Hello,
apparently the stand alone Fall from Heaven game has been cancelled.
But on the plus side, maybe this would be a perfect opportunity for Stardock to entice Kael over to modding for Elemental... his work his admired by a lot of people, and I'm sure he'd have a lot of invaluable insight into expanding and improving elemental. Stardock just need to give him a reason to switch from modding the hugely popular CiV (he's already produced a couple of small Civ5 mods!) to working on the far less popular Elemental.
Thoughts?
And no, I'm in no way connected to him. I just really like his work in with Civ4-FfH2, and think that he'd likely help transform Elemental into the game a lot of us originally wanted.
Can we get back on the subject instead of making this YAEST (Yet Another "Elemental Sucks" Thread)?
Brad, since you're here and you mentioned that Kael is a personal friend I wanted to ask if you asked him to playtest the game so that you can get some external perspective.
At this point it seems that one of the biggest problems other than the new engine is that there was some poorly thought design issues that were not pointed out (or pointed out and ignored by the devs, which would be worse unfortunately). It seems to me that having some external eyes with experience creating a very similar offering to yours would have pointed out a few of the problems in the game, things that have been pointed out very clearly after release and now Stardock is scrambling to implement in 1.1.
It saddens me, but I do get the impression that there was quite a bit of developer hybris going on, meaning that the previous successes, the overall hype and the groupthink going on within the dev team led to ideas external to the internal designers (beta testers and people like Kael) to be marginalized and ignored, leading to a game that repeated some very common mistakes. Is this similar to what happened? If so, I hope this has been a cause to change this mentality and be more open and even welcoming to external ideas, especially from estabilished names like Kael. I'd like to see Stardock inviting these people to present some harsh but constructive criticism and help shape the design for the better. Not just for Elemental, but for Elemental2 and the future.
Good question.
Kael through Fall From Heaven has really captured the right feel for a fantasy strategy game - and this is way beyond the structure of the Civ 4 engine.
In a recent interview Kael said that the main starting point was to get the lore 100% right and then build slowly around it. When you look at Fall From Heaven and all the mod-mod offshoots you can see the genius of the lore he created. Each race fits within the lore in a very unique way with vastly different play styles and objectives. For me, this is the secret to the success of FFH and the biggest lesson Elemental should take from what Kael has done.
That was because they had a well developed lore (17 years of a tabletop RPG) to work from. However good a writer Brad is, it is a huge advantage to have that much weight of Lore to draw on. That gives you a solid core, a reason to say no, and a help in making the inevitable design compromises in a consistent fashion.
I have been playing the FFH series for years, and I think its the best game of its type. I welcome Elemental as being the best current candidate for producing something better than FFH. And I hope they succeed.
Anyone wanting to try FFH, I think the Wildmana mod mod is the best. The basic game is the stablist and least resource hungry, but Wildmana 8 has some improvements including a much improved AI (haven't tried Wildmana 9 yet).
I keep seeing criticism of various AI's. Absolute criticism is meaningless. All AIs are weak compared with good humans. However I do like the CivIV AI best. Beating CivIV on Deity is really tough. Wildman 8's AI is impressive given the complexity of the game. There is a big problem with navel combat in FFH though, somewhere along the line they broke the navel AI. There is a mod mod to fix this, but play on one continent maps for best effect.
As to criticism of FFH's use of artwork. I think its important here to distinguish between a professional product that we pay for, and presumably has a budget for paying for artwork, and a free for all product produced by ammeter enthusiasts. My impression is that most of this stuff comes with some sort of, 'feal free to use it but if you get money from it I want a cut' restriction. I have nothing to do with producing FFH and don't know any details.
It is interesting to see what sort of Fantasy style CivV mod appears.
