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Multiplayer update and brief v1.1 info

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Multiplayer update and brief v1.1 info

from JoeUser Forums

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).

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Reply #101 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Alstein, reply 97
Question: What if your population drops?  Does the merchant stop functioning?  Could/should someone unable to take a town just raze the houses instead?
End of Alstein's quote

I'd assume that they are just empty houses until you can do something with them again.
Of course you'd need a way to tell the game which buildings should be "filled" at which priority so you wouldn't have to monitor a city all the time and enable/disable buildings until your population is large enough to operate them all. That would be pretty boring micromanagement.

Like... a simple priority slider scale when clicking a building. Most of the time you'd just leave everything at default but maybe you need a particular building(s) operated at all times in that city instead of having buildings randomly operated...

The obvious alternative:  buildings that add a % or + bonus only operate to the degree of their workforce.  A 5 worker building producing 5 food would produce 1 food with only one worker.
Buildings that add a digital effect, like "can build cavalry" would still have the priority problem because they'd be useless with less than the full workforce.

 

Related issue:  should population die (collateral damage...) when a city is conquered?  That would add incentive to actually defend cities instead of just leaving them empty because you can just go there later with your main army and plug them back into your empire.
Since that would mean conquering the city twice, the loss could be substantial.

 

Quoting Frogboy, reply 93
The reason for the delay will be really obvious after next week's announcement and I think will make people very happy.
End of Frogboy's quote

Elemental will be able to make coffee? COOOOOOOL!

Reply #102 from Elemental Forums Top

Nothing is better then grand strategy in multiplayer. I want 15 hours mp-games, no problem, because it's such a great experience playing a game like this with other humans. Have not tried Elemental mp due to the wait for 1.1. A buddy of mine will buy it if it gets decent multiplayer, and then we can have whole weekends dedicated to Elemental. My God will it be grand.

The changes looks great, adding more interesting choices and strategy. Hopefully city spam is killed as a result of new food and population rules. Perhaps even harder measures are needed, we will see.

I am really looking forward to play Elemental again. Thanks for the great game you are making Stardock lads.

 

Sins of a Solar Empire II
Reply #103 from Elemental Forums Top

Would it be a good idea to hire Soren Johanson or Jon Shafer as temporary consultants?

Reply #104 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Kalin, reply 100
To be honest I'm starting to wonder more and more about how food is going to be generated now that caravans won't produce them. Are we going to have buildable farms in cities again?
End of Kalin's quote

I was surprised this took so long in this thread for somebody to mention. Outside of faster travel for troops, what's the point? The two games I've played have been loaded with areas dense in all resources BUT food with only a few having food near enough to the other resources.

 

As for me, I bought this game FOR multiplayer and cringe at the red-headed stepchild treatment it seems to be getting. I'm not a programmer or anything near, but I'm failing to understand why you can't take the single player experience and say "OK, instead of an AI player, a human gets to play this turn"

Also, going back to the counter issue in MP, is there any sort of 'human factor' logic built into the AI? My example: It takes milliseconds for the AI to cipher what it needs to do in it's next turn and milliseconds more to execute. Meanwhile, I've been able to pan my screen from one settlement to the other and zoom in, selecting a unit and the turn timer is over.

It's next to impossible to build units as quickly as the AI based on the amount of time it physically takes to do so. The AI never misses a counter deadline or fails to create new tasks in a timely manner, does it?

Reply #105 from Elemental Forums Top

All the listed changes sound highly positive to me at least in principle, the hard part will be in balancing it all correctly. Which is why I'm glad you aren;t rushing 1.1 too much. Mind you since I'm likley to become a father next week I may not have much time for playing for a while.

Reply #106 from Elemental Forums Top

Mind you since I'm likley to become a father next week I may not have much time for playing for a while.
End of quote

k1

Reply #107 from Elemental Forums Top

I'm failing to understand why you can't take the single player experience and say "OK, instead of an AI player, a human gets to play this turn"
End of quote

I'm afraid they use different architectures for SP and MP. In MP you have to send events to server on most of 'player' (AI too) actions, while in SP you can process them in place. Usually in games SP is implemented as client-server too, with AI acting as yet another client, but its less optimal performance-wise.

