Frogboy Frogboy

Multiplayer update and brief v1.1 info

▼

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).

262,903 views 145 replies +2 Loading…
Reply #126 from Elemental Forums Top

Also, I think the game's soundtrack should be changed to all Journey songs. 

Reply #127 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting ElanaAhova, reply 122
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.
End of ElanaAhova's quote

We are leaning towards having v1.1 have a somewhat longer beta process as next week I'll be stepping down as interim Producer on Elemental (I took over as Producer last Spring when the engine was not keeping up with the game design to see what could and couldn't be done). So I'll be returning to my traditional role of designer/AI developer starting November 1.  We'll use v1.1 as our transition from me running the show to him running the show.

Groupy 2 - Organize multiple applications into grouped tabs on your Windows desktop
Reply #128 from Elemental Forums Top


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

Why don't you make it not suck royally, and *THEN* see how many people are playing it.  You said yourself in another post, *DON'T PLAY MULTIPLAYER!!!  DON'T BUY MY GAME IF YOU EXPECT TO PLAY MULTIPLAYER!!!" and now you're saying you'll update it based upon the number of people playing it????  I'm not the only one that sees the ludicrocity in that decision, right??

I bought two copies before I caught your post about "Don't buy my game for MP!" crap.  Actually, I bought two copies, went "Jesus Christ...this can't be right" then went into the multiplayer forums and saw that it was "right."  I bought it so that me and my wife (and my stepson) can all play the game on our LAN, like we still play Heroes V, and either take turns kicking the AI in the teeth, or go head to head and battle it out.  Our biggest WTF? moment was the lack of tactical battles.  Our second big WTF? moment was how inaccurate Tac battle resolution seems to be, or how much the CPU underestimates the spell "Blizzard."

So here's an idea.  Put Tac battles back into MP before you do anything else.  Just flip whatever switch is in the code to make it Tac battle, or add the switch so anyone who can stand it can flip it on themselves, or flip it off, whatever.  I don't care what you think, or what you think you know, or how you feel about it, or how "slow" you're predicting it'll be, how much it'll suck.  It's not your problem.  It's our problem.  Just put it back in, don't think about it, don't question it, just give us the *option* to wait out the monotony, or combat it out.  It doesn't matter how unfun the game being "frozen" while it says "resolving Tac battle" is, getting bum-raped by the CPU's Tac battle resolution without any choice or option on our part is a lot less fun.  Regardless of the tedium, it will actually allow us to play what's left of this game in a multiplayer setting.  We're already playing the cloth map for performance issues, taking away Tac battles just makes this game like playing "fantasy chess" with a 4-year old.  Just put it in.  It's there, it's easy, it'll make MP actually *do* something beyond flip a coin, and atleast we'll understand why our sovereign died a horrible death.

Then give us some more maps.  Give us some more random maps.  Give us more than 2 variations of 1 choice.

Then fix the bug where it spawns our sovereign right next to a hostile bear that attacks us immediately so we see a book popup with the name we chose for our world, and then the "You lose!" screen.  It'll stop being funny by that point.  Well, actually, it'll still be hilarious to me.

*THEN*.   And only then, come back and see how many people are playing MP, and how we're playing MP, and what sorts of people will be playing MP, and what they want in MP, and start fielding some bugs/balance issues/fixes/tweaks/improvements on MP.  Right now it's the Lord of the Ring's edition of Pong.  We need a little more substance before we'll take MP seriously or we'll even know what we want.

Here's a hint though.  Elemental makes us want to play Heroes V.  Then we go through turns in Heroes V talking about how cool it'd be to make our own Heroes in Heroes V, and how I could deck out my wraiths with Cedar Longbows.

Here's another hint.  We don't even bother firing up Heroes V anymore if we're not playing Multiplayer.  In fact, the only reason (the *only* reason) we bought all the expansion packs was when we went back to buy a second copy as part of a bundle to go back and play MP again.  In fact, we currently own 3 copies (wife, stepson, myself).  Once one of us had the cool new Xpac goodness, we all had to have it.

Here's a final hint.  MP will help balance out SP, but not vice verse.  People will always do strange, unexpected crap the AI will never think of.  If you take an MP-centric stance towards balance, then the SP will fall predictably into place.  If you take a SP-centric stance towards balance, we'll just come up with the "one strategy to rule them all" and call anyone else who doesn't play like that a "noob" and the game will be a boring reiteration of the same strategy over and over again.  Make randomization of resources important enough to cause us to reactively alter our strategies, but not important enough that we just quit-out if we don't start with 1 food and 1 gold at positions 10 and 5.  Give us hope if we don't have it, but make us wish we had it, and care enough to go find it.

I will say, you, and you're entire staff, have made some remarkable improvements in a very short time, and you've all shown a real dedication into making this game into *something*.  I just hope you guys don't put in all that hard work and expect to ride out SP forever.

