Hi Everyone,
I am over on the Sins of a Solar Empire site alot and have been following Elemental for some time. After the terrible launch i was afraid that Elemental would be awhile before being ready to play. I ran into a copy at WalMart last night, and it 'is' Nine months later, so i thought i would ask: Is the game ready to play yet?
I have a fondness for Fantasies and for Sci Fi, and have loved both the Sins game and the modding over there, as well as Demi-God, but to be honest Demi-God had problems, and still has problems, it looks like Stardock has abandoned it and will simply write it off. Which disappoints, because i had hoped that with the promise it showed, and with those people that did 'buy' the game, that Stardock would continue to fix it and support it with DLC, but it looks like they aren't.
So that now brings me to Elemental, with all the word out for Forgotten Enchantress and i believe another expansion, as well, or should i say stand alone games with the Elemental Name on them.
So, has Stardock done right by the community? Have they patched and worked and fixed Elemental War of Magic? Or have they let most of the players continue and written them off in favor of getting two more titles out the door? If Stardock supported their products, which up until Demi-God i was totally convinced that they did, but after the horrible launch and follow up on Demi-God, and the terrible launch of Elemental, I am beginning to change my opinion.
Right now, i don't know if i should buy another Stardock game.
So the question is, to the players and buyers and people of the community is : Is Elemental ready to play and enjoy and mod?
Or is it not.
I appreciate your help and comments and please don't feel me unecessarily harsh, i don't mean to be. Elemental looks Beautiful! But both you and i know that no matter how 'pretty' it is, that if you can't play it is isn't worth purchasing.
I had hoped that i could take Stardock's word, but after Brad said that the game was 'ready' and if we didn't agree, then we shouldn't buy his games. When clearly from all the launch reviews showed that there were many Stardock fans that simply disagreed, the game was in horrible shape and it shouldn't have shipped. All of that made me believe i 'couldn't' take Stardocks word for it anymore, so i am asking the players. What do you think?
Thank you very, very much for your time and feelings,
Sincerely,
-Teal
Yeah you will have a good time with it. Just don't use ALT-TAB during the game and you should have fun. Stardock and brad have put out lots of statements since those unwise words and now anyone who purchased the game at an earlier time gets a number of significant perks. You should read the press releases and news stories because a lot has happened since then.
Also the game is tons better than it used to be. Some retailers are selling it really cheap if you have not bought it, I'd check stores like walmart first.
I have been running in windowed mode and having sessions over 12 hours in 1.2, and have not had a chnce to test 1.121 yet
harpo
Thank you boys! Appreciate it. I would love to give it a try, just wanted to 'make sure'.
You actually can use the ALT-TAB BUT it's better to go to the option menu instead of being on t he playing part of the game. I always go to the options menu before alt-tabbing out of the game. I've noticed I get less errors and crashes that way
Yeah, just to echo what they've said, I've played a bunch of games up to turn 100 or so and haven't had many problems.
The one thing that has given me troubles is clicking the End Turn button really fast. I think that with the multi-thread code they're using for the game, clicking End Turn before all of the threads resolve will cause a crash pretty consistently.
Other than that, I'd give it the green light.
Just make sure you're not rolling with an ATI Radeon graphics card, dual monitors, and Vista. The DX errors will make you want to throw yourself in front of a school bus.
Shool buses hurt, even the short yellow ones.
No, wait for Fallen Enchantress.
WoM still isn't a very fun game, even if it works better now. The majority of the development team is working on FE. That's where the improvements are really going to be showing up.
You'll get more bang for your buck later. Don't bother right now.
Ask us again after 1.3 comes out.
Then we might have a more meaningful answer.
I'm waiting until we can get more than one soldier or 'figure' into a group of units to start with. Hate building single units; once that change hits, I'll be playing this game silly. But yeah, I concur on the point to wait until FE, because WoM is still unfinished. In the meantime you might want to try playing the game that inspired it, Master of Magic, although you may get hooked.
