Let me cut to the bad news right off. Beta 1B isn’t ready to go yet. It needs to be pushed. But for your convenience, I’m going to walk through the problems with the current internal build. Now, before someone who isn’t paying attention closely sends me a flame PM, please read this: I work at Stardock. It’s my job to be critical of the game. The only thing unusual is that I’m airing our internal dirty laundry to the public – but there’s a point to that too and that is so that beta testers can participate in those discussions.
So let’s walk through the things that are in our current build that need to be addressed before we release a public beta 1B which is known as the “economic” beta.
Bees and wheat are in.
Or more specifically, we are starting to add a lot more resources into the game. The reason this is important is that we want to begin populating the world with resources that can share city improvements OR have their own improvements.
Info Card system is in
A UI convention pioneered in Sins of a Solar Empire by Ironclad is in Elemental now. If you hover over something of interest, an info card comes up – except here we have decided to go with an actual playing card motify ala Magic the Gathering.
The City UI is cleaned up
Managing cities has gotten a bit easier. the buttons have gotten moved over.
A lot of under the covers stuff has gotten fixed/improved
Performance is vastly better. The economy is technically in there.
While the economy is in there now, it’s no use to the beta testers if the user interface doesn’t convey the information to them. As Tom Chick would say “show me!” and right now we’re not and without that, beta testers can’t give feedback on whether they think the economic system is worthwhile.
Economics are hard to see in action.
Besides the fact that the info cards are way too big, they don’t convey useful information presently. Why does it take 5 turns to complete an Inn? I dunno. What could I do to make Inns build faster? I dunno. Why does the Inn cost $100? I dunno.
Under the covers:
The time and money to build an improvement = Labor + Materials.
The cost of the labor and materials determines the cost and the time to gather the materials and for the labor to execute determines the time.
Now, the card doesn’t need to display all of that. But it should display how much wood is required.
The info card (not shown here) should display what the Inn does and what it requires to be built. The player should be able to see the city data on the right (not a duplicate of the Inn here) so that they can decide what improvement to build and what resources they have on hand to build them with. How much wood do they have? How good is their labor? Do they need the benefit the chosen improvement provides? Without this information, the player is left guessing.
There’s been a lot of overall progress. But Beta 1B is a specific milestone for the economics so we have to be able to display this kind of “stuff” very clearly to players. So it’s looking like it’ll be another week.
Of course, that also buys me a little more time on the AI (which has been improving with these builds as well though it’s all C++ right now and not Python yet).
Stay tuned.
When I speak of a desire for many different resources, let my clarify what I mean. Even though there are many games that succesfully focus on resource collecting and trade, and I do generally like those games, I'm not suggesting that Elemental fall into that category.
For example let's say my opponent has a mystical forest glen that produces 'pixie dust', and a magical waterfall that produces 'giggle mist'. These two resources allow him to train an army of tinkerbelle fairies.
I don't care about 'pixie dust' at all, my civilization is of a very different nature and I have taken it on a different path. I don't scour some marketplace for 'giggle mist' either, it means nothing to me.
However, the tinkerbelle fairies have been flying into the nostriles of my normal troops and eating their brains! This is putting my plans for world liberation/domination at risk! Only now do I care about pixie dust, because my enemy is using it to ravage my armies of spearmen. If I can't deny my enemy his pixie dust, I'll have to see what my own resources can offer. Maybe I can use my 'magma' from my volcano and my 'rolling stones' from my rockslide to create magma men! If a tinkerbelle fairy tries those same tactics on a magma man, her wings will melt and she will turn a crispy golden brown!
So there could be many different resources without cluttering up the game and reducing it to a logistics exercise. You only have to pay attention to the ones you have, and the ones your current enemy has. Not all resources need to appear in every single game either, maybe the game would pick 20 out of 100 or something, so you would only see a particular resource every 5 games on average.
Pigeonpigeon and Cephalo, I wholeheartedly agree with your ideas. Let me add some of my own detail around the concept of specializing in resources.First, resources should not be necessary. If collecting a resource is something I must do, regardless of the situation, then it is not fun, because it is not a choice. It becomes a game of logistics, not strategy.Second, if a resource is widely available, it essentially becomes necessary, because everyone else has it. You'll be at a disadvantage if you don't use it. Thus, again, eliminating choice.While it sounds fun to have to harvest lumber and mine stone in order to build buildings, this will become boring once the novelty wears off. What will remain interesting are the strategic choices that resources present.For this reason, the use of resources should be a choice with tradeoffs. If specializing in iron confers an advantage to attack strength, it should also confer a disadvantage to speed. That way, the choice to specialize becomes interesting for both me and other players. They may build fast units to outrun my slow ones, or I may use iron weapons only for certain purposes. Further specialization should also have tradeoffs, giving more bonuses but also more weaknesses.There are some great posts on this thread, I hope the devs read it!
Let make sure we're all on the same page:
The entire point for delaying the economy beta was so that the user interface of the game could be updated so that people could see how the economy works and debate THAT.
Whether a building requires a resource or not is beside the point because unless people KNOW a building requires a resource or not there can be no real debate in the first place.
Translation: Denryu STFU until you know what your are arguing.
Message received LOL!
What kind of debate ? Who could argue that economical info shouldn't be on the info card ? Or did I misread something ?
Anyway, streamlining economic info is just vital in a game with such a vast scale.
Beta 1b will be the starting point for where we take the economic system. It's very robust and extensible, so we'll have time to try alot of different things until we his that perfect balance.
It's good to know, that you lads @ Stardock are listening to the suggestions. I like this approach.
