The following changes were made in Elemental: War of Magic patch 1.2. The focus of this patch was to improve the UI, memory use in large games and stomp out any remaining bugs.
New Features/UI changes:
Raze city no longer requires a tech and is available right off the bat for all of your cities.
Prestige penalty for multiple cities has been broken out in the Other category on the city screen (instead of being a part of the base prestige number).
In the city breakdown the amount of buildings is listed (so it will say Study x3 if you have 3 studies in that city).
Added a new game option to adjust Movie volume.
Removed the city idle dialog, replaced with a report item notification in the event list.
Pioneers/sovereigns cannot build/found cities in other people's territory
Since spells are capped at level 5, you are no longer given the choice to keep going up in spell level once you reach that max.
Custom sovereign starting appearance is randomized (so you don't start with the same model every time).
You are now able to select a tile under a unit without moving the unit.
Balanced resource placement (more variety, better distribution).
Added a blue highlight representing the range of a spell when in spellcasting mode on both the strategic and tactical map, so the user can see how far they are allowed to cast the spell
Added tooltips that hover underneath the spellcasting cursor that explain why a spell can't be cast on that tile (with no tooltip shown if it is a valid target)
The strategic map spellcasting mode now uses the same wand cursors (with support for an invalid cursor) that the tactical map mode uses
Removed the Refined Diplomacy techs.
Added gold as a tradeable resource for fallen and changed horses to wargs for them.
Added the champion ablity "Diplomatic" which gives +1 diplomatic capital per turn.
Hooked up a list at the top of the city HUD to show the enchantments that are currently on that city.
Added an info button where spellbooks are displayed (such as on the custom sovereign screen) that will show all the spells that spellbook gives.
When improvements are auto-upgraded they no longer make the upgrade noise (which can be deafening when a bunch do it at once).
Auto-upgrades won't spam the event list with the "new building" messages.
When casting a targeted spell on an army (such as imbue champion on a stack with more than one valid target) a dialog is presented to allow the player to pick the unit he wants.
Players can now earn achievements in single player mode if auto-login is enabled.
Min defense on armor has been removed. Previously armor never absorbed less than half the units defense value, now it has the possibility to absorb the full range (though weighted to the high end). So every attack can do damage.
Increased the casting cost for Return and Teleport.
When a pioneer founds a city, any remaining units in its army are now automatically stationed in the new city.
When a sovereign founds a kingdom/empire, the popup explaining what they are doing now includes a checkbox asking if the user wants to station their sovereign in the new city, where if they choose to not have it selected, the sovereign moves to an adjacent tile like before.
The events for "improvement built" and "unit finished training" start out temporarily expanded, for a short period of time.
Faction Power Wnd entries now have a tooltip telling you how each player feels towards you. (ex. At War, Neutral, etc..). Also, if you are at war with them, an AtWar icon will be displayed.
Unit info cards reworked to show more meaningful data, have the data fit better, etc.
Added an event list entry when there are enemy units in your lands. Clicking on the event will cycle through the enemy units in your lands.
Added a new tactical Air 1 spell, Wind Shield. Gives all allied units +5 dodge vs ranged attacks.
Removed the Blink spell.
You can now recruit Janusk directly from his opening dialog (instead of him talking to you and then sometimes running away).
Empire can now claim refugee camps.
In the default formula for calculating the hit point bonus from level and constitution (10 + level * .4 * constitution), made 10 data-driven, can be set with the <GlobalHitPointsBonus> tag in ElementalDefs.xml.
Changed the code that takes the A_Influence player ability into account for the max radius and influence power of improvements to not divide the ability value by 100 when adding a radius and power bonus, so that an ability of 1 now means a 1 tile increase in radius, instead of none (since it would be rounded down from .01 to 0).
Added 4 new maps.
When you select an army on the main map, it now only shows the spellcasting action if the leader can cast spells, and if selected, only the leader casts the chosen spell.
Improved ZOC performance – large map save game used to take 30s to update the ZOC at the end of a turn, now takes 4s. ZOC is no longer cleared every turn and re-calculated; now the objects update the ZOC nodes as necessary, but the graphics and environment do not update until the end of the turn. The ZOC Calculator now tracks which tiles have changed ownership so it only does the end of turn updates if something has actually changed.
The global resource pool in the main UI now reuses entries wherever possible, instead of recreating them for each refresh (performance improvement).
AI:
AI is more careful with their sovereign.
Fixed an issue that kept AI champions from being able to cast spells in tactical combat.
Fixed some bugs in tactical AI code that were causing it to think enemy units were friendly units.
Added code so that AI units will try to cast a heal spell on themself before resorting to trying to escape.
Added code so that the AI can determine the best spell to use based on AI xml weights in the spells themselves.
Added AIData and AIPriority tags to all spells, so we can tweak how much the AI cares about them.
Fixed an issue with the sovereign not going out to pickup goodie huts.
Bug fixes:
Fixed memory leaks.
Reduced memory consumption (especially in the late game) by releasing unneeded textures instead of retaining them indefinitely.