Reply #108 from Elemental Forums Top

Thank you for the update, as always it all sounds good.

@random_target: Love the Avatar. The Praying Mantis is one of the most fascinating insects ever!

Reply #109 from Elemental Forums Top

@frogboy: Well as you do the new AI-coding could you explain some stuff (certain rules, how the ai does longtime planning and strategies etc.) aka how it works (no code just telling what it does essentially) and to what kind of behaviour it leeds?

 

It would be for sure enlightening for me and some other people here who do coding in general but have not so much insight into AIs. 

Reply #110 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting 1SuperG, reply 104

Quoting Kalin, reply 100To be honest I'm starting to wonder more and more about how food is going to be generated now that caravans won't produce them. Are we going to have buildable farms in cities again?
I was surprised this took so long in this thread for somebody to mention. Outside of faster travel for troops, what's the point? The two games I've played have been loaded with areas dense in all resources BUT food with only a few having food near enough to the other resources.

 

As for me, I bought this game FOR multiplayer and cringe at the red-headed stepchild treatment it seems to be getting. I'm not a programmer or anything near, but I'm failing to understand why you can't take the single player experience and say "OK, instead of an AI player, a human gets to play this turn"

Also, going back to the counter issue in MP, is there any sort of 'human factor' logic built into the AI? My example: It takes milliseconds for the AI to cipher what it needs to do in it's next turn and milliseconds more to execute. Meanwhile, I've been able to pan my screen from one settlement to the other and zoom in, selecting a unit and the turn timer is over.

It's next to impossible to build units as quickly as the AI based on the amount of time it physically takes to do so. The AI never misses a counter deadline or fails to create new tasks in a timely manner, does it?
End of 1SuperG's quote

 

I think the line of thought originally was this:

 

People play MP competitively, people who play MP don't like broken stuff.  People who play SP prefer care more about fun tools then balance.

Putting the fun tools in MP will cause rage.

 

My  counter: A good mod engine would allow the MP community to form their own mod.  As long as you give that mod community proper support, both comms will be happy.

 

As for the AI: AI's tend to calculate a lot faster then us humans.  they are computers after all.  That said, you have all the time you need, so it's not really a big advantage.

Reply #111 from Elemental Forums Top


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.

End of quote

My friends and I play multi-player games every Friday night. For the last couple years, it's been predominantly FFH2. I had thought Elemental was the game which would replace it, but I still can't recommend Elemental to my friends in its current state. So when you look at the number of people playing it, consider that there may be some who would really like to play, but don't want to commit their time to playing a kind of rushed, bolt-on version of a game that is in transition itself.

Reply #112 from Elemental Forums Top

The 1.1 changes sound excellent and the secrecy surrounding the first expansion has intrigued me.  I was quite letdown and deflated following the original release, but at least thus far it seems you are committed to turning this game into something truly great.  Thanks for the update. 

Reply #113 from Elemental Forums Top

I would like to beta test v1.1 too. ^_^   I guess when you enable it for my account it will appear as an available (beta) update in Impulse?

Best regards,
Steven.

Reply #114 from Elemental Forums Top

That's probably the best idea- just enable the 1.1 betas as beta updates , so anyone who wants in can see.

 

More eyeballs= more chance to get things right down the line.  Besides, if people survived the Elemental betas, they can surrive just about anything ^_^

Reply #115 from Elemental Forums Top

Well if you are going to a global mana pool then please do it in a simalar fashion to AOW:SM.  Where every turn mana producing resources and the Soverign generate so much mana a turn and it goes to the pool. So if you had total mana generation per turn of 50 then that would go to the pool and build up each turn unless you cast spells or have upkeep which drains the pool. It would really suck if the mana did not accumulate each turn but simply drain away at the end of the turn. This would put a damper on using magic.

