Warning: If you’re not into game development, you will probably find this entry very boring.
While I wait for my items to sell on the Galactic Trade Market in SWTOR, I am also working on Elemental: Fallen Enchantress.
At this point, we have the largest beta group any Stardock game has ever had. Tens of thousands of you now have in your hands the first beta of Fallen Enchantress. The goal of this is to help us eliminate instability, identify late-game performance issues, find out how people play the game and evaluate balance, user interface quirks, and overall “fun”.
Introductions
To get started, I should introduce some of our key players.
Myself, I’m Brad Wardell. My day job is President & CEO of Stardock Corp. which has two entities attached to it – Stardock Software (which makes our consumer software and enterprise software which has historically been what pays the bills) and Stardock Entertainment (Which makes the games). A year ago, there was a third business unit called Impulse, Inc. which took care of digitally distributing our games and apps as well as those for third parties. We sold this unit to GameStop last year and as a result, I have enough available time to be talking to you and actually being involved in the game development process. While Stardock has been actively looking to recruit a lead developer (hint hint), it was decided internally that as of November 1, 2011 I would step in to take on the role of Lead Developer on Fallen Enchantress. My particular specialty is multithreaded software development.
The true key to Fallen Enchantress’s fun factor has been Derek “Kael” Paxton. He was the author of the well known Fall From Heaven mod for Civilization IV. He is the one that has brought design discipline to the team. That means making choices. Fallen Enchantress is first and foremost a strategy game in which the world itself is your first enemy to be dealt with before you can even think of dealing with your other foes. Besides being the designer, he is also the Project Manager (in game speak “Producer”). Nothing goes in without his approval and this disciplined approach is main reason that the beta you see before you is as good as it is.
We also have a number of Stardock veterans from Galactic Civilizations II on Fallen Enchantress. My friends Jesse “CodeCritter” Brindle, Cari “Elf” Begle, and Paul “Mormegil” Boyer are all well known to our community. Jesse and Cari didn’t get to have much time on War of Magic as they were mostly involved on Impulse related projects. I’ve asked Jesse to take the lead on graphics performance and Cari is helping across the board on game play coding. The amazing art you see in the game is a combination of Leo (no cool handle) and Mormegil. They’ve been asked to enliven the world environment (i.e. eradicate the “blah” remnants from WOM).
That’s just a few of the people involved, there’s another dozen+ others but these are the people who get to hear my whining and complaining the most.
Whining and complaining
My job is to try to execute as best I can on Derek’s design. On some things, I take care of directly. On other things, I have to complain to Jesse or Cari or Paul (mostly poor Paul).
So what are some of the things we complain about?
Examples: Why do the mountains not look that distinct? The interface requires me to move my mouse too much around. It takes too many clicks to add improvements. The late game turn performance is slow. The AI needs better units to choose from. The land needs more variance. The world needs more distinction between things I care about and background. The quests need more hand holding. The sound effects are repetitive and horrible. The music doesn’t seem to progress in tempo. I need more spells. And on…and on….and on…
Which brings us to this blog
If you’ve managed to survive this long into this entry, today I’m going to play on a large map with a gazillion players. I am going to play at Normal difficulty and I’m going to try to make the game get as slow as I possibly can. I am going to try to crash the game. I am going to wreck this game. That’s my job.
And you, the victim of this blog, will get to see the crashes, the stupid mistakes I find in my code, and my griping on balance, user interface, music, etc.).
A word of caution
If you aren’t in the beta, please understand, my job here is to criticize the game. My critique of Galactic Civilizations II, which I designed, was that it was essentially a soulless piece of crap with shoddy AI, terrible carpal-tunnel UI, mindless clickfest. And that’s a game that got a 93 metacritic score. So you can imagine what my critiques of the beta of this game are.
A key lesson learned from WOM is that if you get too close to the project to the point you’re playing it non-stop and making a lot of the content is that you lose objectivity. I actually thought WOM was a great game when it shipped. Then I took a short vacation, came back, played it and went “Oh, Dear, God. What hath we done?” Lesson learned, don’t do 100+ hours a week for 3 months and don’t confuse the fun you have making the game with the fun playing the game.
Anyway, point being: I’m going to be flaming the game throughout this journal. The goal is to make the BETA version better so that when people get the final version it is the awesome game people are looking for.