I like the way CivV has tried to incorporate both tactical and strategic games into one. I can readily see how tactical combat in CivV+Fantasy mod could be made to feel a lot like Elemental's tactical combat. Although I think Elemental's tactical combat is particularly weak. Its fine for 2 units vs 2 units combat, but when you get 12 units vrs 50 (like I managed when my city got attacked) the whole thing collapsed. More squares, AOW. It takes a lot longer to build units in CivV compared with Elemental, so you get bigger stacks in Elemental..
As to Kael Stardock. Whatever. I am sure they both know what they are doing. Kael's done some impressive work. Hopefully talented people will continue to produce even better games for me to play.
Man, I'm not sure what makes me the most sad. The fact that a stand-alone FfH-game fell through, or that Kael has moved on to Civ5, that craptastic abortion of a sacrilege.
I have never finished a game of Civ4.
I have played FfH2 for days on end.
For a second there, I completely forgot that FfH2 was a mod.
Brad, we understand that you have an extremely heavy weight on your shoulders and that the game is your baby and it's painful and stressing to see people spitting on its face, but despite I agree with some of your points, I have to say that Engine is not the problem. I really mean it, I'm afraid you don't see it and probably most other players agree on this point, like you can read on other posts.
We can live with some CTD, funky graphics issues and so on, or current engine limitations like on majesty spells. But the real problem of the game is its lack of content, of working and challenging mechanics requiring to learn, adapt and apply them, something that was the core of FFH2 mod.
That's what made this mod so great and why Elemental has got poor reviews so far. To sum up, if we consider the game like a woman, its current state (even if it gets better) would be more like a skeleton, she needs brain, muscles and curvy shapes to really make it interesting, attractive and obsessing.
ps: That's nice to see you posting and sharing on these forums.
Engine may not be the problem, but it was a problem, and the problem that had to be solved first.
That said, as of 1.09 I consider the engine to be, at a minimum, acceptable. I don't have problems with the engine's performance at all (though I wish for 64-bit support, that can wiat)
As for the rest, I trust Stardock and Brad, I just hope that this trust is used well.
As for Civ 5, maybe the FFH can make lemons out of lemonade. I just wish he was doing Elemental modding instead.
I think some people are misunderstanding what I mean by engine.
I am not talking about Kumquat (the 3D engine) but the general Elemental engine.
Kael and I were talking about this issue just a few days ago on how users don't understand how often you end up having to work around the limitations of an engine.
If you were in the beta you would know how much of the game design changed during the course of development, much of it based on issues like engine limitation, scope, budget, etc.
It's not like it's hard to come up with really cool magical spells. Heck, I have the MOM manual here to crib from. It's easy to say you'd like a dozen completely different playable factions that are all fantastically different ala MOM. But units in MOM were 64x64 pixel sprites, each one took a couple hours to do. There's a reason why games in the 3D era of PC game design tend to have very very few races (and almost all humanoid). Next time you play Dragon Age take a fresh look at the creatures in the world, particularly the playable ones.
Designing a dream game is easy. Give me an unlimited budget, infinite time and godlike developers and artists and I'll give you something amazing. But that's not what makes someone a good game designer because most gamers could do that. What makes someone a good game designer is the ability to work within limitations.
For the past month, we've been expanding the engine to support new types of systems that will allow me to design more intricate game mechanics, better computer AI, and make it easier for the team to add more content.
Thanks for the explanation, yeah I kinda misunderstood what you meant by "engine".
Well I was/am actually in the beta team then I have seen that a lot of stuff indeed changed. But you know how we are, we're fans, we've seen what you did on Galciv 2 (many civs, each with a different tech tree, random events, vicious AI,...) and that's why we're expecting so much of Elemental.
Be careful, we might kidnap and lock you down in a cave for a few years with just a computer in order to get that game !
Being a modder you can understand what Brad is talking about in an abstract way. As a designer he has engine limitations to deal with, and the modders have the same type of thing to deal with, because modders usually have less of a grasp of the game engine so they have to tinker with what they got. Modders can only go out of the boundaries so far before they start hitting walls. Sure, an intelligent modder can work miracles and completely alter a game to something new and refreshing, but that's a rare thing. If a person looks at how many mods are out there for the pile of games that have mods, a lot of them are just graphical alterations with some minor fixes/changes, and only a fraction of the mods are truly something new.