The game is currently poorly balanced and the AI is worse. It is also plagued by out of memory crashes as you get deeper into the game. Moreover, from a design POV, the dynasty implementation is so weak as to be irrelevant except for producing the initial bunch of four bonus channelers with one of your initial heroes, and there's very little magic about the "war of magic" in general; Unless you are as stupid as the AI, you'll be using a tiny fraction of the available spells over and over again as the majority of spells either aren't worth the mana they cost or are only useful in situations that do not arise because your AI enemy is utterly incapable of finding its digital arse with its equally digital hands.
The shop for buying hero equipment and the whole hero-equipping deal is as poorly implemented as it was on launch. You'll be buying identical equipment for your heroes one item at a time from a list that grows ever longer as you research more items.
Army design reduces to creating a couple of clearly superior choices every single game unless you want to be deliberately ineffective and wars mostly boil down to having larger squads than the AI and/or higher attack rating through better weapons.
Since Elemental's tactical combat engine is based on first-strike-trumps-all and the AI happily allows you to get the first strike each and every time by zerging you and stopping movement right in front of your troops, tactical combat is about as one-sided as it gets. Opposing magic could theoretically spice this up, but when you see enemy channelers they'll usually just suicide charge your front line rather than use magic. Presumably the AI either doesn't research any useful battle spells, wastes its mana on worthless overland spells, or just values dying without inflicting any damage over spending mana. Who knows? And by this time, who cares?
That said, it is certainly possible that you'll have fun playing and modding it if you can overlook those issues. After all, I've played two 1.2 games to turn 300+ in slow conquest mode (and saving frequently to recover from the OOM crashes) to test out the game improvements and I had some fun doing so, though mostly from a testing perspective, and if your interests in game design and testing are the same as mine you might find such experimentation fun too, so long as you aren't actually expecting to play a fun game.
But the short answer is that the game in its current form isn't worth buying if what you want is a game to play. It is not releaseworthy. If it were released in the state it is in today it would still get disastrous reviews from anybody not limiting their playing to the initial phase, though it wouldn't get as terrible reviews as it did in its original state. Quite simply, despite the considerable work done it remains a bad game with a lot of potential.
Stable enough? I'd have to say yes. Worth your time? No. I came back after 6 months after the patches and magic overhaul for the 1.2 patch. It runs reasonably smooth. Its just boring. I've gone back to playing Master of Magic.
There aren't any differences in the races. No special units. The vast majority of the spells aren't worth the mana to cast. Each game plays out exactly the same way. The overworld map is pretty drab to look at.
Check out this link for Xenonaughts. Its basically all Stardock had to do with elemental.
http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/05/10/xenonauts-dev-diary-exclusive-first-ground-combat-screens-and-walkthrough/
Its basically an update for the old X-Com with better graphics and hopefully better AI and fewer bugs (hopefully, its not out yet).
For my rig, the 1.2 version of Elemental is stable, after previous builds caused numerous reboots. My 2 cents.
Wow!
After being gone for this long I really expected a much different response here although it is nice that some of the stability issues have been worked out.
I guess I will check back again after FE comes out or on the release anniversary.
Yeah, I'm pretty much with the later posters. The game runs fine on my computer but I still get bored with it fairly quickly. The AI is the main issue as it just makes really terrible mistakes and is far too easy even on the harder difficulty levels. And the game just lacks that big immersion factor that sucks you into games.
With the 1.3 update, if the AI is improved enough, you are really itching for this type of game, and you find the game on sale, I say you might have some fun with this one. I have a friend who bought it and has enjoyed it (although I don't think he's played it much). However, I'm with most others and say just wait for FE - that one is looking quite promising.
Stable yes, but the gameplay and AI are not up to Stardock's standard.
That said, 1.3 beta is supposed to start really soon, which is supposed to help in both those areas (and gameplay fixes would help the AI)
Is it stable enough to play? That totally depends on each situation. For me, the game has crashed only once in nine months. So it's very stable for me.
I would like to thank everyone for their input and thoughts, it has been enlightening. I hadn't really thought that it might not be playable just because the AI was dumb. But i decided to jump anyway, Whether that is stupid or not, we shall see. I have played a few games, mostly getting to understand what is going on and how the game works.
It looks interesting, though to be sure it does feel rather 'empty' alot, well, at least in the beginning.
But am hoping FE will be what i hoped this one would be, with challenge and a lot of things to do.
Thanks to everyone for all the help and thoughts,
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