Just want to keep people's expectations in line.
We are talking about a beta so let me walk you through some of the pain you can expect:
There will be crashes
The team has been working hard on making FE the most stable beta release we’ve done before. However, it will crash as this is the first build that will get widely tested in “release” mode as opposed to “debug” mode.
In particular:
(1) Loading games within games.
(2) Starting a new game within a game.
I spent today recoding parts of this and it “works on my machine” but accounting won’t let me ship my machine with the game.
Balance Balance Balance
We have a long list of balance changes that still need to be made. And let’s face it, a little balance change can change the game dramatically.
Performance
Anyone coming from War of Magic will be happy but we still have a lot of areas to go. If you want to maximize your performance, you’ll want to turn off pedestrians (the little people in the cities) and disable outlines. Those two cosmetics eat up a lot of frames. However, if you have the horsepower, you’ll be good. Make sure you update your video drivers just to be safe.
Anti-aliasing will definitely also slow things down horrendously depending on your config and resolution. The game is going to default to your desktop resolution. So if you’re like me at 2560x1440, think twice about turning on 8x anti aliasing.
Graphical Glitches
Anyone who has bought a PC game in the past few months knows this is an issue that has gotten a lot worse in recent times. Until we all jettison DirectX 9 (this is likely going to be our last DirectX 9 game, sorry XP users) you’re going to have a lot of people with unusual issues that we hope we’ll nail down with this beta as opposed to with WOM when the first “release” mode distribution was the release version (the beta versions all had debugging code which covered up various issues). With FE, the betas are going to all be release mode distributions which means it’ll be like you just got the “real” version. It’ll be harder for us to debug but we’ll manage.
MEMORY
This is a tough one but we really want to keep an eye on memory use. If you can keep task manager up and look at committed memory in the process list, we want to make sure it stays under 2GB so that people running Windows XP don’t have problems (if you’re running 64-bit the game will use 4GB). The game is large address aware.
Content
DO NOT judge the final game based on the content of the beta. New spells, monsters, goodie huts and quests get added in every day.
However: We absolutely want to reduce the number of city improvements in the game. Fewer, more interesting city improvements is the goal so feel free to suggest how we can consolidate what we have to improve on city differentiation.
PLAYER differentiation
The tech trees are pretty similar between different factions. As modders can tell you, this is a content issue, not a game issue. Right now, the objective of the base game is to keep both sides reasonably balanced and let modders go nuts if they want. However, we do plan to provide more tech tree differentiation as long as it makes sense (i.e. no different for the same of different). This has been one of Derek’s battle cries that he has convinced me on over the months.
The AI
The AI plays the game 100X better than say what it did in WOM. But I’ve barely touched the tactical battle code (which is still enough to make the tactical battles 10X better than in WOM since they were totally horrible in that game imo).
What we’ll need help on is strategies you’d like to see each player take. Like in GalCiv, each player in FE has its own strategy. We’ll be talking a lot about how to make it so Altar plays differently than Pariden in a way that players will easily observe. If armies end up similar on all sides, we did something wrong and will have to work at it.
There will be NO multiplayer
While internally we have multiplayer, we’ve turned it off. The release game won’t have it either. The reason is that tactical battles would have to be rewritten to support it (MP code needs to be message based but the tactical battles all call directly to internal variables which makes it easier to have greater performance but it means no MP). We decided it would be better to have no MP than gimpy MP for FE. Don’t bother arguing this point as it’s already been hashed out endlessly internally and it’s decided. We may bring it back in some future expansion but no promises because rewriting tactical is a non-trivial endeavor.
Lots of UI stuff is not in still
We have a victory screen still to go in that’s a pretty big deal. There’s a bunch of other stuff that will go in but by all means, if you have a UI request, post.
Modding and Campaigns are disabled
The beta is a sandbox beta. You will have to have an Internet connection to play the beta because we plan to be updating the XML data online so that players don’t have to download an update to the game just to get a balance tweak. It is not copy protection or anything like that. It’s for our convenience. The end result though is that modding won’t work because it’ll be using our online data.
Beta Reporting will be provided
We will be providing how to report problems here: https://forums.elementalgame.com/forum/1010
There is no NDA
The fate of the game is in your hands in the most literal sense. Because Elemental: War of Magic got such a bad rap (fairly or unfairly is irrelevant), we realistically cannot do a lot of marketing because every article is going to start with “After the ‘disastrous’ Elemental: War of Magic, Stardock hopes to make up lost ground, is it too late?” type stuff followed by comments like “Elemental? Stardock should just give up and make GalCiv III!” The only hope FE has is for people who actually have the game to spread the word IF THE GAME IS GOOD.
There’s no NDA so you can do whatever video you want or post about it or whatever. Do with it what you will.
Now, gotta get back to trying to figure out why particle effects are showing up in the FOW.
