Our public beta of Elemental lasted until Beta 4.
We’re going to be making the game available early to everyone who beta tested Elemental (planned day is either Sunday night or Monday morning) and anyone who pre-orders prior to Monday morning will get the game on Monday rather than having to wait until Tuesday.
A quick beta recap for those who didn’t follow it:
Beta 1: Began a year ago.
Beta 1 focused on game concepts and took place purely on the cloth map. In this beta, we talked about all kinds of different game styles we wanted to try to explore.
The key challenge of beta 1 was coming up with a game design that was sufficiently original, challenging, interesting and engaging for players.
Beta 2: Began early this year.
Beta 2 focused on testing the brand new engine that Elemental uses called Kumquat. It is a 3D engine made specifically for the PC. What makes it special is that because it was made for the PC, it sacrifices memory usage for performance (consoles work the opposite – they have a lot less memory but great hardware). As a result, Elemental’s hardware requirements are roughly the same as for Galactic Civilizations II allowing the game to run on a very large number of PCs.
The key challenge of beta 2 was performance and stability.
Beta 3: Summer
This beta deal with starting to put the pieces together. Tactical battles, economics, magic, spells, diplomacy, etc. This was about getting the features in there and seeing what worked in practice (this is why sequels are so much easier – you have an established system).
Beta 4: July
Beta 4 was basically Beta 3 with the modding features enabled.
Beta 5: August
This was an internal beta where all our “stuff” came together.
Gold: August
This is the “release to manufacturing” version. There are actually several of these versions depending on what continent it’s going to for manufacturing with our RTM having been last Thursday evening.
Day 0: August 24th
This is the build where we get to do more polishing, AI improvements, tweaking, bug fixes, optimizations, etc.
Here are a series of screenshots for those whose last experience with Elemental was Beta 4 in order to outline some of the high level changes:
Updated UI
More to come…
That screen wasn't a mock-up. It was taken back when the battles were still real time, but that was an internal version we never got to try. Frogboy said they changed the battles from real time to turn based because turn based battles had a better feel to it.
When they talked about unit numbers a lot of people here on the forums Did Ask if the numbers shown in that screen were still going to be possible. Someone even counted them up and there were 400 and something soldiers in that pic which Frogboy said was around the maximum numbers that could be achieved on the largest maps. It's not unit counts in the thousands like a lot of thought at first, but big epic battles in the 300-400 troop range will still be possible without modding. You won't see them until late mid game to end game though.
Actually, internally they decided that the RTS style wasn't fun and changed it. Beta testers never saw that version. Quite a few people posted saying they wanted turn based combat though. Here's the only mention I could find on short notice:
"Originally, Elemental was going to have continuous turn combat. That effectively meant real-time. Ultimately, after playing around with it, we decided to implement turn based (simultaneous turns based on combat speed) with tiles."
TY Tridus. Honestly the realtime battles were the only reason I purchased Elemental, so having them gone is a bit of a $50 sore spot...I get cranky when they are mentioned.
You can mod the game back to RTS. Its an RTS engine.
FrogBoy said that RT combat was out because it didn't feel right with the system.
A turn-based strategy map, with a real-time battle system? That's what brought the change. In theory, at least.
Heck, I got interested when it was supposed to have massive battles of 10,000 vs. 10,000 late game. That's out too, until a modder can make a blessed creation and make it work. But, the combat being turn-based is one minor let down. Elemental's strategy form is a blast already, and I can tolerate missing RT for the NUMEROUS other benefits.
I was also disappointed by dropping the realtime battles, but I think unit abilities could easily make up for it. The advantage of realtime is being able to smoothly manage a few hundred units charging at each other simultaneously; this is a nightmare if you have to order each individual unit one-by-one in turnbased combat. The advantage to turnbased is being able to micromanage a handful of units that might each have several spells/abilities to pick from, abilities that might need to be timed and coordinated carefully; this is a nightmare in realtime. So I'm disappointed to lose the epic battles associated with realtime, but excited to gain the interesting tactics associated with coordinating unit abilities in turnbased; as long as they're playing to the strength of whichever combat model they're going with, it should work well.
