Hey guys and gals, sorry its taken me so long to introduce myself here, been busy working on 1.1 content for you all. I am the 'less-exciting-than-Derek-Paxton' new Associate Producer on Elemental, Toby Sarnelle.
For a little quick background on me: I have been at Stardock for a year now, however, I was just recently moved over to the games team. Those of you who have been around here for the last year may have seen my posts in the Elemental Army forum, I was the primary developer for that and worked a lot on rest of the Elemental website (among other things). I'm a huge fan of all types of games from all genres and have been playing for over twenty years now. As a sample of stuff I enjoy, some of my favorite games of all time include Final Fantasy 6, Mass Effect, Dragonforce (for Saturn), Starcraft (and 2), Diablo 2, Sins of a Solar Empire and Civ4. Oh and I'm an enormous Penny Arcade fan.
Anyways, enough about me, I'm here to tell you guys about some of the cool new stuff I've been adding for version 1.1. The primary additions for 1.1 are that we are shifting to a global mana pool for all spell casting and we are integrating your population into your production further as had been talked about long ago.
With the global mana changes will come a re-organization of all the spells in the game (along with the creation of a bunch of new ones). Elemental spell books will again be picked up through research, we didn't like the idea of having them as initial Sovereign editor choices as they are so tied to whatever shards you happen to find in the world. Its never fun trying to guess what you will run into when making your character so now your starting spell book selection will be non-shard restricted utility spells and you can research the Elemental magic you need based on your surroundings.
The way global mana will actually work is similar to any other resource; you will be able to build magical shrines in your cities that provide a steady stream of mana that will accumulate over turns until you cast spells. Also in an attempt to simplify some of the confusion over spell damage and how it is affected by your INT we are going towards more flat damage numbers for spells which your intelligence will not be increasing. This should make it easier to balance damage numbers across spells and the rest of combat (another thing I will be getting to for the patch). Obviously this combined with the mana changes basically eliminates the old purpose of the intelligence and wisdom/essence stats. Going forward they will now be used instead as requirements for a unit to cast a particular spell.
Population as a resource. We have always tried to stress that Elemental is a game of individual citizens, unlike most other 4X's. This was initially accomplished by causing you to use a population of a city when producing a unit; the population of your faction is literally drafted into military (or other) service. With 1.1 we will be embracing that idea and applying to the rest of your city production with our new Specialist system.
Highlights of the Specialist system:
As a final note, in another attempt to reinforce the importance of your population, we are changing the way gildar is produced (and consumed) in cities across the board. In 1.1 your primary income is paid through taxes on your populace. For every citizen in your Kingdom you will generate a small amount of gildar, however, to help keep your income in check as you get larger and larger most of your improvements now cost a small amount of gildar per turn to maintain. Don't worry about paying twice, however, as buildings that require maintenance no longer have an up front gildar cost.
These are just a sampling of the changes coming up in the new patch, although they are our (well my) biggest focus at the moment. I'm also planning on going through and trying to balance armor and weapon values among other things.
Anyways, back to work!
-Toby
Welcome, I suppose, to this neck of the woods. Not sure if 'welcome' counts, since you've been around this whole time...but, the point is made nonetheless.
Some exciting changes. I'm really looking forward to the new patch.
yes this is fairly accurate, but you will need to be able to have housing in these big cities as well because in a big city +100% materials is way better then a couple +1's. Obviously some of these numbers will be tweaked as we internally test, but this is the desired effect.
City spam is planned on being solved to *some* extent by making cities beyond your first require a food to place. So while you do have the added benefit of more resources/people you will be less efficiently be using your available food then if you had just built one city. Up to you which is more fitting of your play style.
we already have unique tech trees for the different factions (not races yet) and some varied spells and we plan on adding to it in the future. As it stands now there will not be any further differentiation (for 1.1) between races in a particular faction aside from what is in the faction design options/tag skills.
Both the Empire and Kingdom tech trees are being completely overhauled for the new system (they will look similar but a lot of things have been moved or changed in functionality), also there are faction specific spell books and units already and will be more in 1.1. We would like playing Empire to feel different from playing Kingdom, however, we need to try and keep things in balance so changes will be rolling out conservatively so as not to blow things up.
Ah.. so there WAS a capital city bonus! The first city doesn't require 1 food to place!
(or maybe the player starts with 1 food)
hello toby, nice to "meet" you. Your post sounds like things bode well for most of us on the forums, and for EWoM.