Heh.
People talk about how good GalCiv is but they really mean GalCiv II. GalCiv I was no panacea and GalCiv I was built on an engine that was, at that point, 3 years old.
If we step away from Elemental - the game - and look at Elemental - the software it becomes easier to see the obstacles (besides 3D engine issues that affect stability and memory)
1. The engine didn't support population as a calculated resource (like food is).
2. The engine didn't support spells that used resources (i.e. spells were a different class)
Now, that's just 2 things. And neither took a long time to implement - once we reorganized the team. The mistake was believing that these two limitations could be worked around (i.e. unable to use population throughout the game as a limiter/balance mechanic and spells worked purely in isolation with their own special transitive resource - local mana).
Think through every game design flaw you can think of in Elemental and pick out which ones ultimately boil down to those 2 limitations.
There are other limitations we're addressing (spell cool downs, the battle system separating to hit versus damage, initiative, etc.). But most people don't realize that what you see in a final game is the result of the compromise of the design to match what the engine can do.
The reason Civilization is a turn-based game in the first place was because of one of those compromises for instance (yes, Civ was originally designed to be an RTS).
Sometimes those compromises work out. Other times they don't. It's why I don't enjoy designing games. I don't like having to compromise the design.
How is it that the engine did not follow the design as opposed to the design following the engine? I understand how when developing a mod engine limitations may compromise the design since there are rigid and external limits on what can or cannot be done. I understand how when developing any game resource constraints could get in the way, your example of why it's not realistic to have dozens of races as MoM did is a good one. But I cannot understand how game mechanics fully and completely under the teams control such as those listed above were not changed to better suit the design. A cheap proposition from a resource standpoint by any reckoning when compared to art or releasing a game with severely compromised design choices.
And this gets back to my earlier statement which seemed to have been misconstrued. I don't see the difference between Elemental and the Engine from a players POV. Certainly there is a difference, but as far as design goes, there really shouldn't be. Issues with one affect the other, and being forced to sacrifice on one side or the other in such an open environment as the beta was, isn't going to bother the players with distinguishing whether it was the engine limiting the game, or the game itself.
To go back to GC2, the main gripe I always had with it was the open space decision. Now I get that without it the anomalies, culture, space docks, etc... would not have been able to work as they did, but the down side really was an AI (or AIs if you prefer) which could not manage the strategic complexity of design. Contrast that with other space 4xs where everything happens at 'nodes' and you see an immediate simplification, even in cases where there is still open movement (not limited to fixed warp lines). That's not to say that GC2 wasn't still enjoyable or even occasionally challenging, but it does underscore a design decision (in this case not engine limited I imagine, but to some extent perhaps because the engine wasn't designed to focus on a node construct) which ultimately made the AI less effective and less challenging than it otherwise may have been.
Of course take out the open space and GC2 is a different game entirely. A better one in my opinion, as unimportant as it may be since we didn't get a node based space4x from Stardock...yet (can I dream?)
Back to elemental then. What are the core complaints with it? Magic and tactical battles, and AI, but AI is understood to be a work in progress so I give that a pass for the time being.
How much of the issues with magic and tac battles were driven by the engine, vs. driven by some kind of crisp and clean design mechanism? I get the feeling that Elemental was driven by the Lore Brad wanted to use to make his fantasy game, and by some new engine which was supposed to allow for ease of modding in many different areas. Pardon me for suggesting then, that perhaps this was missing a crucial aspect of what makes for a compelling game. The underlying mechanics and design decisions. I think the beta crowd echoed this sentiment, and worried that with the earlier release the 'balance and game play' beta was being truncated, if not skipped altogether.
