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.
Stardock, you're probably kidding. 8 month after release.....
Did you realise that you dont have AI programmer?
Wow, what's with all the negativity... Everyone knew 1.2 was a bug/memory fix patch and 1.3 would be a feature patch.
Let Babies Cry It Out
[e digicons]:'([/e]
lol all I see is... and going on here now suddenly. Granted it's only a few people doing it. Things were changed or taken out for a reason. One of them was to balance the game others... well you can look at previous patch notes to see the reasons for why things were taken out you know.
The reason why there's a lot of negativity around is that the Elemental engine still needs a whole lot of polish and it's not working too well on a lot of different systems. It's a huge undertaking and it's proving to be a hell of a challenge for SD to get the engine work well on most rigs. I think it's understandable that players are frustrated when the game runs poorly and/or gives out of memory errors.
I still think waiting for 1.3 before playing the game is still the right choice. I will try WoM again once 1.3 is out.
And how long will that take? EWOM works better on my laptop after the patch though not by much (and anytime a unit starts move the game slows down for a moment, managed to get caught in "misclick-loop" due this). Dropping the resolution a bit gave a lot more increase in performance though i have to admit i don't remember if the same was true for 1.1. (And dropping the rez had an annoying side effect, everything looks a bit... blurry? Or something. The aspect ratio is correct (from 1440x900 to 1280x800).)
But EWOM still doesn't hook me... At least not at start. It might if managed play longer than under 50 turns but... *shrug*. An actual working tutorial (still a bit confused about some things*) and/or explanation of the game mechanics might help (but hearing stat X is the best doesn't, that's depressing in a RPG).
I'd like to like and play this game, it does have some interesting concepts (mixing TBS/RPG and tactical combat, magic) and i did pay some 30+ euros for this.
I don't like having to wait for a patch that might make the game finally truly playable :/
EDIT* Maybe i should be more clearer? I'm not in my opinion. What i'd like is a simple guide that details attributes/resourses/units(and/or guide to making effective units**) etc, what they do, why do you need them, pros/cons where applicable (such as attributes during level up) and such. Elemental is so low profile i doubt there's comprehensive and up-to-date wiki (i think there was one during the beta but it was useless (IMO) due to frequent changes to the game)
**I don't really like having to make my own units... at least, not with the current level of documentation***
***Hell, even simple tooltips would help. Hower over thing x and an explanation appears (including in the options menu, eg what the hell is "restrict zoom")
I played about 20 turns. I am going to wait until 1.3 to play any more than that. There just isn't anything to really look forward to in playing the game yet.
But... but... That's the only interesting part in this game?
Ha! I once saw a game that was three craps! Now that was bad
I'll say this as nicely as a I can. It does not matter (regarding WoM, but true for FE too) how much you improve the engine, or polish the interface or add content or anything else if the AI REMAINS COMPLETELY BRAIN DEAD. This game, at it's core is a single player game. Well guess what happens when there is no AI worth playing against: there is no point in playing the game.
FFS Stardock...
Cities names still change to enemy city names and back to my cities/names on the map (not in war or captured just names changes randomly) VERY ANNOYING! when you c that some of your cities have change sides but they really are not.
Units profile portrait are black or wrong ones and occasionaly change to back right one. ANNOYING!
City and unit info profile card wont uptade in game unless you klick anything else.
And OOM after 1h+ Large map 10AI+me. Win7 64bit, 8gt mem, 480 sli etc... Options settings normal/medium.
These bugs have been in this game forever and they still are here! So what this pach is fixin then? These bugs are biggest and most annoying game killers atleast for me.
Seems that this https://forums.elementalgame.com/403315 memory fix thing works better then this patch.
And new bugs.
Alt tab or anything will cause dx error. (whitout that mem fix)
After 50min playing game start freezing for 5-10s and working after that. This happens like every turn or every 2-5min.
Semi positive things.
In challenge difficulty AI built units good as my troops and use ok size armys but I didnt see any good offensive or defensive strategies or anything.
Overall little fixes and performance improvement
I tried the game at the begining when it was released, and had not tried again since then. Now, with 1.2 out I decided to give it another try, and I have to say that I like what I am seeing gameplay wise.
I don't know how many of the things I am seeing are "new" and how many are there since many patches ago, because everything is "new" to me, but the way it works feels very good. I like the concept of using population for everything (or so it seems for what I have seen). Those buildings in cities need people to run them. I also like the idea of having to build studies to get some research.
I have not interacted much with the AI yet, but at least the empire building part looks good. It looks so good that it made me come here and write that I am positively impressed by all the changes. Now I understand all this thing about continuing development in War of Magic and Fallen Enchantress simultaneously. And well, for what I've seen seems like a good idea.
Is not that it looks like the perfect game suddenly, but it certainly looks a lot better than last time I tried, and looks like a huge step in the right direction has been made.
Just my 2 cents
It would be a good thing to have default units made for you. Then you could go and tweak them if you wanted. But designing them may be too much for new players.
Xia, you lasted 5 more turns than I did. Kudos!
I actually played this version for a lot longer then most other versions but what killed me in the end was that I was exploring like crazy and everything was so empty. I found like up to 10 "goody huts", 1 quest hut, 3 food resources, 1 iron, 1 gold and 3 shards (and 2 refugee camps) and all of that on a fair sized area (was exploring with a small group of sovereign+champion+familiar+golem and 2x1 wanderers).
