Found two typos; one in the campaign start screen and one when moving west of the farmland patch just off the ship after recruiting janusk and the farmer. It says "Setting off the new paridian", it should probably be "setting off to...". It also didn't seem to properly advance the storyline once I'd founded the first city. Also, unfortunately, it is not as alt-tab friendly as it was suggested it was; I got a 'DX - bad call' and a CTD when I went out to write this list of bugs. That might be because I haven't restarted my PC after installing; that can cause problems.
These minor niggles aside, initial impressions are that the game has improved quite a lot; there seems to be a fair share of videos too. The new interface has MANY improvements over the old one. I'll report more as I find it, but the 'feel' of the game has improved, and that's a good thing.
Thanks for taking the time to post your first impressions!
For those mentioning that Porcipine is OP as a ruler, she is clearly noted as the most powerful channeler of the realms, at least in the first campaign mission.
The start has a few oddities though; Porcipine's spouse was named åS}, and the nearby town was named Eroor. Which sounded a bit odd.
The tactical map works better, but it scrolls towards the cursor, and you can't move the map with ASDW like you can the main map, which feels a little counter-intuitive. Crashing on alt-tab seems consistent, so no more updates from me. (It does not crash when alt-tabi'ing out of the game, but back in.),
Well, I for one think it looks night and day compared to the beta 4. The tactical combat is much better, the lay out of towns and how they work is also better.
And Alt tab works for me, however if you have an ATI card it will still crash. I like the main quest so far, I just got to porcipine's city and it seems interesting so far.
Yeah, I've got... like a day for my crappy internet to complete the download. Please let us know more about whats new and different.
We thought all prior alt-tab issues were fixed, but the change to fix a graphics memory leak also caused a recurrence of that issue on some ATI cards on Win7 x64. We have one of the game's lead graphics developers on the task of fixing it.
For now, running in windowed mode (which will fill the screen if you set it to the screen resolution) may help. If not, set autosave to every turn and sit tight for a couple of days.
do you mean windowed but without see the window?, checking the windowed mode box and setting to the max resolution my screen supports?.
I have the 3 factors of the problem but still downloading.
I agree that compared to the beta 4, its night and day. I've played for about an hour now (sandbox, not campaign) on a large map. So far I'm really liking the game. There are a few small things I'd thought would have been fixed/looked into, but I'll wait for the 0 day patch before comment on that.
One big problem though. I couldn't play much of beta 4 because of the out of memory error (I assume because I'm on win7 x64 with ATI cards). In beta 4 I would only get 30-40 turns before it would crash. Today I got about an hour into the game and it did it. I had (sadly) just lost a town an all of the sudden the game wouldn't respond anymore. I alt-tab and had a pop up saying it was out of memory. Probably for the best, as I really need to get to bed.
Also, I have not tried the modding tools tonight, but I got out of memory errors when working with the map editor during beta 4. Made me sad as I really want to re-create The Kingdom of the Isles on Midkemia from Raymond E. Feist's great books.
I really hope this out of memory error will be fixed in 0 day patch, because the game is a lot of fun to play. And I want to get to work on the map editor.
Thanks for a great game,
Nathan
PS. sorry if this is a double posts. After I hit the button to post, some odd screen came up about lost pigeons or something??
Yes, that is what I mean. As for the map editor, it likely shared many of the issues we fixed since beta4, but if you notice any errors in the current build, please report them - preferably with links to save games and/or crash dumps!
It also helps if you can say "doing this adds 5Mb" - Task Manager can often help, set it to show the "Commit Size" column under "View" in the processes tab.
Bollocks to the f*cking ati/64bit bug. Seriously guys. Fix that shit.
What's this ATI 64bit bug thingy? I have an ATI 5770 is it going to fark up?
If you're running 64bit windows 7 you might. I don't know if it affects everyone.
