Frogboy

Lowered turn time to build many improvements to 1 turn. If you've got the money you shouldn't have to artificially wait around.

Sovereign now provides 1 research per turn. So no reason why research should be put off. Lowered the cost of spells to level up.

I eliminated the prestige penalty entirely. Also started on the computer AI, took away a lot of its bonuses at higher difficulty levels and am replacing it with just better strategy code. Made unit training time be effected by population: [code="c++"] // New in v1.4: Take population into consideration float fCityPopulation = GetPopulation(); if(fCityPopulation fBaseTrainingMultiplier *= 1.0; else if(fCityPopulation < 50)<

For the first time since The Corporate Machine, I have a version of one of our games 100% in my hands. So v1.4 is all mine. Everyone else is now fully on Fallen Enchantress. I'm not on FE yet because some of the mechanics are still being implemented so I can't work on its AI yet. It's just you guys and me. So it's like being a modder again except I get to play with the source code. In this thread, I'll be hanging out talking abou

The prestige penalty is just a bad concept. It's dying in v1.4.

Actions speak louder the words. I've kind of made it clear to the marketing group that until users are about to get to experience the cool stuff themselves not to talk much about it. In the meantime, you should assume that FE is horrible and will give you cancer if you play it and harm pets.

[quote who="Campaigner" reply="70" id="2984150"]If there's 15 guys on the team and everybody got 3000$/month (7SEK = 1$) then 1 month of development on Fallen Enchantress costs 45.000$. 5 months of developertime (5 x 45.000) is 235.000$. 10 months of developertime (10 x 45.000) is 450.000$. Damn! Doesn't add up Either there's far more peopleon the team OR they're really going to take a

It was really on the job training. Years and years of making AI and slowly getting better at it. But -- in general -- writing APIs that allow the AI to easily get as much useful information so that the AI programmer can easily put together strategies is crucial.

I do: draginol.joeuser.com and frogboy.joeuser.com

I just ordered a PC but I am also learning how to make iOS stuff.

FE will be available, at the very least, via Impulse. If Stardock makes its own direct system, it'll be something more like Get.Live.com where it's just a quickie manager. The future of digital distribution on games belongs to Steam and Gamestop as far as we're concerned. :)

My dreams are simple but not sure what will be possible: 1. Line of sight. 2. Line of Fire. (obstacles) 3. Meaningful terrain I'd love to write an AI to handle this stuff. But you'd be surprised how hard it is to code these things that work well on older machines at the resolutions we want today. If anyone here is running 32-bit Windows still, please stop. You're ruining things for the rest of us. ;-)

I'm on a lot of forums and for the most part, developers aren't usually supposed to read them because the entitlement attitude of some (not most) forum goers is soul sucking. I, on the other hand, am one of those entitled hyper-critical jerks from the forums thus, I look at criticism as karma-retribution for all those years on usenet whining about Civ 1 and Xcom and MOM. I agree with most (but not all) the criticism leveled here. It's always a tough call betw

Is the game playable? Yes. Is the game fun? Not for me. Why isn't it fun? a. The AI is weak b. The game mechanics lend themselves to repetitive gameplay Why hasn't Stardock made it fun after all this time? a. The original release of the game was buggy, the reviews reflect this and so it didn't make sense to spend a lot of money fixing that. Instead, Stardock brought in an all start team to make a sequel, give it away to the original

Thread revival. I have the other two book outlines written. But I haven't decided whether I'll ever try to publish them, at least professionally. For those of you who, like me, always imagined how wonderful it would be to publish their dream novel, think again. It's not fun. I wrote Destiny's Embers, from scratch, several times. The first draft was written from omniscient POV (ala Lord of the Rings). But RH wanted Destiny's Ember

[quote who="seanw3" reply="2" id="2983684"]t[/quote] A little of both. War of Magic had a campaign about Relias, the great hero of the Kingdoms. But all the sandbox maps were designed with the west of Anthys in mind. Specifically, barren with key resources. Fallen Enchantress, from a design point, is much less barren. This means that "terrain matters". Engine-wise, the continents are randomly generated (in WOM, we had premade continents that were fi

Welcome to the Fallen Enchantress forum! Fallen Enchantress is Stardock's second PC game based in in the world of Elemental. In 2010, Random House released Elemental: Destiny's Embers (at a bookstore near you). A month after that, Stardock released Elemental: War of Magic. Originally, Fallen Enchantress was going to be an expansion pack to War of Magic but the design changes to Fallen Enchantress have been so significant that we decided it made more sense to ma

The most obvious change I've noticed is that terrain is much more Civ/MOM like in terms of utilization. in WOM, all terrain was largely cosmetic with special spots.

[quote who="mastroego" reply="15" id="2981577"] Quoting Frogboy, reply 13 The difference, of course, was back then, no one had high expectations so GalCiv I's relative...crumminess didn't create the kind of nerd rage we have today (though with the difference being that GalCiv I's AI was a lot better). Of course, let's keep the denial mode and blame the "raging nerds" who are actually "nerds" enough to be your customers. Let's conv

v1.4 will have significant AI updates (otherwise it will have to go into another update). It is irrelevant to us whether everyone moves to Fallen Enchantress or not. There is a principle here and that is WOM is still not at a place where we feel ready to just let it go into "maint." mode. As some may recall, the same was true of Galactic Civilizations (a lot of people think things started with GalCiv II). But GalCiv I required a full blown free expansion pack (reme

We pay attention to the ideas forum. But there's not really a scenario where War of Magic is going to be re-designed at this point. It's just updates from here on out. Fallen Enchantress, by contrast, is a very radical departure. In some respects, WOM was a bit like a GalCiv but for land (the terrain was rather meaningless). FE is like MOM where the terrain matters. And as a result, the two games become difficult to even compare. Hence, a lot of the ideas don&#39

Yes.

[quote who="Edwin99" reply="42" id="2976697"]Any chance for a variation of these tactical battle Sovereign AI enhancements in the next WOM update? AI sovereign will cast wind shield if the opposing army has archer units and ranged attacks are projected to cause notable damage. AI sovereign will cast magic shield to protect himself from enemy magic if enemy army contains sovereign or magic casting champion. AI sovereign will ca

[quote who="Magog_AoW" reply="39" id="2976648"] Quoting Frogboy, reply 33 With Fallen Enchantress, we already know what the engine can and can't do and can design based on that. That's why is it so different from WOM in gameplay. It was designed from scratch with the engine in mind. When WOM was designed, there was no engine yet. There was a list of capabilities we assumed the engine would have. There's one thing I don't get.

[quote who="markmenm" reply="30" id="2976209"] Quoting jshores, reply 25 . A better idea would have been to design the game within the limitations of the engine rather than modify it to fit in the engine. Based on what I have read from Frogboy's previous posts, that's what they tried to do. However, being an engine in the progress of being built, it's capabilities ended up being changing... In fact, I think Frogboy ended up taking some sort o