (1 person made almost everything and some others helped with graphics and music I think), it's 2D, and it's really fun. Unfortunately, there is only Russian version so far. Author first distributed it himself, but now he has contract with some Russian publisher company and I think they're going to make a translation and release English version sooner or later, also they're going to make 3D version AFAIK. Unfortunately the game has lots of text that is hard to translate preserving original style, so the attempts for fan translations sort of failed.
About the gameplay: you play on random generated maps consisting of provinces. In the starting prov there's your castle where you can build buildings (more than 200 I think, they gradually appear in campaign) and buy units and heroes, and memorize spells. Each hero can lead up to 15 units, so the fight is maximum 16x16. Units have morale and fatigue stats as in dom3. The combat is turn-based, first one side then the other. The units and spells have different tiers; each hero has slots for some tier 1 units, less for tier 2 and so on, same with spells. Spells are recharged after battle. There are 2 resources, gold and magic crystals. All units and heroes collect exp in battles, the cap is lvl30. There are 4 basic classes of heroes and each class can dual on lvl 10 or remain the same (1-10: Warrior, Archer, Commander, Mage, 11-30: W-W, W-A, W-C, W-M, A-W, A-A, etc, where W-A and A-W are different classes). Units get upgrades on every levelup and also can receive a medal for some exceptional performance in battle (like dealing damage 3*own hp etc).
All provinces are owned by indies at start, and the farther the prov is from someone's cap, the stronger indies are. There are special sites in provinces, some of them are known from the beginning and some require searching. The guardians have the same distribution around the caps as indies. First ring has tier-1 units, second t2 etc. You can build guard in captured provinces and up to 3 buildings. Buildings can give some economic effect or allow to recruit units (forts) or other bonuses, guards, well, guard the province (you can have only 1 guard at a time).
OK, I think it's enough for now :) Overall, I really like it, and it costs only 10$ if you buy it directly from author as I did (don't know about publisher's price policy). Of course there are some problems here and there, but I definitely recommend it to everyone interested in MOM, HOMM, AOW style game.

[Natpy]

Eador is a nice game.

[WraithLord]

This Eador sounds real nice. The screenshots look cool as well. I hope they'll do an English version sometime.

[RadicalTurnip]

Nooo. Don't tell me this about Starcraft! See, I sorta' ignore WoW; so, to me, Blizzard is still this tiny niche company that doesn't have a lot of money, but find a style of game, and perfects it and combines all the awesomeness of other games within that style, and then releases a product like Diablo or Starcraft (heck, even Warcraft).

This sounds like I will have to face the fact that Blizzard got *huge* and seems to be succumbing the the money-hoggishness of most other huge companies.

:cry: I miss the Blizzard of yore.

[Dimaz]

I think you can even try to play Russian demo. Probably you won't understand the plot or random events, but you can still taste the combat system. BTW, I sort of learned English playing Star Control 2 in '93 on my 286, and I think Eador is the perfect way to learn a bit of Russian :)

[Natpy]

In Eador all text are open in txt files, so can be easy automatic pseudotranslated

[Folket]

I find that the campaign in Starcraft 2 is the best RTS single player I have played.

I only play on brutal difficulty (highest) and have to fight like an animal to win a scenario (I have so far not manage to win on my first try). Given that the scenarios are 20-30 min long it is really intensive and it does not feel bad when replaying after I have lost.

[Folket]

I downloaded a file called Eador_1.04.1_full.exe but it does not seem to work. I got to something that looks like a installation wizard and then click a button I think is next and then it gives me an error message in russian and exits.

[DonCorazon]

Eador looks very cool - with soul, in fact! I second the motion for an english version for us lazy Yankees. :)

[Natpy]

Eador_1.04.1_full.exe is a patch to 1.04.1 from any version. I think you need http://files.games.1c.ru/eador/demo/eador_demo_setup.exe

[AdmiralZhao]

Maybe that's my problem Folket, I've been playing on normal. I'll try to go back to it on Brutal and see if my impressions change.

[LDiCesare]

Eador screenshots look nice. Pity it's Russsian-only.

[Folket]

And I agree about the cut scenes. I never like the though cowboy style. Also all men except Matt and the news reporter looks like mutants.

But I like to look at the news after the missions.

[lch]

I pre-purchased Elemental, despite myself, after finding the Gal Civ game dry, like a mathmetician trying to describe jazz with algebra equations.


:lol this really hits the :target:
very well put
Dude, I knew that there's a deep relationship of music and math, one of our emeriti profs recently published a book on this, but I had no idea about all that jazz...

After hearing the podcast at http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/lehmantoday/2010_02/a_all_that_jazz.html I've been taking a look at the lesson plans at
http://www.teachervision.fen.com/music-styles/lesson-plan/4851.html and http://www.teachervision.fen.com/musical-notation/lesson-plan/4862.html
and now I'm seeing this with new eyes. Those that made it through all this might even take the Jazz exam (http://www.billanschell.com/downloads/JazzMath.pdf) if they dare.

[Dectilon]

Basically it goes like this for the sc2-campaign:

Casual: The enemy doesn't really build units and have half health compared to you.
Normal: Same AI as casual but normal health.
Hard: The enemy actually builds stuff, if you want a decent challenge this is the right difficulty level.
Brutal: Ohmygodwhydotheykeepcoming?!?

There's plenty of stuff that annoys me in the campaign (like kerrigan going from a pretty good villain in BW to... a whiny nihilist? And the most drawn-out Fox News-joke in history.), but it's good enough that you won't get bored if you play on hard.

[RadicalTurnip]

Yeah, so far in the campaign, the in-between missions are silly and meh, but the gameplay is very interesting for the most part, so I appreciate that. Sounds like I need to up the difficulty from "normal" though, haha.

[onomastikon]

I pre-purchased Elemental, despite myself, after finding the Gal Civ game dry, like a mathmetician trying to describe jazz with algebra equations.


:lol this really hits the :target:
very well put

I also found that perfect, although Ich has a point.

I also agree with Foodstamp about Elemental, which has actually gone gold last week. There are not very many things I enjoy about it, but that could change after release. Currently, I think it will be a fun thing to play with for people who love modding; since I do not, I feel a bit left out. It "feels" like CivIV with bland tactical battles, and the technology innovations are still grouped into GC2-like "trees" or clusters that are all thematically related (e.g. Adventure, Diplomacy, Warfare, Civilization, Magic), it smacks too much of Lasers, Shields, and Diplomacy. The combat side of things is also currently underdeveloped. In general, there is also a great reliance on "Random House" (the company) to write wonderful things in terms of in-game texts -- not actual people, mind you, but the corporation itself is always personalized, as if they would deficate gold. But the hard core of the fan-base seems vitally, almost rabidly pleased, so that there are sure to be many people who are more than happy. Constructive criticism is not always welcome. Where I do have great hopes, however, is for the AI; I think Brad Wardell always does more than his share in that department, and I am sure that we will see strong new developments there before release and afterwards as well.

I don't find myself terribly excited about it now, and the current Beta, two weeks before release, is not a treat to play, although it will run on my laptop quite nicely.

I have heard very mixed things about Sword of the Stars. Are there many people here who enjoy it greatly?

[WraithLord]

Sword of the Stars is on my ToPlay list, right after completing HoMM V's (annoying) campaign, Warhammer mark of Chaos and Discipless III, so at the rate I'm going I'll get to it in a few years, or never ;)

I recently purchased Discipless III and played a bit with it. Its quite pleasing to the eyes (gfx) and ears (music is cool, voice over is bad). Quite shallow tactically and strategically but fun in a, I'm too tired to actually think, kind of way.

All the bits and pieces I hear about elemental point to a dissapointing release. I think I'll stay on the fence for a while longer before trying it.

[sector24]

It bugs me that all of the "it's not ready" threads get locked, even the constructive ones. Usually with the response, "Beta 4 isn't release" with the implication that all the awesome is just lurking on the horizon waiting to explode all over your screen.

Through the whole development process (almost a year now) in my head I was expecting it to not live up to expectations. But my heart was hoping against hope that it would be awesome. I guess we'll see next week, the beta players may get a copy of the game a couple days early and provide some early reviews. But I can't see it being a replacement for Dominions, Civ, or even the old school quality titles (MoM, AoW). I can't even imagine what the game would be like if they decided to release it in February. :shock:

[Gandalf Parker]

Those get locked HERE?

If you mean on the official forum by the games publisher then I wouldnt consider it surprising. They have no reason to appreciate "its not ready" posts. Even the constructive ones. :) They would tend to have an overriding interest in upbeat posts prior to release. That might be irritating, but I wouldnt consider surprising.

But there are plenty of other forums and newsgroups having that discussion.

[llamabeast]

My plan for Elemental is to wait a year, then get it. I reckon they will have it all sorted by then, and the modders will have corrected any of the egregious failures of judgement that Brad is sometimes prone to.

Has anyone played "Distant Worlds"? I just stumbled across it - looks like it might be pretty awesome.

[Knai]

I had high hopes for a while, but they can't seem to get criticism. Even when they do things that are completely stupid (The Empire and Kingdom dichotomy in troop enhancement and such.) the fan base worships them, and if someone raises a legitimate criticism they are either shot down by the mods or everyone else on the testing forum. Its getting eerily similar to Pathfinder in that regard really.

[sector24]

Those get locked HERE?

If you mean on the official forum by the games publisher then I wouldnt consider it surprising. They have no reason to appreciate "its not ready" posts. Even the constructive ones. :) They would tend to have an overriding interest in upbeat posts prior to release. That might be irritating, but I wouldnt consider surprising.

But there are plenty of other forums and newsgroups having that discussion.

I meant Elemental threads on the Elemental forums. And I'm not surprised either, I'm just bothered by the behavior. I didn't think my post was that unclear to be honest. :p

I am just thinking that if I were Stardock and I made this awesome gem of a game, I would let the beta community ooh and ahh all day long. The only reason (in my estimation) to hide features and lock threads is to obfuscate the fact that it's not all it's cracked up to be.

[Foodstamp]

Those get locked HERE?

If you mean on the official forum by the games publisher then I wouldnt consider it surprising. They have no reason to appreciate "its not ready" posts. Even the constructive ones. :) They would tend to have an overriding interest in upbeat posts prior to release. That might be irritating, but I wouldnt consider surprising.

But there are plenty of other forums and newsgroups having that discussion.

I meant Elemental threads on the Elemental forums. And I'm not surprised either, I'm just bothered by the behavior. I didn't think my post was that unclear to be honest. :p

I am just thinking that if I were Stardock and I made this awesome gem of a game, I would let the beta community ooh and ahh all day long. The only reason (in my estimation) to hide features and lock threads is to obfuscate the fact that it's not all it's cracked up to be.

It usually goes like this:

Guy 1: Man this game is not ready to be released. It is not fun, buggy and is nowhere near polished.

Guy 2: STFU you retard! Beta 4 is nothing like release! It is going to pwnzer and you are dumb and stuff.

Me: Hey, you probably shouldn't call that guy a retard just because he is critical of the current state of the game.

Guy 2: LAWL you are retard too for thinking it is not ready.

Frogboy: The betas are nothing like the actual game we are going to be releasing; you guys were really playing the beta for another game.

Guy 2: LOL told you so dewdz.

Guy 3: LOL noobs Stardock tricked you noobs into thinking you were playing teh Elemental Beta.

Thread gets locked.

Rinse, repeat.

[Gandalf Parker]

It usually goes like this:

Not bad. Also to be figured into it...
Game changes gained? zero
Game suggestion now on the "I will never consider that" list? one
Game sales lost due to browsers and lurkers who stumble across the thread? unestimable
Time lost trying to get the programmers back to excited motivation about the game? well worth noting

I also love the reference to the perfectly good suggestion being shot down by the fan base. Meaning that most of the people didnt seem to agree with the wonderful suggestion.

There is a reason that game suggestions go thru a middle man. IF you really have something you feel should be considered then it should be sent to the publishing company so that they can present it in a way that can get it considered. Something that most forum members SORELY lack.

[sector24]

It is my understanding that Stardock is both the developer and publisher on this one, so I'm not sure what you are getting at. Even if someone else was publishing Stardock's game I don't see it would help to explain game mechanics to people who don't actually make the games. What is the publisher going to care about your ideas?

Even the constructive threads are full of fail though. For instance in one thread the guy posted suggestions for making the magic system better, because basically right now the elemental damage spells are identical and the spells lack distinctiveness. So he gave all these great suggestions, then got mobbed by the fanbois and the thread got locked. Stardock chose to have this open beta process; the least they could do is listen to the people that pre-ordered their game and did their best to improve it. Again, not surprising but it bothers me all the same.

[thejeff]

I think that's the point. Why have an open beta if you're not going to listen to the feedback? Is there a mechanism for suggestions from the beta testers to "be sent to the publishing company"? Or is that company's forum the mechanism?
If you don't want criticism in public, don't do the beta test in public.

Sure, lock the threads that are like the faux example above, but listen to actual suggestions and give some indication that you're listening. If it's not really a test, just a way to generate positive word-of-mouth, then it's kind of annoying.

It could be partly the fan base though. If anything but raves turns into a flame war, then that's a harder problem to deal with.