Are all 'specialists' going to be interchangeable (the 'same')? If they are, they merely become a generic bottle neck on city choices - and a sad implementation of an idea that holds so much promise. Or ( hope) will these specialists actually be individuals, each with their own strengths and weaknesses? Also, will NPCs that the SOV "hires" (-ie 'heroines) be able to serve as "specialists."
Inquiring minds want to know...
welcome
I'm a bit concerned about flat spell damage. It sounds a bit clunky to first have to research a spell, then need a caster with high enough int to cast it. It is then possible to have a situation where %80 of your known spells can't be cast by anyone! If you lose some important heroes you may reach a point when the whole spell research process is a waste of time for you to deal with, because you will never until the end of the game have someone to cast any of these future spells you might research.
The only remedy to this scenario is to have a low INT requirement for all the spells, but in that case a caster is just a caster like any other. Its fun to see your heroes begin to stand out from the rest, or to get a prodigy child. The proposed system seems like it will either eliminate valueable heroes if the INT requirements ramp slowly, or else possibly bring an early end to the magic research game if the INT requirements ramp up quickly. It seems like it could be a difficult balancing act.
I'm thinking it would be easier to tie damage to int and balance that. You could have a diminishing returns system so that INT is not the only stat you want to raise.
Yep, I have to agree with Heavenfall in regards to CitySpam. Even with the new system, maybe cityspam will not happen in the beginning of the game - depending on the cost of the new city (e.g. 10 pop per pioneer pack) - but as the game progresses and the more prestige coming in from the different improvements in the further game we will see city spaming again. Given a few good food resource tiles which are claimed and a high prestige monster city, players will spam cities again as there is no other downside to this. I think there needs to be another valid and reasonable point not to spread cities around every single square. Even the current additional burden with increased maintenance cost for a new city, later in the game it is negiateable.
I was tossing around with an idea to have a global variable for available citizen.. In the beginning it should be a higher number but only with a slow increase rate (depending on the world size). After all the cities eat up the available citizen, the prestige could be used to canabilize citizen from other cities if the prestige is approbiate higher. As said, this idea isn't fleshed out to strong, will be thinking on this further I think the more heavy part will be to make this somehow visible through the UI that a player sees what is going on.
More to come
This is only a concern and idea, I really appreciate in general the direction of improvements to the core of the game
Edit:
Related to the stats: If the stats would be smaller - in a range of 1 - 4 for races / normal citizen, and may up to 6 for Heroes / Sov as a starting, INT could e.g. give a value to be used how much a single spell could cost and WIS provides the number of MANA a unit where 'ESSENCE == TRUE' contributes per turn to the global manapool
Welcome to the Elemental Development Team Toby, and thanks for the update on 1.1.
Two questions:
1) How will imbued champions and offspring be interacting with the global mana pool (i.e. do they take mana from the same pool as the sovereign?)
2) Is the 1.1 patch going to be (hopefully) pushed back until the engine is modified to allow for unit abilities?
Thanks
Welcome! You've taken on a hard job. While our tastes in gaming differs slightly, I am sure that you will be an excellent addition to the team.
This is by far the single most exciting thing of your post, in my humble opinion. I truly detest the way this works in the Civ-incarnations (and elemental as well).
Otherwise, I would wish that your teammates will be working to improve tactical combat and terrain before anything else.
Good luck! I would love to see Elemental be fun by the start of 2011!
I do like the ideas you have for 1.1. First saw it in Master of Magic, you going to have a sliding tax for the people between like 10% and 50%, and have the populace say screw you and rebel if they are that unhappy or is it just going to be X for X, don't get me wrong I am happy with your switching over to a population based game. It does make it more of a micro manage for some people, that was something you tried to avoid on your original selling point. I like my startegy games to have thought though.
I think this has been mentioned before, but in the new global mana system, who can cast spells? Is it like before with a spell that imbues heroes, but now each imbued hero has a mana maintainance cost, or is there a new system?
Also, people seem very concerned about city spam, I think this would make a great faction difference. I like how one faction is better at producing metal and the other producing mana, but it would also be cool if one was better a producing a number of strong small-medium cities with just one or two huge metropolises, and the other was better at maintaining more large cities, but the smaller ones were more of a drain on the economy. Just saying that variety is always welcome and maybe some people enjoy having a ton of cities.
I really dislike where the magic system is going, however I do like the specialist system.
