AUGUST 24th, 2010.
This is a day that the team has been waiting for for three years!
As some of you know, some retailers broke the street date and to make sure our beta testers and pre-order customers didn’t get the short end of the stick, we released an interim build of Elemental (internally called Gold Edition++).
It turns out that this was a blessing in disguise because we have gotten a tremendous amount of useful feedback from those of you who got the game before release. The results of this comes in two parts.
First, tonight we released a new interim build. This version is basically bug fixes and such based on player reports. You can see what’s new in it here. Looking at the change log gives you an idea of the complexities of making a new PC game in 2010 with a brand new engine.
But tomorrow (or later today as I write this) is the big one. The official day 0 update that the team and I have been working on since Beta 4 (the beta group can go into more detail on this but in brief: After beta 4, the game tree was split in two. One version went on to be the gold version which is what those people who have it early are playing. The other tree went on to become day 0. These two trees were merged today already and will be going up tomorrow.
So what can you expect?
Here’s a few highlights:
The day 0 version, as most of you know, is the version that was originally expected to be the first version most people would ever play. We’re definitely glad, however, that people got to play the pre-day 0 builds because we got a lot of very useful feedback and some crash reports that were not known about.
Now, a couple words on multiplayer. The servers are up but we are not going to enable multiplayer until next week. Part of this is, to be honest, team exhaustion. The early release meant a lot of people who were expecting this weekend off to rest from the grueling last few weeks had to come in. So we’re going to let them get a couple of days off later this week and open up the MP next week.
One piece of good news on MP. Originally we had planned to eliminate tactical battles from MP entirely because of balance. Some people correctly guessed the misguided (in hindsight) reason for this: We were approaching MP from a purely competitive point of view. Based on the persuasive arguments made by our players, we have decided that tactical battles will be made available in MP – as an option – at a later date as a free update.
So that’s all for now. After the day 0 update, I plan to take a day or two off too. I hear sleeping is the new “in thing” and you guys know me, I’m all about being cool and…um..what not.
I have great expectations for this patch and the future of this game. I'm among the vocal ones when it comes to criticism, but I will also do as much as I reasonably can to make this game go forward for the next few days. The balancing, in particular, will do a lot of good to this game.
Ok I checked out the file and here's the skinny.
ON normal difficulty the AI is basically even however it's gimped in intellegence, it's only using 75% of it's computing power.
On Challenging the AI gets 2x the starting funds and it's intellegence is unlocked (100%). So I would recommend those who want to see the AI function at it's best should go Challenging and above.
IF you want to edit the AI to not have the starting funds bonus (I think the AI needs this to be honest) then just edit the xml under normal difficulty and rase the AI intellegence to 1 instead of .75. So you can have the full blown AI intellegence but with equal stats to you (don't know why this isn't the normal difficulty starter but oh well).
Also thanks awuffleablehedgie for pointing me to the file.
Also want to clear up that the AI on Challenging gets everything the same as you the only benifit is it starts out with twice the starter gold, everything else is even (resorce collecting, economy, ect..).
I have never seen such a dedicated team in my life. Thank you, Stardock!
Agree with all of the praise that's been heaped on you guys. Never ever met a development team more dedicated to their players and providing support, keeping us up to date, and generally making what many consider to be a horrible, scarring experience (the beta testing phase) an enjoyable and friendly process. Truly impressed by the amazing job you guys have done in getting this all to this stage in this much time.
Good work and enjoy your rest (but not for too long right.),
Paradoxical
Ty.
I love all of you...everyone at stardock and everyone on this forum. Time to celebrate, amirite?
i am into the game for about 100 turns and what a epic feel it has. a true classic. i am just scratching the surface. i can see many sleepless nights ahead. great job. ty for all your efforts.
Developers... handing out patches... that's no basis for a system of government.
It does me good to see that your meger forces protecting the tactical battles were easily defeated by logic and Truth. It is said in the scrolls of yore; "Tactical battles shall commeth, and when they commeth there will be much weeping and gnashing of teeth and there will 10 days of mouring for all the followers of whinn".
Let it come to pass.
Can not wait for day 0. Thank you very much for your hard work, and good luck in the future.
BIG thank you, for tactical battles in MP as option !! Now, being able to see setting of the game in the lobby would be instant win !!
Thanks of the "day o" patch. I have waited for a game like this since... well since master of magic.
Wish I bought two limited editions just to help out more and make a friend play (Working on it)- even with the problems game is awesome.
Dear Frogboy + Stardock-Team - thank you a thousand times for making this game and putting all your effort in it!!!!
I played the pre-release version not even close to 100 turns and was hooked immediately!
Can't wait to play the day-0 release and so much more to turn up after release!
thats very good to hear my athlon 3000+ cant handle elemental so i play it on my stronger pc
good luck for the first day
Enjoy some R'n'R. Had some hours yesterday with the pre-order build. Had a bad sleep, due to I was dreaming and fantasing in-game play, so I am a bit tired today. Will be looking forward to the 0 day version, as I had a couple of crashes (4 in total) on Windows 7. But still a good experience and enjoying the time.
Great news on MP tactical battles being added. Thanks.
Now.. this is a little disappointing to me. If tactical battles are already in the game why do we have to wait a future update, at a later date, to use them in MP? Also... could you please tell us which other aspects of the game will be removed and/or dumbed down in MP?