[Lingchih]

Stardock is well known for having open betas, and then not listening to the feedback. Still, they are the top developer of TBS games in my book, and their AI's are top notch. I will try Elemental... it looks like a poor man's Dom3, crossed with MoM.

[Doo]

Elemental is a worry. I have the beta and so far have been... largely unimpressed. It promises much that I should like but I ask myself will it deliver considering release is a few days away?

Ultimately I think that it will be brilliant with time.

[WraithLord]

sector24, can you give example links to the threads you mention?- If what you describe is true then I think I'll avoid elemental altogether.

You know, I now recall making a two suggestion posts that got, well, ignored. No wonder...

You can check for yourself:
http://forums.elementalgame.com/329075
http://forums.elementalgame.com/330349

[Gandalf Parker]

Another facet to this 20-sided dice would be this post from usenet.

A person asked about the game saying it was due soon but he hadnt seen much chatter on it. One of the response posts was this....

I've been doing the beta testing and I am a little concerned.

The game is still very unstable (frequent CTD, extreme slowdowns,
running out of memory on a system with 16GB, ...) and incomplete as of
the last (beta4) release and they have been making huge changes in each
"beta" release. It is waaaaay late to be making such big changes with
release immanent instead of just ironing out serious bugs and balancing
things. I suspect the initial release is going to be in very rough shape.

That said it is a lot of fun and if they stick with it and keep cleaning
things up it will eventually turn out to be a great game.
On the one hand this does support the statement that the release date might be something to avoid.

On the other hand it does not give me the impression that new ideas are being ignored. If anything, quite the opposite. So if one or two ideas seem to have gotten no attention except flamage from fans Id suspect they did not meet the criteria.

[sector24]

http://forums.elementalgame.com/389642

http://forums.elementalgame.com/389083

http://forums.elementalgame.com/388766

http://forums.elementalgame.com/388747

I didn't have time to do too much digging, but this is the general gist of things. There are a whole lot of threads talking about how the tactical combat is awful, how the spells lack distinctiveness, how the research is overly simplistic, etc. They don't all get locked but the "promise" that release will be awesome while all evidence is to the contrary is a bit disingenuous.

I believe the fanatical side of the fan base is sometimes a hindrance as well. I have a difficult time getting objective information out of their forums because there's a ridiculous amount of blind praise and bashing of any contrary viewpoints. That is of course not Stardock's fault per se, but from my (cynical) viewpoint they condition the forumites to tow the party line for "karma" or the slim chance that "Frogboy posts in my thread" kind of stuff.

I'm wasting altogether too much time talking about Elemental. :) But I guess I'm overly harsh simply because it's almost worse to come so close to success and still fail than it is to just come up with crap in the first place. I guess I set my standards a little too high.

[WraithLord]

Good examples.

Frankly, I don't understand SD's attitude.

As a dev I highly value potential customers inputs. It doesn't matter if it's "constructive" or plain *****ing (in case of *****ing I just filter the facts from the noise). Comments are good, criticism is good since at end of the day the product is developed for the costumers not for the devs.

SD seems to be pretty resistant to external influence, the threads give the impression that they know what they're doing, all the comments are already in their ToDo list and the beta version is nothing compared to that hidden version they plan to release.

[Doo]

Elemental will be great, it may need more time but the engine for a fantastic 4X game (in whatever guise the modders wish to take it) is there.

[Torin]

I dont think it will be that great. Just ok.
The graphics look good, but combat mechanics looks very simplistic.

Once I know the mechanics of Dominions 3 then some of the other games looks worse somehow.

Just attack and defense? I remember playing Warlord 2 tough where the units just had Strenght. I doubt they will use an open dice so it will be the strongest unit wins always.

And other thing I noticed in the videos is that buildings are finished in just a couple of turns vs Master of Magic where a granary took like 35 turns to complete. I dislike the spam of buildings just dislike the spam of techs of Gal Civ 2 where you had laser, laser II, etc. Master of Orion tech tree is ok, just laser and you can modify it later when you get more tech (auto fire, A Piercing etc.)

And finally, even if Frogboy gets angry, the factions looks lame.
Good guys and bad guys. You get to design your won tough. I think i would.

[delacroix]

I'll probably write some impressions once Elemental comes out and I've had a few days to see how it plays. I'm a bit hesitant with the game from what I've seen in the beta, but it's still the beta so it's not fair to judge quite yet. I liked a couple of the attributes of the game, but there's some notable glaring shortfalls that need to be addressed too before I'd recommend it to anyone. (eg. combat has been bare-bones so far, so no one other than the devs has seen how it'll play out with unit special abilities or all the graphical effects). Stability has been poor for me as of beta 4 as well, so hopefully they do end up ironing out the crashes by release.

I agree with poster above about the factions; they all look bland and kind of the same.. just tan-skinned humanoids, gothic humanoids, some red-skinned humanoid and a blue-skinned humanoid. The concept art looked a lot more stylistic and seemed to accentuate differences in the appearance of the races, but the in-game units just don't have an appealing look so far.

Also, the faction capabilities are poorly documented. For example this is the strength and weaknesses of one of the factions, Umber, in beta 4:
Strength- caravans build roads faster
Weakness- -20% tech knowledge

That's all. I don't know about anyone else, but I can't say I'm excited about building roads faster as a racial/faction ability. I'd hope the factions will be a lot more unique than that. I'd prefer to see factions to be as varied as the races of Master of Magic, or Dominions, or Heroes of Might & Magic town types versus difference among Civilization games. At least Civilization had the excuse that it isn't a fanstay-era game and all Civs are human so they couldn't have factions that regenerate, or fly, so I can be a bit more lenient with a game like Civ having similar faction capabilities.

[DonCorazon]

I had a bad feeling about elemental when I saw the factions were like Kingdom of Galdor, Kingdom of Minos, Kingdom of [insert generic fantasy sounding name]. And I am making those up b/c I don’t feel like looking to see what the actual ones were but they were just as bland and indistinct. By way of contrast take a look of the old map of the World of Greyhawk for some inspiration – Hold of the Sea Princes, Caliphate of Ekbir, Bone March, Abbor Alz, etc.

And I am guessing in Elemental one will have some generic trade bonus, one will have a generic research bonus etc. Stardock is like a soulless robot. I like the flavor and eccentricity of games like AD&D (1st edition) or Dominions, with all the weird rules and exceptions that make it difficult to reduce everything to numbers. Stardock games feel like spreadsheets with shallow-cliched themes pasted on.

I pre-ordered elemental and cannot get it to run on my laptop so I am the first to admit I could be wrong. But hearing these reports seem to confirm my fears that it is going to have as much flavor as a rice puff.

[NTJedi]

Elemental BETA4 Review: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
The Good:
1) Extensive modding will allow the game to become more evolved, balanced, and even more game content such as items, spells, creatures, quests, etc.,.
2) Good Diplomacy in the game for AI and human players
3) Randomly generated worlds where very rare technologies, creatures and resources will only appear in some games.
4) Custom design of sovereign and rumor is the final version will allow custom design of your nation.

The Bad:
1) The map editor was half broken thus the final version being released will not have much beta testing. It seems the map editor was designed by someone who's never used map editors... so creating a large terrain area is time consuming, no method for editing existing stuff placed on maps, single letters used for resources,creatures, etc., instead of an actual name/image, no method to assign creatures/buildings to a player, and so on and so on.
2) No 64Bit version... it's been tossed on the shelf for "later". This means limited map size until who knows. :(
3) Races/Nations are all human... some with different colored skin. I really didn't recognize any personality/behavior differences so all opponents are just clones of each other.
4) The community provided many topics of advice, but I can't seem to locate any ideas which were actually merged into the game. The Elemental ideas forums is a treasure trove of creativity and the BETA4 seems to only have basics of a game included many which copy a civilization game.

The Ugly:
1) Multiplayer requires an umbilical cord thru the internet into Stardock. Stardock developers are calling this LAN gaming which has stirred a huge argument of complaints from multiplayer gamers. The same as Gal_Civ_2 the multiplayer complaints will be generating some of the largest threads. More here: http://forums.elementalgame.com/390801
2) The BETA4 had major bugs such as saved games not loading, crash to desktop bugs, brain dead AI opponents, and heavy memory/performance trouble. I'm sure many of these will be fixed, but like all previous version releases I expect some major game breaking bugs in the official released version.

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Overall I'm somewhat disappointed\bored with the gameplay and battles. No stealth, no black markets, most terrain has no difference on the map, quests are basic, races(all_human) with very minor differences, not much spell creativity/uniqueness, battles lack excitement, and its lacking real character skills such as druids, clerics, assassins, etc., . The battle for good multiplayer seems like a losing battle.
I believe the game can evolve into something great by the community because of the modding.

[LDiCesare]

I'm not that confident about modding.
I'm used to modding games like Call to Power 2 and Civ IV, so I'm a bit spoiled, but the lack of a programming language (python was touted early on) will certainly hurt. Modding the user interface for instance doesn't seem possible, nor is modding a map script. It will be possible to mod new races, techs, and probably spells and effects, though, but I still think EWOM modding will fall short of my initial expectations.

I think there are 2 main issues in the beta which make the game unenjoyable/unplayable:
-Brain dead AI. I'm quite confident there, as Brad Wardell will take his time, but turn it into something challengin. Unfortunately, this may be at the cost of gameplay/variability/breadth of strategies available.
-Lack of army management UI. It's not possible to group 2 units outside cities and have them work as a single army. This has been the case from the first beta, and not fixed yet. I hope they change it, or make sure it can work seemlessly if it's supposed to work, but as it stands, this problem alone would make the game unplayable.

[Foodstamp]

I had a bad feeling about elemental when I saw the factions were like Kingdom of Galdor, Kingdom of Minos, Kingdom of [insert generic fantasy sounding name]. And I am making those up b/c I don’t feel like looking to see what the actual ones were but they were just as bland and indistinct. By way of contrast take a look of the old map of the World of Greyhawk for some inspiration – Hold of the Sea Princes, Caliphate of Ekbir, Bone March, Abbor Alz, etc.

And I am guessing in Elemental one will have some generic trade bonus, one will have a generic research bonus etc. Stardock is like a soulless robot. I like the flavor and eccentricity of games like AD&D (1st edition) or Dominions, with all the weird rules and exceptions that make it difficult to reduce everything to numbers. Stardock games feel like spreadsheets with shallow-cliched themes pasted on.

I pre-ordered elemental and cannot get it to run on my laptop so I am the first to admit I could be wrong. But hearing these reports seem to confirm my fears that it is going to have as much flavor as a rice puff.

This guy nailed it. I would only add that I think Elemental WILL be a good game a year or so from now. If they only give us XML for modding, I am going to be PISSED.

[das123]

First off, someone asked about Distant Worlds. Grab it!!! Best 4X space game ever made and getting better and better with each patch.

Regarding Elemental, I still hold high hopes for the game at release but I certainly empathise with the comments through this thread. Couple of things need to be said though:

1. Brad, the MD of Stardock, is basically on the forums every day as FrogBoy giving feedback and sharing the development of the game. I have never seen this level of openness from a developer. Bloody brave to face up day after day to defend what he is doing. He mustn't have a soul because I would imagine this to be a soul destroying exercise.

2. The screenshots of the final game do look much better than the Beta. So the world looks to be fairly immersive. Jury still out on racial diversity and tactical battles.

3. Like many here I think the game will end up being great after it has gone through a few versions and mods. But I also really believe it will be very good on release next week. A few lucky individuals managed to get their copies early through an error with the passwording and they are reporting that the game is fantastic.

4. Modding is based around XML but there will also eventually be Python as well.

[sector24]

3. Like many here I think the game will end up being great after it has gone through a few versions and mods. But I also really believe it will be very good on release next week. A few lucky individuals managed to get their copies early through an error with the passwording and they are reporting that the game is fantastic.

Can you provide some links? Good reviews would be very encouraging.

[das123]

3. Like many here I think the game will end up being great after it has gone through a few versions and mods. But I also really believe it will be very good on release next week. A few lucky individuals managed to get their copies early through an error with the passwording and they are reporting that the game is fantastic.

Can you provide some links? Good reviews would be very encouraging.

Here are some links to a couple of guys that downloaded it...

http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showpost.php?p=2343106&postcount=1920

http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showpost.php?p=2343115&postcount=1922

Not a lot of specifics but I'm heartened.

Also I felt very comfortable after reading the GameShark interview with the developer...
http://www.gameshark.com/features/741/Elemental-War-of-Magic-Q&A-with-Brad-Wardell.htm

[LDiCesare]

2. The screenshots of the final game do look much better than the Beta. So the world looks to be fairly immersive. Jury still out on racial diversity and tactical battles.
But the spell learning interface seems to be mostly the same as in beta, and it realy sucks.
I found the game more interesting to play only with the cloth map to be honest. the graphics hinder play more than they help, managing to make it hard to distinguish fluff (worthless rocks or scrubs) from gameplay element (ores or forests).

[sector24]

Good find! Ironic that the guy got in trouble despite providing a pretty much glowing opinion of the game and the only data point which indicates that the game might not be a flop. You would think that they would want a counterpoint to all the negativity/disappointment going around.