Eaxample: If your total mana accumulation per turn is 50 and you don't cast any spells or have any upkeep for 5 turns then your mana pool should be at 250 mana. But if on the 6th turn you cast a spell that cost 100 mana then once cast your mana pool would be at 150.

Now personally I would like the heros with magic to also contribute to the global mana pool like the spell casting heros in AOW but you already said that they will be a upkeep which I don't care much for but oh well.

 

Have a question about multiplay. Is it basically the single player game with all that it has to it but with the ability for players to play each other and play the AI or does it have it's own special rules?

Reply #116 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Alstein, reply 37

 

Idea on the training groups of units.  How about this, allow for upgrading smaller groups of units into bigger groups. 

 

You lose the old unit instantly, but the training time for the group is decreased, and the new unit starts with a portion of the old unit's XP. (1/3rd maybe?)

 

One more suggestion on caravans: I think as the trade route matures, it should take more then a single darkling, or dislike of excessive micromanagement to mess the caravan up.  Maybe give the caravans guards over time, or require a minimum combat strength to fight a caravan, which would increase over time?

 
End of Alstein's quote

I would love to have the ability to upgrade the units to larger ones however I would not want to lose the old unit instantly. The old unit should still be around for the time it takes for it to grow larger, allowing a chance for the unit to be killed before it becomes larger by an enemy.

For example: If I had a 1 man peasant unit and I wanted to upgrade to the 4 man peasant unit but it will take 4 turns to upgrade. The unit should still be around in the outpost or city upgrading but still can be used for defense or offense. If he gets killed then the upgrade failed.

Also when upgrading the unit should stay in a outpost or city while doing it or loos that turn. For example: If it takes 4 turns to upgrade but on turn two the unit leaves the city or has to fight for any reason that turn. The unit will lost that turn of upgrade so he still has three more turns to wait.

I like this because it gives that chance that the unit can be wiped out or at least delayed from becoming larger.

 

Reply #117 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Gwenio1, reply 40



Quoting StarReaper,
reply 39
They are not doing either Hotseat or By email.



They need to. They are the best forms of multiplayer, especially PBEM for long games.
End of Gwenio1's quote

Well they need to put Hotseat in. Nor sure why anyone would play a stratagy game by e-mail. where is the fun in that?

 

Reply #118 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Vhorthex, reply 89
I'm really confused about the whole process behind Multiplayer.

Frogboy himself said that he didn't feel that elemental had much potential as a competitive game. (Versus) But rather more enjoyable with a few friends against the AI. Now, that being said, the dev path still is pointing/leading towards competitive play. What's going on?

And the other thing that makes me even more confused, is that you say that you are waiting for player feedback in order to make changes to it. But you haven't enabled Coop play? So this means that all the feedback you are receiving is from people playing Versus. (Or against the AI... alone).

I really don't' understand the logic or purpose behind this. How are you going to make coop play better with versus feedback?

I'm really eager to play Multiplayer, with a friend, against the AI. Although I'd like to contribute to the MP experience, I am not at all interested in versus play.

I really think this whole different game for multiplayer concept should be thrown out the door, and simply focus on Singleplayer version, and make a direct port to MP, and THEN, work on it to make it better.

You, the dev team, basically created a multiheaded dragon to deal with, rather than one. Since all the techs were changed, support will have to be divided in two. (To some extent).

Although I won't be able to get a straight answer, I'd really like to know why was multiplayer version geared towards competitive play, even though it was stated that it would be best enjoyed in Coop play. And why was another version of the game created, rather than simply port the Singleplayer experience to Multiplayer?

I'm more than thrilled with the changes coming to Elemental, but still highly worried about the future of Multiplayer mode. I said it many times before, but I really wished that they would of just ported SP game to MP. And after everything is all balanced, if they wanted to venture towards a specific MP mode or chagnes. THEN... do it. Trying to do 2 things at once is usually a bad idea.

I really hope COOP mp mode can be implemented, so that the coop community CAN give feedback. I just find it ridiculous that the mode MP would be fun for, isn't implemetned, and that the feedback for the versus will be used as reference... My mind it is confused.

