Next week we expect to release an update to Fallen Enchantress. That update will be available to existing users of Fallen Enchantress and it will also be the first version available for sale on Steam (Beta 4-A).
The plan is to put out Beta 4A and then collect as much feedback as we can. Seriously, NOW is the time to ask for stuff (within reason) because when Beta 5 comes out (next month) we’ll be in feature lock-down. No new features until after release.
Now, we have a few questions for you guys:
(1) How do you think we should refer to this game? Elemental: Fallen Enchantress or just Fallen Enchantress?
(2) You can already go to www.fallenenchantress.com btw to go right to the page.
(3) What sorts of additional magical spells would you like to see us add before release that aren’t already in the game?
(4) What sorts of additional quests would you like to see?
(5) Random events – yes, we have them but we don’t have a lot. Now is the time to suggest them. Ideally, ones that don’t require crazy amounts of work.
(6) I will be needing your help on strategy for the AI. When you play Fallen Enchantress on Challenging (anything below challenging has the AI gimped to various degrees) you’re basically playing me. As some of you know, Fallen Enchantress (like GalCiv but unlike WOM) will make use of your multi-core processor. Every AI player gets their own thread. Long story short, I can do some terrible, evil things with the AI. But I know there are players who are just far better at this game than I am. Please feel free to make posts discussing your strategies. I am not ashamed to steal from you.
(7) If you have not already voted, please please vote in the journal poll: https://www.elementalgame.com/journals We use this data.
(8) Modding time is almost here. We have tried to make it hard to mod so far but the time to turn off the network data stuff is nearing. Here is what I’m thinking: http://screencast.com/t/5IyRz7XY. (9) Before anyone asks, no, you can’t transfer your FE serial to Steam. I can’t go into the details on why this is so don’t ask. Just assume it has something to do with gold plated rocket cars or something.
(10) The Fallen Enchantress budget is 2.2X the budget of War of Magic. We hope people like what we’ve been doing here. I know it’s been a long journey but it was important to us that our most loyal customers, you guys, knew that we were dedicated to making sure our fantasy strategy game was nothing short of awesome. Beta 4A has a lot of nice things but I think you guys will be surprised how much we were holding back for Beta 5 (for testing purposes mind you).
(11) I can’t tell you who the Fallen Enchantress is. But you can probably guess.
(12) The campaign, which isn’t in the beta (for spoiler reasons) was designed by Jon Shafer and written by fantasy author Dave Stern. It plays quite a bit differently from the sand box game. The idea was to give players an idea of what could be done via mods as well as give players a fun campaign experience that wasn’t just a bunch of sandbox scenarios. I do want to emphasize that the campaign is made with the same tools players will be given and they will be able to make their own and share them.
(13) While Fallen Enchantress will be available on Steam, it won’t require it.
(14) If you don’t have War of Magic, skip it. We’re going to discontinue it (we’ll still support it for existing customers for the long haul and may put out another update later this year). Fallen Enchantress is a lot closer to what we had in mind.
(15) If you have Windows XP 32-bit, you can get better performance if you enable large address awareness.
First of all, thank you for bringing in this gem of a game. I played through a lot a versions of War of Magic and Fallen Enchantress and I have to say that this version is a keeper. Keep it up guys!
(1) Elemental: Fallen Enchantress for me...
(3) I played a lot of Age of Wonders and domain spells are a necessity (Haste domain, which boosts movement of your units throughout your territory, or Life domain, which heals all your units in your territory by a certain amount). By the way, at least your sov, but any casting heroes too, should have some kind of casting area around them, which would help use strategic spells like pillar of flames more often.
(4) Quests to liberate heroes, quests to reconstitute artifacts of great power... Quests to retrieve "legendary mounts" for your heroes, like the spiders from some high level heroes we can get. Mounts like Pegasus and Nightmare(demon horse from D&D)
(12) Hope to see a campaign that spans multiple chapters.
Magical item crafting in game would be great, if not already implemented (I haven<t constructed every buildings and I saw). Like building an item forge, where we can choose the enchantments to add to items based on what schools of magic the sovereign knows, or how many shards are owned. Teleportation from town to town, via a constructable town portal would be great too. Finally, some stealthy units and/or heroes which could conduct sabotage or assassination missions in enemy towns, based on their accuracy and dodge skills or something similar.
I have one, and only one, truly urgent wish: Less spammy AI armies. At the moment, ESPECIALLY in the early game, these armies seem built to gain the power-meter rather than do any damage. The first time an AI goes to war, they send hordes and hordes of weak spearmen, scouts, and pioneers at one city. I have to fight about 5 battles in one turn, then it's a steamroll. Find some way to give the AI interesting armies, and powerful ones, and the game will be ~1,000x better.
Random event/world quest ideas:
Tectonic Shift: randomly changes a part of the terrain, like water to land, land to mountains, mountains to plains, plains to water, in a not very large area of the map.
Reign of Fire: A bunch of dragons start roaming the land, you'll need to find Christian Bale in order to stop the source of the invasion.
Time of Storms: Units on the map outside any area of control are randomly struck by lightning.
Night of Doom: Any non-undead, non-demonic creature suffers a penalty to it's statistics as long as this event is in effect. You could actually spawn some sort of altar that we need to destroy in order to end it.
(Would be cool if we had quest treaties, like, temporary alliances in order to stop a world threatening event)
Power of the twelve: Twelve riders spawn on the map and randomly begin to attack cities(not all at the same time, but in smaller groups), if they are successful, the population of that city decreases, as they are being kidnapped for some nefarious purpose. If they get enough people, they summon their king/sovereign, who is very large and nasty and starts tearing stuff up.
Turmoil: Unrest increases in all cities for a several turns.