[HoneyBadger]

I don't have a whole lot of faith in Stardock. GalCiv2 was (for me, anyway) unplayably buggy, even after fully patched (BSOD every single game, and very poor customer service/little help from the boards), and the bits I could play, were extremely and obviously (to the point of Stardock outright stating the fact) reminiscent in flavor to the Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien in space? Wha?

And trying to get the game to run on a brand new, cutting edge computer, was just more problem, since the vaunted "downloadable game" feature has been moved to an indecypherable/extremely difficult to use download site, with enough distracting advertizements on it to choke the Las Vegas strip.

Compounding that was the game's (entirely unwanted and, to me, rather distasteful) simplistic combat system (boiled down to, and again described as, paper-rock-scissors...in space!!!), and even more simplistic alignment system, ala early stoneage basic D&D. Frankly, both of those elements are the opposite of something I'd ever want in a science fiction game. I barely fathom the purpose of an alignment system in a fantasy game, as it is, and science fiction battles should be all about ever heightening levels of complexity.

Considering that they're basing Elemental on Master of Magic, another old as dirt game (although undeniably a beloved classic, and one of my favorite games), and looking back on their attempt at something comparable to Master of Orion, I'm extremely wary here. Nobody in their right mind should be trying to reinvent the so very worn fantasy wheel... Innovate or get out of the way. Coupled with the reports on their not easily accepting Beta feedback, it'll take a great deal of convincing before I shell out the cash for Elemental. I think I'd rather give the updated King's Bounty a try.

[WraithLord]

Save your money for IWs upcoming game. I do have faith in them since every single game they ever made was blessed with imagination and creativity and, most important, is fun to play.

Also, Disciples III is fun, as in aesthetically and musically pleasing while you cruise the campaign at 10% brain capacity during a hard day's evening.

[Torin]

I think that Gal Civ 2 its not an improvement over MOO2. In MOO2 you get complex battles and personal ship design that you actually witness and make some sense of.

In Gal Civ 2 you design your ship to get them in a "battle" wich is 2 battleships crashing against each other. One lives and one dies. Why would I care if it get laser beams or missile or a mix. You dont actually see the missiles and they dont make any difference.

[Doo]

GalCiv 2 is clearly a different game, 4X in space does not have to be MoO2 spin off. Having said that, GalCiv 2 was kinda boring after a while, too abstract.

I liked the Space Empires series for the tactical battles. Somewhere on the net is a blow by blow account of a MASSIVE SE IV: Carrier Battles mod battle. Picture the biggest movie space battle with massive numbers of tiny fighters buzzing around the battleships, it must have taken the player hours just to do that one battle.

[Knai]

I would consider Gratuitous Space Battles an example of a well designed space combat system, though it is only that. Put that in with an economy, research, and all that and you would have a solid space opera 4x game.

[Doo]

I would consider Gratuitous Space Battles an example of a well designed space combat system, though it is only that. Put that in with an economy, research, and all that and you would have a solid space opera 4x game.

Yes, its like the combat in Dom 3 as a stand-alone game.

Well, Elemental: War of Magic version 1.0 is on my pc and I feel it is not too shabby. Not too shabby indeed. I was concerned but now feel better about it, this game has really good potential to be another Dom 3, ie still kicking years after its release.

I must say that I have not played much of it yet (sleep takes precedent and I'm pooped after work) and I'm a gamer who is forgiving and patient. Having said this I have not seen bugs of any kind, so basically its a 1.0 version, it works, possibly has some non-game breaking "quirks" and has spelling mistakes (like Dom 3 :) ). I believe the engine will allow for some great gaming experiences, as it stands I have not played enough to say either way if it has solid replayability on release but I am happy with what I have seen.

[WraithLord]

Doo, now that you have 1.0 can you relate to some of the questions below:
Do the races/nations feel unique and interesting?
Is the spell system interesting?
Is tactical battle interesting?
Are the races balanced by way of being more or less a copy of each other?

and bonus Q
Will Elemental ever support MP?

[onomastikon]

Doo, now that you have 1.0 can you relate to some of the questions below:
Do the races/nations feel unique and interesting?
Is the spell system interesting?
Is tactical battle interesting?
Are the races balanced by way of being more or less a copy of each other?

and bonus Q
Will Elemental ever support MP?

From what I can see of the game now, I'd say "no" to most of your first questions, whereby I found the spell system to be somewhat interesting (if not as interesting as Dom3's), and "yes" to the last question. To disambiguate:
- No
- Somewhat
- No
- Yes

Bonus Question: Yes. (It should support MP now, but I havent played that yet). (What's the prize for the bonus Q? :D)

[WraithLord]

you get the first copy of a game of your choice from the list below:
a- MOM II
b- Dominions IV
c- IW's secret game

That's the gaming industry's best kept secret, they not only exist and enjoyed by many (albeit at the cost of signing an NDA), they are also given as prizes for bonus questions (sadly making their MP community somewhat small) ;)

[Gandalf Parker]

MoM II has existed in many forms since MoM 1.
Some have reached being playable, but none have reached distribution form that I know of. Most of them are good starts that get destroyed by an effort to make them multiplayer.

Dom IV is still in discussion mode as I understand it. (note that it is not being done by Illwinter)

IW's secret game is only alpha as far as I know and their alpha's tend to require a working knowledge of Finnish which I dont have.

You forgot to mention :

Space Empires Plus, one of which is back to looking for programmers and the other is nearing alpha (neither done by Malfador)

VGA Planets IV which has become overdeveloped for release

Malfador's latest project World Supremacy which is in Apha

[sector24]

There is a lot of feedback, most of it pointing to the game being "fun but unpolished".

http://forums.elementalgame.com/391385

http://forums.elementalgame.com/391443
http://forums.elementalgame.com/391433
(and many more)

Some of the more disturbing stuff is that the "random" maps are not random. The goodies huts are random but you always get some starting resources nearby like fertile land. However the land mass is seeded, meaning that the ocean, mountains, forests, etc. are all static. Kind of takes the wind out of exploration.

Also the tactical combat (which is the biggest draw for me personally) is disabled in multiplayer. It still might be a fun single player game (with time) but I can't see it replacing Dominions.

[Amhazair]

Dom IV is still in discussion mode as I understand it. (note that it is not being done by Illwinter)

What? Where? How? When? Who? (And possibly some other one-word questions too.) This is new info, right? Haven't heard anything about it before.

[LDiCesare]

Some of the more disturbing stuff is that the "random" maps are not random. The goodies huts are random but you always get some starting resources nearby like fertile land.

This is much like Civ IV. The default random map generators put a lot of additional resources near the player's starting location.

However the land mass is seeded, meaning that the ocean, mountains, forests, etc. are all static. Kind of takes the wind out of exploration.
By seeded, you mean a same seed gives the same result, not that it's always the same seed? Please?

[sector24]

Yes, the same seed will give an identical land mass, just unique goodie huts and resources and neutral monsters, etc. In the current version there are about...15 seeds across all 4 map sizes? Something very small. There is of course the promise of "dozens" of map seeds coming, but still that's not quite random. To equate it to dominions, it's like having dozens of pre-set maps (Parganos, Silent Seas, etc.) but with random magic sites. I would not call that random map generation, and I don't think any Dominions player would either.

[Doo]

Space Empires: Battle for Supremacy

http://www.mpogd.com/news/?ID=6379

[Fantomen]

MoM II has existed in many forms since MoM 1.
Some have reached being playable, but none have reached distribution form that I know of. Most of them are good starts that get destroyed by an effort to make them multiplayer.
Unless you can give at least one link to an example of this I'm going to assume you're making this up.

Dom IV is still in discussion mode as I understand it. (note that it is not being done by Illwinter) You mean we're sometimes whining about how much we'd like it made? I wouldn't call that "discussion mode"

IW's secret game is only alpha as far as I know and their alpha's tend to require a working knowledge of Finnish which I dont have.
They're Swedish, like me. Not finnish, completely different languages. So if you have the slightest idea where I could use my extraordinary linguistic skills to find out more on the alpha I'd be more than happy to translate for you. Or perhaps the problem is rather the whole "secret" thing? You know, them not wanting anyone, including you, to know about it.

[Zeldor]

My first impression of Elemental is that it's poor man's Civ without any soul with artists being paid in non-alcoholic beer - sovereign and unit arts are just disgusting. Nations are a joke. UI is a joke. Economy seems bland. I will play a bit more, but so far I don't like it at all.

[HoneyBadger]

The truest heir to Master of Magic that I've ever played has been Lords of Magic: Special Edition.

Not an exact copy ofcourse, but definitely similar beyond mere reminiscence. And it quite possibly
has the most sheerly beautiful (map) scenery porn in any game, ever. It's very much like playing on
some centuries old Italian master's oilpaint landscape.

The game itself is fun, and the (many) elementally derived Nations play differently, because they are different. This does affect the balance a bit, unfortunately, but not horribly so, and anyway, you can play every single Nation, ranging from the very benign to the very evil.

The focus is on heroes, which are generally incorporated very well into the game. It's a little bit like Warcraft 3 in that aspect, but to my mind, the incorporation seems even a little bit smoother in terms of the gameplay, considering LoM:SE is years older. Storywise, there isn't much, ofcourse, but the game lends itself well to making up your own story, as you go along.

The AI is also not great, and it's a fairly easy game to play, and beat (perhaps a little too much so),
but there's multiplayer support, and from what I've heard (I haven't tried it), it isn't awful. I couldn't find an item editor, though, and I don't believe the game itself has very powerful modding tools.

Even if not terribly challenging, games are long and feel suitably epic, atleast in a "better than average saturday morning fantasy b movie" kind of way (think "Krull", "Beastmaster", "Hawk the Slayer" etc. but with better special effects and slightly more coherant story.), so it's a pleasant way to spend an afternoon actually enjoying a game experience, rather than fighting for survival.

The nicest part is, I got my copy for less than 10$, and that was years ago. Unfortunately, for everyone else, it's currently around $45 at Amazon. Worth it, though, in my opinion.

Does the game have a personality? Yes, and a fairly well-adjusted one at that, I think.

[Gandalf Parker]

MoM II has existed in many forms since MoM 1.
Some have reached being playable, but none have reached distribution form that I know of. Most of them are good starts that get destroyed by an effort to make them multiplayer.
Unless you can give at least one link to an example of this I'm going to assume you're making this up.

Any that are being done semi-professionally I dont care to give you. And tho I gave up on most of them but if you put Master of Magic into a search on sites like SourceForge you can easily find large projects in various stages of completion. Feel free to join any you wish. But like I said, most tend to start off good then try to go MP and fall apart. Im still hoping for one that just completes the working-version stage before going off topic (come to think of it, isnt Elemental itself an example of that? So why did you ask?)

Actually speaking of SourceForge and any of the other Open Source or Cloud Project sites...
Anyone here who is interested in getting in as a programmer, graphics, sound, or just general idea-discussion; take any old game that you really liked and do a search of project sites like these. If you loved it then chances are that someone else did also. There are many projects trying to resurrect old classics.

Dom IV is still in discussion mode as I understand it. (note that it is not being done by Illwinter) You mean we're sometimes whining about how much we'd like it made? I wouldn't call that "discussion mode"
Thats funny. I thought that Dom3Mods had one. :)
Most of the ones I was thinking of the discussion is in IRC. Of course, I tend to be less of a cheerleader than a naysayer. And I wouldnt say that any have reached any serious levels. In fact, until at LEAST an alpha playable version exists I dont bother contacting most projects.


IW's secret game is only alpha as far as I know and their alpha's tend to require a working knowledge of Finnish which I dont have.They're Swedish, like me. Not finnish, completely different languages. So if you have the slightest idea where I could use my extraordinary linguistic skills to find out more on the alpha I'd be more than happy to translate for you. Or perhaps the problem is rather the whole "secret" thing? You know, them not wanting anyone, including you, to know about it.No I dont think so. I really dont picture you in the alpha group.

[Gandalf Parker]

Yes, the same seed will give an identical land mass, just unique goodie huts and resources and neutral monsters, etc. In the current version there are about...15 seeds across all 4 map sizes? Something very small. There is of course the promise of "dozens" of map seeds coming, but still that's not quite random. To equate it to dominions, it's like having dozens of pre-set maps (Parganos, Silent Seas, etc.) but with random magic sites. I would not call that random map generation, and I don't think any Dominions player would either.
Pros and Cons. There are times that I wish the mapgen in Dom3 would take a seed.

There is usually a seed. You just dont always get access to it. Unless it randomly reseeds in mid generation its the same whether you know there is a seed or not. Creating a true random in programming languages is a history subject all its own.

And a seed generally means at least 65535 options. Thats alot of maps.

If properly used a seeded generator can create a map hundreds of times larger than other games without adding to the size of the game, cpu load, or memory use.

[sector24]

To be honest I don't consider Sourceforge and similar projects to be successors in any tangible way. If you don't own the intellectual rights to the project, you can't make the sequel. You can certainly make something, but when everyone is a volunteer the odds of any project going all the way to completion go way down.