Please.. I beg you, make so that we get the full game in MP and not a dumbed down version... I understand others would want a faster gameplay for competitive MP matches over the internet, but for all those that love to play these type of games on LAN with friends it would be nice to have an option to enable all the SP features in MP.
HUZZAH! You have a long day of irc ahead of you tomorrow. Go get some sleep!
I don't want to be accused of spamming but ...
This game rocks. It is well supported by an excellent developer and company. I am very happy with it.
Having made my position clear (this game is excellent) I am now going to get back to what I prefer to do, ie lobbying as to what I want to see in the expansions!
The Expansions and Patches Requests
Spells - Wants more spells. Interesting global enchantments please. Armageddon anyone? Eternal Darkness? Season of Light? Chaos Channels? Global Fertility? Battlefield spells - Prayer, Darkness, Mass Confusion, Rain of Fire etc. etc. The devs should basically rob the MoM, Dominions 3 and AoW 2 spellbooks.
Artefacts and Equipment - So much more. And more interesting swords, rings and amulets than just +1 - +5 please?
Equipment Abilities - To give more special ability options for regular troops? Bandage pack to give healing power - training component to give First Strike etc. etc.
Building Art Content - more and varied building components for the mod section (crystal buildings, spires like in AoW 1 & 2 for the elves, rounded domes and organic buildings like WarCraft 1 Orcs and organic structures like Zerg or something)
Creatures - Wants more monsters (not just humanoids).
Races - Non humanoid, maybe different gameplay mechanics?
Well, played the day 0 fully patched version fpr about 6 hours, and while I'm really glad you released it, please focus on a bugs for a while!
I found oodles of them. Some easily worked around, many not.
Big ones:
1) Imbue Essence asks if I want to give up 3 essence, and then takes a lot more, probably due to my having many shards and essence towers, and so the champ is recieving 3 and getting a nice multiplier (up to 5 in my case) and so it took 5.
2) graphics getting mixed up very often. My wife turned into a different person in her circular icon, the hud for my city changed to read the city of an enemy and wouldn't fix with hide/show hud... had to build something there to fix it, one champ changed from one graphic into another guy's graphic seemingly permenantly, after about 6 hours of him looking the first way.
3) This is a big one for play: when I have a friendly stack and mouse over the circular icons, the "card" changes fine. This doesn't happen with enemy stacks in many cases (usually). The then makes me have to click on each circular icon, and then click on the big cirular picture to see stats for each enemy, which is quite painful.
4) My minor water elemental showed his 2 mana, but when he got to level 3 or 4, this hit point bar got big enough so that it deleted his mana bar from view... there seems to be no other way to check his mana amount at that point.
5) I imbued a champ with mana and she had 10 mana, when she tried to teleport it took 5 mana and did nothing.
6) This is not a bug, but may as well be: the random numbers in combat are WAY too random. Why bother with having subtle elements like 25% increases in defense on a unit when a unit with a 36 attack can easily get only 5 damage when they are in the open? Even when the enemy has low armor and is of similar level. I don't mind some randomness, but the amount here makes many of the subtle tactic simply not worth worrying about, since luck determines the battles in most cases, given reasonably non-stupid play.
7) The particle system seems to fairly quickly stop working, in random ways. On loading the game, it all works, but then random particle effects will go off and STAY off permenantly fairly quickly. By about 1 hour of game play with no full reload, no particle effects at all work, including spells, shard "rays", smoke from towns, and even the glow of adventure locations.
8) Maybe not a bug, but probably: I spent tons of reserach on getting heros and legends, and saw extremely few show up. In fact, more showed up before I invested in these technologies than after. After researching Legends, the following 60 or so turns saw none show up at all, and if it matters, my cities were big and had buildings increasing influence. I finally had one level 3 production chick show up, and made her into a mage, but the pay off was pretty slim for the research invested.
9) Alt-tab usually, but not always crashes when I alt-tab back. In battle, it happens nearly always.
10) Random crashes after fairly long amounts of play, probalby memory leaks.
Great game, but needs about 3 weeks of pure debugging, then more balance passes! Going to love it when done
Congratulations on the official release
Check this post. The short version is that tactical battles, quests, LAN play, and custom servers were disabled. Tactical battles and quests were for competitive "this isn't fun when playing against someone" kind of reasons, which IMO (and several others) was a mistake. Games like this are best playing with and against friends, rather then random people, and I'm not worried about my buddy in a co-op game taking a while in tactical combat or finding an uber sword on a quest.
They listened on tactical battles and those are coming back. Woot! It takes an update to re-enable them in MP because they're disabled entirely right now and an option to turn them on for a given game has to be put in and they have to be tested in MP on the release build.
Custom servers are needed for mods in MP (maybe, we're not quite clear on that) and in theory will also be what enables LAN play. Those might come later.
It's a source code term. The code is managed in a tree-like structure, with a trunk and branches. They "branched" a copy of the code at beta 4 for the gold version, where the goal was just to stabalize it and get things ready for the DVD press.
Main development continued on the other side, which is the day 0 version. That one got improvements that couldn't go in the gold version branch because it might break things and the gold version needs to be working when it goes to the DVD press.
Version 1.01 is not the 0-day patch.
To my knowledge it is not out yet.
Good points for upgrading the UI, and the AI. I hope they'll be good.
Despite all the other pestering you'll receive, you must remember to work on the AI. It's why you made the game, and it's what'll make it good or not. I shouldn't be able to win a game on normal if I don't even know how to build a farm.
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