Any news about this?
I know that it was supposed to be internally checked today, but when is it supposed to become available?
i am also unconcerned about campaigns. in my ideal world the two become one: i never played the gc2 campaigns, but from what i know of the story i can totally have imagined them being incorporated in a sandbox as an improved version of the dreadlords event.
also, if brad is thinking about it, i'd also wish NO to unique tech trees. it bothers me a little already that there's such an arbitrary line drawn between kingdoms and empires. to my mind technology/science, even in a fantasy setting, is one universal set of rules and if there's any difference in the technologes of different factions it should be due to
a - the predefined racial attributes of the civ (eg, dwarves are not tall enough to ride horses)
or
b - choices i make (ie, my sov is a bit of a bastard, so he uses fear to improve morale instead of entertainment)
rather than arbitrary lines in the sand.
They've staged tomorrow's build for QA so that's a good sign.
Great!
I'd kind of go the other direction. Although the laws of science/magic don't change, the approach to how to solve a given problem is as vast and varied as there are people researching it. Therefore, the tech/design/ritual used to generate a given effect, even the approach to get there, may yield vastly different paths. And at least with GalCiv2, different races have vastly different cultural and biological variances. So they should take very different approaches to tech.
In Elemental, I would imagine the same but only with different races and outlooks.
let the pre-feeding frenzy, and mass hysteria begin...
I don't really agree here.
The #1 reason Stardock has beens successful is repeat business. We're in this for the long haul. We don't look at Elemental on its own. We look at ALL our future games and applications. If we don't make people feel like Elemental was a great game in the long-run, it'll cause business harm in the long run.
The biggest obstacle (with the benefit of hindsight) to Elemental was the size of the team. We had never managed a team with more than a half dozen people. Elemental had nearly 20 full time people involved and there were a lot of people putting their fingers in a lot of things.
Why is the AI so "brain dead"? Well, if you farm monsters (something I wasn't aware of as a strategy and I made the AI) you can totally flatten the AI.
Stardock, as a company, is much more like the type of company that many internet users would probably create in the sense that there's very very few managers at Stardock. This blew up in our face because there just were too many people involved and too few managers (basically none, I did AI, Scott, our producer, did the campaign, and the rest was handled by each group). In a normal setup, the Producer (Scott) would be overseeing things day to say and the Executive Producer (me) would dabble maybe but generally stay disconnected from the day to day in order to be objective.
With Sins of a Solar Empire and Demigod, I was the executive producer on both and was able to offer useful feedback (the economic system in Sins, the citadel system + flag system in Demigod) because I wasn't pesonally involved day to day.
By contrast, on Elemental, if I'm making the AI and someone else is making it so you can get 1000 gildar loot from killing a monster and I have no idea about that, you end up with a walk over of the AI since it's no sweat to crank out peasants that are more powerful than channelers.
If anyone here has ever thought about game design, consider how easy it is to totally mess up the pacing and gameplay of something with just a few variable changes. For instance, why are soldiers so much better than spell casters in Elemental v1.0? The reason is because it's so easy to get super powerful guys versus the difficulty in getting super powerful spell casters (it doesn't help that the shard magnification does didly in v1.0).
The big changes going in at this point is the removal of chefs from the kitchen. It was never our intent for individual developers to start inserting their own preferences on their own into the code. But it happened and the results speak for themselves.
Combine the above with a general compatibility issue and bang. You have a disaster on your hands. It's a lot to live and learn from and it's been heartbreaking for all of us who spent 3 years on this game. The layoffs we had at Stardock were painful but allowed us to move back to our traditional model of not relying on game revenue to pay the bills and give us the luxury of focusing on Elemental until it is the game we all want.
Dogs living with cats, panic in the streets!
Sooo...is that a yes or no on the pony?
I'm -still- awaiting an ETA on our promised trog porn.
O MY GOD...I a laughed so hard at this my side hurts. People in the office think I lost it.
Brad-
Thank you for the serious, in-depth perspective on the game and your company.
Glad to have you in Michigan!
Consort
Let me just say as a member of the community, I overwhelmingly and completely with all of my heart and soul DO NOT WANT THIS.