As far as the seeds go, I do understand how they are supposed to work. However, the way Stardock talked about them it seems like only certain seeds have valid resources surrounding the starting areas. Since not all seeds are valid, we have to rely on them to provide them for us. Technically you can delete the seed altogether and create a totally random map, or use a manual brute force attack to generate all maps and then manually check which ones work for you. I think that's only for people who want to play Elemental: War of Boredom.

[HoneyBadger]

When you've got a game so old, and so influential, as the "Master of..." games, the idea of making a true sequel at this so very late date is a dubious fantasy, at best. I'm not certain that would even be very desireable.

It's pretty easy to list the things we (plural) liked about MoM, and create a game that utilizes those ideas, while discarding the body of outdated "stuff" that 20 years of programming has improved on.

For that matter, I suspect it probably wouldn't be terribly difficult to just mod the latest version of Civilization into a more or less MoM clone, if all you want is a fairly straight copy.

Personally, my wish is for a turn based strategy game that was deeply generic, and that let you create units/structures, and harvest resources, right from the ground up, in a Spore-like fashion, maybe with some user-defineable universal physics, along the lines of a user-created tech and resource tree--discarding the trappings, and inherant limitations of "fantasy/science fiction/historical" strategy games. With a deep and broad enough level of gameplay, you could end up with something with a whole lot more replayability than any given rehash.

[Gandalf Parker]

To be honest I don't consider Sourceforge and similar projects to be successors in any tangible way. If you don't own the intellectual rights to the project, you can't make the sequel. You can certainly make something, but when everyone is a volunteer the odds of any project going all the way to completion go way down.
I fully agree. In fact, I mentioned it in another thread where they were discussing how great games would be if the devs listened to the community. Im not against it. But everything has its pros and cons. Open projects tend to show the other side of that argument at a high percentage.

But it still makes a good hunting ground. Sometimes one of them will actually get to a working alpha. They are often just messing around with it but once it gets there you can talk to them about going legit. Sometimes it involves giving up the games working name for a completely new one and dropping some other too-close-to-hide characteristics of the old game but if they want to continue onward to a marketable product they can.

But like I say, until they have a working playable alpha its usually not worth talking to them. 90% of them fall out before doing any real code.

As far as the seeds go, I do understand how they are supposed to work. However, the way Stardock talked about them it seems like only certain seeds have valid resources surrounding the starting areas. Since not all seeds are valid, we have to rely on them to provide them for us. Technically you can delete the seed altogether and create a totally random map, or use a manual brute force attack to generate all maps and then manually check which ones work for you. I think that's only for people who want to play Elemental: War of Boredom.Thats sucks. Ive gotten used to developers not making good use of seeds but that sounds like not even making average use of it. On the other hand, changing out the seed-feed for a generator is something that can easily be done at the last minute so maybe its just that way now for testing purposes (I hope). Well Brads fame has always been AI, not maps.

[Doo]

I kinda suspect that Stardock would like to have put more things in at release but didn't have the time and it is good enough as a release version. I suspect a lot of crinkles will be ironed out over time.

You can see the Stardock team sitting around a table saying:

"Only some seeds give good starting resources, a bad seed effectively screws the game."

"Oh poo...."

"Lets release it on schedule and run with it, more maps can be added over time. It will fly."

And thats ok by me.

*edit* Immediately after writing this I went to the Stardock Elemental forum and guess what, Version 1.01 released with more random seed maps :)

[Folket]

I would buy Elemental if it had hotseat. As it stands now I will pass on that game.

[HoneyBadger]

Gandalf: Stardock gives good AI, but consider that it's AI in GalCiv is operating in a really simple combat environment.

That's always seemed a little suspect to me...

It feels like, once you've got the AI performing well in terms of overall strategy, that it shouldn't be to huge of a step to code in some kind of tactical framework that can go beyond "paper-rock-scissors".

People have been designing competitive chess games for well over a decade, that are able to outperform genius-level human players (1997: Deep Blue vs Kasparov, 1998: Rebel 10 vs Viswanathan Anand etc.), so why successfully create an AI that can perform on a macro-scale, but then not even make the attempt at one that can compete in a deep microgame? It's a letdown, in retrospect.

Another letdown is that the Dreadlords (the big bad Balrog-types) are neither capable of "learning" (they never adapt new weapons or defenses to the tactics of others), nor of fully operating on the grand strategy level (they don't take new planets), so that, to me, is a major failure of the AI towards giving the single player (which this style of AI seems to have been adopted for the benefit of--obviously, human players wouldn't require these kinds of handicaps), the ultimate challenge of trying to overcome an enemy that is not only strong, but in some fashion, smart.

It's a perpetuation of a tired old cliche: that of the supervillain who exists only to wait around for the plucky heroes to knock him off his dark throne. Once again, Tolkien in space. And in this case, there's not even the excuse of a Barad-Dur for the villain to be tied to, or a Cracks of Doom/Ring of Power weakness.

In GalCiv, Sauron has a spaceship.

[LDiCesare]

Stardock's handling of maps is very bad. They've been told to open map scripting to modders, who proved with Civ IV that they can do it.
No, they preferred to do it themselves. Now they have a big map generator, that is slow, that has to pick bits of here and there because they can't think of a non-fractal random map or can't create good fractal random maps and make them fast...

As for the ai, it will be decent enough given time, but right now, the Gold version is just worthy of a beta.
And I concur that Stardock games had good ai's because of simple rules.
Now, it's much harder with Elemental, which has way more varied rules, and in which many tricks will come, including unforeseen ones I believe, like self-hasting fire giants.

[Zeldor]

Is there anything interesting in Elemental that would make you want to stick longer to it?

And some questions:

1. How to deal with Golems? They pretty much insta-kill any armies.
2. Or maybe auto-resolve comabts sucks so bad that with 10x higher attack you lose anyway?
3. Is there any hard limit for tiles for my cities? OR any pattern? Some of my cities have same size, but 2x less tiles...
4. Can I make more adventurers or do I have to run like crazy with my sovereign to check all huts taht pop up everywhere?
5. Do games take hundreds of turns, or is it just me?
6. What's the strongest sovereign? So far it looks like the one starting with 2 units just owns everything, as he can amass insane amount of gold etc from monsters and treasures. what's +1 gold per turn if you can find 200 gold chests?

[sector24]

Is there anything interesting in Elemental that would make you want to stick longer to it?

And some questions:

3. Is there any hard limit for tiles for my cities? OR any pattern? Some of my cities have same size, but 2x less tiles...
6. What's the strongest sovereign? So far it looks like the one starting with 2 units just owns everything, as he can amass insane amount of gold etc from monsters and treasures. what's +1 gold per turn if you can find 200 gold chests?

3. You are limited to 50 tiles per city. If you put a resource inside your city (gold mine, etc.) that takes up 4 tiles. But it is put behind the city walls, so there's a tactical decision between freeing up 4 tiles and preventing bandits from burning down your gold mine.

6. Statistically speaking, some of the pre-made sovereigns are unbelievably powerful compared to the custom sovereigns. A few have more than 50 points placed in stats alone, and then on top of that they have abilities and equipment. The only advantage of a custom sovereign is the stacking of ridiculous bonuses, like getting all the +movement bonuses and the ability that allows all units to move at the same speed as the soverign (or something like that).

[Doo]

Gandalf: Stardock gives good AI, but consider that it's AI in GalCiv is operating in a really simple combat environment.

That's always seemed a little suspect to me...

It feels like, once you've got the AI performing well in terms of overall strategy, that it shouldn't be to huge of a step to code in some kind of tactical framework that can go beyond "paper-rock-scissors".

People have been designing competitive chess games for well over a decade, that are able to outperform genius-level human players (1997: Deep Blue vs Kasparov, 1998: Rebel 10 vs Viswanathan Anand etc.), so why successfully create an AI that can perform on a macro-scale, but then not even make the attempt at one that can compete in a deep microgame? It's a letdown, in retrospect.

Another letdown is that the Dreadlords (the big bad Balrog-types) are neither capable of "learning" (they never adapt new weapons or defenses to the tactics of others), nor of fully operating on the grand strategy level (they don't take new planets), so that, to me, is a major failure of the AI towards giving the single player (which this style of AI seems to have been adopted for the benefit of--obviously, human players wouldn't require these kinds of handicaps), the ultimate challenge of trying to overcome an enemy that is not only strong, but in some fashion, smart.

It's a perpetuation of a tired old cliche: that of the supervillain who exists only to wait around for the plucky heroes to knock him off his dark throne. Once again, Tolkien in space. And in this case, there's not even the excuse of a Barad-Dur for the villain to be tied to, or a Cracks of Doom/Ring of Power weakness.

In GalCiv, Sauron has a spaceship.

I thought these supercomputers used a brute force AI, that they simply run play out millions of optional moves and where they lead and then pick the best.

[LDiCesare]

Is there anything interesting in Elemental that would make you want to stick longer to it?

Good potential when there's an ai, a better ui in places, and some more balance. hopefully good modding capability too.


1. How to deal with Golems? They pretty much insta-kill any armies.

You mean fire giants, stone giants, etc? Yes, they kill everything. Best counter: Summon one of your own. Next: You need lots of attack to get past their armor, so need good weapons and lots of units grouped together. So buy a company of soldiers equipped with longsword or heavy warhammers or the like. Just make sure to have many individuals in the unit, each of them dishing out lots of damage.
Alternately, accumulate insane intelligence on your sovereign and cast some spell at it, particularly if you own the shards that go with the spell.

2. Or maybe auto-resolve comabts sucks so bad that with 10x higher attack you lose anyway?

I wouldn't trust auto resolve except maybe for 1 on 1 fights. The tactical ai is so bad that playing by hand means you'll win evenly matched fights easily so...

4. Can I make more adventurers or do I have to run like crazy with my sovereign to check all huts taht pop up everywhere?

You can hire adventurers and the like. Some of them seem to keep roaming the map even late game.

5. Do games take hundreds of turns, or is it just me?

They do for me too. But then I use a magician sovereign, she casts spells, and if it takes 20 turns for her mana to refill, the game drags just because of that.

[Dhaeron]

Can anyone who already played it give a review of the tactical battles? For me, boring tactical combat is a complete dealbreaker. GalCiv 2 was promising until the first fight showed that braindead rock-paper-scissors scheme that had going. There's a reason i always come back to playing MOO3 when i'm in the mood for space 4X. :D
Well, SEIV is nice too.

[Doo]

I can write a good review in around 48 hours time, so far I have not committed much time to playing it because after work I'm pooped. Friday night I intend to have an epic 6 hour marathon, Saturday morning I'll give you a fair and proper rundown of the game.

[sector24]

There is nothing "tactical" about the tactical battles. Basically all your guys are on a grid, all their guys are on a grid. There are no obstacles or impassable tiles to create choke points or anything like that. Most of your spells are single target, infinite range, deals 1 to X damage where X = your INT. Melee attacks deal 1 to X damage where X is your attack rating. Defense reduces damage ranging from 1 to X where X is your defense rating.

The wide number ranges make it hard to guarantee that any given attack will result in a kill, and it's especially frustrating when your spells roll low because you only get back 1 mana per game turn. So blowing 10 MP in a fight is rarely worth the price.

When you research warfare tech you can make groups of units that all stack together on the same square. Instead of 4/6/8 guys with individual stats, their stats are merely added together. So basically, 4 peasants = jaguar warrior, 4 axemen = niefel jarl, 4 knights = prince of death. It's pretty crazy. You spend all this time leveling up your sovereign so that he has 40 HP and a whopping 20 attack, and then a couple turns later you can just crank out unlimited numbers of 150HP 300 attack units in all your cities.

That's the gist of it. I bet one day all the units, equipment, spells, and special abilities will be modded to make tactical combat as good as it was in Age of Wonders oh 17 years ago...one day. But not today. :)

[Fantomen]

How depressing.

[WraithLord]

...
That's the gist of it. I bet one day all the units, equipment, spells, and special abilities will be modded to make tactical combat as good as it was in Age of Wonders oh 17 years ago...one day. But not today. :)

And I won't buy Elemental one day earlier.

The way you describe it, even HOMM V and Disciples I-III has better tactical combat, not to mention AoW/MOM or, heaven forbid, dominions.

[Zeldor]

You should read that, following all links in the article:

http://www.pcgamer.com/2010/08/25/elementals-disastrous-launch-stay-well-away/

[LDiCesare]

There is nothing "tactical" about the tactical battles. Basically all your guys are on a grid, all their guys are on a grid. There are no obstacles or impassable tiles to create choke points or anything like that.

This is plain false.
There are impassable tiles.
There's also terrain that provides defensive bonus.
It's hard to guess which, since what looks like a hill may not be one, and vice versa, but the terrain has an effect, and some tiles you can't cross (barriers).

Most of your spells are single target, infinite range, deals 1 to X damage where X = your INT.

False again. Many spells have short range and a side effect (freeze opponent f.e.), some have an area of effect. However all tend to deal the same damage.

Melee attacks deal 1 to X damage where X is your attack rating. Defense reduces damage ranging from 1 to X where X is your defense rating.

The wide number ranges make it hard to guarantee that any given attack will result in a kill, and it's especially frustrating when your spells roll low because you only get back 1 mana per game turn. So blowing 10 MP in a fight is rarely worth the price.