That's clearer Thanks. Can't wait to try to mod the game
So I've got a few questions (and even proposals), if I am to wait another week (to beta-test the new release):
P.S. One more thing. In the end game (which many people refer to) there will be always some problems with micro-management (MM). You have to make the game REALLY simple to enable players to manage their kingdom very easily. That is why there should be a reasonable compromise between micro-management and automatizing the game.
I don't think I could disagree More. Logistics IS part of Strategy, as is controlling important resources. Harvesting Lumber and Stone should be added to things you Need to do. How can you make wooden planks without some kind of Lumber Mill? How can you properly cut large quantities of stone without a Quarry?
Lets compare this to RTS games like Warcraft 1,2,3 and Starcraft 1 and 2. In those games there are resources that you MUST acquire to be able to build some types of buildings. This is Realistic and makes Sense. These resource points become Strategically Important to hold and control. Fighting over these resources is a important aspect of the game. If you limit your enemies control of needed resources you can shut them down quickly and effectively.
If you say doing that over and over again isn't "fun" then you might as well say going to war over and over again isn't "fun'. Casting spells over and over again isn't "fun" either right? EVERY Aspect of a game can get monotonous if done enough times. That is a matter of the players perspective on playing these kinds of games in the first place.
A huge fear I'm starting to have where Elemental is concerned is that people are already starting to complain and whine about Micromanagement. Micromanagement is a Integral part of any 4X Strategy game that's any Good or Fun to play. Without a decent amount of Micromanagement we end up with a Dumbed Down kiddie version of a game with no more Strategic Depth then Spore. In Spore you can only build 4 Types of buildings. How fun is that? Not very. You can only build 2 types of Units during the Civilization Phase of the game and there are only 3 very basic ways you can "conquer" a enemy city. Either you take it over with military might using only 3 unit types, you trade with them until you assimilate them culturally, or you get them to surrender through diplomacy. All these options are Dumbed Down to a practically Pre School level in Spore.
DON'T LET ELEMENTAL BE AS DUMBED DOWN AS SPORE. The ONLY good thing about Spore are the editors.
I'd rather see Elemental have TOO MANY options then NOT ENOUGH. Things are a Hell Of a Lot Easier to Mod Out then they are to Mod In.
I'm still angry about Spore. That was an outrage.
You're preaching to the choir brother.
Yeah, we need more info. Lots more info.
We will have a lot more info next week when the patch hits. An informed opinion about the game from playtesting is a lot better than armchair quarterbacking the game's production.
Yes sir! I will go play Demigod until Beta 1B.
Well said Raven..well said.
It looks like that I am not the only one, who is worried that Elemental will be kinda dumbed down/it will be way too simplistic in many aspects. Like the stats of the units. We only know about ATT/DEF/SPEED. We don't know anything about morale/fear effects/weaknesses/resistances etc. Hopefully we gonna have lot of different abilities for the units in the game...the economy looks very simple/basic as it is now, but we don't know everything + as Boogie has said, they will update the "problematic" parts if needed. So all in all...I have my hopes up!
In frogboy we trust.
I'd rather have a meaningfull economic beta than one that I can't make heads or tail from.
Warder
Implement a very complex system and let the player dumb it down if he/she wants. In CIV IV you can choose stuff like aggressive barbarians, no vassals and such. In Elemental one could choose setting simplefied economy, normal economy or full simulation.
1. Simplefied - If you have iron you can build swordsmen
2. Normal - You need to have iron and have it connected to the producing city
3. Full - You have a storage house where iron is put and it is used for production
Something like this would be great in my opinion. I would ofcourse go for Full always (as I will always use marathon game lenght if implemented).
Implementing multiple different economic models is considerably more difficult and expensive than implementing any single one of them; aggressiveness of barbarians is much easier to make variable, and there are probably some significant aspects of the economic model that can be made variable, but I doubt they're going to want to put the necessary effort into two/three parallel designs to make them bug-free, balanced, properly exposed through the user interface, and properly used by the AI.
But things like making the gold/turn substitution-cost of a resource moddable, with the re-balancing burden on the modder, that could provide a lot of the range we're looking for.
I agree and I've been very concerned as well that a few developers are 'pushing' too hard for a system which is toooo simple. I want to have resource piles of not only gold, but also wood, iron, meteorites, crystals, stone, etc., etc., . Simply allowing nations to build anything despite lack of resources is unrealistic and feels wrong.
I agree... this would work best for the longterm value of the game.
I still think I'm failing to communicate.
The problem with the internal beta is that you don't know what the economic system is.
It simply says "takes 8 turns to build". That's it.
Players need to know how the economy works in order to effectively debate changes to it.
We know we are running on empty here - but when the mountainside is crashing down its too late for the pebbles to vote. In other words we cant stop the debating cause we are so exited. Forgive us mr green!
No, you didn't fail . The purpose of the betas is to allow us to give you some feedback on what is implemented. It should help you to make a good game.
If it becomes worrying to release beta versions to us, it becomes an hindrance. Nobody wants that.
And if we can't see and understand the underlying mechanics, it has no point discussing them.
It is also easier to come up with good ideas when you have some common base to start from.
Proof is that most of the time, the ideas are comparisons with existing games.
Besides, I will never have too much time to think about this, so I'm pretty confident that anything you will come up with, will be better than everything I could have imagined myself.
So waiting eagerly for Beta 1B, but do it at your pace
Brad,
I think we may be failing in our communication to you. If we don't get builds, discussions like this thread will happen. You inflict pain on us, we inflict pain on you.
(more seriously, I do understand you, that's why I've been refraining from wading into the details on the topic)
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