Even the monsters were mostly avoiding me. What had to keep the fun for me was building 3 cities I had and an occasional tech/magic research all of which comes too few and far between (and is mostly meaningless). You really need to trim down the build times of buildings (and reduce their numbers) and tech/magic, especially tech. Tech should be like Civilization and Sword of the Stars where each discovery almost has a game changing meaning not these small incremental movements (except weapons tech where it is completely out of sync with rest of the game and even each other in that group - I still do not know what walls do or groups of troops as they are never more useful then getting better armors and weapons for my champions or singe troops). No, I do not want to spend 17 turns discovering civic that will let me build a building that takes another 10-15 turns and gives me an almost useless bonus to gold or prestige or whatever. Seriously...
I think the reason build/Train times are really long was part of the initial design concept. I think the devs intended the player to spend lots of time adventuring etc so we would be focused on that more so than the cities. However what I've noticed especially since the inclusion of taxes (1.1), cities outstrip the other methods of gathering gildar. since every 10 people gives me 1 gildar, after I have a level 3 city, i'm rolling in money. Before taxes, finances were always strained (too much so) but that forced me to get out of the town and find adventures.
So I can see SD going one of two ways. They can reduce most if not all of the build train times to make this game more of a world conquering game or they could re-infuse the adventuring so there is a greater point in doing so. From what I've gathered about FE, that will be a more "adventure 4x" than WOM. So I believe we are going to a more "empire sized" game rather than adventure game with 1.3.
Indeed (though i'm not that "new"... though i've played the game less than some new players probably). Pre-made units would be nice, to show what sort of units you might need. Scouts, early warriors, guard units, some cavalry, ranged guys...
Keep them simple, cheap and weak (though usable) and task players to create better versions of them (and custom tailored for the job).
For a bugfix patch with a lot of buzz put out half a year after release it sure is disappointing playing (aka testing) and seeing the same bugs that have been around since launch.
On the bright side Fallen Enchantress looks promising. Hopefully it will be released soon so I don't have to wait a year to truly play the game I paid for as advertised
Blood Rage now is work correctly?
--
sorry for my english,
/snip
wow. i was about to load this up, have not tried it for the last few beta or three, but if this stuff is all still broken i don't really see the point, or what has really changed recently. i have all these same problems.
until the AI stops building huts/hovels, cities right on top of each other, and starts using magic and building groups and archers, he's right. there is little point.
I think everyone lost sight as to what this patch is about. This patch was about fixing the Engine. The engine is the foundation of the game. All other parts of the game are built upon it. The engine handles memory, resources and all of the "behind the scenes" part of the game.
The following are not part of a game engine.
So for SD to release even the minor AI tweaks that are in 1.2 was a gift. They told us repeatedly that the patch was for the engine. Now some have expressed "Whats the point in fixing the engine if the game is not fun?". IIRC Fallen enchantress uses the same engine as elemental (Called pear or something like that). So by making these memory fixes, Fallen Enchantress will also benefit from 1.2.
Save your criticism for 1.3. And please make it constructive. If something is not fun or imbalanced or feels wrong, express exactly why it is such.
Jec
You have to admit, the bolded part is hard to explain. eg: Some find making custom units fun, i don't. Why? *shrugs* I might be able to explain but in the end that's (or might be at least) really waste of time as that is very subjective. Wouldn't it be better just to say "I don't like this", "I don't like this because [insert simple reasoning here]" or "This is good"? At least in this instance, custom units.
I would find making custom units fun, IF I could change their look more, or if there were any real choices with weapons and armor. There isn't. Heaviest armor and best 2handed weapon. Make the exact same units every game, they look the same, they play the same, and that is true of 7 out of 10 races. Then the other three look alike. We have 2 different armor types, little people and big people. And two weapon types, curved swords and straight swords. SOOOO exciting, And it's not like there are multiple valid ways to play the game. There is one, research weapon and armor technologies and thats it. Spells? Ignore? Diplomacy? Having the biggest, baddest army is the only way there, Special troops? Dragons, Darklings are cool, but expensive and not that useful, plus they might spawn in a neighbors land any way. The only other technique is if you play empire and create Scions, since they one hit kill anything. Unless you quick battle them, then they die easily. Want to explore? Why? Not going to find shit. How about quest? Why? There is one quest worth anything and do you really want to waste the research, you might get railroaded by an army with super sticks when you only have pointy sticks.
The game is simply not fun to play. So many big and little things that are a problem. It's a very gilded game. On the surface it seems it has all these great features, 4X game play, RPG elements, blah, blah blah, but look deeper and realize that most features were only half done and done half ass. I hope future patches will fix it, but I am sceptical. I doubt they can afford to put in the resources and the time that would truly be needed to make the game really good. But, I hope I will be pleasantly surprised and I believe that Brad wants WoM to be good and I know he and his team will make FE great.
Amen. I would feel a lot better is someone (anyone!) from the team acknowledged that the game just isn't that strategically deep or interesting. I'd feel even better if Kael wrote a post outlining how they were addressing this for FE. But, I respect that they are working to fix what they perceive to be the game's problems, and because of that, I'll stick by them as a consumer.
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