This is going to be long. I beg for forgiveness up front.
So for those of you just tuning in, Elemental has just completed a marathon 8 month Beta 1 cycle. The purpose of which was to explore all kinds of new game mechanics and try different things out. It went so well that in our next game, I’d like to bring the beta people in even earlier.
For Beta 1, we stripped out the graphics engine forcing users to play on a “cloth map” interface. We went through considerable lengths to ensure that beta 1 was unpleasant to play. The goal was to get people to think about what makes a good game rather than thinking about graphics or features per se.
From that marathon beta we got a incredible amount of feedback, online discussions, and lots of debates. We read them at length and they made us think about a lot of different things that we hadn’t thought of before.
So what was the impact? Below I’m going to walk you through the tangible differences to the game based on the betas and the beta tester debates.
No one will ever agree on the single best way to make Elemental. No matter what we do, there will be dissatisified people. It’s inevitable because (and I consider this unfortunate) the gaming industry has reached a point where there is a severe lack of what we call “new IP”. That is, games that don’t include a roman numeral after the name. Worse, when we do get new games, they’re increasingly designed to work on both PC and consoles which means that their feature set has to work on the lowest common denominator. As a result, Elemental has a lot of hopes behind it.
But we have to be careful. Anything designed to be all things to all people is doomed to failure. So with Elemental, we’ve had to really consider what the game is about and focus on that game.
Camp #1: The Settlers Camp
This is the camp I’m nominally from. That’s where you mine resources which in turn get processed into one thing and then turned into another before being used as yet another. The economic system in Elemental was (early on) very much like this. You mined metal. This metal was processed into metal bars which in turn were turned into weapons, armor, etc. Which in turn were shipped to where you wanted to build the unit.
This was one of the concepts that the beta program jetisoned. Not because it was a bad idea but because A) there is a “Settlers” game already and it would so overwhelm the rest of the game.
Camp #2: The Master of Magic Clone Camp
I am nominally part of this camp as well. This camp’s input tended to be “Master of Magic had X” and that itself was enough to argue that Elemental should have it. While Elemental is almost certainly the most similar game to MoM since MoM itself, it is, by no means, a clone of it.
Camp #3: The Fall from Heaven Camp
The popular Civ IV mod has lots of fans (myself included). There’s certainly plenty of items in Elemental that are similar to what is in Fall from Heaven since both ultimately are civilization style games.
Camp #4: The Panzer General / Magic: Total War camp
This is the group that argued, quite correctly that with a subtitle “War of Magic” that it made sense to focus on the warfare elements of the game.
Camp #5: The SimFantasy camp
The term isn’t meant to be dismissive of those who would like a truly organic world. At the one extreme, you have Elemental as a board game and at the other extreme you have Elemental as a fantasy world simulation.
So what are some of the big changes that occurred because of the massive beta?
In no particular order:
With Beta 2 expected in the next couple weeks, we’ll have a pretty good idea whether release is going to be this Summer or next Winter. (Fall is “booked” at retail). I personally believe that late Summer is still likely but we’ll see. Beta 2 will give us a pretty good sense of where things stand.
The big questions in our minds will be the role of the NPCs in the world and the role of quests in the world. Their inclusion are the most obvious “differentiators” for Elemental. We’ll be balancing and enhancing those features for years to come.
I'm very excited, very excited Indeed!!! This all sounds wonderful. Turn Based combat sounds amazing. It would have been nice to have the option of real time or "pause when I want-give orders" though like X-Com Apocalypse. I love turn based too though so you won't get any complaints here. I'm happy as hell that we have battles We Control as I thought that was the only thing really lacking in Gal Civ 2.
For the next strategy title you do, think along this line...
Have the Strategic Map and Game-play depth that the Civilization series (or any other super deep game-play) has and marry it to the Total War battle system that plays in real time with custom units you create. You came very close with Elemental and with all the Mods we'll be able to make I'm sure it won't be long until we see "Civilization: War of Magic".