-Of course, I also hope we eventually get the option to mod back in the realtime battles (the engine once supported them, it should be possible?) so that different mods have the option to go either way - epic clashes of armies in realtime, or a handful of units with detailed RPG-like abilities in turnbased. A very clever continuous turnbased system could even integrate both, the possibility of sitting back and watching your hundreds of infantry charge, or pausing to micromanage the abilities of your sovereign/champion/dragon/etc.
I miss the real time battle plan as well, Sushi.
The thing that irks me about is that the beta testers never even got the chance to TRY OUT the real time battles. Perhaps the community would have liked them better than the turn based?!?!?! We don't know for sure because we Never Got The Chance To Try Them.
While it's true they "could" be modded back in...without Extensive Knowledge of Python there's no way to do it. There's certainly no Easy Way to do it. Also, even though I LOVE the moddability of Elemental...after the last year and a half, the "You can Mod it in" tag line sounds more and more like a lame Excuse that's just handed out to everyone who wants something that won't be in game. While it's a "true excuse", it's an Excuse none the less.
I would be Incredibly Happy though if in the future they gave us an Easy Way to at least try the real time battle option. Maybe on the settings page where you set up the map just have a check box for "Real Time" or "Turn Based" Battles depending on what the player was in the mood for. The fact of there being so many things left out that were "originally planned" is a sore spot for a Lot of people and I imagine a lot of people may even regret their pre-orders. I myself was looking forward to Massively Epic Battles. Whether or not they were real time or turn based wasn't much of an issue to me but that's just my personal preference. Sadly having Thousands of Soldiers on screen, just like the real time battles, is a dream that will have to be modded to see the light of day. To me when the troop counts got chopped down by so much that was about half the reason why I was so excited about the game.
Now having battles like those read about in LotR and Dragonlance just aren't possible without HEAVY Modding and a almost Totally Re-balancing of the game mechanics. I don't see why they went back on it honestly. They knew/know what the majority of their fan base wanted and expected and by tweaking some values when in the design stage it could have been made possible very easily.
The way things are set up now in tactical battles I notice something ...hmm, weird. Here's how it goes. You have two "Units" facing off. Unit "A" has 20 soldiers in it. Unit "B" has 15 soldiers in it. When one unit attacks another one guy from each unit steps up to fight while the rest just stand back and do nothing. Having battles happen that way means that the more units you have the longer the battle will take and as we all know there were/are tons of people who didn't want long battles.
If instead they would have All the soldiers from each unit step up and swing together all the soldiers in that "unit" would fight and take damage at the same time, meaning the battles would go much faster regardless of how many soldiers were in each unit. <---- Right there, just like that, the issue of being able to have massive battles even in a turn based environment would have been fixed. What would that have taken to accomplish? A little more work by the animators to shows groups fighting instead of one guy fighting at a time (which would have looked Way Better IMO anyway).
Don't get the wrong idea from my post there btw. I'm still Very Happy with the way the game has turned out. We all have to realize we won't get everything we want every time we want it in a game. I don't think any of us though can say we're totally unhappy with how things turned out. I know I'm not. I'm still Incredibly Stoked to be getting Elemental this weekend. With all the Love that went into the tools and making the game moddable, we can literally do just about Anything We Want with the engine. Stardock, Brad and the Team, need to be Praised just for doing that, because lets face it...how many game companies do that kind of thing in today's market? Practically NONE, which is Why we All Love Stardock.
TBS games are almost just as common as RTS games. And there happen to be some extremely well made RTS games out there in this world that require thought (company of heroes comes to mind) instead of focusing on overwhelming opponents with endless waves of cannon fodder.
I'm kind of happy the game went with the turn-based method, but I'm curious as to how the real-time version would have worked out. Maybe it would have been better. You shouldn't judge just because you're old and need time to think .