I do appreciate SD and their games as well as the commitment to being DRM free (well aside for the activation). I just fear that the development of these games tends to gloss over the 'hard' stuff, clean mechanisms, easily understood by the AI and player which present a multitude of decision points throughout the game. There is so much cool stuff being put into them, but there isn't always the feeling that it all fits cleanly together.
Patch and polish are the usual answers, and that's fine, commendable even for the support SD provides to their products. Yet some decisions made early on send the process in a one way direction which cannot be reversed as initial design decisions become ingrained in the engine to the point where it's not possible to change them. Good or bad will depend on individual tastes ultimately, and my particular bent is of no more value than anyone elses. Yet I still maintain that moving forward with those decisions without a clear underlying concept is more likely than not to end up with a product unable to ultimate tap its vast potential.
How do you balance design work with your leadership responsibilities? I feel like I would have to sacrifice the perspective necessary for one role in order to take on the other role. It must be challenging to alternate between the big-picture, harshly realistic CEO and the more idealistic, task-oriented designer.
It is common for project managers to take on individual design tasks, but how often does the CEO of a multi-project company (not even a game development house by primary revenue) attempt to do what you are doing? You seem to do it because you love it, and I respect that. I wonder if you find it taxing, however.
> But most people don't realize that what you see in a final game is the result of the compromise of the design to match what the engine can do.
Are you not the ones who did the engine?
Why was the engine _designed_ this way?
I'm not really sure how to even respond to this. Software development is always a battle between scope, budget, and time.
I do. That is why I'm bringing on a dedicated project manager to replace myself going forward on Elemental. That way, I can focus on the things I do best (general design across Stardock and AI coding for fun) and have a dedicated project manager on each game.
On our NON-games projects, there is always a dedicated project manager.
But finding someone who can project manager AND knows games is a lot tougher call. That's why I made myself project manager on Elemental in the Spring. But it's not something I should be doing long-term at this point.
This is a good point. The downside to our rather...unique level of openness is that you guys aren't talking to community managers but rather developers themselves.
So to us, we look at "the game" in a very different way. To you guys, you see Elemental. To us, we see Kumquat, Havok, Miles, LBS (Land Based Strategy Engine) and Impulse::Reactor.
"Elemental" is a thin cake on the top of all this.
Years ago, I turned Galactic Civilizations for OS/2 into "Star Emperor" (think Warlords in Space) in a weekend because the "game" is just a thin layer over a lot of existing software.
90% of the work on a game is making the underlying engines.
GalCiv was always inspired by Civilization. Literally Civilization in space. I wouldn't do nodes in GalCiv because I already had a favorite game that did it well - Master of Orion.
Sins of a Solar Empire is node-based and is 4X.
The core problems with Elemental are in my view: Magic, Infinite Force Projection, and tactical battles.
The Magic was limited because of the game engine. Infinite Force Projection was due to a poor design compromise by me to try to work around the magic system problems. Tactical battles were problematic because I had to gimp the design after the continuous turns system turned out to be a disaster.
In both cases, the engine dictated the design. Not originally of course. The original design of Elemental was essentially MOM but as budget, scope, and internal capability began to come to the fore (and this is why developing so many new engine systems at once is a bad idea) the design was altered.
Nothing is as simple as it seems.
Writing the original design document for Elemental wasn't terribly difficult. Take Master of Magic, add quests and goodie huts and NPCs, and unit design make tactical battles continuous turns so that you can have really HUGE armies battling it out and voila, game of the year.
See how easy that is to design? When I see someone say "Why didn't they copy MOM more" my only response to that is "Well, duh."
The hard part is when you don't have an engine that can do any of that and you have to develop it at the same time. You find out some things are harder to do in 2010 than others and begin to make compromises to your design. Add months of growing exhaustion and fatigue and pretty soon you start thinking "Hey, yea, enchantment slots and local mana, great idea! I'll buy that for a dollar!"
