Thursday musings

Greetings!

v1.09 work

The team is hard at work this week on v1.09 which we expect to put out next week. It’s mostly fixes, memory optimization, performance optimization and hopefully some updated AI stuff from me.

v1.1 development

At the same time, we’ve been combing the forums and looking at all the suggestions to see the game from different perspectives. A lot of these ideas are going to make it into the first major game play update (v1.1) which will also serve as the basis of the demo version.

The biggest changes, as previously discussed, is making mana global rather than a per unit.  This has been one of the most challenging issues both in terms of balance and AI programming (since players could imbue heroes and then have each of them had their own mana pool and enchantment slots).  The global mana system is a lot closer to our original concept and that of Master of Magic, our original inspiration. Summoned units will have a mana maint rather than using an “enchantment slot”. Once you have such a concept in there, we can start to look at things such as cast times (spells that take N turns to cast, counter-spells, etc. for the future).

The other modification is returning population back towards a resource. Ironically, population is supposed to be a resource now but it is currently treated like metal and materials – you can spend population on troops but they come right back ala GalCiv II.  This is something we’re addressing with v1.1.  You’re essentially going to be having to choose between guns and butter (or swords and butter in this case) on what to do with your population.  

This will allow us to cut down on the special resources since now success in the game is much more dependent on player skill rather than luck of the resource distribution (we’ll still have cool resources, they’ll just be rarer and be more like their original intent – cool stuff you occasionally see).

There’s a lot of other changes scheduled for v1.1 which I’ll get into as we get closer but we wanted to give you a general idea on what we’re doing there.

Stepping Back

One of the internal changes going on is that I’ve moved back towards my traditional role as a executive producer / AI coder rather than as a general programmer (which is what I did throughout Elemental).  We’re expanding the Elemental team (in terms of personnel) starting next week to make up for my changed role (so I’ll take on the same role in Elemental going forward that I did in Sins of a Solar Empire, Demigod, and GalCiv II where I’m providing feedback, design help, or more depending on what’s needed) except for the added part of AI programming which I will be spending a lot of time on.

I’ll still be out on the forums and such but you’ll be seeing a lot more Stardock people posting journals, especially as more mod tools get released since they’ll be the ones explaining how they work.

The Expansion Talk

I want to address one issue that there’s been a lot of misunderstanding about.  Today, we have Elemental: War of Magic.  While v1.1 will be making a lot of major changes to the game play, it’s still fundamentally the same game.

What we are interested in doing in the future is making more radical changes to the game design based on a lot of hard knocks we’ve picked up recently. But we want to make sure that players who enjoy Elemental: War of Magic v1.1 can continue to play that game with that design and get support for it going forward. 

So we’re going to branch in two directions starting with v1.1. One branch will continue forward with v1.2, v1.3, and so on.  The other branch will become an expansion with some pretty radical changes to the core design. It’ll include Book 2 and a lot of content too but our main concern and the reason we’re calling it an “expansion” is simply because we don’t want to “bait and switch” the people playing Elemental: War of Magic.  This micro-expansion will be free to everyone who has Elemental so players can go back and forth between the two and play the version of Elemental they want.

At some future point, we’ll then do a second micro-expansion which will add Book 3 and be more of a typical expansion.  If you’ve ever played any of the Sins of a Solar Empire micro-expansions you get an idea of what we’re doing.  Except here, like with Dark Avatar and Twilight of the Arnor, we’ll be also adding new story-driven content as well.  This will also be free to people who currently have Elemental as a token of thanks for sticking by us.

Hopefully that clears up any misunderstandings on the expansions.

In terms of details of each expansion, we’ll provide a lot more detail as it becomes more relevant.  For now, our primary focus is on Elemental: War of Magic and making sure our customers are taken care of.  So we want to stick to talking about what we’re delivering in the near term rather than talk about futures.

Have a great night!