Still, this is an excellent time to be a strategy gamer and a Stardock fan. Well done all around.
I am a little bit disappointed at there not being any rts involved battles i thought it would look nice to maybe have a gratuitous space battle style of play so i could see a massive battle take place but still have the time and control a turn based battle would have, if that makes any sense
For Frogboy--Master of the AI: During the turn-based battles, will I be able to turn on the AI for my side, so that you can essentially get a good AI v AI fight? If so--hopefully I can do it at any point during the battle.
Also I am assuming there will be a sort of "auto-resolve" choice at the beginning of battles that will calculate the battle result and let you move-on. Please, please, please make the resolution process somewhat intelligent. Nothing will make me want to heave my monitor quicker than to come in with a group of my darn hard to produce +10 Demonically Possessed RavenXs (love the picture man) with super-regeneration and lose a unit to a group of +0 Slightly Agitated Slugs because the resolution algorythm decided to lump all of the possible damage on one unit and end up destroying it--when this could have never possibly happened if I done the battle myself.
...sorry if this has been answered somewhere else and I missed it.
Well, I'm very happy to hear about the turn based tactical change, but I'm wondering just one thing: once we see massive armies deployed onto the field, at what point does it get tedious/overwhelming commanding your units? With X-com and MoM it was no big deal--- there was rarely more than 9 units on the field on either side at a time in X-com and never more than 9 in MoM. I think a way to create and move block formations in battle would be a handy short cut, but I guess we'll have to see the actual tactical battles to get a better idea.
I've been out of the loop for quite a while (have my own software product to ship imminently). I must say, hearing that you've gone to conventional turn/tile based tactical battles is wonderful.
three cheers for the return of tactical tbs combat. My dream is to have a simultaneous action combat in a fantasy game. Similar to they systems in Combat Mission and Laser Squad Nemesis. I find the ability to bluff, feignt and outthink your opponent much more interesting in those types of games.
At the end of the day, I want the tactical battles to be heavily influenced by player skill. Too many times, I see tbs combat games come down to who brings the bigger army. Give the players some tools to be clever, surprising and ruthless!
Great post, I didn't find it too long.
- Yey for turn-based tactical battles!
- Question 1: It is not clear from your post which camp you, Brad, feel now has some (any, the most) stance in Elemental. Were you trying to say that all camps, or no camps, or all but the Settler's camp, are currently where things are heading?
- Question 2: I think the two biggest questions you put at the end of your post are interesting, but not nearly foremost in my mind (partly because I feel I will be satisfied one way or the other). Foremost in my mind is still the question of What Can We Do In the World? That is: What actions can our units perform? In order to get a better feel for the answer or answer-scheme that people could expect, I think part of this question presupposes the further question(s): What kind of entities will our units be, how flexible will they be? I mean: How will actions or events such as charming, stealth and hiding, bribery, loyalty or fear be implemented? Will there be characteristics ("stats") that help reflect these different aspects of interaction with the world? Parts of these questions I ask and elaborate more at length here.
Thank you for your effort (and, hopefully, your reply!)
Funny thing about global ressources: the first time I played a TBS game with global ressources, it was Master of Magic, with food and mana crystals.Master of Orion 2 also have/had a global food system and you can blockade planets/systems.Thanks to Gog.com I have been playing again both games lately, and it's a blast.
I really want to see a turn based battle mode. I didn't know that it was ever planned as a RTS before.
Turn based tactical battles is great news.Thanks a lot.Maybe you could add hotseat option now ?
I don't object to turn/tile-based combat on principle, it's a great way to represent small scale battles, particularly RPG-style ones where the focus is on a few powerful units (champions, spellcasters, dragons, etc) and not a thousand foot soldiers.
