Frogboy

Can you post your saved game then? Because on ridiculous, the AI should be getting a lot of extra gold and your screenshot shows them actually losing 1 per turn. The AI isn't hard coded to build particular buildings, it is taught to play the game. While I may eventually create build scripts, the game doesn't currently support it. I also don't agree that building a hut is the best thing to do right off the bat. But like I said, if the game was on ridic

Alstein this build is based on fixing what crashed on you in your saved game. Troj, turn up the difficulty if you're unhappy with it. Turn 20 and they ave a city and a defender. Just because it's not building doesn't mean there's something wrong. The ai now will save up resources to build better things.

The Beta for the expansion would likely begin in February. Since this expansion is of the scope of a full blown expansion (these aren't micro expansions) we're looking at a late Spring release at the earliest. There will be a lot more details given in the coming weeks. But I know a few include a massive revamp of game mechanics (food/housing/etc. to be a lot different and we think better), a totally new tactical combat system (not a modification of what's in the v1.1 serie

As some of you know, over the holidays I like to use my vacation to program (my day job is running the company). As a result, I have a private .EXE replacement of Elemental for those who want to try it. The main differences are: 1. Significantly better AI. 2. I think I fixed that crash issue some people have reported 3. More resources 4. AI better at using magic strategically. 5. AI much better at waging strategic war. 6. R

On behalf of everyone at Stardock, Merry Christmas! For those of you who are not familiar with the #elemental chat channel on Impulse (Impulse->Community->Chat and then /join #elemental) I've been making available little test builds for anyone who wants to try one made on my machine. Definitely not official but I was able to reproduce the crash some people had and worked on eliminating it as well as made some AI tweaks. Feel free to hang out with us on the channel during t

Thanks guys! Merry Christmas to all of you.

Nice work. We'll have someone coming in in January who will be heavily involved in helping make sure the modding features in Elemental grow in the way they should.

I do indeed keep bees. I wanted a hobby that was not computer related. There's a few funny videos on YouTube of me with bees. Today I was putting mouse guards on the hives and when I started back to the house I was being followed by deer. Below is the video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwqQLXokXjQ

Thanks Dave. You verified something that we'll have to deal with in v1.2 and is something some of you techies may find interesting for what it's worth. So, in the old days, video cards had say 64MB of memory. When they ran out, they dumped their memory to disk and the game would, when it sensed a certain threshold would "dump" textures out of main memory. Fast forward to 2010 where video cards like yours have 2 GIGs of memory. First, this is

There's going to be a lot of AI updates over the Christmas break. I put out 1 on Friday. I took this weekend off to do other stuff but tomorrow I"m back on it.

Here's my personal view. When the game came out, I thought it was an 8 out of 10. That's what you get for working 5 months at 100 hours a week. If anyone ever asks what the effects of long term overtime, point to Elemental. Because not only did I think the game was an 8 out of 10 but we had the former editors of IGN and Avault working here. Now, that said, once I had some time to get some distance and look at the game objectively, the shipped game was, at best, a 6

This is the kind of post that makes me excited to work on the game during the holidays. Kudos to you Jon.

Glad to have you in the channel. We're gonna have some fun!

[quote who="dawgs4ever" reply="77" id="2849442"] Quoting Tempestwrath, reply 11I'd also like to mention that the engine used for the game is one designed in-house by Stardock, and so it never (and really couldn't ever, considering Stardock's size) went through the rigorous compatibility testing that larger engines go through. And some of the larger engines even have serious issues. Look at Gamebryo. The only way to rectify this is to s

You can also reach #elemental from Impulse on the community->Chat tab.

Oh I could have totally won. I only let the AI win because I felt sorry for it..

[quote who="Seabird" reply="65" id="2848502"]The game should change its name from Elemental War of Magic to Elemental War of the Beta Testers...with all this squabbling going on between users. My experience with 1.1: it did crash after about a good 2 hours of play...I should have saved, but was so hopeful that 1.1 would be the fix all and have the same stability as 1.09v....WRONG. In addition, played the game on normal and challenging...the AI still seems a little wimpy.&nbsp

I started handing out new EXEs to people on #elemental today. I think the first one made a pretty big difference. However... [1] The AI is still not getting groups of units fast enough. Knowing what the AI should do and making it do it are two very different things. [2] The AI is still not building up its cities in the way I'd like to see it do it. [3] The AI is still not designing units well enough. [4] The AI needs to be more flex

Btw. The manual was rewritten for 1.1 and is included with the update.

Well, based on my weight gain, I think I found your food.

This is good stuff. I'll be posting some journals through the holidays on what I'm doing on this. I also plan to be on IRC some during the holiday for those of you who want to hang out (in the virtual sense) and chat about this stuff. I may even be able to pass some builds from my machine back and forth.

I think the Pioneer thing is actually a bug because during the beta I actually started hard coding limits on # of pioneers so there's some weird issue going on there. Now that I'm free to...indulge myself...we'll see what can be done. I've never looked at the tactical AI, so I don't know how much I can do (and I don't want to step on someone else's area even if it's during the holidays). There's probably a handful of stupid things the AI does in tactical b

I'm on the AI today actually. But I need your help for those of you who are stream rolling. The AI's weaknesses are more to do with strategy than anything else. To use a Starcraft analogy, it would be like the AI developer not realizing how important it is to block off their base making it easy for the Zerg to win.

Thanks. yea, now that v1.1 is released, I can go to town on the AI to a much deeper level. I'd like to see the tactical AI addressed prior to v1.2 and have asked those involved on that part of the AI to address some of the things I've read and witnessed.

Just a real quick note here: While some problems people run into are indeed due to hardware configurations, in my experience, the difference has to do with the way people play the game. For example, consider city building. Some people manually place each improvement. Others just click on the build button. And still others (like me) just double clicked on the build list. Well, the last would sometimes cause a crash because of the multithreaded nature of Ele