Frogboy

This is how we were able to solve this crash internally -- through crash reports sent in.

[quote who="Trojasmic" reply="79" id="3077021"]So is that it? Are we going to hear anymore about the AI Wars: February Edition?[/quote] yea, when I work more on it. Doing the AI is my night job at Stardock. The weekends I get to do whatever I want which, this weekend, was helping with sound and music.

How many turns do your games typically take?

Interesting story behind this: In DirectX 9, if you want to use true type fonts, you need to use white on black because they are anti-aliased to a back blackground anyway. This is the reason our fonts in WOM looked so terrible. We had to come up with all kinds of work arounds for the crummy font handling of DirectX 9. DirectX 11 fiixes the font stuff but since FE is a DirectX 9 game, we decided it would be better to pick our battles. So now you know why eve

When writing AI one has to look at all the players, not just the one. For instance, how to you make early game rushing be costly to the player? Well, one way is to have it affect their relations with other players. Because, as a practical reality, I don't want every player to have to prepare to be rushed early on. It should be a strategic CHOICE of the human player to try to do that but one with definite consequences.

I can't promise 0.78 this week. It'll be Derek's call but I'm pushing to delay it. There's a lot of feedback to integrate into balance. Plus, there's a crapload of new music and art that has to go in that is just very time consuming.

Each player in FE has its own theme which comes up when you talk to them.

[quote who="MadMagnus" reply="28" id="3074761"] Quoting sweatyboatman, reply 16 Quoting Frogboy, reply 15Derek has told me that anything that makes a tactical battle take more than 3 minutes to finish is a bad thing and I have come to agree with that. So anything that threatens to make them actually tactical. Sigh, so much for my suggestion of large stacks for epic tactical battles. I can only hope that tactical battles will have some t

I obviously love MOM. But I have been somewhat...amazed at how often people overlook the fact that it was basically not possible, at any difficulty level, to lose because the AI didn't actually play the game. I used to have this issue with GalCiv when people said it should be like a certain Space....empire type game with people eventually acknowledging that it was impossible to lose at said game. We don't have the luxury of the AI not being able to play the game

[quote who="Alstein" reply="76" id="3074612"] Quoting Frogboy, reply 62 For instance oneidea I keep pushing for is to allow improvements to boost the caravan gold multiplier in both cities connected by the caravan. A small easy to implement change but I feel it would greatly boost the depth of trading. Work with the system not againist it. Yep, that is a good suggestion. I.e. that would be a good text book example of the kind of feedback that is practical. <br /

[quote] For instance one idea I keep pushing for is to allow improvements to boost the caravan gold multiplier in both cities connected by the caravan. A small easy to implement change but I feel it would greatly boost the depth of trading. Work with the system not againist it.[/quote] Yep, that is a good suggestion. I.e. that would be a good text book example of the kind of feedback that is pract

[quote who="Mtrixis" reply="55" id="3074398"] Quoting Frogboy, reply 52 Quoting Emperor_Nero, reply 49 Does this mean that any suggestions we make that aren't about balancing just the current mechanisms we are just wasting our time? If the suggestion involves getting rid of some basic game feature like technology trees or mana then yes, you're wasting your time. *raises eyebrow* With zero developer feedback or direction

[quote who="Ashbery76" reply="50" id="3074336"]I do not wish to see talk of internal builds doing this and that.WOM had lots of that talk about internal builds doing the same.Beta testers should have the latest build.[/quote] No they shouldn't. There are entire weeks where you can't play the game 20 turns without crashing because some major element is being worked on. The game can't be kept in a consumer friendly state all the time. Righ

[quote who="Emperor_Nero" reply="49" id="3074335"] Does this mean that any suggestions we make that aren't about balancing just the current mechanisms we are just wasting our time?[/quote] If the suggestion involves getting rid of some basic game feature like technology trees or mana then yes, you're wasting your time.

[quote who="mastroego" reply="40" id="3074229"] Basically though, what I'm saying is this: from a few of your (or your team's) posts, it seems you all feel the game is "almost close to the finishing line". Which is understandable, after so much work. Yet, some of us (I don't know how many) feel that the game is not 77% (78% ?) ready. I'd be glad to get the full game earlier, but I don't think we're there: so many things are right this time, yet a few o

[quote who="Lord Xia" reply="9" id="3073343"] Quoting econundrum1, reply 6 Sun Tzu says commanding a large force is the same as commanding a small force. But, that being said, the current game mechanic is fine, doesn't matter really either way. I rarely have a need for an army of more than 6 any way.[/quote] He's wrong. Read Sherman's autobiography (which is where the idea came from to limit army sizes).

Email [email protected].

[quote who="mastroego" reply="20" id="3073935"]I'm writing this since this comment looks a little bit like the ones we used to read for WoM. "You just have to trust us, the game is fine, even though of course we know we can't please everyone".[/quote] I think some people may have a distorted memory of WOM. The biggest problem with WOM's design was that I did try to implement features from the community. And not little ideas either. The big ones. So what

[quote who="TLamming" reply="37" id="3073730"]Here is an idea: If the AI loses to certain monsters, have certain things happen. Like turn the AI into a beast or have the monster who slayed the AI get some of the AI's magic and become sentient and assume control of their team, with beast like changes to the race... [/quote] I was planning to have dune buggies in the game instead. ;)

Based on a lot of the posts I read, I think some people have an overestimation of my involvement in FE. On the one hand, I am definitely spending a lot more time on Fallen Enchantress than I ever got to with WOM. But on the other, I'm not that involved on the design part. I give lots of suggestions and ideas but it's Derek's call. The biggest design problem with WOM is that it started out, in my mind, as MOM2 and then morphed into trying to be all things to a

There was a second bug we found and that was a repeat in the AI battle resolve code that resulted in an AI city being destroyed every time an AI champion or sovereign was defeated (regardless of where the battle took place or where). Obviously this will have a massvie impact on how "good" the AI seems.

They would potentially appear as suggested unit names (rather than "King's Ward" or "Barons"). The idea being to give each faction their own flavor.

Brain storming time! I'm trying to come up with cool names for the AI to refer to their various units as well as suggested names for human players. I have names like Oath Keepers and Sentinels but this is an area where I think it might be fun to try to include some names the players.

Well, I remember that as the monster difficulty goes down (for the human) it goes up for the AI (i.e. the monsters go after the AI players more).

Just curious, what world difficulty did you have it set to?