Let the Butchering Begin…
First, I’m going to see if I can cheese up a custom sovereign and faction…
Like all good hearted people, I wish that all races were Smurf-Like…
I’m going to play 18 other players…
Expert Tip:
Fallen Enchantress defaults to running at your desktop resolution. If you are going to be playing a long game, I recommend lowering your desktop resolution to maximize performance.
The Game Starts
I am already regretting choosing deep blue as my color.
Complaint 1: Champions vs. Everyone else
It’s a fine line. You want champions to matter but you don’t want to make it about collecting champions and steam rolling. The basic problem I see is that champions have too much base HP imo. We used to have it a lot less but then they were pointless. So it’s something we’re placing with.
Complaint 2: UI of the research window
If you don’t actually click on the graphic, it won’t switch tabs. This creates a little fatigue after several hours. The graphic itself is transparent so I go code hunting…
Complaint 3: Long end game turn lengths
There is an inncoulous check for city contiguity that gets very expensive late game which I’ve changed to only care about if it’s humans since the AI just uses the auto place system anyway. This little tweak just reduced the turn times by 75%.
Complaint 4: Frame rate when lots of stuff on screen
This might as well be a complaint about reality. You want to see lots of stuff but you don’t want to pay the price. Well, I don’t want to pay the price but I still want to see lots of stuff.
But the human eye is easily tricked. It’s just a matter of giving the illusion that the player is seeing the same lots of stuff as they zoom out. Unfortunately, I know zilch on DirectX programming. So I’m just kind of going through the code and trying to learn it on the fly to see if I can help in this area.
My first attempt at reducing the number of things being painted. On the one hand, the frame rate is really high…
Too extreme. Now, I’m learning this with you right now (on a weekday, I’d just bug Jesse or someone).
So there is our start. 25fps.
Reducing the number of children to 1 gives us..1fps. A dead end. Oh and I lost my UI.
Trying to crash the game: Tips and tricks
Under the covers, the game revolves around having a ton of things going on at once. I hate “Please wait…” screens. To eliminate that, we use threads. Lots and lots of threads. And it can be tricky with so many different hardware configs.
The best way to get the game to crash is to have it autosave every turn and try clicking on the UI everywhere. That’ll expose if someone accidentally tried to directly update the UI rather than sending a message request to update the UI.
That is, you can’t just say MySoldier->SetMovesLeft(defaultamount) and in that call have it update the UI right there. It needs to send a message to the UI and then be processed.
The best testers for this are people with crappy computers and terrible OSes (single core, Windows XP users). We don’t officially support single core CPU’s because they’re so old but their terrible performance helps us find bugs.
Complaint 5: The world needs more…umph
This is one of my main gripes. A long time ago, the goal of the look of the game was a kind of cell-shaded look. This evolved into Illustrated look. But illustrated doesn’t need to mean desaturated and brown.
Now, mind you, I’m no artist. But just playing around with Photoshop I got this (barren land):
So in the above picture, I took the dullest looking area and tweaked it. Tell me what you think. I don’t have an artistic eye.
Here’s a starting location.
Desert
Fallen lands
Like I said, I’m not an artist so I just messed with the textures. But I’ll pass these ideas on to the art team to see what they think.
Here I messed with the color of the water.
I went through the comments. My work on FE revolves around coding, not game design – other than making suggestions. I did pass on ideas to Derek.
I kind of went off track by playing around with the art stuff for fun.
I rewrote one of the city functions to hopefully improve performance. There is that little…stutter I see when I place an improvement. I also made it so that you can double click on an improvement in the build menu and have it auto place it.
Champion Stacking
One of the things humans do in the game is they just toss all their champions in one stack. This isn’t surprising, it is a good strategy with the way the game is currently set up.
One of the things on Derek’s list has been to split experience up amongst the units in the group (rather than all the units simply getting all of it). It was supposed to be in Beta 1 but just didn’t get done. In hindsight, I wish I had gotten this in sooner because the champion stacking combined with this creates a real imbalance.
It’s in now though.
More playing around with the art.
Trying to figure out why sounds cut out. The state of sound drivers on the PC is deplorable (outside the really mainstream brands – that is what you’re really paying for, quality drivers). But we can program things to work around driver issues.
Debugging
Why does god hate me?