But I do worry how well it'll scale up to massive army vs. army clashes in the late game. Those thousand foot soldiers may get to be micromanagement hell if you're moving individual units one by one from one tile to the next, telling each one what to attack, that's the part where I really expected a continuous-turn or RTS combat of some kind to shine. You wouldn't need individual orders, you could just say go! and watch your army charge at the other guys in realtime, occasionally issuing a specific order, perhaps pausing while you do so (i.e. telling sovereign to cast a spell, or archers to focus on a particular enemy) but not needing to micromanage every single unit.
I don't doubt you guys will come up with some kind of workable solution, I'm just curious what it will be - as long as we're not going to remove or limit those epic army vs. army battles in order to accommodate turn/tile combat, I'll be happy.
Edit: Come to think of it, I'm overlooking some obvious solutions. Turn-based doesn't mean the units have no unit AI and need to be micromanaged, that's just conventionally the way most turn-based games work. You could, for example, have some kind of default action (move towards nearest enemy and attack) that kicks in for any units without orders at the end of your turn. So you tell sovereign to cast a spell, tell a few soldiers to defend the sovereign, hit 'end turn' and all the other guys without orders charge at the enemy. Best of both worlds - micromanage every action important units take in turn-based detail, but no need to tell every one of your dozens/hundreds/thousands? of spearman to head for the nearest bad guy and stab him.
Does this mean that you no longer need to have NPC in your influence area in order to recruit them?
I'm pretty happy about the combat change. There are only two RTS's I've ever been able to play and enjoy. The first is Endwar because it's mostly voice controlled. Yeah, it's a bit simpler than most RTS, but it was definitely interesting. The other was Sins of a Solar Empire. That was more up my alley because I didn't have to micromange the damn thing. What general starts pin-pointing specific targets for every damn unit after a battle has started. Occasionally I intervened with targeting certain ships/structures, but the AI was smart enough to say "ok, I destroyed this ship and I'm strong against shipX. Are there any of shipX nearby? Yes, so I will go engage it now."
I am kind of down on the squares or even hexes for battles, though. I still think the best idea for a combat system in turn-based battles has been Valkyria Chronicles- you can't just mosey by an enemy without getting pumped full of lead and it didn't have any tiles, but it was still very tactical.
The AI in such a case, should try to destory one of your untis hard. It's what a player would do.
What I want is something between quick battle and full-on tactical battles- there needs to be some sort of middle option where you don't control the battle, but can give tactics to units, and maybe orders for units to be cautious or aggressive?
Wow, as another waaay out of the loop person, there's certainly been some bold changes in this past while----good stuff. An Elemental that largely stands alone is the ticket in these all too homogeneous times in the gaming industry. Adopt the "obvious" good basic ideas and then run like crazy in a new direction beyond the scope of those basics.
I doubt it. Turn/Tile based combat is more tactic&strategic oriented than the RTS style combat, and that is what matters.
Tactical battles haven’t been part of the beta but they’ve been heavily discussed. Originally, tactical battles were designed to be RTS. Then Continuous turns. But as time has gone on, it’s become clear that the gameplay that people (and frankly that we enjoyed the most) was more closest to XCom. That is, turn based. Tile based. Moving units to the best spots. And eventually working to have your units in spots that are easy to spot the enemy while they themselves are hard to find. [/quote]
Huge disapointment. What was a must have game for me just became a game i don't feel essential for me to buy after playing sword of the stars, gal civ 2, Civ 4 and sins of a solar empire.
[quote who="Tormy-" reply="67" id="2628209"]Quoting TCores, reply 27I doubt it. I think that Turn/Tile based combat is more tactic&strategic oriented than the RTS style combat, and that is what matters for me.
Fixed. I played lots of TBS and RTS games and i think your statement is more about your personal tastes than about "TBS games are for the real strategy guys". But i suppose that we will have to agree to disagree on this one.
TBS + Multiplayer really is kind of rough. Auto Resolve takes the David / Goliath battles out of it too. Hmm.