It simply wouldn't work, not without a complete engine redesign. Once that engine redesigned happened, it would be a game I do not want to play. A turn based game is tactical in nature, especially a turn based game with heroic units. Moving things to a massive scale would simply drown you in minutiae.
That and there exists such a long list of things that need to be fixed or implemented ( like game crashes, game balancing, AI strengthening and Multiplayer ) that the linked idea is actually harmfully unfocused.
So please put me down as an epically opposed vote, in case Stardock actually entertains these silly ideas.
I have to agree. I'm not sure I want epic battles like is being suggested. That's not really MoM esque, it's... well, total war esque.
Yea, we're not going for epic tactical battles. MOM is our influence, not total war.
Agreed, that's not the kind of battles I'm looking for either.
I also wanted to add that you've got my repeat business Brad (even though I can still kick the pants off your AI currently without farming the mobs for gold at all --- sorry, I couldn't resist).
Hey Brad, have you ever considered ( and have the infrastructure to support ) enabling QA builds to a subset of the community? I am not even talking from a gameplay/play balance perspective, but to expose the game to a wider set of hardware. This is an aspect I realize Stardock is a smaller company, and as a developer myself, I realize that QA is extremely important but doomed to failure if you don't have a large enough hardware base.
If you enabled people to update with WIP or QA builds, with the caveat they basically borked their warranty and could lose all saved data as a result and which additional QA reporting features already built in, both parties would benefit. Your testing would be more comprehensive and the people exposed to "mistakes" would be a minimal pool of people who volunteered for hardship in the first place. On the other hand, people with failed hardware could get updates earlier and end users would get better, more solid releases.
For example, I know in my case, my one machine with an Intel GPU is simply unplayable. I would have nothing to lose trying/using WIP code, while your QA team would get detailed information from a machine that very specifically doesn't work.
Seems like a net-win all around, if your current infrastructure supports it.
Glad about this.
One question - a little off topic - but I noticed that in the current survey/poll the racial short-comings and racial blandness of the game wasn't mentioned. Is this on the cards to be worked on at all in the future? Seems this gets glossed over all the time and is rarely officially addressed. I'm not sure if this is either a:
Thanks.
I would think releasing beta patches would be a good idea, if only to test ideas...get feedback on things you are trying. Sort of how the MMO's do it.
Would the AI really be fine if players didn't have the ability to farm monsters for loot? I was under the impression that the problems went quite a bit deeper then a simple gameplay mechanic that it was not able to take advantage of.
Your reading comprehension skills seem to be lacking, here let me help you with that.
By contrast, on Elemental, if I'm making the AI and someone else is making it so you can get 1000 gildar loot from killing a monster and I have no idea about that, you end up with a walk over of the AI since it's no sweat to crank out peasants that are more powerful than channelers. If anyone here has ever thought about game design, consider how easy it is to totally mess up the pacing and gameplay of something with just a few variable changes. For instance, why are soldiers so much better than spell casters in Elemental v1.0? The reason is because it's so easy to get super powerful guys versus the difficulty in getting super powerful spell casters (it doesn't help that the shard magnification does didly in v1.0). The big changes going in at this point is the removal of chefs from the kitchen. It was never our intent for individual developers to start inserting their own preferences on their own into the code. But it happened and the results speak for themselves.
To paraphrase, too many cooks in the kitchen spoils the broth.
But hey, if you want to cherry pick points to feed your rage, I wouldn't let the reality of what was actually said get in your way.
So, just re-quoting what was already posted magically increases reading comprehension? Thanks, that IS helpful!
And there was much rejoicing. I honestly didn't know there were this many MOM fans out there. I thought I was the only one that thought that game was incredible. To me Elemental feels like a very nice progression of this. I LOVE the squads reducing in size visually as their hit points go down. Gives me a warm fuzzy feeling.
Some people apparently need to have their hand held. I would have read the pertinent lines aloud putting the proper emphasis on the proper syllables, but sadly we are dealing with technological restraints.
That and technically I quoted a subset of what he said, then summarized the point.
Smarmy sarcasm make it through? I sure hope so.
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