Yes. The real issue with tactical battles though is that if you spend 12 mana (4 fireballs targetting 1 target, or 2 lightning targetting 9 squares for 10 mana), it'll take you 12 turns to regenerate it, which means tactical spellcasting is just unusable.


When you research warfare tech you can make groups of units that all stack together on the same square. Instead of 4/6/8 guys with individual stats, their stats are merely added together. So basically, 4 peasants = jaguar warrior, 4 axemen = niefel jarl, 4 knights = prince of death. It's pretty crazy. You spend all this time leveling up your sovereign so that he has 40 HP and a whopping 20 attack, and then a couple turns later you can just crank out unlimited numbers of 150HP 300 attack units in all your cities.

That's the gist of it. I bet one day all the units, equipment, spells, and special abilities will be modded to make tactical combat as good as it was in Age of Wonders oh 17 years ago...one day. But not today. :)
It's also worth mentioning the ai isn't very good yet, and that the one who strikes first still gets a very big advantage.

Overall, I agree that the tactical combat is not yet good enough.

[WraithLord]

You should read that, following all links in the article:

http://www.pcgamer.com/2010/08/25/elementals-disastrous-launch-stay-well-away/

:(

For those too lazy to follow, I'll summarize:
review summary: "Elemental’s disastrous launch: stay well away"

And quoting this notable paragraph:
"In response to someone saying Elemental “plays like an early beta” on the Quarter to Three forums, Brad requests that anyone who thinks so “please stay away from our games in the future. I consider it ready for release and if others disagree, don’t buy our games.”
"

The review seems to be fair, even considerate. The reviewer states that he's or was a stardock fan and loves the game concept, he also gives a link to a thread in which Brad responds to that sad comment.

All in all, too much drama too little "soul" in this game that I once so looked forward too.
Looks like I have more to look forward too if they'll ever translate that game Dimaz mentioned to English.
Or, some company do an "exact" copy of MOM with production values of 2k11.

[delacroix]

[QUOTE=Zeldor;755450]You should read that, following all links in the article:
And quoting this notable paragraph:
"In response to someone saying Elemental “plays like an early beta” on the Quarter to Three forums, Brad requests that anyone who thinks so “please stay away from our games in the future. I consider it ready for release and if others disagree, don’t buy our games.”
"


I don't see what's so bad about the quote though or why PC Gamer is making a deal out of the quote. Maybe it's just how I'm interpreting the quote. All I get is Brad is saying is if a person doesn't think a game is in a good enough state, not to buy it. Sounds fair enough. "Vote with your wallet".

It's not like Brad's making a derogatory comment, or saying he "wants his life back" or calling them "little people" like BP oil's PR campaign and people don't care about that anymore either.

The reviewer says he'll be making a full review soon, so it'll be interesting to see how that turns out.

I'll post a couple impressions as well in a couple more days. I haven't had enough game-time just yet with the release build.

[13lackGu4rd]

You should read that, following all links in the article:
And quoting this notable paragraph:
"In response to someone saying Elemental “plays like an early beta” on the Quarter to Three forums, Brad requests that anyone who thinks so “please stay away from our games in the future. I consider it ready for release and if others disagree, don’t buy our games.”
"


I don't see what's so bad about the quote though or why PC Gamer is making a deal out of the quote. Maybe it's just how I'm interpreting the quote. All I get is Brad is saying is if a person doesn't think a game is in a good enough state, not to buy it. Sounds fair enough. "Vote with your wallet".

It's not like Brad's making a derogatory comment, or saying he "wants his life back" or calling them "little people" like BP oil's PR campaign and people don't care about that anymore either.

The reviewer says he'll be making a full review soon, so it'll be interesting to see how that turns out.

I'll post a couple impressions as well in a couple more days. I haven't had enough game-time just yet with the release build.

the problem is that Brad is the CEO of Stardock, thus he can't just act like your average poster! sure, he apologized for it later saying he was tired and sleep deprived, and of course that his quote was out of context, but it's still no excuse for the company's CEO to post in the forums as if he was some child customer. also saying "if you don't feel the game is ready don't buy it" and insisting that he feels the game was actually ready for release, sounds like "this is the game, take it or leave it" instead of "we are aware of the problems and we'll fix them. sorry we released the game too soon, our mistake".

I mean, come on, the game has been released, not beta, retail! you can't release a game and charge money for it when even basic features don't work and the came crashes constantly! sure, they're patching it up and fixing problems on the fly(and causing old problems to reappear it seems), but that's just bad, period. don't release a product until it's ready and mostly bug free, that's pretty basic. if you find the odd bug here and there that's alright, nobody is perfect, but crushing every 10 minutes? having tactical battles not work? AI factions that don't work or don't move outside their capital? those things are basic, and should never happen after release!

they'll probably fix all those bugs eventually, and even fix other things like the UI, AI, etc, heck Elemental might be a good game eventually(in a year or 2) but right now it's just pathetic, and charging money for such an unfinished product(and claiming it is finished) is almost criminal.

[sffrrrom]

Firstly, Brad isn't an average CEO. Stardock is a privately run company, so it's not like he has to answer to the shareholders, and Brad has always been deeply involved in the trenches, so to speak. While he has been known to take criticism poorly, and this is a prime example of that, I'd much rather he continue to lose his temper once in a while and still be actively involved in the community. Also, the review, while fairly accurate in a variety of extents, struck me as somewhat disingenuous in their use of that quote.

Secondly, the reason Elemental's release was so rocky is that several retailers broke the street release date. While the game still would have been rough around the edges without this (notably with respect to balance, which is still remarkably poor, a fact I've been critical of in the Elemental forums) many of the unplayability bugs and crashes probably would not have been large issues if people had been able to access the Day 0 builds properly, which would have happened if the street release had gone as planned.

That said, I really couldn't recommend buying Elemental right now. Personally, I'm just sticking it on the shelf for a month or two till it gets better balanced.

[sector24]

I did generalize for emphasis, but I will be happy to explain my position a bit more. I have played about 50 tactical battles, mostly against wilderness creatures (spiders, bandits, etc.). Those fights have virtually no impassable terrain. In one (and only one) fight, I saw a rock that blocked one square. So there isn't really anything you can plan a strategy around there.

I fought one battle near a town and there was a fence (exciting!) but there were three open squares in said fence. To deny the opponent access to your back line, you'd have to block the area with 5 units (because units can move diagonally). In my opinion if it takes 50% of your army to block a choke point, it's not a choke point. Due to AI "issues" there are never 5+ defenders in a city. More often than not the city is undefended.

You are correct that some tiles provide a defensive bonus or penalty, but surprisingly that doesn't add anything to combat either. I was all about taking the high ground in my first few fights, but honestly I can't tell if the defensive bonus matters in any substantive way or even works at all. First of all as you pointed out they are hard to spot and the terrain does not always indicate the presence of the bonus which is unfortunate. But the real problem is that the battle is always won before it has begun. For instance I found a sand golem in one of the goodie huts and its stats are ridiculous: 36 HP, 17 attack, 9 defense. The golem can kill an unlimited number of bandits, spiders, wolves, etc. It can also attack and then move back a square, effectively kiting enemies that can't be killed in one shot. The defense bonus just doesn't factor into the player's decision making.

Sun Tzu would be proud of my strategy. In real life you are supposed to win the battle before your men take the field. But it doesn't make for a fun game.

You also pointed out that not all spells are infinite range which is correct. In my defense I said "most" spells, and to elaborate my point the problem is that magic is only good in the very early game. As soon as you get Warfare 1, you can choose logistics which allows you to make peasant stacks. 10 turns later the first stack will be done and magic is already on its last legs. I only use offensive magic in the early expansion phase when I'm grabbing all the free goodie huts. So from a tactical point of view, the only spells you'll ever use are infinite range. However, I must admit that this is a playstyle choice. You could certainly choose to use magic but it's like casting Summon Animals with all your nature gems. Just not a good use of your resources. Personally I save all my mana for teleport, because for 5 mana you have an instant army anywhere you want. It's ridiculously overpowered.

I apologize if I was being inflammatory and to be honest Elemental is occasionally fun. But I think we agree in general that the tactical combat is a tragic failure that needs several hundred man hours (minimum) just to get it to 1993 standards. Speaking of Age of Wonders, Elemental does not allow you to drag adjacent units into combat so you can't set up 2-pronged attacks or battles between 3+ factions. Another disappointment that I meant to mention in the previous post.

[13lackGu4rd]

Firstly, Brad isn't an average CEO. Stardock is a privately run company, so it's not like he has to answer to the shareholders, and Brad has always been deeply involved in the trenches, so to speak. While he has been known to take criticism poorly, and this is a prime example of that, I'd much rather he continue to lose his temper once in a while and still be actively involved in the community. Also, the review, while fairly accurate in a variety of extents, struck me as somewhat disingenuous in their use of that quote.

Secondly, the reason Elemental's release was so rocky is that several retailers broke the street release date. While the game still would have been rough around the edges without this (notably with respect to balance, which is still remarkably poor, a fact I've been critical of in the Elemental forums) many of the unplayability bugs and crashes probably would not have been large issues if people had been able to access the Day 0 builds properly, which would have happened if the street release had gone as planned.

That said, I really couldn't recommend buying Elemental right now. Personally, I'm just sticking it on the shelf for a month or two till it gets better balanced.

keeping such close contact with the community isn't always a good thing. generally speaking the masses are stupid, and when so deeply involved in fan forums it gets harder and harder to filter the quality criticism from all the junk. sure, it's good that he's open and all that, but taking it to heart is dangerous.

oh, and don't blame the early release on the retailers, that's just bull... the game still isn't ready a few days after the original release date(even without the early street release), so blaming it on that is just a pathetic attempt to clear their incompetence. moreover, Brad himself said that he feels the game is ready, which it clearly isn't, which makes your excuse even more mute...

[Zeldor]

sffrrrom:

If someone does that, you sue them in court. There are deals, if someone releases game earlier, it's breach of contract. They'd have to pay huge fines for that.

[Baalz]

Yeah, I had a pretty crappy experience with Demigod from Stardock. It was so buggy upon release that it was nearly unplayable - it's essentially an entirely MP game that was launched with unusable matchmaking. Months in it was still just plain *bad*, requiring a potentially prohibitive amount of effort just to line up people to play, which sucked because the game had a lot of potential. The community just withered and died because of it, I've no idea if they eventually ironed out all the problems but it didn't matter because nobody was playing it anymore. It totally soured me to paying retail for a game then doing the beta testing for my trouble. Stardock used up all the goodwill I have, I'm not picking up another game from them until I have some assurance it's polished.

[sffrrrom]

13: What do you mean by the game still isn't ready? If you mean that it still needs serious balancing and gameplay work, then I agree with you, and did in my above post. My point was that the broken street release date most seriously negatively impacted performance/crashing/unplayability, especially people who tried to play the retail version without patching (because they couldn''t patch yet). Many of those issues have been addressed by now, and I don't see that they really should constitute a black mark against Stardock. On the other hand, the fact that the game isn't really much fun to play at the moment, because its so poorly balanced, should certainly count against them.

Also, whether or not you think close contact by Brad and the others is a good thing or not, it's really the only way for Stardock to pursue their business model as an indie company. There are plenty of large, impersonal corporations out there who take no notice of their fans (cough, EA, cough).

Zeldor: No, or at least not in Stardock's case. The fact is, retailers DID break the street release date, and this probably represents a breach of contract. However, suing those retailers who did is impractical (Stardock even stated this themselves), at least for a small independent company like Stardock. Maybe a huge company, like EA or Blizzard, who commands millions of dollars in sales of one product, might be able to pursue litigation. But the reality is that in pursuing legal remedies, Stardock would likely be forced to spend far more money than they would ever see in return - money they don't have to spend to prove a point, like Blizzard or EA do.

[Zeldor]

sffrrrom: [couldn't you pick easier nick?]

No, small companies cannot afford not to sue. They have to be even harder when dealing with people that want to damage their business.

But even without that we see that:
- game was not ready to be released now, or in a week or probably even few months
- they cannot do betas, there are insane amounts of bugs that can be spotted after 15 minutes

There are many very serious bugs that are not fixed in 1.05 patch. And Brad thinks 1.05 is a ready product. Database is screwed terribly - you can build multiple limited buildings, have multiple battles with same opponents and collect same loot few times - you just need to click fast enough [or make game run slow enough, easy thing]. Imagine this in MP. And if they cannot make basic stuff like that, how about all hacks and db injects?

And I'm not talking about balance or gameplay, which feels like Civ5 mod that adds 100x more huts and make barbarians diversified.

[13lackGu4rd]

sffrrrom, not ready not in the sense of game balance but in the sense of game options not working properly, I gave you some examples in my above post, Zeldor just gave you more. also, I understand that the multiplayer aspect of Elemental still doesn't work, which is another huge issue, considering most gamers buy new games just for the multiplayer aspect...

now, stop with this bull**** about the early release due to retailers! we're now almost a full week after the retailers released the game, Stardock already made what? 2 or 3 patches? and the game still isn't ready! Brad thinks it is, but it is clear he's mistaken... the game won't be really ready for a few months at the very least, sorting out the various bugs, getting all the game options to work as intended, fixing the UI and AI, etc. note that none of these have anything to do with the actual game play, balance, etc(well, part of the AI issue I assume, but the AI issue is huge...) so yes, we're talking about the BASICS not even the more advanced stuff(that usually takes more time, and is the real reason for patches, not to fix basics).