Reply #129 from Elemental Forums Top

While I don't agree necessarily with the tone of the above post, the main point is entirely correct.

 

I think making SP and MP content be the same, then hearing what the MP folks want or mod would help with SP balance the most. 

 

While MP may be a tiny fraction of the community, they do serve an important role. 

Reply #130 from Elemental Forums Top

I strongly agree with this.  Make MP like SP, let people play it for a while, and *then* ask us what we want added/changed. :thumbsup:

Best regards,
Steven.

Reply #131 from Elemental Forums Top


Like Alstein, I don't agree with the tone of Mercestes's post, but I do agree with some of the points he makes.  Mutliplayer needs to have the option of tactical battles, it also needs to have the option of more victory conditions outside of plain conquest.  Also more maps need to be supported.  The creator of the multiplayer game should be given the option of turning these extra's on, and players joining the game should be able to see what options have been enabled and then have the chance to exit the game if they don't like the options.  Also it would be nice for LAN support to be added.

 

Having said that, I realise that this is a lot of work to ask Stardock to do, and I appreciate the fact that it's going to take time for these features to be implemented.  I just wish people like Mercestes would stop with the hositilty towards Brad.  The man is doing everything he can to make the game fun for us.  Some game publishers just ignore the community when they rightly complain about a game having problems, (2kGames I'm looking at you here with Bioshock 2). Stardock isn't ignoring the community, they've been up front with the community, they've taken responsibility, and they are working on fixing the game.  It's just going to take time.

Reply #132 from Elemental Forums Top

They already said they were going to put TACTICAL battles into the MP version of the game, why are you till whining about this? It isn't going to be right now but sometime in the future, so stop complaining and be patient.

Reply #134 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting BlackRainZ, reply 132
They already said they were going to put TACTICAL battles into the MP version of the game, why are you till whining about this? It isn't going to be right now but sometime in the future, so stop complaining and be patient.
End of BlackRainZ's quote

 

I missed have missed where they said that. Thanks for letting us know :).

 

Cheers,


Raven

Reply #135 from Elemental Forums Top

I have no hostility towards Brad.  I do have hostility towards the game and some of the decisions surrounding it.  If Brad wants to take sole responsibility for that, then so be it.  There is a 4-page thread in the MP section politely asking that Tac battles be returned to MP.  Now Brad is saying "We'll see how many people are actually playing MP and then dedicate resources to MP based upon that."  It's a falictious decision that's dealing with a corrupted sampling, and honestly, the time for politeness is over.  If four pages of "please" isn't working, then maybe "hostility" will drive the point home.  I really don't care if I have to villify myself to that end.

If it was dogpiling, I'd just say the game sucked, ask for my refunds and go merrily upon my way.  However, I do have a vested interest in this game turning into something I actually want to play Multiplayer.  Brad has made some comments in other threads regarding MP and waiting for Tac battles that I don't agree with and I want to be extremely clear, on behalf of everyone, that I do not agree with them.  Nrad can go on not liking MP if he wants, some of us like what could have been the MP experience in Elemental, and other games like Elemental.

Now Brad is liable to come back and say "I don't want your support."  That's fine, Brad is welcome to give me my $100 back if he feels that way.  Otherwise, I feel like it was fairly predictable that MP would work a lot like SP - random, and I feel a little ripped off that what was pretty obvious to me was not the case, and I would very much like for it to be made that way.  It's not whining, it's an expectation, one I would like fulilled ASAP.  Not one that I would like to be determined by "how many people are playing MP."  I really think that was a silly thing to say at this juncture.

If that's hostile...then paint me violent.  I don't care.  I'm not one for subtleties or minced words.  A very wise man once said, "People keep saying that.  If I were indeed hostile, you would be bleeding."

Reply #136 from Elemental Forums Top

I don't really get it... if you look at what they have been doing for the last two patches, it seems pretty clear to me that they are putting in a real concerted effort in multiplayer for Elemental. Now you might not be happy with it, in it's current state, but saying that they aren't trying to improve it is just fallacy. What he's saying in the comment regarding allocating resources to MP is that they have limited resources, and have a LOT of things on their plate right now, so multiplayer won't be a top priority unless there are a lot of people interested.

 

Let's face it here, SD has NEVER been known for great multiplayer. Their successful games (GC2) never relied on it, and does well despite not having any support for it. In fact, you might even say that they earned a reputation for shying away from multiplayer. However, because people in GC2 were seriously asking for it (along with tactical battles), they ultimately decided to give it a try to see just how much multiplayer have an impact on the game. In some respects, Elemental is a trial run of several things people wanted from GC2, but they couldn't do with GC2, namely multiplayer and tactical combat. It's no surprise then, that neither of these points are up to standard, because they have very little experience in these fields. That doesn't mean that they aren't trying to fix/improve it. You just can't expect people to be perfect from the start.