See you Thursday!
Well you enjoy that in your world, in the real world there ARE still single player games, whether you want to admit it or not.
its not like i have to admit anything
there are games where developers dont bother adding the multiplayer feature
its true indeed, doesnt mean they wouldnt work online, its just a bad decision at start, nothing more
and stop with this civ 4 online good plz
it NEVER worked for more than a year, go ask real multiplayer community if you dont believe or plz stop talking about things you never experienced on first person
cIV worked perfectly fine in multiplayer. I am not sure what you are prattling on about there.
Civilization 5 on the other hand had quite subpar multiplayer. Supposedly addressed in a December patch I've heard, though.
Perhaps you've confused the two?
im just telling my civ 4 experience for MONTHS of online playing
50 60% of ppl we met could NEVER in ANY WAY join our games (we were 3 friend playing online with 3 diff conn so not my problem at all), at times WE couldnt even join our own game, i couldnt connect to a guy who lives 10 min from my home (gamespy is like a fake host so we were hosting games thats why it is hilarious)
90% of the games were laggy as hell cause of gamespy bad service
most of the times ppl was getting randomly booted from the game or the entire game crashed for no reason
there were few bugs probably of coding more than net causing the game to get stuck and not allowing ppl to pass turns or move forcing to restart the game
etc etc
this was the situation of online civ 4 for more than a year, until many patches started to solve something and maybe gamespy too after all the crap he got started to do something
it wasnt still solved in a single step, it took yet MONTHS from this point to improve patch after patch until the end times of civ 4 when it was nearly good
and now plz this is a stardock forum, lets talk about FE
I just want to throw my opinion in the hat here and say that I play strategy games almost exclusively multiplayer. Playing against AI is just boring and predictable after playing against them a few times, no matter how well they are coded, and the more complex the game, the worse the AI tends to be.
I'm getting this game for free because I pre-ordered War of Magic, but I can assure you if I wasn't getting it for free, the lack of multiplayer would prevent me from ever buying it. I'm sure there are plenty of people who couldn't care less about multiplayer, but there are also people who exclusively play multiplayer games.
I spent many many hundreds of hours playing Derek's Fall From Heaven 2 mod on Civilization 4 multiplayer. (To be honest, he's the only reason I have any interest in Fallen Enchantress at all) I can probably count on my fingers how many games I played against exclusively the AI. And yes, after a certain patch, (I think the one where Sephi's AI code was added from Wild Mana) out of sync errors became a major issue in multiplayer games with AI, but there was still -absolutely no problem- playing FFH with only human players. But you know what? It was still worth it, because FFH was just that damn good, especially multiplayer.
Can we let the people who are interested in talking multiplayer go to the proper thread? https://forums.elementalgame.com/415252
One thread of endless moaning is enough.
This is the Internet, only one thread of endless moaning is never enough
as a side comment, my spell checker is giving me an all caps variant for INTERNET, just so. weird, huh?
Tons of games out there to play multiplayer. Fun is less "game-dependent", since, as everyone points out, the main factor is the presence of another "true" intelligence on the other side.
Conversely, there are few (and getting fewer and fewer) great single player games, and it's a lot more difficult to make them consistently interesting. So thanks to Stardock for focusing on that first.
Just expressing my opinion, but thanks for trolling me lol. I have to disagree with Civ 3 being the same game as Civ 4. Besides that they share some hallmarks from the civilization series alot of the core game mechanics are completely different. I'll agree that gamespy is crap, but I mostly played direct connect or hotseat, so my experience was pretty good. Also, if you played alot of Civ 3 multilayer you would know that Civ 4 had a superior multiplayer. That's my opinion atleast, especially since Civ 4 supported "team" play.
we all loved Master of Magic and have been following the Elemental series because of that Game. The ONLY thing MoM lacked was multiplayer support for us to play vs our friends.
THEN YOU MAKE THE GAME WITHOUT MULTIPLAYER?!?!?!?
I don't think you realize just how epicly you're failing the bulk of the long term followers of this project.
why was it ever hard to figure out the recipe for success? make a MoM with better graphics and multiplayer support.... im not sure if you succeeded in either
My first impression is that there is definate potential to beat thine MoM here. Frogboy also, clearly, gave his reasons for no MP, and also posted clearly that he was just as miffed as you are. The only reason for no MP at the moment is that recoding the tactical battles would take months.
But please do not state "bulk of long-time followers" unless you have statistical evidence. The WoM Multiplayer function was hardly used... Same for Demigod. I'd rather have the Skyrim of MoM than a worse game with mutliplayer
I don't think you realize just how few people truly care about multiplayer. They aren't failing anyone. They are prioritizing correctly.
I and many others don't want this game watered down and its single player experience weakened just for the sake of multiplayer.
