Elemental: Day 0 Preview

Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

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Elemental: Day 0 Preview

AUGUST 24th, 2010.

This is a day that the team has been waiting for for three years!

As some of you know, some retailers broke the street date and to make sure our beta testers and pre-order customers didn’t get the short end of the stick, we released an interim build of Elemental (internally called Gold Edition++).

It turns out that this was a blessing in disguise because we have gotten a tremendous amount of useful feedback from those of you who got the game before release. The results of this comes in two parts.

First, tonight we released a new interim build. This version is basically bug fixes and such based on player reports. You can see what’s new in it here. Looking at the change log gives you an idea of the complexities of making a new PC game in 2010 with a brand new engine.

But tomorrow (or later today as I write this) is the big one. The official day 0 update that the team and I have been working on since Beta 4 (the beta group can go into more detail on this but in brief: After beta 4, the game tree was split in two. One version went on to be the gold version which is what those people who have it early are playing. The other tree went on to become day 0. These two trees were merged today already and will be going up tomorrow.

So what can you expect?

Here’s a few highlights:

The UI is updated to be somewhat more intuitive.
The campaign is significantly updated (though only for those starting fresh).
Resources are treated more like units. This is hard to explain but essentially the game will let you know of what resources you’re not using and how to make use of them.
There’s a lot of performance improvements the day 0 build, particularly for those with lower end CPUs.
The “day 0” AI is in it.
There’s been a polish pass to the spell books and tactical battles.
There’s been a general polish pass to the main game UI overall.
There’s been a lot of balancing to monsters, units, etc.

The day 0 version, as most of you know, is the version that was originally expected to be the first version most people would ever play. We’re definitely glad, however, that people got to play the pre-day 0 builds because we got a lot of very useful feedback and some crash reports that were not known about.

Now, a couple words on multiplayer. The servers are up but we are not going to enable multiplayer until next week. Part of this is, to be honest, team exhaustion. The early release meant a lot of people who were expecting this weekend off to rest from the grueling last few weeks had to come in. So we’re going to let them get a couple of days off later this week and open up the MP next week.

One piece of good news on MP. Originally we had planned to eliminate tactical battles from MP entirely because of balance. Some people correctly guessed the misguided (in hindsight) reason for this: We were approaching MP from a purely competitive point of view. Based on the persuasive arguments made by our players, we have decided that tactical battles will be made available in MP – as an option – at a later date as a free update.

So that’s all for now. After the day 0 update, I plan to take a day or two off too. I hear sleeping is the new “in thing” and you guys know me, I’m all about being cool and…um..what not.

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James009D
solidsmooky

Quoting Lucifon,

reply 83

Quoting Polynomial, reply 81You're seriously not giving us multiplayer until next week?

Appreciate the sleepless nights and work gone into getting the game up in time but this just seems like a repeat of Demigod all over again on the forums. Dates for seriously important things moving back. What if your general consumer walks into a store, picks up a copy of the game, and starts playing it then decides to jump on Multiplayer but haven no luck. Are they going to check the forum? Unlikely. Are they going to return it? Quite possibly. Again I really do appreciate the slog-work gone into getting the game up to go but Multiplayer is a pretty major feature!

My major concern is reviewers will not even be able to play the Multiplayer properly. I dont believe many sites will be waiting til next week to publish their reviews. I'm expecting to see much like Demigod where reviews were riddled with 'multiplayer currently not working' comments, a similar thing. Although Multiplayer is not as major of a component for Elemental as it was for Demigod, it's still pretty important.

You're probably right.

Its more concerning because of the reviewers, yes.

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Quoting epmode,

reply 67

Quoting diamondspider, reply 456) This is not a bug, but may as well be: the random numbers in combat are WAY too random. Why bother with having subtle elements like 25% increases in defense on a unit when a unit with a 36 attack can easily get only 5 damage when they are in the open? Even when the enemy has low armor and is of similar level. I don't mind some randomness, but the amount here makes many of the subtle tactic simply not worth worrying about, since luck determines the battles in most cases, given reasonably non-stupid play.
From the limited time I've spent with the game, I agree with this. Damage ranges need to be more predictable for sure.

