Greetings!
We’re doing some final testing on Beta 2 and expect (but we’re not promising) to release it this week.
This article will walk you through the beta and help you understand what is and isn’t in the game and what kinds of feedback we’re looking for.
If you’re in the beta or joining the beta program, please become very familiar with the reporting guidelines.
General Objectives
Major Features that are NOT in this beta:
Game Elements Disabled for this beta
Game Play Notes:
1. Most of the Magic, Adventure, and Diplomacy techs have not been checked into the public build.
1. The HUD
We plan to have a HUD option where users can play the game with a head’s up display (HUD) that provides additional on screen details. We’d like to have it configurable (more than just HUD enabled or disabled).
2. General Balance
Make sure you play the game a few times first before deciding on what the game “needs”. But we are looking for your feedback on everything from balance to pacing.
3. Multiplayer
The multiplayer part of the game is pretty primitive. Our main interest in this build is to make sure you are able to connect with each other. This was something in Demigod that we felt didn’t get enough attention during the beta that we want to make sure is very solid. Playing against the AI is also a good test in multiplayer because you have to connect to an AI on one of our servers.
So sum up multiplayer: Our interest is whether you can connect. Once you’re in the game, it’ll be pretty crummy for now. Once we are satisfied with connectivity, we’ll enable and clean up the actual in game-multiplayer experience.
4. The Empire & Event Trees
What would make the game easier to play and easier to manage?
5. Performance, Stability, Bugs
‘nuff said except absolutely be specific on your hardware.
As anyone who has ever worked on a large commercial software project can tell you, particularly a game, changing interface and usability (game play, balance) is not the long part.
To use an analogy, it would be like first having to write Adobe Photoshop in order to create a really cool image on it. Most of the effort/expense was put on making the program first. Tweaking and enhancing the image is certainly crucial to determining whether the final image is a good one or not but relatively speaking, it isn’t time consuming compared to making the underlying “engine”.
In the case of Elemental, half the effort is making the engine. Nearly another half is making the assets (graphics, models, etc.). And the tiny piece left are the game specific elements. It’s a huge undertaking and we are so very glad to have you guys as part of it. Hence, when making suggestions and requesting changes, things that require changes to the engine or creation of new assets are much tougher than things that involve changing game play, variables, etc.
Hope that helps.
Oh man, I was hoping Michigan was CT, but it's EST...
I'm fine with 2010. I just need to figure out how to hook MayDay's into it and muck with the resolution, since the version I downloaded seems to be immune to my doing so.
Other than that, I'll make a thread in the next couple days here (Sat/Sunday) when we've all had some fun with Beta 2.
Sounds good! Bring it on!
Sounds good. If you want someone to gen the world, I'll do it: with my i7 920 I can crank em out pretty quick. Just tell me what kind of site you want. Or I'll decide, but it would be nice to know how hard people want it.
As long as it doesn't end up raping me in half and stuffing me through a mailbox (IGN.com) I'm fine. IE, Not Terrifying. I only have the Complete and Utter Newby Tutorial and 3 forts under my belt (I flooded the tutorial intentionally and the other three. . .let's just not talk about.)
Other than that, I'm fine with whatever, since, as stated, I fully expect to screw it up and have people have to revert.
I'll see what I can do. I'll probably go untamed wilds for medium amounts of Fun, should be fairly dangerous since Toady fixed teeth, horns etc. being as strong as skin. And flux, sedimentery, etc.
Medium Fun is well and good. I just don't want a Boatmurdered or something worthy of the Hall of Legends, just yet.
Editosity: I genned a world for the purpose of an Adventure game, but after watching it gen (70K deaths, 40K Hist Figs, five human towns wiped entirely from existence) I think I might try a fortress here. Especially after reading in Legends.
Ola The Abyss of Heroes - Forgotten Beast
"A great quadruped composed a vomit."
Oh goody. . .