 

The main problem right now is that Elemental is a somewhat flawed game, and they are putting in a lot of effort to fix it. But with limited resources, they are focusing on the game itself (magic system, tactical battles, etc), so there are very little resources left for multiplayer. Which is why Brad said what he did.

 

Reply #137 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Mercestes, reply 135
I have no hostility towards Brad.  I do have hostility towards the game and some of the decisions surrounding it.  If Brad wants to take sole responsibility for that, then so be it.  There is a 4-page thread in the MP section politely asking that Tac battles be returned to MP.  Now Brad is saying "We'll see how many people are actually playing MP and then dedicate resources to MP based upon that."  It's a falictious decision that's dealing with a corrupted sampling, and honestly, the time for politeness is over.  If four pages of "please" isn't working, then maybe "hostility" will drive the point home.  I really don't care if I have to villify myself to that end.

If it was dogpiling, I'd just say the game sucked, ask for my refunds and go merrily upon my way.  However, I do have a vested interest in this game turning into something I actually want to play Multiplayer.  Brad has made some comments in other threads regarding MP and waiting for Tac battles that I don't agree with and I want to be extremely clear, on behalf of everyone, that I do not agree with them.  Nrad can go on not liking MP if he wants, some of us like what could have been the MP experience in Elemental, and other games like Elemental.

Now Brad is liable to come back and say "I don't want your support."  That's fine, Brad is welcome to give me my $100 back if he feels that way.  Otherwise, I feel like it was fairly predictable that MP would work a lot like SP - random, and I feel a little ripped off that what was pretty obvious to me was not the case, and I would very much like for it to be made that way.  It's not whining, it's an expectation, one I would like fulilled ASAP.  Not one that I would like to be determined by "how many people are playing MP."  I really think that was a silly thing to say at this juncture.

If that's hostile...then paint me violent.  I don't care.  I'm not one for subtleties or minced words.  A very wise man once said, "People keep saying that.  If I were indeed hostile, you would be bleeding."
End of Mercestes's quote

 

Do you not know how to read? I just said a few posts up that SD already said they were going to put tactical battles into MP. IT HAS ALREADY BEEN SAID THEY WOULD. I hope you can understand this. They didn't say when, but they said it would be done some time in the future.

Reply #138 from Elemental Forums Top

I'm holding off on Multiplayer until it's all full featured as the rest of the game (especially tactical battles).

So, that would be my vote for "What people want to see added".  I want the SP game, in MP.  Until then, I'm not interested.

Reply #139 from Elemental Forums Top

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).

 

Are larger armies really a good idea?

Single NPC/champions vs. armies doesn't sound like fun or a good idea! This makes a large army more important than NPC/Champions which may destroy the rpg element in the game! Will larger battles really going be more fun or just more boring? To me the tactical battles are about leveling/saving NPC/Champions not army vs army.

 

 

 

 

Reply #140 from Elemental Forums Top

That's already the case, Champions are jokes late game.

Reply #141 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Gwenio1, reply 40

Quoting StarReaper, reply 39They 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

 

TOTALLY AGREE They have to implement those!!!

Who is going to sit in front of a screen alone waiting for someone else somewhere else to end his turn? WE WANT PBEM!!

Reply #142 from Elemental 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

 

She's obviously not paid enough for that impossible task.   }:)   

 

J/k.  Still I think it'd be really hard.

Reply #143 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Frogboy, reply 73
Grr. Stupid forum, I wrote a huge response and the forum ate it.

 
End of Frogboy's quote

Psst... That is why I use MS Word for large forum responces :grin: It has an added benefit of fixing my horrible spelling O:)

Reply #144 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting PaxTerminus, reply 143

Quoting Frogboy, reply 73Grr. Stupid forum, I wrote a huge response and the forum ate it.

 

Psst... That is why I use MS Word for large forum responces It has an added benefit of fixing my horrible spelling
End of PaxTerminus's quote

I thought MS Word isn't capable of long texts :rofl: :rofl:

Reply #145 from Stardock Forums Top

Quoting Frogboy, reply 68

Quoting Pantasd, reply 60i think the bonus of getting the free expansion is done but iam not 100% sure

 

the first expansion is free to everyone no matter when you bought the game

 

the second expansion is free for ppl who own the game before 30 septembar
Correct. And the scope of both expansions has recently been increased so the first one won't be coming out in 2010 anymore.  It'll be clear why next week.
End of Frogboy's quote

Early posts stated that the deadline for the second free expansion was before 1.1 was released. I did not realize this had changed, or I would have waited to purchase until I found out if 1.1 was a legitimate improvement. I have not even played the game yet, planning to wait for 1.1.