Dear Stardock

Wouldn't be better for you and for us if you could start selling your game after it is done properly (finished)? What are we? 50$ worth BETA TESTERS?!

- We have temporarily disabled the empire faction portion of the Faction creation mod tool since it was creating Imperial factions with invalid tech trees.

Any word on WHY this happens? Is there an .xml entry in my factions i can manually edit quickly before the next patch fixes it?

The hotfix does not fix memory allocation errors. (error: Out of Memory!)    

http://pastebin.ca/1925029

Seems u just gotta change <TechTree>Empire_Tech_Tree</TechTree> (which doesnt exist) to <TechTree>Trog_Tech_Tree</TechTree>
What a booboo they made on that one lol, but why wasnt it just fixed in the hotfix rather than disable the entire editor?

ALL games which are released have bugs and crashes : all of them (except, perhaps, a few simplistic indie games). It's the price you have to pay, in the gaming software industry, for increasing complexity to have richer content.

The Big Boss of Stardock (forum nick "Frogboy") was still on the forum yesterday evening, around 11:15 (my time : Eastern), when they were in the process of putting up 1.05 on Impulse.

I came back here this morning to learn that 1.05 had already been patched during the night (up to 1.05.016), and I noticed this thread, initiated by Frogboy at 5:09 (Eastern). 

It means that between 11:15 and 5:09, Stardock's CEO has had little sleep, and has been working hard supervising the 1.05+ final production process.

Earlier in August, Stardock sent to the printing presses version 1.00 for the retail, non-Impulse release. Then, versions 1.01, 1.05, and hot-fixed 1.05.016 have been made available, on Impulse, in less than 5 days.

No released game is perfect : far from it. What's important, here, is that Stardock employees and their Boss are working overtime (and posting on the forum, a very rare initiative for developers) to squash bugs and refine their game. It's very normal for a post-beta game to have bugs. What's extraordinary, here, is that the responsible corporation (and its CEO) have accomplished in about one week the fixing and upgrades that most other companies would have taken at the very least one month to accomplish -- if ever. (Take the example of Heroes of Might and Magic 5, in 2006: the first patch was released by major corporation Ubisoft many, many months after the initial release.)  

People who believe that versions 1.00, 1.01 and 1.05 were premature "beta" releases don't know anything about the computer-game industry, and especially, they don't realize that it is extremely rare that the CEO of a game-development and game-production corporation (Stardock playing both roles in the case of Elemental) will post on a forum, answer complaints, and spend the major part of his evening and night directly involved in the fixing of a product.

Go here my friend: How to Fix the Faction Creator (Work Around for Working Techs) I Explain how to do the work around to fix it. Editing the XML the faction creator generates is pretty easy. If need be copy the code I give in my example and then just alter it to your liking and then put it in the right folder and you're good to go. Enjoy

@Stardock peoples: Thanks for the efforts in resolving the launch day issues.

@Cryptomancer: This particular industry doesn't need any more people to make excuses for its failures, provide rationalizations for not improving, or aid complacency when dealing with issues.

Still dont understand how they could make such a simple booboo in the faction editor, and LOCK half of it in the hotfix rather than just, fix it, which i myself accomplished in a minute (its just a single line that needs changing).

Been playing custom game all night since patching and hotfix. So addictive, just lost a game to the AI, gonna start a new one with better knowledge of the game now that I've played it Just one more turn...

Maybe they'll see this and release another hotfix. Did anyone post it in the bugs thread?

Just be glad Elemental is not a MMO. For those, not only do you pay $50 for the game, but you also pay $15 every month for the privilege of being a beta tester.

Does this mean we have to start a new campaign/game to take advantage of the changes?

I kind of had the same problem, but I just hung around Procipinee for a turn or two and the next stage with the creature camp eventually fired.