My personal preference as to a battle system would have been real-time-pausable like the Original Baldur's Gate for PC. That system was the perfect hybrid which I don't think has been surpassed even to this day (and yes you can make it work for massive numbers by giving oders to "Units" as a whole group). Of course I LOVE X-Com and all the sequels, Masters of Magic, Masters of Orion, all the old school turn based games, so I'm happy either way. I think a Baldur's Gate style system would have best though, which is just my opinion. We each like what we like. So long as the battles turn out to be fun and have strategic depth that's what matters the most .
Thanks for the one day earlier pre-release!
maybe 2 days
Yeah, I understand. Originally I wasn't sure about the idea, then it grew on me, then it grew off me again... right now I'm thinking once we get up to larger armies with the special abilities in, tactical combat should be pretty fun despite the switch.
Were realtime battles even originally planned? I thought it was a continuous turn system that got replaced with traditional turn based.
I for one am thrilled that realtime battles were scrapped - there's no way at all that I'd be buying this game if tactical battles were in real-time. There's ten thousand games with real time battles these days and almost none that are turn-based. I like to plan my moves and take my time. and Elemental was designed as a throwback strategy game - why would it need to be "improved" by having my decision making taken away from me? Auto-resolve is there if you want to plow through a big battle quickly. My two cents - no offense to any who like real-time battles - I just wanted it to be clear that there are those of us who feel strongly the other way.
It was continuous turns. Realtime was never planned AFAIK, but to be completely honest, I have no idea what the difference is between continuous turns and realtime. They sound the same to me.
I was always on the side of continuous turns/realtime, but when the announcement of the switch was made, it was pretty obvious that we are the minority. A lot more people cheered the decision than hated it. Mind you, I don't hate the change, but I think I would've liked the orignal implementation better.
Oh well, that's what modding is for. Although I'm not completely sure where Raven got this idea that changing it requires "Extensive Knowledge of Python" (or why he capitalized those words)
He likes capitals.
"Continuous turns" is like Dragon Age: realtime with a pause button. You can issue orders in real time, or pause and issue a bunch of orders to be carried out when you unpause.
Ah, that's the best explaination of it I've heard. All the previous ones used games I've never played as examples
harpo
Ok, so you know how to change it from Turn Based to Real-Time/Continuous Turns in XML? I sure don't. I figured that being a pretty much "Core Mechanic" it would take knowledge of Python to change it. I haven't seen anything in the XML to show me how to change the nature of how the tactical battles work.
No, I haven't, but that doesn't mean it needs python, either. IIRC, Frogboy said it wouldn't be very hard to make it realtime. They obviously had the code for it at one point (xml or python) and they might feel like giving it to the modders after release. And even assuming it does require Python, there is nothing to say it requires "extensive knowledge" of it to do so.
I don't know Anything about Python, hence any Python knowledge required is "Extensive Knowledge" too me
I'm honestly hoping they kept the code for that too and will decide to pass it out at a later date. That would be very cool
P.S. If you can figure out how to do it I'd really like to incorporate it into the DL Mod
Python is a great language. I'm not sure if they use 2.4/2.6 or 3.1
"Hopefully" they use 3.1 but they probably use either 2.4 or 2.6 since 2.4 is still industry standard
3.x is not backwards compatible with 2.x so that's important.
However it's a pretty simple language, and very powerful. It reads much like English, which is nice, and has good XML parsing built-in. If you're comfortable writing XML from scratch and you're capable of planning procedures you could probably handle basic python without too much training.
This is the documentation/tutorial for 2.7, which was released just today (:
http://docs.python.org/tutorial/index.html
With regards to changing battles from TB to RT, remember that Frogboy has repeatedly mentioned considerable costs were associated with overhauling the system. High costs means high man(or woman)-hours, which means it's not just going to be a simple matter of changing a few things around in python, it would require a considerable amount of rewriting and new writing, as well as defining new things such as unit abilities, spells, unit stats, and pretty much everything else about the game. It will be done, but I think this one is going to take a while.
Stay optimistic though!
Paradoxical
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