If you do have the problem, someone might be along to tell you that playing in windowed mode may help. Or turning down graphics settings. Or playing only in the "cloth map" mode and staying clear of tactical battles. Which is all fine, for a beta.
I have Vista 64 as I read Win 7 still has lots of bugs and issues with older games and now I see newer ones. Vista may not be as fast as Win7 now but at least it's been stable for me and I've been running everything under the sun with it lately.
Wow this game is buggy. I've been playing for about 30 minutes and I don't know if I can continue.
I started out on the campaign and the first thing I did was to go into the menus to see if I could invert the mouse-scrolling. Didn't find it and when I got back to the game it was zoomed in to the max and I could not get it back out again. Not with the scroll wheel or the +/- buttons. Restarting the game solved this.
Next I spend some time trying to figure out how to build the city and how to build farms. I wish the tutorial would have helped me some more here but I figured it out. Seems you can't click a square if there's someone standing on it? Opening the city seemed to be bugged too. When I double clicked, it opened really quickly and then closed immediately. I managed to get around that by double clicking and keeping the button pressed for a while before releasing it.
I now notice the big spider over at the wreckage and go over there with my hero, that other guy and the militia. I kill it easily, pick up the stuff and then try to attack the much smaller spider next to it. Figure it's going to be even easier so I auto-resolve the battle, but it turns out I lose everything except my hero with 1HP. What the hell? Must've been stronger than it looked... Oh well, I reload the game, kill the big spider again, pick up the sword and try to figure out how to equip it, or at least make sure I have it on my hero. Well I can't because the description text on the hero is so long I can't see the items?
I'm now starting to get a bit annoyed at the game but I try to attack the smaller spider again. Except I can't. Nothing happens when I click attack. Why? I click next turn some 10 times and the city grows. I try to attack it again but I still can't. I try to move up to the bandits but I can't attack them either. Restarting the game doesn't help.
I'm on Win7 x64 with an ATI card as well, if that makes any difference to all this?
I have Win 7 64 bit with an ATI 5870 card. Getting the 'DX - bad call' error message after 'alt - tabbing' and clicking to go back in the game. Was keeping an eye on the Memory commit and saw it go from about 300k initially to 1.3 gigs when I looked right before it crashed. I played about an hour in between the two 'alt - tabs'.
Fortunately, I had saved my game so no big lose or anything.
Another thing I noticed. There are no magic 'effects' when casting fireball. The screen moves like its tracking something but you don't actually see the fireball or anything. You see the hit points being removed from the target though.
So far my favorite thing in tactical combat is when the guys go flying backwards after getting the hell knocked out of them...it just doesn't get old! LOL
Hey guys, been following beta closely, finally registered.
While I appreciate Stardock's candor and their enthusiasm, I do have one thing to say.
For a game with MAGIC in the title, Stardock clearly shoved magic on to the back burner in favor of a lot of other features. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt because they've committed to updates for a long time...but that's a pretty big failing in my book. I hope Stardock uses this release as a cautionary tale about getting too excited with your own IP, and pushing too hard toward a release.
Because I think I could have waited until 2011 for a very polished build. I'm just not sure Brad and Random could have.
And in 2011 people would complain that there should have been more in the game and that it should have been a 2012 release.
Im sure there should be more magic among other things but they will happen if Brad and co want it to happen.
Rather than asking whats been left out, is whats been left in good enough to warrent it being called a computer game? If yes then they have achieved their goal. The fact that more will go in after release is a bonus.
(P.s. im not a fanboy, i didnt like DemiGod or Sins. Loved Galciv though)
So Far i'm enjoying it. I also found the change in the way you build farms and mines a bit of a surprise. But once I worked it out I think it's actually better.
Might be a few minor SPOILERS for the story below.
I'm having some weird game play issues at the moment in the campaign. I have 5 towns, and the NPC towns haven't grown at all. I couldn't build pioneers so no new towns at first. after I had to build a town for the story I assumed that was design - then I designed a unit that had the pioneer pack and therefore could start settlements . I'm wondering if i bypassed part of the game in doing it that way.