Here's two I've whipped up:
They've both got access to all civs. The first goes 35 z-levels down, and the second 36. The second has a minor river meeting with a brook, but has more soil layers than the first, so less stone with our limited amount of z-levels. The second has sand, and the first does not.
Opinions? Do either of these two look good to anyone?
Lol @ vomit monster. Good luck killing it, the only ways are maybe magma, and definately cave-ins and magma+water.
Unfortunately, upon further perusal of the Legends for the world, the vomit monster was killed by a dragon, as far as I can figure. It got in a duel with one and was never heard from again, so. . .
As for either of those locations, I'm not massive fans, but the first I would definitely prefer.
Tormy at least is in on this, so let's see what his vote is.
Ok, I've found another one I think is decent. If you want something else just ask.
It has an aquifer, but you can easily pierce it by going under the ocean, the land is untamed wilds, the ocean is joyous wilds, so there's a chance for merpeople; it also has sparse trees and moderate vegetation. Obviously it has salt water, so we'd have to make sure not to run out of booze, and eventually construct a purifier. 115 z-levels deep too!
That's damn shiny! My only concern is lack of trees, but if an earlier player (at this point you, Bill and then Tormy) knows ways around that, I'd be happy to bow down to your superior knowledge.
Keep in mind I'm basically nit-picking at this point because of lack of knowledge. So whatever will work, I can probably do something with.
As long as there are some trees, we should be fine. You can order plenty from the caravan, the elves and humans bring a bunch if you have low amounts, and there's always the caverns.
Then I see no reason not to start butchering merpeople immediately!
We're spamy mcspamsalot'ing this thread. We might want to start a new thread in PC Gaming.
Agreed. Also, in for the succession fort!
If we have them, the wiki says there quite rare. But there bones are worth 6000. Or at least masterwork skull totems are.
I agree about making a new thread, would you like to do that or should I?
Threaaaaad goin' up!
Woo.
Also, REFRESH REFRESH REFRESH! We got a status update yet from frogboy?
What the hell are you guys going on about up there with your Amiga graphics? Some kinda multiplayer thing? What's this? Dwarf Fortress right? That's multiplayer? Or are you doing a turn-by-mail thing?
Yep, it's Dwarf Fortress, and yes, it's a turn-by-mail type thing, it's normally a single player game.
Check it out here.
You should check the game out Raven. It's one of the best & most diverse games, even tho it's not for everyone. [ASCII "gfx" + bad interface]
Well, you can use tilesets, I think 16x16 is the most common size.
But, really, Raven, you should try it out, with your love of complexity I think you'd like it.
If you don't believe me, at least check out its TvTropes page, and google Boatmudered.
It's free, BTW.
Does multiplayer have hot seat? Because if not, you can be expected to be bugged about this continuosly after release.
I echo these sentiments.
We've talked about this a while ago, so to sum it up: There won't be hotseat or PBEM in the retail game, but SD might add these MP features later on.
I'm probably late to this, but I originally posted this in the wrong thread so I figured I might as well move it:
As for the HUD, having played around half a dozen games or so (and a few 1 or 2 turn failures), I'd at least like to see the following elements on a city HUD (I would imagine they could be turned of if a player doesn't want them cluttering up the screen):
- City level
- Room left to grow in tiles
- Amount of prestige
- Icons of resources gathered in this city (maybe amounts too, not sure)
- Perhaps a visualisation of the unit being trained, if any. Maybe also an indicator of the remaining queue. Maybe total turns left to build the rest of the queue or something like that.
- Maybe some kind of visualisation of the strength of the defending units. Perhaps their combat score? (as seen when inspecting NPCs)
I think this would make for a really nice experience when macro managing a number of cities. I am a big fan of the BUG mod for Civ 4 ( http://civ4bug.sourceforge.net/BUGMod.html ) which gives you quite a bit of this sort of information in the main screen if you want it - perhaps a good place to look for some inspiration?
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