A few thoughts have occured to me. I am presuming that, since it has been described as X-COM like, this will be alternating rather than simultaneous turns:
I'd also like to second the call for looking at some sort of reactions system. Unsure how much sense it will make in a melee focused game - it would have to be based on some sort of charge/counter-charge mechanic I suppose? I would recommend against the X-Com method of having to leave time units, since I feel it takes too long to learn to use. I suggest that all units could have a zone in front of them where they would charge in and take part in a battle if the enemy starts a fight in there. Some units might get bonuses for this. The attacker could also have the option to line up a bunch of their units within charging range of an enemy and send them off together.
Basically this gives you back some of the spectacle of all your units going at once, along with a covering mechanism for units to support each-other, and opportunities for flanking and counter-attacks.
I think people would get used to it pretty quickly, since its already how RTS games work. It's a bit of a change for a TBS, but not a harsh one. Especially with what modern computers can do, it's easy now to put an overlay on the screen when you select a unit showing it's movement range from where it is now, along with attack range, spell effect AoE radius, and so on.
Square tiles are particularly bad, because diagonal movement is faster then straight movement. If each tile is say 4 square meters (2x2, which to hold something like a cannon and supporting troops probably isn't a huge stretch), then a unit with a movement of 5 going along a striaght line can move 10 meters. But moving diagonally, it's going ~14 in the same amount of time. That is particularly gamey and doesn't make a lick of sense, though hex tiles fix it. Speaking of movement, you're reduced in movement speed options. To make a unit that's say 5% slower then another unit, you need to use very high movement scores (20 tiles per turn). If your average movement speed is 3 tiles, a faster unit is a base of 4 which is a huge relative increase.
Most TBS games also have limitations whereby a unit can only be one tile big. That leads to strangeness with a single soldier and a Red Dragon taking up the samount of space, in terms of targetting (even though the dragon *looks* a lot bigger). When calculating a fireball blast radius, the soldier is counted as bigger then he really is, and the dragon as smaller then it really is because they're both one tile big.
For AoE spells, radius style effects just get weird. A one tile effect is hitting 4 square meters. The next rational size up hits all surrounding tiles, which with squares is 8 tiles around the center of the effect, or 36 square meters total. The granularity here is very poor, the next size up is nine times the size. The only way to prevent that is to create effects with unnatural shapes like just hitting the target tile, and the one to its left.
pigeonpigeon mentioned a smaller quantum, and you can reduce the tile problems by shrinking it. If units can take up more then one tile, you can use very small tiles and have units of any particular size take up more of them. That reduces the granularity problem somewhat. You might get really big numbers in that system though, if each tile is 0.25m by 0.25m, you will start seeing units that can go 80 tiles in a turn.
Though if you eliminate tiles entirely, you can have a unit move 10m precisely, and you can tell if it's in a blast radius or not based on it's distance from the impact point.
Huh i love RTS combat turn based combat kinda seems dull for me and not very spectacular but thats just me so ill just allways skip the combat lol
I'll try to make this as thoughtful as a I can. (also, I have been told about squads, this post was made before I knew that....)
I too am slightly disappointed by the drop of the continuous turns, partially because that means that large-scale battles are relatively impossible now. Can you imagine moving 1000 units individually?
I was looking forward to continuous turns, as the battle would flow and the decisions would have to be more strategic: the "go here... flank this group... pincer this magic dude to kill him fast..." etc. Rather than a "you go here. Now attack this guy. Move here to block that unit..."
Don't get me wrong, I REALLY like HOMM, and I've played the snot out of it. But part of the promise of Elemental was the large scale battles, and the adjustable battle speed. I KNOW it was on the website at one time, though it seems to be removed now, but the website specifically talked about being able to adjust the game speed from Full Turn Based to Continuous. This was appealing to me, as I feel there are situations where both are enjoyable, some people preferring the full turn based, some preferring the continuous.