[sector24]

Update to tactical battles: http://forums.elementalgame.com/392831

Shards are supposed to increase your spell damage, but currently they do not. This is definitely a contributing factor to magic being so weak.

[LDiCesare]

Impassable terrain exists in tactical battles, but I've only been able to make use of it once, and I had 4 or 5 troops to boot, so it isn't terribly thrilling indeed.

The game is indeed in a beta state if anything.

Main issues remain. Brad blamed the number of Windows variants and graphics cards. He's certainly right in a sense, but then he wanted to make a PC-only game. And he's wrong in that in ye olde days, there was this mess with sound cards and with extended memory, so... Anyway, this kind of game certainly shouldn't use cutting-edge features that'll bleed the memory out of the game. But then I checked the 'cloth map only' option, so I'm probably biased. (And yes, I'll launch nethack of adom again soon.)

As of 1.05, the game crashes often (2 hours max for me). Several posters also report the impossibility to load saved games.
Random map generation is unable to provide a decent number of maps, and won't ever be if they stick to their current scheme. They have a patchworkk-algorithm prepared, but it's still ridiculous, as they would have decent map scripts ported from Civ IV if they had just opened the map generation api during the beta.
Tactical battles are dull. Auto resolution is pitiful, as I managed to lose a battle by autoresolution (I had about 100+ vs 33 in terms of estimated power), and when I reloaded and replayed I didn't lose 1 health on any unit...
Flavor isn't to be found anywhere.
AI is dumb. Just researching big armies with big weapons and some armor, and building ONE such unit wins you the game on a normal sized map.
Magic is mostly useless tactically, although some strategic spells (teleport, summons) can be useful. Even then, spells aren't balanced. Reveal costs a lot of mana for little benefit, while fire giants can be summoned pretty early and can win you the game all by themselves if you're fast enough at locating your opponent (which only requires building peasants, but I'm usually too lazy to have more than 1 stack at a time).
UI is bad. Locating armies/units in needs of orders is difficult. Finding out how to equip your heroes is unintuitive. Also, sometimes, one unit will move out of your stack alone without your wanting nor understanding. This can lead you to lose the game in case 'twas your sovereign who suddenly left his army because there's no army management window.
Champions are worthless. They cost so much to equip and will be slaughtered easily by the first squad of soldiers they'll meet that they are a joke. Even putting tens of the +2 attack for 100 gold amulet, cheesy as it is, isn't going to make them useful.

I'm pretty sure I'm forgetting stuff.

Still, the game will probably be good in several months or one year.

[Foodstamp]

The game suffered because:

Developers added, took away, changed features all the way up until the last minute. (No time for polishing those features)

It is obvious their internal beta team and the developers did not play it enough to realize there is no fun, balance or point to combat, the spell system, or the various other systems that were thrown in just because.

They leaned too heavily on the forums for direction, when they should have known that the Stardock forum goers were going to amount to little more than "yes men" to any idea they presented.

They were following a decent course to release at their secondary date of February 2011 but circumstances forced them to release in August instead.

Add to that the promises that were not kept. The game that Brad (CEO) talked about is a far cry from the Elemental I received. There is no python, there are barely any modding tools, this is not a spiritual successor to MOM, you can hardly call this a game even because the rules it follows are so bizarre, from spell damage to stacked unit damage to everything else, there is no continuity at all.

I paid for beta!

[Num]

The game was not ready for release. In a few words : The AI is terrible, lot of minor bugs, no polish, no balance. It looks like a single player only Dom3... Not really the good way to make it fantastic.
It looks great, graphic design is attractive but there is lot of work to get it enjoyable.
But Civ5 is released in 3 weeks, Stardock probably was in need of money and the next time for a release would be in months...
So lot of disappointment, hopefully the players will not disappear the next weeks until work will be done on the game...

[HoneyBadger]

In support of 13lackgu4rd's comment: I think that many, if not most, Dom3 players can accept that game balancing is one of the responsibilities of a game's community. It's also more of a subjective "grey area" than broken features/promises.

If Elemental had come out with only balancing issues, I doubt this thread would have gone in the direction it has.

Beta's for ironing out atleast most of the major bugs, and for making sure the game is working well enough to be called Gold. "Crashes every 2 hours or so" should never, ever, be an issue in a Gold version. And this is the second Stardock game that's had this issue. I personally experienced the exact same problem with GalCiv2.

They should have just waited for a holiday release. Yeah, it's difficult to have to hold out for a payday, but look at Blizzard and their successes. They wait until a game is actually Gold, before releasing it. I'm not saying that their 1.0 versions are perfect, they've released plenty of patches (itself a good thing, rather than any mark of inferior coding), but they give quality product from day one, without any insulting "take it or leave it" garbage.

This whole idea of the community being a second or third Beta team is getting out of hand, and really starting to leave a bad taste in my mouth. People volunteer for Beta all the time, so let whoever wants to, sign up and help out, until the game works.
Games are for entertainment, enjoyment, a clean break from work. If I have to work hard just to help a game become playable, on top of my 40+ hour work week, why aren't companies like Stardock paying me, instead of the other way around?

[Doo]

After playing the game last night I don't think I have too much more to add about Elemental that has not been said here.

1) Its playable

2) It needs work to be more balanced

3) It has bugs (having said that, no CTD's for me. Also patches are being released)

4) It has great potential and I believe there will be some fantastic mods in time.

If you are a picky person and get stinky pants over bugs and games not being polished then save yourself the effort and don't get it now, but do keep following the games (and mods) development. If your a relaxed gamer and like TBS get it, have a muck around and watch it improve over time.

I personally enjoy it and especially hope Stardock can bring it up to where the potential says it can be. I do believe this will happen and I'm happy to have paid for it because I do have faith. If this comes back to bite me then I'll lament the loss of time and dollars. However if its improved upon most TBS fans will buy it and be very happy.

Overall: Watch this space.

[Ichirou]

Funny I should see this thread after arriving at these boards after being away for some time. The reason I came back here was to see what was new in the Dom3 world since I was so disappointed in Elemental and needed to find something substantial like Dom3 to scratch my MP strategy itch again.

Rather than rehash the details that others here have already so ably discussed, I will limit myself to saying that Elemental is not only an unfinished product, it also seems to be a confused design as well. The game seems to have thrown things together without a thought of how to weld them all together into a pleasing whole. From what I've read, it would seem that this stems from the devs making large changes from build to build. Was there no overall design plan for this game? It doesn't seem like there was. And the game that I first read about and got interested in over a year ago seems to be totally different from the game that they released this week.

Add to that the bugs, an unintuitive UI, an unimaginative set of starting nations, just to name a few things, and the whole thing adds up to something that certainly needed a few more months of work and polish. The only bright light I saw with the whole thing was their stance towards modding the game, and the tools that they will give to help that along.

And of course the real gem - there is no multiplayer on release. Oh there will be servers set up soon, but really, I would have thought that they would be especially careful to have their multiplayer ironed out and ready considering the much deserved flak that they received over their Demigods game.

And yes, I know like others have said that SD will support the title and that they will get things patched and cleaned up eventually. And I do have faith that this will be done. But releasing the game like this when it's not ready just isn't right. And Brad claiming that it is ready is only fooling himself and anyone else enough of a fanboy to believe him. And I think it's going to bite him pretty harshly when it comes review time. While I haven't yet seen a formal English language review on the game yet, other than the PC Gamer warning which was as stated not a review which would come later, there is already at least one brief French review that gives the game a sound 30/100 mainly siting the unfinished and unappealing nature of the game and UI...and the lack of multiplayer being enabled.

Oh well, I suppose I'll have to queue up with everyone else, my gaming buddies included, and just shelve this game for a few months to a year and then check back in with it then. A pity though to see SD waste the good vibes that could have been generated for this game by releasing a finished and polished product that would have in turn ensured a much stronger response, and sales, from the gaming community right from the get go.

[onomastikon]

Could you post a link to the French review please? thank you

[Doo]

Here is a good review of Elemental, also containing a mention of Dominions 3.

http://fidgit.com/archives/2010/08/elemental_the_review.php

Inscrutable?

[sector24]

Review aggregator: http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/elemental-war-of-magic

[DonCorazon]

Well, i still can't get this thing to run on the old XPS 1710 so have to reserve judgment but the reviews look atrocious. Surprising the big sites like Gamespot or IGN have held off - guess they like to let the game manufacturers sell more lemons before they reveal the truth.

You know, I read an interview with Brad Wardell one time where he talked about how he made alot of money, was married to a good looking woman, and drove a nice car (something along those lines) - and I thought - what a douche. Well, I can't believe I have been dumb enough to buy more than one game from him. I won't ever be buying or supporting any Stardock drivel nor will I ever pre-order anything again. btw I pre-ordered the hard copy version so have a copy of the lousy 20+ page manual. Classic Stardock tripe:

"Urxen: Another Fallen race, they are smaller than Trogs and are less effective in battle, but more productive"

Wow, that really fires up my imagination Stardock - wtf - I mean almost anyone could write something better than that. I want my f-in $ back.

[Zeldor]

In theory you can sue them or return the product, I am sure it says "multiplayer" on the box :)

Class-action lawsuit would be so funny, someone should finally do it vs one of the game companies.

[Torin]

The gamespot critic must be a friend of stardock because he knows he must do a bad critic and its waiting for to see if patches change the game.

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/elementalwarofmagic/news.html?sid=6274610&om_act=convert&om_clk=newsfeatures&tag=newsfeatures%3Btitle%3B1

[DonCorazon]

I almost want to volunteer to work for their company just to help. So little effort could improve the manual tenfold, for example.

"Urxen are skittish and frenetic chittering humanoids that worship the fiery monkey demon Bloodfinger (husband of the moon goddess). They dwell in large temple complexes where the braziers unrelenting flames consume the sacrificial victims of outlying villages throughout the dry season until the torrential rains fall."

Two minutes of effort for a little flavor, albeit warped.

[Zeldor]

They have huge beta group. If they were able to use any help, it'd be totally enough. There are sever bugs that can be found withint 10 minutes. Still present after 4 or 5 patches.

[Torin]

"wielding graphics that would look right at home in a Dire Straits video"

thats a good explanation of some of the characters graphics in this review
http://www.1up.com/do/reviewPage?cId=3181116&p=1

But to be fair. Apart from these card graphics that look atrocious. The rest of the game looks awesome graphicwise.
Most of the bad is the bad timing on the animations. The cavalry animation is buggy, long after it finished moving it stalls making you wait for several seconds. there is no standard in timing for animations.

[WraithLord]

I think SD are making terrible marketial mistakes and are rapidly burning that most important, yet ellusive, coin - their good reputation.

For me personally it's a done deal, any expectations I might have had from SD to release fun TBS games are now completely gone. I gave SD a lot of credit, mainly b/c TBS games are so rare these days and b/c the high praise gamespot reviews gave them.

So I tried, I really did to like the GalCiv series but DonC has put it well, it's just lacking sou/fun/"magic" - you name it.

So, after years of lurking on MOM2 sites I read this exciting news that SD and Atari are negotiating for SD to do a sequel to MOM. From that point of excitment it was a down hill journey: first that deal blew off, so instead of a real sequel SD was doing a "spiritual" successor to MOM.
Still, could be great, but, as time goes by I notice that SD devs don't have a clear concept of how they want their game to be like. I follow their forums, their devs diaries and the fan comments and it all translates to a sinking feeling. No, they won't do PBEM, no they won't take great concepts from AoW/Dom, no-no: they want to do their own game - albeit they still haven't decided what exactly they want in and how the economy, military, combat and spell systems would all bind together to work seemlesly and smoothly. That was my feeling but I tried to tell myself I'm probably exaggerating. Luckily I didn't preorder.

I hope there will one day be reall sequel to MOM2, AoW SM & Dominions 3. Or that a good FTBS game would come along.
As of now, FTBS genre seems to be withering. Good titles are hard to come by and are growing ever more scarce.

[Foodstamp]

Wraithlord,

I don't know about you, but to me it feels like the game still has 6+ months of beta before it should be released. Brad made a money decision to get the game on the Walmart shelves, reputation be damned.

[WraithLord]

Yes, 6+ months for beta, consolidation of game mechanisms and openess to none-fanboys comments re. how to make the game have more flavor, pace better etc. Sadley, the attitude SD exibited so far doesn't paint them as being very open to critisicm.

Oh, and of course they need to add real MP to the game. MP at the mercy of SD server's is not something I'd look forward to.

[Meglobob]

Thankfully, I didn't pre-order Elemental (I didn't want to get involved in beta testing) and I am unlikely to buy Elemental any time soon.

I personally love Galactic Civilizations and bought GC 1, GC2 and all the expansions. Also I have bought several games which I am happy with via there impluse platform. So Stardock have alot of goodwill from me, however Elemental and how Stardock have handled it is a diaster and will no doubt cost them alot of goodwill in the future. I know I would never pre-order a Stardock game but wait for the magazine reviews/demo before parting with my money.