Balancing and bugs aside, MOM had a lot of character in it's feature list. Just the whole Myrran / Myrror planes was kick ass, and the character/wizzard creation was also leagues better. I'm happy to see that some of the issues with magic in EWOM seem to be addressed in FE. I saw that you can't choose all the schools of magic at characater creation. (Finally)
As for this whole MP fiasco, from what I've read the problem is that they painted themselves in a corner. For some odd and obscure reason the way Tactical battles are coded it's not compatible with multiplayer. Given that there was so much nause about no tactical battles in multiplayer, they decided to not include MP since it would take, and I quote Brad, months to 'change/fix'.
At this point it's too late to change I guess, and I'd be highly surprised if it ever comes back on the table. Pretty sure we have as much chance of getting FE multiplayer (with the same singleplayer experience) than we do in getting GalCiv2 in MP.
Now I hope my friend won't bring up FE, for I was telling him how it was going to make up for EWOM and that we'd finally get to play some cool coop games... Guess not.
I don't think you realize that people who want MP don't want any special tinkering done with it. They just want the same singleplayer experience but with other humans. How is that taking away from the singleplayer experience, I fail to see it.
Obviously if they waste time trying to think of ways to make MP fast and furious, and gaze at ideas like Wizard duals, then yeah. I see it taking time away from SP content. But from the impression I'm getting form fellow MP'ers is that they don't want any extra Jazz, just the same thing. If values or something is off key, then fine, let the modders deal with it. It's just shitty that modders can't do anything about adding MP, or I highly doubt it's possible.
And I love that there is seemingly no love between TBS fans. TBS is already a extremely niche market, and yet no compassion for their 'lesser' comrades that would enjoy playing MP.
Multiplayer is all about balance. After all, how could you get bragging rights for being the better player if you used something unbalanced to achieve victory?
I remember Kael musing about multiplayer about a year ago and saying that sort of thing. Not worrying about balance means you can do some really cool and crazy things.
I do feel some sympathy for people that love multiplayer but Stardock is a small company. Putting in multiplayer and making it work well would take a lot of time, money and resources that in my opinion could better spent on making the game ever better.
Bragging rights? Who said anything about bragging rights? Saying that makes it sound like it's all about competition. This isn't Starcraft, Halo or COD.
My main attraction to multiplayer for TBS is cooperative play, and usually play with people who can restrain themselves from using exploits and unfair tactics. Self moderation goes a long way.
Anyways, like Brad mentioned in one of his posts. The whole debate is pointless since they aren't even going to consider it. OK, they left a sliver of a window open, just as ethereal possibility if they ever change their minds.
Only point left to make is that, they did set out to create a spiritual successor to MOM with Multiplayer and they did end up in failing, regardless of how many people 'tried it'.
If you tell people you are going to build a bridge to cross a river, and that your bridge if full of holes, has severe weight restrictions and you need to hop on one leg to cross it. You can't turn around and say, damn we spent all this money on this bridge and people didn't really want the bridge to begin with since nobody uses it.
I really feel like they painted themselves in a corner and now are just trying to make the best of a bad situation.
Multiplayer afficianados are divided into a number of groups. Most prominent are co-op players and e-sports type competition players.
I will concede that co-op play is not so bad. If I do play multiplayer in a game, that's my style. So, in that way I sympathize. It would be nice to play with friends but not at the expense of a better game.
In the spirit of compromise, down the road (talking 2 years here), if they want to institute a standalone game with multiplayer then I suppose that's acceptable. As long as it doesn't change the single player experience in any way, shape or form. Although, if I was given the choice, I can think of many more things I'd rather see like sieges, naval stuff, dynasties, etc than multiplayer.
It is true, that MP players are divided amongsts those 2 categories, and sadly I believe that SD made the erroneous decision of wanting to cater to the e-sports group. (Which almost makes no sense given nature and pace of TBS games *EVEN SLOWER* in MP.) I personally feel that TBS games are the "next generation" of board games. I was a huge Axis & Allies, Dungeon & Dragons (AD&D) table top player. So obviously for me long sessions of gameplay, including wait times are all but natural to me. I'm also have my fair share of white hairs, so I'm not the youngest buck in the pen! So maybe I'm just out of sync with what is considered to be the niche/target audience that they were aiming for MP EWOM.
Thanks for sympathizing, and being a contribuing statistic, to the fact that COOP would be what pulls you to EWOM MP more so than "deathmatches".
As for hoping for MP in the future. I don't know, SD have "great data" that points to an utter lack of appeal or interest to Multiplayer. I mean the fact that Brad took the time to state that only 1% of people even went to the MP lobby is a bit indicative that, as a company, they don't see any more logic in "throwing" more money at MP. Which is why I took the time to write my, albeit a bit absurd, analogy about the bridge. I don't want them to have the solace of saying that even though they screwed it up (the MP) that it wasn't worth it in any case.
