Multiplayer update and brief v1.1 info

So this week we’re finishing the process of porting the 1.0x updates to multiplayer. The new combined version will be called v1.09E.  It has a handful of single player game fixes (like the free money from pioneer thing <g>).

After v1.09E, we’ll take a step back to see how people are playing multiplayer and start putting together plans for future improvements in that area based on the number of people in the community playing it.

For myself, I’ve been working on a different branch (v1.1) along with additional content for players of the book (Elemental: Destiny’s Embers).  People have been asking about what the focus of version 1.1 is.

So as some know, the initial release of Elemental was pretty buggy. Obviously, we didn’t intend that and we apologize for the inconvenience and disappointment this caused to our fans and community.  So these updates thus far have been largely about addressing those issues.  Given how traumatic the past month has been on all of us here, I can tell you we’ve spent a lot of time looking into the what, why, and how.  Obviously, fixing things won’t change the early negative reviews. But we’re big believers of word of mouth and we’ll see how things go as the game improves.

Version 1.1, however is almost purely new features and game play changes.  Briefly, here are the general changes:

1. A global mana pool. Right now, every spell caster has their own private mana pool. This in turn allows players to imbue lots of units with spell casting ability who in turn can summon their own army of monsters.  In version 1.1, there will only be 1 mana pool to draw on and every summoned unit will have its own per turn mana cost to maintain it and every imbued champion will have a mana upkeep cost as well.  This goes back to our original concept of what a Channeler is: Are you going to keep your power for yourself and become incredibly powerful or spread it out into many creations?
2. A revamp of the spells. Because of the above, we can have a much larger variance in the way spells function.
3. Population becomes a stored resource rather than a consumed resource.  This means that soldiers, improvements, pioneers, etc. use population for them to function.  Players thus have to make choices between sending their citizens off to fight wars or use them to research new technologies, study spells, run your shops, etc.
4. Money becomes more derived from people rather than things. Rather than relying on gold mines (which will still exist but won’t be the defacto source of wealth) money will come from the economic activity of your citizens (again, getting back to the concept of you’re rebuilding a society and your strength comes from the strength of your society).  The higher your population in a city, the more money it makes. Higher level cities gain access to improvements that magnify how much each citizen generates. Send your people off to war enmasse and you’ll hurt your economy.
5. Training times for groups of units will have far less penalty. In essence, we will encourage larger sized armies to move towards more epic battles as well as reward those who have more developed, large cities (i.e. able to supply more citizens for training).
6. Outposts won’t provide any housing anymore which also means no area of influence until you start housing people.  Outposts will function like…well, outposts. Guarding an area.
7. Pioneers will be able build on resources outside your zone of control (as long as it’s neutral).
8. Caravans will provide greater economic benefits but will no longer provide food.
9. The new multithreaded AI will be in v1.1 which should allow the AI to fight a much more effective game and allow me to implement more background analysis functions (like in GalCiv II) rather than purely reactive (Elemental 1.0x).
10. Technologies will begin provide special abilities to various types of units. In addition, special abilities will not be tied to “mana” but rather have a cooldown time (and in fact, cooldowns will be in generally).

This is, by no means, even a remotely complete list and it still pales compared to what we’ll be adding in the first free expansion.

We’re also in the process of further increasing staffing on Elemental based on analysis of what areas we need to improve internally. 

Anyway, v1.09E should be up this week, v1.1 should hopefully be ready sometime in October but no promises. We’re giving a lot of the team some time off to recover from the past few months.  At the very least, if you guys want a sneak peek, we can look at letting those who want to have access to our beta builds of v1.1 to tide them over (though I don’t recommend this for most users).