There website is very, very scary place to visit, its full of fanboys who stomp on any critisim of the game or any reasonable discussion. If those were the type of players who were giving them there beta feedback, then its no wander it has resulted in what is currently a very, 'average' game.

The demo will be out in September, so I will try that and see what I think, I may still buy Elemental but only if Stardock continues its development and turns it into at least a 'good' game. It could very well be the 1st expansion before this is the case.

[ioticus]

I emailed Stardock for a refund which is what I think we should all do to send a message that we won't put up with their paid beta tactics.

[Zeldor]

Yep, I think the correct address is sales@stardock.com

I've heard that Bradell posted that everyone unhappy with the game can ask for refund. Everyone should do it and then pick it from $2 bin at walmart.

[onomastikon]

There website is very, very scary place to visit, its full of fanboys who stomp on any critisim of the game or any reasonable discussion. If those were the type of players who were giving them there beta feedback, then its no wander it has resulted in what is currently a very, 'average' game.


In all fairness, while "their" website does indeed contain a large number of rampant, vociferous fanboys, "it's" not terribly different from most game websites throughout the world. Sometimes I also "wonder" about the degree of harshness with which those who offer constructive criticism of Dominions are treated here on this website.

What's true is that Brad -- not unlike Johan et al. -- feels that he will and can end up doing his thing, no matter what, and that gives him a certain degree of immunity to criticism. Like Johan et al., Brad has a "real life" in a slightly different context, albeit one that is not quite so different than that a game developer as a schoolteacher is (he runs a software company which also happens to have a small gaming branch); while he has resources and gets paid for Elemental, his bread and butter is elsewhere (various Windows applications), allowing him to create a niche product, if he so wishes. For reasons much like these, the creators of Dominions 3 are also able to say, with a certain degree of reassurance, that if someone doesn't like what they are doing, then they might as well stay away. Unlike the creators of Dom3, however, whose main target group consist of people posting here (in other words, a small, vociferous, fiercly loyal (it seems to me sometimes to the point of being blind), frequently rampant fanbase) -- in other words, the nerds here like you and me --, the creators of Elemental simultaneously wish to be mainstream and reach a much larger target group. I think that is greatly inconsistent and self-contradictory, and I am currently writing a useless, somewhat acerbic post full of well-formulated rantings on their website, mostly because I still suffer from the common delusion that things people write on sites like these will be viewed with patience and goodwill and may even change things in the world. Look for my post there soon. Ah excuse me sidetracked.

I too was a member of the beta "team", and Megablob is more correct than he knows. What he doesn't know: We never actually tested the game. Never. We tested parts of it, but what you can purchase now was never played by a human being outside the laboratories of Stardock, and by them only minimally (by their own admission), before reaching your shelves. You read it here first. Ah excuse me again.

[WraithLord]

In all fairness, while "their" website does indeed contain a large number of rampant, vociferous fanboys, "it's" not terribly different from most game websites throughout the world. Sometimes I also "wonder" about the degree of harshness with which those who offer constructive criticism of Dominions are treated here on this website.

Care to share some examples before making a statement like this?


What's true is that Brad -- not unlike Johan et al. -- feels that he will and can end up doing his thing, no matter what, and that gives him a certain degree of immunity to criticism. Like Johan et al., Brad has a "real life" in a slightly different context, albeit one that is not quite so different than that a game developer as a schoolteacher is (he runs a software company which also happens to have a small gaming branch); while he has resources and gets paid for Elemental, his bread and butter is elsewhere (various Windows applications), allowing him to create a niche product, if he so wishes. For reasons much like these, the creators of Dominions 3 are also able to say, with a certain degree of reassurance, that if someone doesn't like what they are doing, then they might as well stay away. Unlike the creators of Dom3, however, whose main target group consist of people posting here (in other words, a small, vociferous, fiercly loyal (it seems to me sometimes to the point of being blind), frequently rampant fanbase) -- in other words, the nerds here like you and me --, the creators of Elemental simultaneously wish to be mainstream and reach a much larger target group. I think that is greatly inconsistent and self-contradictory, and I am currently writing a useless, somewhat acerbic post full of well-formulated rantings on their website, mostly because I still suffer from the common delusion that things people write on sites like these will be viewed with patience and goodwill and may even change things in the world. Look for my post there soon. Ah excuse me sidetracked.

I'm not sure what you're getting at here. I disagree with the comparison you drew. I am following IW for many years now and I personally witnessed their attitude to critisism. I think they are more open than SD are and certainly less condesending (IMHO)


I too was a member of the beta "team", and Megablob is more correct than he knows. What he doesn't know: We never actually tested the game. Never. We tested parts of it, but what you can purchase now was never played by a human being outside the laboratories of Stardock, and by them only minimally (by their own admission), before reaching your shelves. You read it here first. Ah excuse me again.
Unbelieveable. Not even the devs played the game. Do they even like what they created?

[rdonj]

There website is very, very scary place to visit, its full of fanboys who stomp on any critisim of the game or any reasonable discussion. If those were the type of players who were giving them there beta feedback, then its no wander it has resulted in what is currently a very, 'average' game.


In all fairness, while "their" website does indeed contain a large number of rampant, vociferous fanboys, "it's" not terribly different from most game websites throughout the world. Sometimes I also "wonder" about the degree of harshness with which those who offer constructive criticism of Dominions are treated here on this website.

What's true is that Brad -- not unlike Johan et al. -- feels that he will and can end up doing his thing, no matter what, and that gives him a certain degree of immunity to criticism. Like Johan et al., Brad has a "real life" in a slightly different context, albeit one that is not quite so different than that a game developer as a schoolteacher is (he runs a software company which also happens to have a small gaming branch); while he has resources and gets paid for Elemental, his bread and butter is elsewhere (various Windows applications), allowing him to create a niche product, if he so wishes. For reasons much like these, the creators of Dominions 3 are also able to say, with a certain degree of reassurance, that if someone doesn't like what they are doing, then they might as well stay away. Unlike the creators of Dom3, however, whose main target group consist of people posting here (in other words, a small, vociferous, fiercly loyal (it seems to me sometimes to the point of being blind), frequently rampant fanbase) -- in other words, the nerds here like you and me --, the creators of Elemental simultaneously wish to be mainstream and reach a much larger target group. I think that is greatly inconsistent and self-contradictory, and I am currently writing a useless, somewhat acerbic post full of well-formulated rantings on their website, mostly because I still suffer from the common delusion that things people write on sites like these will be viewed with patience and goodwill and may even change things in the world. Look for my post there soon. Ah excuse me sidetracked.

I too was a member of the beta "team", and Megablob is more correct than he knows. What he doesn't know: We never actually tested the game. Never. We tested parts of it, but what you can purchase now was never played by a human being outside the laboratories of Stardock, and by them only minimally (by their own admission), before reaching your shelves. You read it here first. Ah excuse me again.

Wow, why are we coming down so hard on "meglobob's" spelling/grammar? I mean, I've been a bit of a spelling nazi myself, but this forum gets visitors from many countries around the world, and that means we have a lot of players here who don't speak english as a first language (which I'm pretty sure includes meglobob). Of all forums to attack someone's use of the english language, this one really isn't terribly high on the list. It doesn't add anything to the conversation and is kind of rude. I would kindly ask you not to do that again on these forums, please.

And otherwise, I completely agree with Wraithlord's sentiments. Are we reading the same forums here? The ones in which there are only a very few people that stand completely behind the devs in all things (seriously, other than gandalf, does anyone fit this mold? And he's at least quite open in admitting it)? The one in which, on patch days, we are likely to see more people complaining about the lack of cave darkness than we are people who thank illwinter for the extra work they've put in to make the game just that little bit better, years after getting it out on the market? The one where the vast and overwhelming majority of games are played using a mod that makes significant changes to the game due to perceived balance concerns that they devs don't really see as a problem for them?

You baffle me.

[Meglobob]

Spelling:D

Ha ha, yes it was very sloppy and I am embarrassed to be called a Englishman, which I am...:doh:

[onomastikon]

Sorry, I did not mean to come down on Megablob's spelling like that. I have been having a bad day, little things were and are being blown way out of proportion, and I did not take my medicine. Sorry.
(I do, however, continue to feel differently about the nature of loyalty and criticism on these boards than you do. I see about equal levels of vociferousness and constructive criticism here as on the elemental forum.)

[HoneyBadger]

I think most if not all of the longtime Forumgoers would be more than willing to buy Kristoffer and Johan a beer, or several, to go with a pat on the back and a "bloody good show".

I certainly would.

Infact, if I had the ways and means to drop everything and off to Sweden, I'd make the beer myself (it's not that hard, but I don't even have time for that, lately...).

I've found the medium (an internet Forum) to be far more lacking than the sentiment.

Also, the audience that Dom3 is directed towards is a small, rarified faction. It's a game made for gamers who have been either ignored or burned (thanks Stardock!) for over a decade. Considering that we're not just gamers, not just fantasy gamers, not just turn-based fantasy gamers, we're some kind of...specialized retro breed of turn-based fantasy gamer/roguelike degenerate bastard hybrids(?)...well, how fine of social graces can you expect from us, afterall? I'm the only one here that I even know is married, and I suspect my miracle of a wife was as relieved to chance upon someone who shared her interests, as I was to find her.

I'm forever immensely grateful to Illwinter for keeping this dream alive, but they've taken a heavy burden upon their shoulders by practically being the only bearers of this particular torch.

Do we crave more and better? Ofcourse we do. Do we expect more and better from Kristoffer and Johan? Frankly, I don't think anyone expected Dom3. It's a whale of a game, but it's swimming in an empty sea, and I don't think very many people know quite how to act when it also turns out to be a magical fish that grants wishes.

How does one even deal with that, let alone thank it properly?

[WraithLord]

+1

with small correction -
Plenty of married guys here (me included), see the thread that goes something along the lines of "mouse clicks when playing dom makes my girlfriend/wife/mother in low, angry/sleep deprived/lock me in basement" ;)

[onomastikon]

You say that well and nicely, Honeybadger.
I realize that this is about as niche as you can get, I'm not good in formulating stuff succinctly. I suppose I was overwhelmed a few times here by what I (mistakenly?) took to be long-standing forum-goes with much clout beating me on the head for saying something wrong, and since then (I believe that was 2004, when I joined for playing Dominions 2) I have mostly been a lurker.

And now, I bet there will soon, possibly right here, be quite a number of people who are going to give us information on their marital status. I'll start us off: I've been married for ten years (August 2000), and the wife detests computer games of all sorts. Otherwise, we have what appears to be a wonderful time and wonderful kids.

In related news, Brad Wardell posted from his holiday house (http://forums.elementalgame.com/394104)that he loves Elemental and will be sure to address all the bad stuff very soon.

[HoneyBadger]

+1

with small correction -
Plenty of married guys here (me included), see the thread that goes something along the lines of "mouse clicks when playing dom makes my girlfriend/wife/mother in low, angry/sleep deprived/lock me in basement" ;)

Oh, not mine. My wife (who I should mention, spends considerably more time actually playing games on her computer, than I do on mine,) finds this all to be adorable.

I've actually been encouraged to play more, provided I still give her an acceptable amount of attention, and keep the house from falling apart.

My mother in law, on the other hand, is a very avid collector of Harry Potter merchandise, and has owned atleast 3 computers since I've known her, so I'm not getting a lot of grief from that quarter, either.

[Baalz]

+1

with small correction -
Plenty of married guys here (me included), see the thread that goes something along the lines of "mouse clicks when playing dom makes my girlfriend/wife/mother in low, angry/sleep deprived/lock me in basement" ;)

Mouseclicks? I learned long ago to turn the sound off if there was any chance of elephants or starspawn being in a battle in order to preserve marital bliss...

[WraithLord]

Thanks for sharing Brad's post.
I liked what I read. I think that it would be,if SD would stand by it, a major step in the right direction.

However, releasing the game in such a sorry state shouldn't have happened. SD basically punishes it's most dedicated fans, while those sitting on the fence will:
a- probably buy the game cheaper (least important) and
b- not do paid beta testing, or put it other way, be frustrated with bugs, crashes and inconsistencies. And
c- will buy the game with much more content

The way the game would be in this 1.1 version Brad mentioned is how it should have been released.

Oh, and my wife too hates vidoe gaming in general and dominions specifically. It's the one game she hates most. ( The one game to rule them all ;) ) - I wonder why? :confused:

[WraithLord]

+1

with small correction -
Plenty of married guys here (me included), see the thread that goes something along the lines of "mouse clicks when playing dom makes my girlfriend/wife/mother in low, angry/sleep deprived/lock me in basement" ;)

Oh, not mine. My wife (who I should mention, spends considerably more time actually playing games on her computer, than I do on mine,) finds this all to be adorable.

I've actually been encouraged to play more, provided I still give her an acceptable amount of attention, and keep the house from falling apart.

My mother in law, on the other hand, is a very avid collector of Harry Potter merchandise, and has owned atleast 3 computers since I've known her, so I'm not getting a lot of grief from that quarter, either.