Yea, I know how that feels.
I wanted to throw this idea in there; I love the "card game" randomness of champions leveling up. I love the rare, common, and uncommon traits. Why not apply this to magic? We should get to choose from the spells to cater to what we're trying to accomplish and they should be dealt to us, allowing us to pick a card.
I also noted a distinct lack of summoning spells. Or maybe I just didn't learn them yet?
What happened to custom races, anyway?
Thank the Creator the broken XP system is on "on the map." Maybe I can stop bitching about it now.
Maybe...
I think splitting the XP will not work, because it delays only the problem and the player can still have a single hero army that gets huge amounts of XP.
IMO, Units should level up faster than heroes, not the other way around (as they get less benefits from leveling). And maybe leather and basic weapons should be available from the beginning, or much easier to research, because by the time you can afford it on your troops, you don't need troops anymore with all the random stuff the heroes can get their hands on).
I think Fireball and other AOE spells are another reason troops are so weak : its damage should be much lower for troops to be able to serve any purpose other than converting production points to ennemy champion XP.
And I totally agree about the prohibitive upgrade costs. It doesn't make any sense to have to spend 1K gold to upgrade a single unit.
I much prefer limiting the availability of champions to nerfing them, though. powerful champs are what made MoM, and Age of Wonders so fun, but in both games, they took ages to level up, and they were in very limited supply.
That's all we're trying to do. Balance the timing just a bit.
And that's not really the issue.
The issue is that if I defeat a tough foe in an epic battle one-on-one with a single hero, a battle which drained every last resource and forced me to use every trick in my arsenal, I want to feel rewarded for this action, not "Oh, why did I waste all that mana when I coulda just grabbed some buds, kicked back, and dispatched these foes with a flick of our magical bottle-openers and ALL GOT THE SAME XP ANYWAY?"
They aren't "buzz-wording" anything. This game is not released. It's called balance, and implementing sound basic game mechanics which they intended to implement all along is not "nerfing" anything. In fact it will be an improvement on the core game (see above post.)
EDIT: That's weird, the board is showing me as quoting myself in #81, when in fact I quoted post #80...odd.
ooh... Porta-Jon Tycoon?
ok, I realize that this is extremely un-funny...
On a more serious note:
+1 on the double-click to auto-build fix, I was just finding that annoying about 15 mins ago.
cheers,
-tid242
Hey thanks for fixing the XP distribution issue. This will most likely severely impact the way I play game and the way I dominate (or now not) the AI.
However if I have to split up now I'm afraid that there is not enough for me and my heroes to do in the world - at least not without passing enemy territory and getting kicked out. I personally would love to see new quest locations spawn every now and then.
Thanks for your hard work - appreciate it.
€: oh when will this be in? Wanted to start a new game of FE today but I'd rather wait for this fix to be in.
Alternatively, the number of hirable heroes could be linked to faction prestige, or any other stat that would more or less make sense (diplomatic capital?) so that it is impossible to make a killer hero stack too early. If there were flanking penalties and limited hero number, letting heroes battle without support would be bad for their health.
I like the idea of heroes costing upkeep too.
Edit: Another solution would be to make HP and damage less dependant on levels (in AoW:SM for instance, you don't get that many more HP at higher level, but you usually are a bit harder to hit) : the power curve feels DnDish, but it is pretty hard to balance for such a game (while a logarithmic power curve, like in the CODA system, or the old Star Wars D6 game would be much easier to balance).
Its a downer when you finally can produce that Drake as Umber, and they are ungroupable and weak as puppies compared to champs.
Hey,If someone is interested in ideas for making cities more unique and flavorful, have a look at my post on city guilds(https://forums.elementalgame.com/416510) and throw some ideas in!
Derek you need to pm me and i can give you instructions on how to proceed.
Galactic Civilizations III
I want to see more randomness with champs.
As for heroes, I really don't think drastic solutions are needed.
One conceptual idea- Maybe make it where heros can't conquer cities, so you need normal troops to win the wars? (also, you lose a normal troop when you conquer a city, which becomes its militia)
Nah. We just need to split experience between the heroes in an army, take it from there, and we are OK!
If the player is forced to burn resources (mana, healing potions, ...) to win a difficult battle he should get huge amounts of XP and loot, but currently you could use path of the mage + affinity + mantel of ocean to cast zero cost spells or a bow + high dodge + high movement to win battles without any resources.