It would also be nice if the game showed a damage estimate before you commit to an attack, taking enemy defense bonuses into consideration (it might already be doing this and I just missed it).

Yes Please!

The insanely random damage is driving me mad. I go to a combat with full magic, hoping to be able to take down those wolves before they do significant damage, and I end up doing 2 damage with a spell claiming it has 56 (one of the casts did 30 so I know it could do more)! At one point I used a AoE spell on 4 wolves and missed (i.e. did less than 1 dmg) all of them, at which point they proceeded to decimate me. Come on, it's supposed to be a strategy game, not a roulette.

Personally I think the combat algorithm needs to be rethought. A simple you do (1 to ATK) - (1 to DEF) damage is far too unrealistic and impossible to plan with. We need a minimum at the least. I also think the way stacks attack could be significantly improved.

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Quoting Bellack,

reply 90

Retaliatory attacks should stay in the game as is with one exception, Unit should only be able to retaliate if it still has action points left and these attacks should cost action points.

Damage spread should have at lest a min damage after all we already have a Miss mechanic in the game so what is the point of having a hit do '0' damage. If a unit can do 0-6 dam it should actully be 1-6 (or d6 in D&D terms.) There should be a Random roll still.

This is a really good idea by the way. Please read this.

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Quoting EdrinFra,

reply 60

Heroes are useless, because underpowered, unless you equip them with really good stuff. Did you think to give two or even three stats points to dispatch on level up ?
How comes equipment for heroes is so expensive? for the price of a hero's club, you could equip ten peasants with clubs... And train them in the process. Are sales reserved for peasants or what ? This is one of the things that makes heroes so useless. It is so true that, you can sometime resell heroes gear for more than the price you hired them right after they join your empire. It should be possible to craft high quality stuff for the heroes, too expensive to use for troops, but that comes with better stats. And that would take time and resources to craft. The gear price for peasants should even be more than the ones for the heroes, as heroes don't need to be trained to use them. And basic gear, like a club, should cost a lot less than a merchant's shop to build, for example. Weapons should begin to be expansive only when they start to be of high quality. You may argue that the merchant pays a part of the price, but then , what about the other buildings?

I don't necessarily agree with everything in your post but these I completely agree with. The majority of heroes are UTTERLY WORTHLESS, not to mention feel bland. I would assume that this will eventually be fixed but I saw some people defending this state of affairs and that very much disturbs me.

Also I'm amazed that the current merchant prices even made it into the game. It literally costs more to give a guy a sword than it does to build a city.

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Quoting CatfishBiff,

reply 101

Hello, would you mind sharing the graphic card/driver used? Having terrible crashes here on W7 x64 can't seem to figure the reason. Do you have any antivir realtime software enabled when playing?

I'm running the following and the performance has been great. 0 crashes and I've played up to around 100 turns.

Win 7-64bit

Core i7-920 Factory clock

Radeon 5870 (Catalyst 10.7 drivers) @1920x1080

8GB RAM

Using Microsoft Security Essential for AV

There's some known problems with ATI cards right now. If you haven't done so yet, please after a crash post your debug.err (located in My Documents\My Games\Elemental) file to the support forum. That helps them track it down.

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Quoting Lucifon,

reply 83

I guess the question there is if the tactical battle change will be live when MP comes up. If it's delayed so that what goes up is an improved version? That's not so bad.

MP is something where "getting it right" is important, probably more so then getting it out immediately. I'm certainly not happy about the delay either, but given the option I don't mind waiting for something that's going to work better.

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Quoting Bellack, reply 90

Retaliatory attacks should stay in the game as is with one exception, Unit should only be able to retaliate if it still has action points left and these attacks should cost action points.

Damage spread should have at lest a min damage after all we already have a Miss mechanic in the game so what is the point of having a hit do '0' damage. If a unit can do 0-6 dam it should actully be 1-6 (or d6 in D&D terms.) There should be a Random roll still.

