When Is .87 Coming?

It would be nice to get a tiny peek behind part of the screen. Its been awhile since a meaningful journal, expressing the current mindset of the devs, has been released.

I can see that, with the beta turning public, a lot of widespread (and sometimes conflicting) ideas are being introduced.

Therefore possibly, with a bit of (contemporary) communication, we might have a better idea of which of our ideas are useless and which are useful.

-> clearly things which are a complete change of the game are right out, but I feel that there is still a large gray area of how far we can press for change in certain areas while still being heard.

 -> If we know the sort of key words and key concepts that activate the mute button, we could perhaps trim and treat our ideas until they are fitting with what is considered 'acceptable' for this installation of Elemental.

And Example:

I think the two primary concerns with this build are 'glass cannons' and 'not enough uniqueness'

-> I think the unique-ness issue is of even greater concern than the 'glass cannon' issue, because being able to play every faction the same doesn't lead to a lot of replayability.

(examples of uniqueness. As an Empire, I have all these death spells to play with, but I might want to play a Kingdom game just to see how it feels to play with life magic instead. Kingdom/Empire is a real choice. Choosing Unending Legions is a real choice. I think we need more real choices.)

-------> While some may argue that Unending Legions is one of the best current civ traits, it (and death worship, and serpent's pact) really changes the way you play.

Death Worship and Serpents pact may add new toys later on, while Unending legion affects everything about the early game.

-> The choice between Unending Legion and Lucky is another good one I think, because you have to choose whether you want survivable soldiers or throwaway soldiers. Yes you can choose BOTH, but then you can't choose something like Enduring, Death Worship, or Serpents Pact.

There are currently some good examples of choices ... I just think we should have more of these relating to Race.

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Minor stat differences and Art is the only reason to choose between Quendar, Tarth, etc. Unique (functioning) races, and more choices for factions ... can lead to the wild Faction differences that we see in other games.

And I don't think we need invisible or flying units to do it either! (although stealth traits are fun ;))

My guess is next week and it'll probably be v0.90.

That's creeping awfully close to 1.0. Probably a dumb question, but do you consider 1.0 a release candidate, or does that number not necessarily have any significance to release?

Awesome! Except. Given the version numbers it sounds like you're gonna be at 1.0 within a month. I think the game needs more polish time than that.

Or more polish awareness.

  Yes, with fixed AI, better difficulty choices, an a ton of bug fixes ... FE will be a decent game

I think the main focus right now should be to have Factions and Races more different (from an absolute mechanics perspective), to increase replayability.

More Uniqueness = (more) fun and replayability = a better game

In the last game's beta we got to .98 and then went through 10 new builds after that. The numbers getting higher seems to relay information about the broader game aspects being finished, such as crashes, memory use, UI, settings, and overall design. The sooner we get to .99, the sooner we can expect to see the smaller details get addressed, like faction difference, improvements mattering, AI intelligence, lackluster citylevelup, spell additions, leveling refinement, path variety for heroes, etc. 

I am glad things are moving quickly. Of course I am hoping there will be some major feedback gathered before release, which seems to be likely in 3-4 months. I doubt they would move to release without majority approval from the community. 

Yeah... I hope their not planning to release it soon. While it is hands down WAY better them WoM. It's still no where near completion stage in my mind. Please don't release it until it's ready. I actually really want this one to succeed and become a classic. =(

If a month is the approximate timeline I am worried for Fallen Enchantress.  It is in no way ready for release yet.  I would expect maybe six months development to get it to say 70-80 metacritic level.  If the release date was planned for the end of the year I would feel confident that we will get a good game. 

Frogboy - thanks for the update - looking forward to .90

You can always have .100 after .99. Or .991. The numbers don't mean anything, except that 1.0 is the first release version.

Actually even that's not for sure. If you look at minecraft the betas went up to 1.8

A release next week would be great. And maybe even an update on what's planned on being changed. Like Tasunke mentioned, it'd be great to know what to give feedback on (and what not to).

PLease put the quests back in!  I really miss the storytelling that comes with the quests, and right now they are all absent barring a few Deadly ones.

I'm having good fun with the current build. Some added hotkey and other interface improvements would be welcome. Also better AI. I wouldn't say it needed 6 more months of development.

Whats your thinking behind what you said feelotraveller?

Mainly game balance issues.  Quick example - last beta we had stacks of doom, this beta we have spam mooks. 

There are still basic mechanisms which need work - pathing/movement for example.  Good work is being done here but we are far from finality.

Combat is far from balanced.

Faction differentiation is lacking.

Then we will need the bigger game balances - rush vs. turtling vs. something in between.  Civilisation vs. warfare vs. magic being more or less equally viable.

Also a balancing of the timing of progression across multiple interacting elements (think of HP increases, or certain techs being OPed at a given point in the game, or the potential spell effects with x number of shards; but things like growth rates or the relative speed to get to each of the victory conditions are also relevant).  We are not able to even investigate this at the moment since the early game is so unbalanced.

And a lot of 'AI' (what's intelligent about it... ) programming afterwards so that our opposition is something worthy of the name.

I've probably left out more than I've mentioned.

On the more general level I think Stardock need to be very careful with having a polished product this time around after the fiasco that was WoM.  Two high profile failures in a row is not good.  You can bet all the reviewers are going to mention WoM in the first breath too.

Pioneers are too cheap and over half of the game's AI opponents are expansionist.

The start of the game is dull and way too slow.

Would like to see faster XP gains for champions even if that means the bonuses they get are not as powerful. Smaller carrots more often > Big carrots less often

Faction differentiation has already been mentioned, but it's worth mentioning again.

Randomness in the tech tree is something I would like to see gone. Some games I am able to research 3rd Book of the Magi and sometimes it never shows up. I would like to see the spells in 3rd Book of the Magi unlocked earlier too. Especially Twilight Bloom. It seems totally worthless to be an Earth Archmagi when Twilight Bloom is only available after you research Book of Mastery and, chances are, you aren't going to be expanding much unless you are taking over enemy cities in which case, you don't need twilight bloom to restore barren land at that point in the game.

Would love to see new spells added... Whatever happened to Summon Air Elemental, by the way? Why is it only available in scroll form?

I want to be able to summon my armies if I decide to delve heavily into the magic tree and ignore the combat/warfare tree. Thus, more summons need to be available and I need to be able to summon more than one of them.

I would really like each factions cities to actually LOOK visually different-- not just the units.

This may be nitpicking, but if I want to be sneaky and pay another faction to go to war with a leader, why do I have to officially declare war on them as well? I was kind of disappointed that I couldn't pretend to be one factions friend while secretly making a deal with another for their demise. The AI tries to get me to declare war on other countries all the time. One time I accidentally accepted an offer and I declared war, but the faction that paid me did not show a war status with the country they paid me to declare on.

I kind of miss being able to create my own artifacts via spells I know ala Master of Magic too.