As a long time fan of Stardock's (I own all the titles since Gal Civ 1), I am intrigued by SK. I like the concept of the game and the asymmetry - it could be a nice fresh take on the 4x games, which at this point, all are starting to feel a bit similar.
My concern is this: the game seems to use the creaky Elemental engine. No one, least of all Stardock, has good memories of the original Elemental. FE/LH was a vast design improvement and a very solid game. But its engine was never great. Mid game took such an FPS hit for me, I couldn't even play it on my old computer. I complained at the time and Brad responded - Stadock was able to optimize a bit but it still was relatively unplayable midgame. I now have a top-of-the-line new Alienware computer these days, and things even get a little chunky midgame for me now.
Seeing the dev-streams (I'm not in beta - sorry I only pay for a finished product), the game's art looks charming (certainly an improvement over FE), but the engine shows its age compared to contemporaries (Civ and Age of Wonders 3, namely). GalCiv3 got a new engine, why not SK? And how is the performance? Will it bog down mid game like FE/LH?
The underlying graphics engine is almost completely new.
Performance isn't an issue and the shader system is much nicer. Even though the graphics are much improved, it uses less than 1/3rd as much memory.
Doing a brand new, land-based, fantasy engine would be a major undertaking as you might imagine.
Hopefully some of the beta testers can attest how much improved overall performance is.
It draws polygons way faster than I can.
the engine performance is very good, I play it on an old laptop with a i5 cpu and a 1gb gt525m. My laptop struggled with other elemental games, but SK I get a steady 60fps on low settings and 40fps with graphics on high settings.
The only problem is that some of the character movements between turns are not always smooth.
By the way the art style on SK is truly amazing, it looks good, almost cartoon like.
'Almost cartoon like' is a sword with two edges. Some people like a cartoony style, some don't. I remember 'Zeus' was quite controversial in this regard. And then there was the 'Age of Empires Online' fiasco. Fortunately I think SK has a better art style than either of those.
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