You lucky lucky man :envy: ;)

At my house dominions is like, I'd say, a pet that only I like. For my wife it's no better than a flea infested, bad smelling mongreal and she probably wouldn't mind giving it the occasional kick or downright kick it out of the house :)

[sector24]

My problem with Stardock's forums is mostly the suppression of negativity that makes it impossible to see a situation from multiple perspectives. When I want to learn about a game, the most valuable feedback for me is the negative feedback because it is generally the most honest. People gushing about the game is largely meaningless because you're on that game's forum, of course the people there are going to like it. For positive feedback it's better to go to metacritic/gamefaqs or a neutral board.

Even now that the negativity on their boards is overwhelming, every post must contain the caveat that "I love Stardock and I know they will support their game" before being honest. It's ridiculous and I don't see that on these forums at all. Any bashing on these forums is usually people asking questions they could answer themselves with some testing, or from experienced players who forget just how complex and daunting Dom3 is to new players. Even then it's pretty rare.

I just finished my first sandbox game of Elemental last night. Tiny map, ridiculous monsters and all ridiculous AIs. I had the game wrapped up by turn 70 but I played until turn 250 to finish the tech tree and check out quests, etc. I finally won via the quest of mastery but I did crush a few nations to get to the quest locations.

Now that I have accepted the UI flaws and the quirky behavior and crashes, the game is actually growing on me a little. I see the game's potential for fun given lots of patches or a huge balance mod (like CBM does for Dom3). That doesn't really excuse the current state of the game, but if you could pick this game up at Christmas for $30 that might not be a bad deal.

[Kheldron]

+1

with small correction -
Plenty of married guys here (me included), see the thread that goes something along the lines of "mouse clicks when playing dom makes my girlfriend/wife/mother in low, angry/sleep deprived/lock me in basement" ;)

Oh, not mine. My wife (who I should mention, spends considerably more time actually playing games on her computer, than I do on mine,) finds this all to be adorable.

I've actually been encouraged to play more, provided I still give her an acceptable amount of attention, and keep the house from falling apart.

My mother in law, on the other hand, is a very avid collector of Harry Potter merchandise, and has owned atleast 3 computers since I've known her, so I'm not getting a lot of grief from that quarter, either.

You lucky lucky man :envy: ;)

At my house dominions is like, I'd say, a pet that only I like. For my wife it's no better than a flea infested, bad smelling mongreal and she probably wouldn't mind giving it the occasional kick or downright kick it out of the house :)

+1
Except my wife actually asked me to chose between this "pet" and her several times. This plural supposedly means she's not too serious about it but who knows? :sick:

I had forgotten about this thread WL, thx for reminding it to me, that was one good time when I didn't feel alone with my "household vs dom3" issue :)

and Baalz, IIRC the clicking problem was never solved since it's a "physical" one with mouses.
Try to move some dozens of blood slaves/gems, at night, with all computer sound off just to realize how stressing this particular noise can be for a nearby sleeping usually-loving-but-never-in-this-case wife ;)

[Gandalf Parker]

The switches dont work?
-s --nosound .......... No sound effects or music
-m --nomusic ......... No music
--musicvol X ........... Set music volume, 0-100
--clickvol X ............. Set mouse click volume, 0-100

Id have to look at which ones Im using since Ive had the defaults majorly changed for a long time.

Along the same lines, there is also a Sound Pack file. The description I have on the Dom3Minions.com link page is....

Ballbarian's file of replacement sounds for elefant.smp (oliphants)
f_death.sw (1 of the female death sounds) fear.smp (R'lyeh mind blast &
several death/fear spells) sling.sw (slings) vasande.smp (Wyrm, etc).
This is definetly a life saver if your significant other is irritated
by some of the sounds the game makes.

[Gandalf Parker]

Concerning forums that dont allow negativity, I hear that a lot. I know people want that but am I just too old-on-the-net to be surprised by that anymore? The only forum with no censoring is going to be your own (and dont be surprised if others dont even agree with that). ANY company whether its games or cars or music or whatever is probably going to delete "unhelpful rants" (in their view) to some extent, which causes complaints about censorship. But Ive just gotten to the point that I take that for granted. If I want the nice view that sells things, I go to the company owned site. If I want the other side of the coin I will look elsewhere. I dont really expect the worst opinions to be on the company site.

[Doo]

and Baalz, IIRC the clicking problem was never solved since it's a "physical" one with mouses.
Try to move some dozens of blood slaves/gems, at night, with all computer sound off just to realize how stressing this particular noise can be for a nearby sleeping usually-loving-but-never-in-this-case wife ;)

I play on a laptop and if its late I will mouse click with the laptops mouse buttons as they are much more quiet.

[Torin]

good tip.
Ive been playing elemental and i have some spoilers.

*spoilers*
Good to get resourseful and the negative research of magic as racial traits. Theres a power to fast battle move and hit points.
Good the power organized for the sovereign (and more moves). And stupid is not bad research spells its not that hot.
I got an offensive sovereign last night and worked fine. Started with a spear and armor and positive battle skills. Just killed my neighbour in ridiculous AI.
So that dont look good yet. The AI is better now in 1.06, they build better military units but ive never seem them reach metal armor soon enough.
Im sure once it get MP there will be mods for balance. And stardocks job is to improve performance as i have to play on tiny maps and because of that. And even then they lag.

The thing I like the most is designing my units. Thats a big thing. I made this longbomen wraiths in violet robes. And the armored guys with 2h hammer, "punisher".

[Zeldor]

You are not getting AI confused? I think you need to set it to "beginner", not "insane" for best performance? As you set yourself to "beginner" to have the easiest game, more like in Civ.

[Torin]

No, i play on hardest settings=ridiculous. And its not scary as it should.
Edit: i found out here a thing
http://forums.elementalgame.com/392513
So i was playing with only 1 ridiculous AI. thats misleading.
Edit2: No, i was playing against all ridiculous after all. So AI is weak.

[Gandalf Parker]

There is apparently MAJOR breaking news about Elementals release.
Im off to read about it now

[Cosian]

I have and play both ....

Starcraft II is a good example of a very polished game. The campaign is well done and everything works as you expect. That said, it is not much different from the original. At the end of the day, despite probably one of the strongest community and MP interfaces out there, the game itself is a typical 4x RTS .... and I do like it. :)

Elemental has some potential but is currently an unpolished gem. Version 1.06 is still quite buggy and the AI just plain sucks... Despite its problems, I am enjoying playing it, but my jury is still out regarding whether it will have permenancy here on my hard drive.

I actually stumbled on the Dominion 3 as a result of a post in the Elemtental forums...favorite Fantasy Strategy games to play while Elemental is being fixed..... D3 got a lot of play in that thread and I ended up buying it. I am just scratching the surface, but I really like what I am seeing here despite its dated graphics. It is definetly much deeper than Elementals War of Magic

[HoneyBadger]

I'm looking forward to Starcraft 2. I haven't bought my copy yet, but I'm on my 3rd copy of the original, so I'll be very happy with "more of the same" in the form of a good update.

[WraithLord]

I have and play both ....

Starcraft II is a good example of a very polished game. The campaign is well done and everything works as you expect. That said, it is not much different from the original. At the end of the day, despite probably one of the strongest community and MP interfaces out there, the game itself is a typical 4x RTS .... and I do like it. :)

Elemental has some potential but is currently an unpolished gem. Version 1.06 is still quite buggy and the AI just plain sucks... Despite its problems, I am enjoying playing it, but my jury is still out regarding whether it will have permenancy here on my hard drive.

I actually stumbled on the Dominion 3 as a result of a post in the Elemtental forums...favorite Fantasy Strategy games to play while Elemental is being fixed..... D3 got a lot of play in that thread and I ended up buying it. I am just scratching the surface, but I really like what I am seeing here despite its dated graphics. It is definetly much deeper than Elementals War of Magic
Glad to hear you stumbled unto dominions. It has a steep learning curve and outdated gfx but it is a great game nonetheless. IMO it's the best FTBS currently available on the market. So, I encourage you to take the time to learn it and when ready join a newb MP game to get started playing it the way it's meant to.

EDIT: I forgot to say: Welcome :)

[Daynarr]

I have both as well. Starcraft itself didn't appeal to me very much simply because I'm more in favor of slower, more 'layback' strategy games like dominions, civ series and total war series, where you have time to think of strategies over the games where fast clicking skills are essential. It's just personal preference of course. I bought Starcraft 2 mostly on my friend's advice and didn't regret it. I suck at it, mind you, you can't change from slow clicker into fast clicker over night but the game is perfect example on how those fast strategy games can be really fun as well.

Elemental is a game I anticipated as soon as it was announced years ago. Needles to say I preordered it as well. It really is unpolished with lots of issues but it does have that something to it as well. That, just one more turn syndrome exists even in it's present state. It's a shame it came out this way to get trashed in the reviews but you can't change that anymore. I know that Stardock will work on that game hard and make it polished and great game that everyone expected it to be. Of course, everyone expected it to be such right from the release. :(

[WraithLord]

For what it's worth MOM was released full of bugs and got trashed in the early reviews as well :)

[Thanatus del Dragos]

I picked up Elemental this weekend, and I have to say, it is fantastic. It is my dream come true...well, as far as games go. Buggy as hell and balance issues and such still, but I have faith in Stardock to fix that. I love it.

[WraithLord]

What do you love about it?

[Thanatus del Dragos]

I'm a huge fan of nation building games. I never played MoM, but I have loved RotK, Genghis Khan, Civilization, And the Civ 4 mod, Fall from Heaven, which was inspired by MoM, GalCiv, And a billion Paradox games. This game has heroes, quest, city and nation building, wars, alliances, high fantasy good vs evil, and dynasties, along with magic. I'm playing it, and I get deep within it. I'm wondering if I should marry off my daughter to secure an alliance, there is a powerful ogre hovering on the edge of my Kingdom that is blocking my trade route I want to build, my son, the prince is leading an army to solve a quest to gain the spellbook of an ancient witch, and so on and so on. I just love the feel and play of the game.

[NTJedi]

For what it's worth MOM was released full of bugs and got trashed in the early reviews as well :)

The game definitely has future potential based on Stardocks record. The developers fooled everyone into the thinking Beta4 was completely different/improved from what's planned for release... they even fooled the CEO.

Anyone who purchases the game now will receive its first expansion for free. With the modding and solid updates from Stardock I expect the game to definitely be good after 9months. Besides we have to support the fantasy TBS games since they are so rare these days.

[Thanatus del Dragos]

The AI is terrible, GalCIV II had really good AI though...and the game has bad balance issues and crashes all the time...the champions die pretty easy, especially as the game progresses. But I am still enjoying it a lot and have faith in Brad and Stardock to keep working on it.

[DonCorazon]

Anyone who purchases the game now will receive its first expansion for free. With the modding and solid updates from Stardock I expect the game to definitely be good after 9months. Besides we have to support the fantasy TBS games since they are so rare these days.

That first line cracks me up - wow what an incentive. Anyone who falls for that deserves what they get.

I do agree with the last line - I like to support game developers, but there is a certain level of mutual trust / respect required. Releasing something in this shape blows that - I feel like a sucker with this game.

I wish someone who speaks Russian would tell the guys who make Eador (mentioned earlier in this thread) to get it translated to English - that looks like a game worthy of support.

[Dimaz]

Eador's author had an agreement, I think with Snowball/1C (big Russian localization company) and they were going to translate it. But there were no updates on translation status after that. Probably they think it won't give them enough to cover the expenses, I don't know. Actually the author said there was a group of people who tried to make fan-translation, but after professional guys from Snowball looked into their 2-month work they said that it's "crappy English" and discarded it.
So, some time ago I was thinking what can be done as the game really deserves to be known outside Russia, and on ag.ru forums we thought it could be possible to finish that crappy translation and give it to some native speaker so he can polish it in communication with original translators. So, if anyone here can help in that, I think we can contact the author about existing materials and see if they can be polished this way.

[Dimaz]

I'll add some numbers here to show the amount of work needed. The game contains text in 2 formats, .txt files that contain mostly text and .var files that contain game data in text format. Now, all the txt files are about 400K and the var files are 2.6M. For txt files, the amount to translate equals total size; for var files it's less, but there are 2 files dialog.var and campaign_dialog.var that contain mostly text and are 950K together. So the total amount to translate is around 1.5-2Mb, closer to 2.

[DonCorazon]

I'd be willing to help if it is in basic enough form to clean up. I think I taught Zeldor English while playing Dominions! :)

[Stavis_L]

I'll add some numbers here to show the amount of work needed. The game contains text in 2 formats, .txt files that contain mostly text and .var files that contain game data in text format. Now, all the txt files are about 400K and the var files are 2.6M. For txt files, the amount to translate equals total size; for var files it's less, but there are 2 files dialog.var and campaign_dialog.var that contain mostly text and are 950K together. So the total amount to translate is around 1.5-2Mb, closer to 2.

For reference, according to this site (http://www.wisegeek.com/how-much-text-is-in-a-kilobyte-or-megabyte.htm) that amounts to about 750-1000 pages.

To put that in context, Wiki Answers says (http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_pages_are_all_of_the_Lord_of_the_Rings_bo oks) that Tolkein's Lord of the Rings trilogy is 1008 pages.