Fixed bug where conquered cities that had caravans that called that city home would end up with messed up caravan counts.
Fixed a bug where player ability penalties on resource production weren't actually being taken into account.
Fixed the effect of the "Call of the Titans" spell, which gathers all your unstationed units and transports them to a specified tile. It will now skip units without an attack (ie. pioneers, caravans, boats).
Fixed bug where particle glow effect would remain on the map after getting a goodie hut until you hit the turn button.
Fixed delay in tactical battles with mounted archer units.
Fixed bug where sometimes particles would remain on the map from a destroyed factions cities.
Disabling Janusk advice does not disable his creation in the game.
Limited improvements (like the faction specific Beacon of Hope) won't be counted as being built until they are completed.
Fixed Titan's Breath (thanks to Heavenfall and Kenata).
Fixed an issue that was keeping the AI from casting spells in tactical battles.
Fixed a bug in spellcasting where non offensive, defensive, or terraforming spells were now checking that the spell target was valid when deciding if the spell could be cast.
Fixed the Fallen Ambassador (so it now correctly gives diplomatic capital).
Fixed a bug in the main city context wnd where it would use the AI's cached version of the battle rank for display, causing it to often not match the city HUD and other screens.
Fixed a bug where dispelling Guardian Ward (and any other spells that involved a city-target summon modifier) would not kill the summoned unit.
Fixed a bug where killing a unit summoned on a city would not cancel the enchantment that summoned that unit, keeping the spell from being cast on that city again.
Fixed lighting on shields in unit design screens (so they won't appear black anymore).
Fixed an issue that caused units to lose their custom portrait after a few turns.
Units now fade out when they get killed on the main map.
Units now fade out when they get killed in tactical battles.
Fixed a bug where improvements in FOW still played their particle effects.
Fixed a bug with lifesteal that caused the caster to lose hit points.
Fixed a bug with units getting stationed over end turn not showing up in a cities context, and ensuring the new city founding behavior shows the most updated city context when all the shuffling of units is done.
Fixed bug where, when founding a city, you could see the pioneer either die on top of the city while it was being built, or the pioneer's graphic would stick around for a turn if in cloth map mode when the city was built
Fixed Grip of Winter and Greater Grip of Winter to correctly apply a chance of taking effect (previously they always caused the victims to lose their next turn).
Fixed the Arrogant weakness so it correctly makes recruiting more expensive instead of less expensive.
Fixed the custom faction tech granting abilities so they work correctly regardless of the factions allegience.
Fixed an issue that can cause massive recruit costs when the player has to many recruit cost reductions.
Min radius now takes into account the player's influence ability so that their influence zone won't shrink when going up to the next level.
We will allocate more memory before saving (so that you don't OOM while saving and corrupt the save).
Fixed bug where action entries used for a combat ability would always trigger that combat ability when clicked, even if reassigned a different action when being reused, caused by some entry info not getting cleared out.
Fixed bug where dragon breath effect (and any other attached spell effect that isn't a projectile) would play throughout the entire battle once triggered, floating on the tile where it was triggered.
Fixed bug where casting a spell from an army with a spellcaster leader on the main map, with the army selected instead of a particular subunit, would cause every unit in that army to cast the spell.
Fixed bug where, if you finished researching all spells and reached the max spell level, it would start automatically researching non-existent spell levels beyond the max spell level.
Fixed bug where the dragon's breath sfx would occasionally not play until the target unit took damage, causing the attack itself to be silent and the attack sfx to linger long after the attack.
Fixed bug where killing a unit in a tactical battle that had tactical modifier effects from spells on it would cause it's stats to get recalculated using a function with auto-killing logic in it, so that the parent unit would immediately be set to be destroyed, causing bugs like the sovereign dying and immediately ending the game, because no retreat or battle-finishing logic was reached.
Fixed a series of population and prestige-related bugs that conspired to cause cities to have negative population and huge power ratings.
Fixed crash on closing a game that had a tactical battle in it.
Fixed bug where some unit clean-up stuff in the player was not getting called when a unit died, so that the player-wide abilities of dead champions would remain until something reforced an ability value calculation, players would hold onto a pointer to the dead sovereign spouse, and military might and power rating wouldn't be recalculated.
Fixed a crash when exiting a game with any shards owned by the local player.
Fixed a potential deadlock when a unit is removed from a player, caused by some UI refreshes taking place while the unit critical section was being held onto.
Fixed crash when killing an enemy sovereign.
I want you to keep working on WoM Brad! A few feature tweaks, plus some added modding muscle, I think could do wonders for it. Especially the modding part. I know in most eyes WoM is a complete failure, but if you open up large parts of the engine to modding, including optional custom AIs, people could do some wonderful things with it, and there are no expectations of having to be the best game in the history of the 12 galaxies. Plus, there is still a large amount of time to go to FE, even the public beta, so why not use some of your new knowledge about modding to open up E:WoM, perhaps even allow total conversions? I think it would help to sell FE too if some really great total mods take off with WoM, and I will definitely play more of, and be interested in, in many different aspects of the Elemental world if you do this.