I like the idea of having the magic system more closely tied to the stats rather than just 'fulfilling' a necessary requirement of a spell. Is there a way to make the game where we can use the current magic system or combine the new system with the old (making it so that global enchantments draw from a global pool powered by cities, and the initial casting cost comes from the individual casting cost powered by the individual)?
I would like to see Stardock work with the intelligence based spell characteristics system and working to balance it rather than getting rid of it. Plenty of companies have been able to do this (3D0-before they went under with Might and Magic and Heroes series, wizards with D&D, etc). I would really love to see a balance reached similar to a Might and Magic spell system (current stat system and reworking of spells with durations, power, etc in relation to intelligence with some basic spells).
Despite that misgiving I do like the specialist system. I think the specialist idea and 'commuting' individuals should be apart of the tech tree. Especially since centralized state societies appear late in European history (you had cultural centralization and tribute systems, but actual political centralization occured during the late 1800s. . . am uncertain with regards to Eastern state civilizations). Since this means fairly significant amount of organization I feel like it should be quite a ways down the tech ladder. Perhaps tie it to trade as well (the commuters move with the caravans so they are easier to protect. . . and attack), and thus having commuting groups actually creates a point for an enemy to attack without actually having to lay siege to a city.
Even with all of this If you're going to expunge the current 'essence' and magic point system I have a feeling I might avoid the update even with the advent of the specialist system and a fix for the OOM error. Combining the two seems like a great idea, but completely doing away with spells drawing on statistics seems like a bad idea to me. I like the current system way too much, even if it isn't 100% balanced.
Looks promising.
This thread give me a nerd boner.
Hopefully its still an imbue style of system, only with casting points rather then a mana cap. Where someone with 20 essence (or whatever) can channel 20 mana worth of spells a turn, and someone with 5 can channel 5. If they also add in multi-turn spells, then spells are in reach of a fair number of units but your really good spellcasters can do a lot more and can do it faster.
Thank you for explaining your position. While it isn't really what I wanted to hear I can respect the reasons you gave. You said 'yet' which gives me a window of hope for 1.2.
If race differences won't be tackled in 1.1 will there at least be mod opportunities. For example to introduce a new unit or tech for a specific race? At the moment the mod structure doesn't really support this with any sort of power or consistency.
Yes, it does. You can just use a custom tech tree for any race, and that means you can use custom armor or units for any race.
You had me at Dragonforce.
Couple potential ideas:
Specialist heroes such as Merchant masters, lore masters- can promote a lvl 1 building into a better building that takes no specialist slot, and maybe has better abilities? Consumes the hero though.
dragon Force for the Saturn was a nice game back in the day- wish the sequel had come over to the US. One of the three games that made me love the Saturn (Real Bout Fatal Fury and Guardian Heroes were the other two)
I'll need to look again. Thanks for the info.
Small point of concern, does this mean our starting spells are ALL utility, with no attack options? This will greatly shake up my starting game, as suddenly my previously-fire-dart-slinging sovereign is far more vulnerable, and until I research weapon techs quests are MUCH more dangerous.
I'll wait for the patch to make any judgments on the larger system changes, but I'd like to point out this:
"These are just a sampling of the changes coming up in the new patch, although they are our (well my) biggest focus at the moment. I'm also planning on going through and trying to balance armor and weapon values among other things."
The last attempt to balance weapons/armors was only balancing said items against others in the same category. That is, weapon A was balanced against weapon B. While this created a fairly decent system for weapons and armors, it also made some very serious problems on the side. Forget that armors became very strong (you could say that was intended), just look at how god awfully OP special units that doesn't use equipments became. Weapons and armor nerfing made the units who didn't use weapons and armor too good, and broke units that did use them (IE: Drath vs Shrill). So if you're going through the balancing act again, please consider the whole system and start from there.
Hi Toby
Sounds like some great changes, haven't really played much lately mainly 'cause I'm waiting on 1.1. I hate getting involved with a campaign and having to abandon it due to a major patch
Any eta on 1.1?
I would like to see more racial diversity within the factions in terms of units, spells and tech, make each race more unique
We got 3 weeks at least. Kael isn't there yet, and then they have to beta it I think. I read a lot of post on this board, but they get all muddled up in my brain.
version 1.1 is supposed to come out BEFORE Kael gets there, that was supposed to be the transition version. Version 1.1 is "supposed" to be out by the end of the month, but we will wait and see.
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