Still, thanks for the hard work, just hope coop MP will see the light of day.

Regards,

V
End of Vhorthex's quote

Coop MP mode? what the hell are you taling about? This is not Quake then is a stratagy game. Just ally with the other Players just like in any TBS or RTS game and fight the AI. I'm not sure what different features would be in  "coop MP"

Reply #119 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Bellack, reply 115
Well if you are going to a global mana pool then please do it in a simalar fashion to AOW:SM.  Where every turn mana producing resources and the Soverign generate so much mana a turn and it goes to the pool. So if you had total mana generation per turn of 50 then that would go to the pool and build up each turn unless you cast spells or have upkeep which drains the pool. It would really suck if the mana did not accumulate each turn but simply drain away at the end of the turn. This would put a damper on using magic.

Eaxample: If your total mana accumulation per turn is 50 and you don't cast any spells or have any upkeep for 5 turns then your mana pool should be at 250 mana. But if on the 6th turn you cast a spell that cost 100 mana then once cast your mana pool would be at 150.

Now personally I would like the heros with magic to also contribute to the global mana pool like the spell casting heros in AOW but you already said that they will be a upkeep which I don't care much for but oh well.
End of Bellack's quote

Heroes that are imbued will require a mana upkeep. The only other diffrence in what has been out lined from what is in AoW:SM is they have not said if individual casters will have a limit to how much mana they can use from the pool per turn (spellpoints).

Quoting Bellack, reply 117

Well they need to put Hotseat in. Nor sure why anyone would play a stratagy game by e-mail. where is the fun in that?
End of Bellack's quote

If you put in hotseat, you might as well add PBEM. And for long, large, epic games it is better for multiplayer than normal internet MP. There is a thread dedicated to explaining this in the multiplayer board.

Reply #120 from Elemental Forums Top

Question

 

I thought the deadline for getting the 2nd XP free was end of October, not end of September.

 

Correct or not?

 

 

Reply #121 from Demigod Forums Top

Quoting Frogboy, reply 12

Any chance of some information on the first Expansion pack?  I think I remember reading that Tactical Battles are getting an over-haul?
I'd love to share those details but my PR minder would have me killed.  Poor Steph, she's been a real hero these past few months. Imagine your job being keeping me out of trouble?
End of Frogboy's quote

Yea I know. Can you imagine if Brad Wardell (Frogboy/Draginol) was a big-company CEO?

Reply #122 from Elemental Forums Top

Brad,  I would be very happy to help with the betas.  And if your design / implementation team has specific areas they wish tested, etc.  Let me know and i will focus on that.

Reply #123 from Elemental Forums Top

This may have been asked already, but I dont like reading other peoples post.  I'm a jerk I guess, anyway...

Pioneers will be able build on resources outside your zone of control (as long as it’s neutral).

 

Does this mean that resources are no longer going to be linked to cities?  Right now, to gain the benefits of a resource, they mustbe in your zone of control, and must be linked to a city and then the resource becomes apart of the global resources.  Are you saying that now the resource just goes directly to the global pool of resources?  Does this mean that I can specialize a city, like knowledge, economic, etc, and it doesnt matter what resources are near, as it will have the same effect either way?  Right now, if I have a gold mine that provides 5 gold, in the city it is linked, I can build improvements that, lets say, increase the gold that city creates by 100%, so that city is making 10 gold.  If the resources are not linked to a city, I'm just curious how all this will work.

Reply #124 from Elemental Forums Top

I'm particularly keen on point 4 because in an post-apocalyptic environment it makes no sense for wealth to be derived from precious metals, after all gold is just shiny yellow lead.  The true determinants of wealth are trade and specialisation and that's what towns and cities do so well.  And the bigger the city is the more trade and the more specialisation there can be.

 

So as well as potentially improving gameplay it'll actually make your in-game economy more realistic.

Reply #125 from Elemental Forums Top

Mmmm, shiny yellow lead reminds me of the yummy paint chips I use to eat as a child...