It's weird because Brad seems to say that he was a staunch defender of the MP side of the game. And yet, as I said already, since they are stuck in a corner without any 'quick fix' to the lack of Tactical Battles, rather than being dragged through shards of glass by us, the annoying MP crowd, it was a better idea to just shelve the whole thing and forget it ever happened. :/
Anybody here can reverse engineer MOM and add MP? Please?
Does Warlock: Master of the Arcane have tactical battles? I personally perfer MP have tactical combat over the Civ style combat. To me tactical combat is the most important part of the game these days.
There was something that wasn't sitting right in my mind, and I did some research and I found what was bothering me.
Quoted from:
https://forums.elementalgame.com/391013
Frogboy/Brad said:"#2 More Multiplayer Game Options.
I would like to see the tactical battles take on a life of their own. The day 0 multiplayer does not have tactical battles in them. We took them out. Yes, in an ideal world we could have made this an option, but anyone who has been on a forum for any amount of time knows that you'd still have people flaming us who found tactical battles boring because while the other guy was fighting some drawn out battle, they were stuck watching it."
Uhm, how can MP Tactical battles be at the same time impossible to be available, and yet were 'turned off' because of people complaining it took to long to do a tac battle? Were there severe changes done to the Tac battles which didn't take into account an MP option?
Just sounds a little weird when comparing both quotes.
Part of the problem may be that last quoted area was from E:WoM and not E:FE
Captain Obvious to the rescue!
Are you under the impression that FE is an entirely brand new game with no left over code? I mean have you tried the beta?
And we all know the MP code is still partially there, since as Brad said, they have it 'internally' but turned it off because of no tactical battles. My question is whether these changes were from FE and was it done so because MP was off the books at that point. I'm just curious as to why so much 'optimization' was required to the tac battles, that they had to scrap the MP coding part of it. I just found that my characters didn't move very fast during tac battles, not so much that the performance was lacking.
As Brad also mentioned, they spent so much money on MP, you'd think they'd try to salvage whatever they came up with during the the first Elemental game.
Fallen Enchantress IS a brand new game as far as how they are promoting it. It is NOT an expansion pack.
So it really doesn't matter if they stole some code or not.
I realize you are pissed because you want MP, I'm not even saying you don't have the right to be pissed either. But pulling some quote from a year and half ago, and combining it with some newer post does not actually make any arguments valid.
Maybe you're only argument is about trying to make sure they are not using feeble excuses for not doing MP.
And as far as the Captain Obvious comment goes, how in the hell am I supposed to know you knew that. For all I knew you did a quick forum search, that popped up, and you got your panties in a knot.
I know they are branding FE as a 'brand new game' in the sense that nothing that was there needs to stay there, or be the same. I get that, it's just that from the intitial direction of MP (pre launch) it seemed like MP was going to be, not in focus and the primary feature, but still 'part of it'. Just like you expect spells to be in FE, well I expected MP to be in FE. Also given that there was literally no heads up to the no mp, exept Brad's recent post, it's all but normal for the sliver of customers to react. Something which you've already acknoledge in your reply. (Our right to be unhappy)
I'm not saying they are cheating/stealing code from EWOM, I'm just saying that since we know that at some point EWOM had MP tac battles, what was it that caused the code to change so badly that it's not even fesible without MONTHS of work. (<- Quoting Brad) Which begs a -What the hell happened?- type of question. And since they said they'd take as much time as needed to make the game be awesome, it's again another "surprise". :/
So yeah, maybe I am trying to see how solid the decision behind abandoning MP was, since it's a core element of the game which brought me to it. Some might say I'm exaggerating, and I hate to say this, but I still find MOM to be a better game than EWOM (maybe EFE won't be the same) and so if I'm going to play an SP game, EWOM wouldn't/won't be considered. I'm dying for the game to offer the replayability level of MOM, in terms of tactics, Wizard abilities and spells.
At this point I'm left with an extremely bitter taste in my mouth with my EWOM experience (play a lot during the early patching process), I had shelved it to stop playing the 'unfinished game', slowly I started thinking, why not wait for FE? The little I had heard about it was great, and I thoguht to myself: "There is no way they'll leave MP Tac Battles out." I guess I was wrong like no one had ever been before on the face of the Earth. So with this in conjuction with my past experience, I'm not a happy camper to I'm extremely reticent towards FE and felt I needed to share my thoughts and opinions on this whole turn of events on MP and FE.To Frogboy and the SD team, thanks for trying to make an MOM successor with MP. The effort was appreciated.
PS: Oh and sorry for the Captain Obvious comment, I forgot how some people are not so bright and would have done as you thought I had. Sorry!
No worries, I knew you were a bit on the grouchy side with the whole no MP thing. So it's all good man. I do hope MP does make it in some further expansion, there is definitely nothing wrong with having the option!
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