I too think that the post release support is one of a kind, this is a real gem of a game & will make stardock a fortune as long as they continue to make it all it can be.  I for one have more money to throw at tha game, just waitin for an opportunity.  Wish I could send another $20 or so ya'lls way to make sure the ai is a 9.5/10 instead of 4/10 or 7/10 (heck, even if it was a monthly charge, heh).

It isn't. The comment was regarding the level of post-release service, and not the justification of a poor release. Stardock has a history of supporting games post-release, and this is where the appreciation is stemming from.

I agree. However, from a consumer's point of view, having dealt with the bad, you tend to appreciate the better. On top of that, Stardock is one of the best game development companies when it comes to post-release support, so they do very well in that category by comparison.

Jeez, now I know why people always accuse me of being a fanboy. But it's just hard not to note all the cool things that this company represents, despite the failings in some areas. But then nothing and no one is perfect.

Ooh, who is this person? When will we know? I wonder if I've seen his posts here...

I've gotta hand it to you, Brad. I'm starting to see where this thing is goin'. Building a solid infrastructure to allow the mod community to content the crap out of this will be a real future money maker for you guys. If I had some extra gildar laying around I'd invest beyond my $50. If Derek and crew can patch my real life income daily like they do the beta builds I'd be a happy camper and could throw some Tarthian gildar your way. Derek did tell Toby to do something about my gas in another post so I'm optimistic this will happen.

Despite the initial bumpy road you guys are walking the talk in my humble opinion. Kudos!

Please add the ability to invert x and y camera movement!  Please add the ability to invert x and y camera movement!

This is a recording . . .

Good grief!  I only patched to t this morning!  Or was it u ?  This is great!  And bring on the mop-API specialist!  This is, once again, great!

I just had my first war...

Failed to note the turns, but one empire smothered me with those golem things and warriors.

So yeah, it was a defeat by wipe-out.

Score of 2.  That's one thing I DO remember....that "2" popping right out at me.

And now the guessing game begins. Is it Heavenfall? Seanw3? Is it an experienced and well known mod-developer from another game?

Throw us a clue!

Ooh, maybe it's that guy that made FfH2!

If the game was finished on release then why was it necessary to hire Derek Paxton to be the new senior producer if the game was already produced? And why was it necessary to go back and revamp the entire spell/magic system. If the game is finished how come naval warefare is absent. Why is military technology so boringly linear i.e. mace is better than sword is better then dagger is better than spear. But the guy with the spear should be able to hit and kill the guy with the mace first. There is no strategic depth to tactical battles just equip the best weapon and kill. That level of depth is what I would expect at an alpha/early beta stage of development, not a finished product. I understand that "finished" is a subjective term but if you had release Elemental in August with no crashes then you would still not get reviews above 5-6/10 not the 9/10 you were aiming for.

I hope that this post doesn't reflect the true attitude of Stardock but nonetheless it removes any remaining desire I have to play this game at this point. The developers implied they were building the spiritual successor to MoM in the fantasy world. What we have is more of a medieval tbs with a bit of magic thrown on the side. Ok I agree that the core features are in but they need at least another 6 months of polish before i would be tempted to call it complete.

Having a huge selection of dynamic and interesting spells, unique faction traits, special abilities for sovereigns/monsters/units/races, naval conquest, rock-paper-scissors style combat is what is needed to make Elemental a great game. All of this was missing from 1.0 but I hope that you develop these things for the expansion.

Expecting modders to build the game that the community was promised and therefore expected is even worse than the paid beta we are going through now. If modders do create a really great new game, so great that noone plays the original Elemental it will be a testament to how mediocre 1.0-1.1 is, even if stability is 100%.

Eh, you can complain about it or help the people who are working on making this game better.

About war: The AI is very aggressive but can't properly evaluate the strength of the opponent I think. I played a bunch of turns last night as Gilden (difficulty:hard) and two empires kept coming at my town with underpowered forces. All of them single units, of course. I'm not sure if they don't understand that units guarding a city are more powerful than in the open field... If they would have kept coming at a higher pace I might have been killed but they let me and my units heal between the attacks. Still kind of fun though, went to bed at 1am.

I have not noticed any difference between empires and kingdoms when it comes to strength.

Perhaps a more economic method should be made available.

I think I vaguely recall the Alchemists Lab name being taken already, but the old premise of Alchemy was to turn things to gold from lesser invaluable things.

Maybe we should make a building that converts x gold to y metal, noting that the ratio should be off a fair amount, reverse the order so to speak since "Gold" is the purest element it can be transformed into Iron.

Just some thoughts on the AI Metal Dilemma.

Will the AI ever be able to play on a map of islands/continents?

Indeed.