I can't do any research - i haven't met an NPC to help me get started in that area and If i open the research area it tell me I have no one studying. Maybe i haven't got far enough into the story to be allowed - or i just missed something.
I've also got stuck in the campaign story. A scribe sends me for a book - to translate a map - but i can't find the NPC - Town or whatever it is i'm looking for. The yellow glow on the paper map in beta made that sort of thing more fun. (though it's not really a quest)
Lot of fun - i'm off to restart the campaign and see if it works that way again or if i have done something silly
I guess I'm just a little weary of being billed an idea and not really seeing it in the first release. There's plenty of game there, no denying that, and it all looks very fun. The reason I got into Elemental was because it promised to be big on magic. What I've seen instead is a world setting that revolves around magic, and the same generic, bland treatment of magic in game that characterizes every fantasy game made today.
So that makes it standard. And I have faith they'll get back around to magic in their due time to do something.
Just saying though. War of Magic is in the name of the game, and it's not a standout feature of gameplay at all. Just reading some people's descriptions here, I'm really disappointed on that front, more than I thought I was going to be after magic has sort of been downplayed and not really detailed. I mean...Earthball, Fireball, Waterball? Really? The names alone indicate how much of a priority it was for them. That's the kind of stuff I could have waited on a release for, and they decided they didn't need to. Committing to updates later is a great tendency of the indie dev scene, but there are times it does work against them, like right now during the initial release impression, for those that aren't familiar with Stardock. (I played GalCivII.)
About the ATI/Win 7 64 known bug. The problem there is, I have windows XP media edition, and an Nvidia 9600 GT graphic card. Edit: I also have the memory leak, but since I can't alt-tab much, I can't find out what increases memory usage easily either. (I'll try the maximize window thing next.).
@Stardock: PM me and I'll happily help with doing whatever is needed to help identify the problem.
@Rune_74: Yes, I agree completely. The game flows much better, although I did have to go sleep for a while. Now I'm back and going to log a lot more hours on this.
Changes:
The biggest change is in many of the small details. Character creation has less oddities, more icons (for talents/weaknesses, for instance), the nations include information on what race they are (The Yithril are just 'Fallen', but the rest are a specific race.). The Yithril no longer start with an exceptional longbow, but they start with piercing weapons researched, so you can create archers from the start. BIG advantage as far as I can tell.
Interface has a few more subscreens, the Hiergamon infromation windows has more consistent links and descriptions - better organized, tabs for the spellbooks, etcetera.
One surprise - casting spells is no longer an action you can do; you need to click on 'abilities' tab and 'channeler' to cast spells. A little unintuitive, but it's still on the character, at least.
About tactical combat, bows no longer shoot at 45 degrees to the right or left of the target and still hits. Jay. Unfortunately scrolling with ASDW or edge scrolling is not enabled, you need to zoom out and then in to do anything at range. That's a bit clunky.I did get an all-white tactical screen (landscape and units, not interface), which was a Beta 4 bug as well. I think it's connected with the out of memory thing, but not sure. I did take a screen shot but not sure how to put them here.
More huts, more quests, more lairs, more STUFF.
An update:
Using a full not-fullscreen screen (sounds messy) helps with the alt- tab thing, and it makes it possible to monitor memory usage a bit more. It does not, however, fix the memory leak. Memory use goes up consistently and for my part, when it reaches 960 mb, things start gooooiinnggg.. sloooowwww......
I did get the impression it increased slower though. In the campaign it only got unbearable when I got to the point where I'm supposed to move north of Gilden, after picking up the soaked map.
On a side note, I'm wondering if there's an option that disables edge scrolling, because I no longer got it in the main screen either. Tooltips on the option screen options would be useful.
Also, typo on the tooltip for 'dominate'. (Which seems to be a very useful ability).
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