I also like this idea, as it brings it closer to the Xcom way which they claim to have copied. However I would like to suggest that if the game goes this way, the retaliation should be simulataneous to the actual attack. This makes sense since in actual combat you don't wait swing your weapons in turns.

Personally I think that while turn based combat is better than real time in a game like this, an order & turn based combat makes much more sense. Basically each player has a planning and an acting phase and their army acts their orders based on combat speed. They give each unit orders during the planning phase (charge this enemy, attack this one, cast this spell on that one) and then click end turn, at which point the units act out their non-melee orders in order of initiative. There's no retaliation but rather the units attack whoever they've been ordered to. However combat happens simulataneously as the last thing in the acting phase, so all armies which are currently locked in melee, do their respective damage to their enemy.

Unfortunately at this stage it's unlikely this would be an option but hell, since we're suggesting stuff I thought I'd through it out there.

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Quoting ,

quoting post

And with a simple paragraph, Stardock earned back at least 3 more sales.

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Quoting Buio1,

reply 100

Quoting Lucifon,
reply 98
Very expensive for us UK gamers Can pick up alot of PC new releases for £18-£20 off sites here, Elemental is £32 for the digital download, probably a tad more when you get to the final price - stuff usually is on Impulse. But no retail version of the game over here.

£18-20 for a newly released boxed PC game sounds extremely low. Most new PC games cost double that amount or more. Where do you buy your games?

Not in stores thats for sure. Online. Play.com, Shopto, etc often offer new titles for that price. Demigod was £17.99 on Play.com at launch.

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Quoting ,

quoting post

Resources are treated more like units. This is hard to explain but essentially the game will let you know of what resources you’re not using and how to make use of them.

Can we get more info on this?

Thanks,
Sammual

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Quoting diamondspider,

reply 45

Well, played the day 0 fully patched version fpr about 6 hours, and while I'm really glad you released it, please focus on a bugs for a while!

...My wife turned into a different person...

Sorry dude--That's supposed to happen!

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Quoting Lucifon,

reply 110

Quoting Buio1, reply 100

Quoting Lucifon,
reply 98
Very expensive for us UK gamers Can pick up alot of PC new releases for £18-£20 off sites here, Elemental is £32 for the digital download, probably a tad more when you get to the final price - stuff usually is on Impulse. But no retail version of the game over here.

£18-20 for a newly released boxed PC game sounds extremely low. Most new PC games cost double that amount or more. Where do you buy your games?

Not in stores thats for sure. Online. Play.com, Shopto, etc often offer new titles for that price. Demigod was £17.99 on Play.com at launch.

£1 = $1.55

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Quoting CatfishBiff,

reply 101

Quoting ddem1,
reply 94

Quoting elmo3,
reply 91

Quoting be0wulfe, reply 79Unfortunately, even with the 1.01 patch, it's extremely unstable on my Win7x64 box - and since I no longer have a Vista-32bit or Win7-32bit box, couldn't tell ya if it's just an issue with Win7x64 - I will say tha SINS, LotRO, TorchLight and other games work like a charm on that same box ... so ...

FWIW I've played over 100 turns on my Win 7 x64 system without a single crash.

Hello, would you mind sharing the graphic card/driver used? Having terrible crashes here on W7 x64 can't seem to figure the reason. Do you have any antivir realtime software enabled when playing?

I'm running the following and the performance has been great. 0 crashes and I've played up to around 100 turns.

Win 7-64bit

Core i7-920 Factory clock

Radeon 5870 (Catalyst 10.7 drivers) @1920x1080

8GB RAM

Using Microsoft Security Essential for AV

I have played up to 475 turns before seeing a crash using the original release from Monday AM EST, not the interim pre-0 day patch or the 0-day patch.

Win 7 64 professional, fully updated and patched.