Death: If the Elemental lore has anything that resembles the Grim Reaper in function or form, it's coming. A devourer of live walks the land and it won't stop until it's killed by several legions. This is a end level event/quest, and whoever gets to murder it, will get a spiffy bonus in the form of.. um, his scythe? or something that's useful at a kingdom level.
The Silence: Spellcasting is impossible for the duration, so are any abilities that can be considered magical in nature.
Beware the Red: A great red dragon offers you his services in exchange for feeding upon the population of your towns every few turns. Refusing would cause him to go rogue and start attacking you. Sending him to his death would cause him to escape battle when he loses and turn on you.
Spell ideas:
Shining peace: As long as there are no wars, production and food.. um production, are increased.
Living artifact: At the cost of part of a characters health/exp/attack/defense, you can create an item with powers that are random but in proportion with the amount of stuff the character sacrificed to create that item.
Steal Essence: Unless the owner of the target city pays a certain amount of mana to fizzle it, he loses one point of essence in that city, which is added to another city of the caster's choosing.
Time lock: For as long as you have mana left (huge cost, huge huge cost) take another turn after your current one instead of the enemy or other creatures
(will add more soon)
I'll be curious to dig into modding.
There are some things like "random events" that does not matter much since players will probably make mod pack with additional event, goodie hot, quests, etc if modding allows to do that. This is just data right, there is little code related to that. So you should focus on finishing adding code based feature than data based feature since those can be easily be added afterward.
Another suggestion would be beefing up diplomacy to make it as meaningful as it is amusing. A good and simple start was discussed here.
High praise - thank you Orion!
I really like events that encourage you alter your gameplay, either due to obstacle or opportunity. Here's hoping that events of these type won't be difficult to implement.
I would agree, except that the code for random events needs to be fleshed out a little more. There is only so much modders can add when events are limited to population triggers that can't spawn goodie huts. We also probably don't know all of possibilities of the current xml because it has not been revealed to us. I am glad they are spending some time on this feature and hope it adds code as well as content examples of how far we can take this.
Spells:
Quests:
Tactical Battle Requests - Greater Variety of tactical maps & city defenders
New feature: get rid of hp altogether
Size, injuries, resists, dodges, veteran or not, etc. can do a good job of emulating battle without going "iron golem has 32 hp! squad of 12 level 5 peasants has 34 hp!" because really, IRL we all know iron golems pwn 12 peasants. I've seen it.
You avoid the trap of having peasants kill iron golems w/ wooden clubs because, you know, hp. And you'll have to do just as much balancing, because right now apparently things are all whack as far as hp anyway.
But it's probably too late for this "feature." And pples will also be like "but my d&d feature! it is good" when it is clearly not.
Oh, I just assumed we were getting it through Impulse. Straight from Stardock is even better.
I don't think that is a good idea. Hit points are a fine notation on a unit's ability to continue fighting. The only thing that might be beneficial from this kind of logic is a system where lower Hp reduces a unit's ability to battle. Even this would be hard to do with multiple soldier units.
Other idea.
Can we please get a few more unique hero progression options? Most if not all of the perks I keep finding are all statistics related, it would be nice to have some that aren't just tied to numbers, but give some sort of extra ability. Like, when your hit points go below a certain number, you start to randomly teleport across the map every turn. Or, every time you cast a spell that requires X or more amount of mana, there's a chance you'll summon a demon as well, that may or may not play nice. Also, what if you could obtain those through quests as well?
Random events
Chaos: The owner of every city on the map is randomly reset. New kingdoms will have to be forged out of the chaos.
Change of Destiny: The player switches to control a different faction. The focus of this tale has shifted to another sovereign.
Master of Orion 4: The Apology
I have to disagree here. I perfer HP over what you purpose. In fact if they got rid of HP out of the game then I would stop playing it due to the fact that your system (oh lets see Iron Golem vs Peasants [Paper vs Rock] - Iron Golem wins every time) not something I would call fun to play. There should always be that chance (yes in D&D I do like my home brewed Critical Hit/miss charts where even a 1st level can get lucky and smash in a 20th level skull killing him instantly. Of course it is very rare.)
Oh and changing topic I have never encounters a Random Event in either WOM or FE. I keep hearing about them however.
I am making one for my Path Mod that gives Assassins a guaranteed critical hit for the next action. That kind of special ability is very welcome in the vanilla game.
FE is on Steam! http://store.steampowered.com/app/216390/ But when we get cdkey for steam key?? ;/
This is basically unacceptable for me as a customer and longtime supporter. You are punishing those who supported you and preordered the game early. This will be the last game i preordered from you guys if you dont find a way to give out steam keys to those who allready preordered and want their game on steam.
I will not buy the game again just because you are too lazy to transfer keys, other companies do that for their customers.
That's not being fair to Stardock. I'm sure it was Steam that's not allowing old keys....not Stardock. Steam wants to make money off purchases.
Be thankful that Stardock is trying to appease the 'steam' crowd, but cutting as good a deal as they did with Steam.
If you don't like it, don't buy it through steam.
Buying through Steam reduces Stardock's profits I believe. I assume making a transfer deal would have required Stardock to pay out for each transfer in some way. It sucks, but I am not going to ask Stardock to take that much of a hit. They are already giving me 2 free games.
2 free games for pre order WoM ?
For buying it till October 31 2010. https://forums.elementalgame.com/399482
I know that( but all who preordered got ONLY FE, because no other game or expansion from elemental world)
The next free game comes out in a year or so.
still sucks, but you can add the game outside of steam to the steam library.
it's almost like having it in their system, no links to news, no contacts seen playing the game, no shared achievements, no forum, and the overlays are probably conflicting BUT you can launch it from within the steam.
EDIT: overlays coexists fairly well.
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