I want you to continue to work on WoM, for all these reasons, and more! I think you try to do the best you can, and learn from your mistakes, but part of this is reaching for the stars and not just trying to stay far away from the dumps. Great Modding support would definitely help in this area.
What do you and others think?
Best regards,Steven.
Now we know who else to assign blame for eleMental: WoM, apart from the usual Stardock suspects..
A fat lot of good the results of your suggestions have been so far, Xia, a fat lot of good... he he
Actually, I just looked back at the first post on my E:WoM 1.1 bitching topic and a lot of things have been or are being addressed like:
"When creating a custom faction, we need to be able to tell which bonuses don't work with Empire or Kingdom, seems simple, but apparently not." That has been fixed
"And Stop letting other factions create cities in your area of influence." Also fixed
"No reason to have the entire kingdom disapear like a fart in the wind when the Sov is defeated. " being fixed in 1.3
"Need random events, like the ones that GalCiv2 had and FFH2 had." Being fixed in 1.3
So, yea, I haven't gotten everything that I asked for, but I have gotten some things. They listen, but they can't do everything and they are not going to agree with me about what needs changed. I have to accept that they are the designers and the experts and I am a customer, all I can do is make suggestions.
What about the pony?
No word on the Pony, but I did go on Facebook and find the WoM page and bitch about the lack of ponies there too...some day they will learn to never make a game that doesn't highly feature adorable mother fucking ponies!
I actually had the closest thing to a decent game earlier on... While NPCs spamming pioneers and building Level One cities behind your front lines is aggravating (And literally curbstomping your enemy all across the land--but being unable to make a decisive victory because they're somehow churning out more units then the hundred-unit stacks I'm annihilating), there's a lot of AI fixes promised for 1.3, so I'll refrain from arguing
The game's getting a bit more polished though, and as soon as the AI stops being psychotically warmongering, and actually needs resources to expand (Rather then being able to go literally deep into the negatives but still being able to churn out armies every round--I'm not kidding, my last game had me take out 11 settlements, each one deep into the negatives resourcewise, and my nemesis is still teching up and increasing their numbers despite this!), this game'll be great
How is this (the negative resources settlements) still happening in 1.2?
Well, I've played quite a bit under 1.2 by this point. I have noted that the game is way more likely to have a crash, either through memory loss or something else, if you reload at any time.
The game is more fun, I can play for quite a while without crashing, I am trying a large map so we'll see how it goes when I get a bit more of it exposed. I only have 4 gigs of RAM right now as the other 4 are being rma'ed to patriot.
A couple things. I have a few mods, so I don't know if this is a mod quest or not, but I started a level two quest looking for a lost expedition but after the first fight I can't find the next point.
The other thing, I'd really like the city upgrade where you pick a creature to be a little bit more restricted as to the pool of creatures. I have played around with it and they vary wildly from 1 lone wolf to a cursed short sword (pretty good), with tier two being much the same with the high end being a cursed battle axe or perhaps skeleton captain or whatever. The range is too broad and your reward can be really crappy. With the other upgrades being precisely defined I'd like the see the creature selection diminished and held towards the higher end of the spectrum. It's not even a small wonder why every strategy guide says to pick the gildar or tech boosts even if your city isn't producing much of either.
I'd perhaps like to see "Imbue Champion" be more expensive to cast but not cost mana per turn? I don't know that may seem unbalancing. I am a bit of a hero addict though and there are so many intelligence based heroes that a lot of my mana per turn is used up on them. I guess that's a weakness in my game play or something but it is hard to pass them up.
All in all, I upped my rating to 3 from 1. We'll see if 1.3 can up the fun factor even more. I have faith in Stardock though, so am looking forward to it.
I played, and actually finished (!) a game last week, on a medium map.
Some observations:
1. It was actually stable for me! Before, during long games it would either reboot the computer during play, or right after exiting. Didn't happen once this time around (~300 turns over a few days).
2. The annoying really long pause between firing a bow and being able to take another action has been resolved.
3. The AI was really, really bad about using all the resources in its territory. It left a few unupgraded for a few hundred turns. I think there was even a Ancient Library (the only one on the map) that went unupgraded the whole entire game...) Granting is was only Normal AI difficulty, but still...
4. The terraforming spells are ridiculously cheap, breaking SoD. It can cost dozens of mana points to call down little bits of fire on an enemy in battle; it costs only three (iirc) to shift gigatons worth of material to raise land out of the sea...
Great update in fact !
But may i suggest something... It would be nice if we could get an intermediate update between 1.2 and 1.3 that would only fix the few remaining bugs like the tactical combat freeze and a few others. In order to be able to play in a more comfortable way while waiting for the 1.3. Instead of waiting a few months and get a mega pack like here and being unable to play while waiting.
And personally i think that we should wait until the 1.3 to see in which direction the content will go before crying above stardock incompetency.
I agree with having an intermediate patch that fixes up bugs like the tactical combat freeze and others.
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