I said this back in September but it's important even after the success we've been seeing in the past few weeks:

EVEN if Elemental had been delayed to February it still would have been a disaster.

This is important: The problem with Elemental's launch was not an issue of not having enough time. It was a problem of Stardock still operating like a tiny studio while trying to make a AAA title.  Our "logistics" failed.  If it had been delayed until February, it would have still been a disaster.

As sucky as it is, Stardock needed this shake up. If you're going to make AAA titles, you can't make them like a hobby shop. Most long time people know that Stardock's main business is enterprise software. That's what pays the bills. Our software. But with Elemental, we decided to make a "real game".

The very idea that Elemental was seen and designed to content with games like Civilization (which had over 10X the budget of Elemental) should have put the company on a different track. It should have been making its games the same way it makes its software. Full time project managers, organized QA, and lots of other basic processes that just weren't done because our games were usually just a few people working on them.

So after Elemental launched, the best way for Stardock to build the studio to being where it needs to be is to go out and begin attracting the world's best talent.  Kael was the first person I turned to (not just because we're friends but also of his qualifications). Kael's day job was as an ENTERPRISE project manager working with Fortune 500 companies.

The next key position is to bring someone on board who can design games and knows what modding is inside and out. 

Do you guys remember me talking last year about ME learning Python so I could begin putting that into Elemental? Think about how misguided that is. The CEO of Stardock picking up python and trying to learn "on the job" on how to integrate deep modding like that? No. Wrong. The correct path is to find people who are already gods at this.

Not to mention, if we're going to move back to having a second studio team, we will need to bring on an experienced designer/PM from the game industry who is familiar with our genre.

Yes.  Once they (those bums upstairs) tell me the ultimate way naval mechanics will be handled. There is a lot of internal dislike of the current way ships are handled.

Modding with Python was one of the things that initially got me interested in the game (that and the real-time battles). I know you answered this somewhere else already and I understand if you don't want to commit to an answer - but when are the Python tools going to be released? At least a year from now was your last answer - am I right?

God I love video games.

EDIT: oh wait, there's a thread for this over here: https://forums.elementalgame.com/402208

Thanks for the thoughts and reply, Brad.

Don't doubt for a second I had my "WTF!" moments when I first purchased the game. However, my attitude changed when I perused the forums and witnessed some open and honest discussions about what happened and the go-forward plan. In the end we can choose to cry over spilled milk or clean it up and pour another glass. It's refreshing to know that user's ideas are at least read and considered here. I fully realize alot of ideas won't make the final product but to know the developers are considering them is enough for me. They have a business to run.

"You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time." - John Lydgate

Really like the direction the latest builds have taken, great work.

Speaking of Ships, their movement is painfully slow.  Hopefully there will be a pass on Ship animation.

Currently playing "Kraxis" on a Medium map at challenging difficulty.

Recruiting Heroes needs a pass.  Early in game I found a couple, then nobody until way late in the game.  Actually flooded with heroes now.  The problem seems to be that Heroes are only spawning in uncontrolled territory.  Would be nice if some Heroes were recruitable in addition to chasing finding them around the countryside.

Food generation is still a bit of an issue.  In the current release I was thinking it would be great if you could get 1 food generated on building a Harbor.  I imagine the expansion will have fisheries and all, but that doesn't help me now 

City Building has been vastly improved but still a bit clunky.  On building to level 4, there are problems with expanding the cities due to some tile constraints.  Not sure what the max tile area is allowed, but it's very difficult to develop level 5 cities right now.  In the same vein, when clearing forest area around cities, you are unable to clear enough area to place a 4-tile building.

The enemy AI has yet to cast spells at me  =(

 Surface deposits tend to vanish rapidly when near any advanced civilisation. Once they're gone you've got this highly laborious process of having to learn to mine, which includes such essential technological leaps as removing rainwater from the bottom so it doesn't flood, avoid tunneling into underground lakes and preventing the ceiling collapsing on your miners. And it helps if you figure out some way of finding out where the metal ore is without having to dig holes all over the place. Once all that's done you end up with a whole bunch of iron ore that some bright spark has to work out how to smelt and actually produce a useful metal from, then someone has to figure out how to work it so you can get decent tools from it, which is a whole other bucket of industy.

I don't think it's lack of metal that's the problem, they certainly have sufficient when I trade from them. It's the single units instead which suggests that perhaps the AI dislikes the multiplier on the cost for squads.

Given that a squad is always more powerful than the single unit what it perhaps needs to do is to by default always pick the largest group it can, unless there is a pressing need not to (i.e. it can't afford them / needs a garrison urgently). It sometimes seems to me it'll still churn out a single unit even when I've seen groups of said unit wandering around, which makes no sense whatsoever. Or at least I can't think of any reason I'd want to train a single bowman if I could train a party.