So will elemental ever be "Master of Magic, add quests and goodie huts and NPCs, and unit design make tactical battles continuous turns so that you can have really HUGE armies battling it out"? Through either expansions or is it possible to evenutally do this with modding?
The current turn/tile based system is perfect for a game like EWoM....IMO of course. [...but it must be tweaked a lot, that is true...and the devs will take care of it.]
I'm curious about the intended degree of modability.I don't expect you or even SD as a whole to come up with the perfect and all-encompassing list of spells.I have my own list already and those are mostly the non-obvious ones that are not in the MoM manual / spell list. (I, too, have those in arm's reach)Sure, these spells may require some serious scripting but that doesn't scare me. For X3 I wrote a script that replaces the entire off-screen combat resolution (a "quick combat" system, comparable to auto-resolve in WOM) because the calculations were wrong and often outright ridiculous, like a small scout ship destroying a 10 km long star station with it's puny lasers.Most thought this feature was hardcoded - and the broken bit was indeed - but I got around that by intercepting the call and replacing the entire thing. =P
So would something like that be possible? Replacing the entire auto-resolve calculation? (as an example)Adding UI elements like 5 "favourite spell" buttons on the main page so we wouldn't have to dig up the same spells from the book over and over again... or just sorting the spell book by how often a spell was cast, automatically displaying those spells as "hot buttons". Just some random examples.
I'm actually more interested in implementing tactical combat rules (like this). The announced initiative system is great but by itself it doesn't add anything "interesting" to the tactical combat. It's more of a bugfix that is indispensable for paving the way for the real combat rules.Hidden / stealth units, line of sight, flanking... more or less turning WOM into a small scale Fantasy General where units are not reduced to their attack / defense / hit points.
Obviously that means altering the AI so it can understand the new rules or all that work would be completely pointless.
Coding a new spell is a pretty localised change. It does it's thing, modifies a finite number of game variables, and then it's finished.But what about altering "general" game mechanics such as LOS or hidden units in tac battles?That's where things are getting interesting...
My experience with X3 (which is amazingly scriptable, btw!) usually boiled down to working around this or that hardcoded feature that stayed just out of reach.Working like that can be pretty disheartening when the simplest bit of the script, which should have been one line, turns into a brick wall....at which point we're back on the topic of engine limitations.
Hah. Only in the real world. =P
Some bits will obviously be fixed and increase the complexity of the game, automatically getting it closer to well... EMoM. =POther bits of MoM simply don't fit into WoM so the devs won't. But depending on the modability, some modders go to quite insane lenghts to achieve the... intended result.My "small tweak" to the target tracking/acquisition system in another game has turned into an 18000 line script with up to 14 interlocking processes running simultaneously for every single ship. Insanity is a relative term.
I don't even want EMoM. I want a game that is better than MoM. See, I'm reasonable! =P
Edit: What does Annatar (a band) have to do with modding?And noone's knocking anyone just yet. (although modders and ego...) Considering that noone has produced a single line of WOM script so far, the field is pretty much open. =P
I'd love for him to get into elemental. Or civ5.
And to the above poster. Annatar.
Their modders. Of course they used icons and models from other things they still worked out a great mod and did alot of coding work so don't knock them Unless you can do better.
That's the goal (except continuous turns, we won't be going back to that). It's just a matter of how long it will take to get there in terms of sequels and such.
The most expensive part of a MOM in 2010 would be providing convincing spells and the playable races. Sprites have their advantages.
Dont ya just want to pinch Brads cheeks and smile when he says good things like that?
Is there a goal to ever go Tile-less? As in Maps "similar" to King Arthur, Total War, etc where there is an actual slope gradient to all elevations, various impassable terrains, various Forested/ hide-able terrains, and the possibility for City walls?
I rather like turn based ... but I feel we don't need to be limited to tile-based (at least if we're talking about Elemental 2)
+ the possibility of WeGo
Tileless is not needed for elevations, just look at Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic; it have (hex) tiles with hills and city walls.
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