Radeon 5870, most recent drivers. Core clock - 885, Mem clock - 1245. 1920x1080. HDMI out to plasma @ 60Hz

Intel X25M G2 SSD, most recent drivers/fw (OS, app and game drive)

WD 1TB Caviar Black (mass storage, supplemental page file for games that absolutely require one, temp files, internet cache)

Asus mobo, most recent drivers/fw

12gb Mushkin ram, 1604mhz, bumped voltage, rated timings.

i7 920 @3.2ghz, bumped voltages

MS security essentials, steam client, impulse client, logitech firmware, apache web server, dyndns client all running concurrently to the game

Edit:

Also, when turning anti-aliasing on is when I see the majority of graphical glitches. Turned off, I haven't really seen too many graphical hiccups.

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Right on! You guys rock frogboy <starts plotting MP tactics>

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Quoting pad152,

reply 97

Please add a list of Hotkeys to the Hiergamenon, so they are available in-game!

It is avaliable in game. Look at the top right hand corner of the screen. You will see a '?' just click that.

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When will limited edition preorders be sent out?

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Sir_On_The_Edge

Join Date 07/2006

I played the beta somewhat, but, I'll be waiting for the day 0 release to give the game a whirl.

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Quoting Lucifon,

reply 110

Not in stores thats for sure. Online. Play.com, Shopto, etc often offer new titles for that price. Demigod was £17.99 on Play.com at launch.

Over here, sometimes shops sell games as bait products, i.e. at lower than normal price to get the customer there and buy other stuff too. But still most games sell at full price, which is normally 400SEK or more (just about €40, or £33). But that mostly happen to big games, like Starcraft 2.

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For those complaining about "miss" its when the defense roll is equal to or greater than the attack roll. Eg, "miss" means doing no damage. Back in Beta 4 your Sov could have an attack value of 0 (it seems units are kept at a minimum of 1 now). You would watch him/her punch things and it would always say "Miss".

"Miss" means "0" not "Miss". You can think it as a block (knight v knight), a "true dodge" (theif v theif), or your arrows simply not working on those dragon scales.

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Quoting Sir On The Edge,

reply 118

I played the beta somewhat, but, I'll be waiting for the day 0 release to give the game a whirl.

on that subject, when are we expecting the Day 0 update on Impulse? I kinda wanna wait until then to play again, see what kind of improvement in performance is given. My version still says 1.01 so I guess this is the "pre-day 0" or whatever you want to call it.

will the day 0 have better support for (dont know if it has anything to do with the current shaky perfomance) win7/64-bit?

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I highly propose most attacks/spells having a minimum damage (even if most of those minimums are 1 or 2)

Therefore, honestly I think we should go back to the dicussion of having both an Attack vs Defense roll AND a damage roll.

Edit: With the damage roll being crazy things like, (oh I don't know) 5-7 damage, or 12-20 damage, or 2-3 damage, or 1-5 damage, or 9-10 damage. You know, crazy stuff like that.

...

Anyone Know where I can find the Combat code?

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Sir_On_The_Edge

Join Date 07/2006

I asked a dev, and he said that a 64 bit exe will be coming, but it won't be here for the release.

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Quoting Sir On The Edge,

reply 123

I asked a dev, and he said that a 64 bit exe will be coming, but it won't be here for the release.

Just so long as everyone understands that a 64bit version of the game isn't necessary to play on x64 systems. That really should only come into play when you want to run with OMG THATS HUGE!!! sized maps and the game needs a bigger address space in order to be able to handle such a beast.

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Isnt this supposed to be out today?

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Quoting Buio1,

reply 119

Quoting Lucifon,
reply 110
Not in stores thats for sure. Online. Play.com, Shopto, etc often offer new titles for that price. Demigod was £17.99 on Play.com at launch.

Over here, sometimes shops sell games as bait products, i.e. at lower than normal price to get the customer there and buy other stuff too. But still most games sell at full price, which is normally 400SEK or more (just about €40, or £33). But that mostly happen to big games, like Starcraft 2.

Starcraft 2 is the only PC game in years I've come across where everywhere was charging full whack for it. Thats never usually the case here. I'm used to paying £25 at max for a new boxed PC title.

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