I'm not going to NOT buy the game over this, but I feel that the loss of this option is more of a "bait and switch" than leaving the Continuous in there. I'm not upset with going Turn Based only, it's more the loss of the option that is kinda irking. I LIKED that option.
Ah yes, it was a post by Frogboy:
Continuous turns are turn-based.
The difference is that the turn button is held down by default. Baldur's Gate was most certainly turn-based in its combat but, like Elemental, it was continuous turns. It literally used the D&D combat system in which every action used up X number of time units and such. A player can turn off the turns at any time they want in the battle and literally just do it themselves if they want to be the one pressing the turn button. With Continuous turns, you can literally pause the action, give orders to your units and see how many "turns" it'll take for that to happen. But when the action is moving, it moves fluidly. Master of Orion had continuous turn tactical combat as well. You could, however, stop the action at any time and give new orders to your ships. I think you should reserve judgment until you've tried it.
The difference is that the turn button is held down by default.
Baldur's Gate was most certainly turn-based in its combat but, like Elemental, it was continuous turns. It literally used the D&D combat system in which every action used up X number of time units and such.
A player can turn off the turns at any time they want in the battle and literally just do it themselves if they want to be the one pressing the turn button.
With Continuous turns, you can literally pause the action, give orders to your units and see how many "turns" it'll take for that to happen. But when the action is moving, it moves fluidly.
Master of Orion had continuous turn tactical combat as well. You could, however, stop the action at any time and give new orders to your ships.
I think you should reserve judgment until you've tried it.
What was wrong with this? I could make it turns, give orders, explicitly say "go here, do this" just like in HOMM (though I presume I could pick the order, as opposed to HOMM's speed determining WHEN you got to move), or I could go continous and enjoy the battle, giving orders as necessary.
(I'm really not trying to whine, as I like turn-based too, it's just I like options!) However, Frogboy:
Can you explain why this was dropped? How has the battle system changed from the above? Is it now more like HOMM, where in my turn I move ONE unit, or is it more CIV, where I move ALL my units, then the other guy moves his? How much would it take to bribe you to leave the awesome epic-ness of continuous turns in?
<edit> Found even more regarding the size of armies (and hence why continuous turns sounded like the natural answer to this)
Journal entry by Frogboy:
Sizes of armies
As a player, one of my questions about this kind of thing would be how big are the armies going to be? The answer is that it’s going to vary a great deal.
At the start of the game, I would imagine the sovereign walking around alone or maybe with 10 foot soldiers armed with pikes. Those early battles will be pretty straight forward.
Later on, however, you could have battles with thousands of soldiers with a few recruited magical creatures involved along with your hero.
Hence, even if you enjoy watching the tactical battles, you may eventually want to build up your heroes leadership ability so that you can have confidence in letting them call the shots so that you can just sit back and watch the show in fast motion.
Is this still an option? Does the switch to turn-based cause us to lose this "large army/big battle"? What about the commanders? Have we lost them?
Again, not trying to whine. You haven't lost a sale. I'm just an interested gamer that's very interested in the game being FUN. Not necessarily what I or anyone else expects. I don't need or want a clone, I want a gamemode that is fun, and is a natural extension of the foundations. If that's Turn-based, then that's what I want. But make sure the shoe fits!
Why should you move 1000 units individually? We have squads you know.
The only major change that I would like to see- but won't happen - is a hex tile-based map. I always liked hex maps for outdoor map movement as well as for unit facing modifiers for combat, as it seemed more realistic, without the diagonal movement incongruity inherent in a square tile system. This is one mechanic that I think Civ V is going to get right.
I still sort of miss some of the early ideas re: Frogboy's point #1 (resource collection and logistics and item/unit construction). Some of the peripheral side-effects relating to the change were for the better though, resulting in a more fluid gameplay experience (instead of getting stuck waiting for something to finish production in the process). But I still get wood thinking about some of the possibilities that would have been available in collection, processing and construction of stuff with the original ideas on resource and construction.
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