Though it will not be in FE, I like MagMagnus's idea for picking spells - deal a random hand and let the player pick the spell(s) to add to their spell book.
That said, you could add this to the traits system with traits that give access to specific a spell or it could be added to a magic research branch with every advancement allowing the player to add one of 2 to 4 randomly selected spells to their spell book. (Low intelligence you get to choose from 2 spells, high intelligence you get to choose from 4 spells).
Anyone make the comment that fallen rivers should be green? Seems like now they are blue and then flow into green lakes and oceans.
Quick Comments:
Having different elements in different colors is important considering that I am partially color blind (and probably other people are). So if everything is the same color, we won't be able to see the differences.
Make sure people can tweak the appearance of the game to reduce the processing power required to play the game. Removing transparency or the number of shown object including the cloth map mode are all good options.
Okay, so I have done a few tests and came up with more suggestions. I also found the New Race button. Thanks.
I started a few games and built myself as extremely as I could in different directions. In one game, I ignored champions and built a massive army of regular designed units. It was really difficult to get my troops at a point where I could function and here's why:
A) Couldn't afford them: It takes a lot to get my empires to more then 4G/turn income. Maybe I suck. If not, that's an issue if we're supposed to fielding armies. Is it possible city maintenance is too high? If 1G is one unit of income per turn, then you end up with 4 units total. This may be a greater economy issue, me sucking, or just military maintenance being too high. Perhaps your city level should grant X number of free units?
have the technology to equip them to deal with the wilds. In all the combats I had against wild monsters and whatnot, I lost all but 1 battle against darklings. I think this is partially because I couldn't get enough troops to overpower the enemy. I was fielding armies of 4 to 5 units. I will note that I really like the choices we have in designing units; there is always room for improvement, but it does feel like if I make a Spearmen with bonus damage to higher level units and a Constitution boosted guy with a shield, they serve their proper roles in my military.
My biggest suggestion is the technology. It should be easier to get competent troops - not powerful ones. My example is that in civilization, the moment you had the Phalanx and fortified them among your cities, you felt safe. You knew you were okay until catapults came ringing on your door. In MoM, just about every race had a unique trait to all their units that made even their weakest unit able to support a champion or a stronger unit against powerful monsters. It was never incredibly difficult to get that mainstream trooper.
Right now, I have to pound through 4 or 5 technologies to get armor, weapons, and shields for my infantry. My suggestion is to put all the basics in one early tech - Basic Equipment; grants chest piece, swords and hatchets, and wooden shields. Branch off of that to specialize in each directions. Advanced armor giving you your helmets and gauntlets and such. Weapons giving you spears, bows, and so on and so forth.
Another suggestion I believe I made for Elemental: Create Item or Enchant Item spells.
Then, I tried starting the game off going straight magic. I wanted to see if I could survive using nothing but raw magical power. I was almost doing well with my mage (I had 2 cities doing research and my sovereign, that was it) when he started dying to higher level groups of monsters. He basically wasn't able to do enough damage to all of them before they got to him and smashed his face in (trolls in particular). Now, this isn't a smart style of play, but...
If you gave summoning spells to each element, this could be a viable strategy. If I could have spent my mana on summoning Zombies or small groups of infantry made out of wood, he could have lasted longer. The summoner is a practical and common wizard type, but I don't see it being celebrated here. IF there are a wide variety of summoning spells, perhaps a trait could be added to have you start with them instead of the normal 4 per level?
That's all I got for now. This game does make me feel the closest I felt playing MoM out of any 2X in a long time.
I want to see FB's journal touch the AI he is said to be working on this week. I don't care how the game looks or why people hate me in game. They are probably being peer pressured by people in the real world.
Just read the post that suggested you guys put all the early weapons and armor in one or two techs. Please don't. That is why WoM was so uninteresting in the tech tree.
If anything go back to GalCiv2 where we had each weapon type and armor type in parallel trees. That game took it too far with like 20 techs per option, but the overall design is solid. Right now plate is some kind of ridiculously perfect armor. This should not be the case until you get Masterwork Platemail.
I don't think one tech to get your military started early game makes it similar to WoM. It costs like 250 turns right now to get the basic military teechnologies. That's way too much.
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