Frogboy

I sure hope no one doing a random Google search comes across these post titles. :)

They are much much rarer. Pretend you've never seen one before ever. Then when you see one, it's cool! You've never seen a Lost library

Another thing I found today was that the cached value for your units combat rating (the value the AI looks at) was alwyays 0 -- the AI would never think of your stuff had any combat rating in the new code.

I found a bug with undefended cities (well not so much a bug but a misunderstanding). The Outposts are supposed to provide some basic population. The AI won't even attempt to defend a city that has 0 population.

Sounds like a corrupt install. :(

Just wanted you guys know that I've been testing the latest build out and it's looking good enough for a beta. No one's at the office to stage/release it but it's looking a lot better. We'll be pretty interested in hear feedback on it. It's definitely a beta but it also has a lot of bug fixes and performance improvements in it too. The UI improvements will probably be one of the things users notice right away though. I'm finding things a lot easier to do. The

Ok, it's going to be tomorrow. I promised the team I wasn't going to work them crazy hours. So we're calling it a night. We think we have the problem fixed but it takes about 90 minutes to build/stage/publish a build and it's already 8pm our time.

We're having Pizza tonight at my house. Theere's a deadlock issue with the threads. AI thread and main thread both accessing player data in a critical section. We may have to delay until tomorrow.

I found a bug in the candidate. So they're still working on it.

I'm at home right now testing out the candidate. If I had a mic here I'd blog it.

Elemental is a pretty unique opportunity for all us PC gamers who love strategy games. I think fellow PC game advocates should look very carefully at what's being release for the PC this year as well as what NEW things are being released in 2011 for the PC. Elemental was released and didn't live up to what we hoped. We all know this. But we can, together, turn it into something special. We're putting in the time and money to do that. We are painfully aware of the

We typically release our updates on Thursdays at around 7pm EST.

[quote who="Werewindlefr" reply="116" id="2826118"] Quoting Frogboy, reply 106The goal of v1.1 is to address the major issues we all -- as a community -- have identified as being basic issues with the game -- the magic system, AI, and economic system being the top 3 IMO. Beta 1 is a big step towards addressing magic and economics in the game (they'll need to be balanced still but it's a much better mechanic).Do you share the opinion of those who think that other aspects of the game

[quote who="Trojasmic" reply="113" id="2826112"]I've been a support manager, project manager, and product manager and one thing remains the same... Devs hate hearing the word "broken". lol! Especially as a product manager, I find myself in the middle of Customers saying something is broken and Dev saying it's not broken. So we'll just leave it there because there is a lot of understandable bias, pride, etc., in developing something. I get it. You don't

I think one word that people could really benefit from removing from their vocabulary: "broken". Not liking a particular game mechanic doesn't make it "broken" (for instance, not allowing divorce in dynasties doesn't make it broken). The goal of v1.1 is to address the major issues we all -- as a community -- have identified as being basic issues with the game -- the magic system, AI, and economic system being the top 3 IMO. Beta 1 is a big step towards a

It allows other AI players to exploit other AI players too. :)

[quote who="id_est" reply="37" id="2825598"]This is a singleplayer game, WHERE IS THE AI?! No ai in beta patch --> there is nothing to show --> game will suck continuously. There is no point in the new spells, global mana, etc., when there is no challange. Ok, you want ideas? Make survival mode with enormous monsters spawn, that want only one thing - to kill your soverign! This is the only way to create challange without AI (except PBEM).[/quote] I'm burning the

[quote who="bboybutzemann" reply="3" id="2824114"]Very nice!! Thanks a lot for all the infos. Just a quick Q: Did i get it correctly that, the Global AI oversees the full map and all strategic AIs can access all flags set by it? It would be much cooler to only provide each player AI with flags on information within their line of sight, wouldnt it? But maybe thats already in there, then appologies for the question [/quote] That's how it works. One thread goes thro

[quote]The main problem, now, is that there isn't any strategic depth to really any economic decisions. I think a lot of this will be alleviated by the addition of a maintenance cost for most buildings. As it stands, with no maintenance costs, you just build every building available in every city, and the only times you have to make a strategic choice is where to build the one-per-faction or one-per-gameworld buildings.[/quote] This. Indeed.

There's a couple things being worked on but I don't know when they'll make it to the public branch. First off, we want to make ti so that people can use the website to create their own quests and submit them for sharing. Second, we want to break the quests into pieces in a similar manner that we do for other things in the game so that rather than having 10 quests you could have a thousand quests with the same parts.

[quote who="voodoochile123" reply="56" id="2818894"]Shame the game didn't just come out when 1.1 was done. That way it would have got better reviews and more people would play.[/quote] I think we can all sit back and think about "what might have been". I think, at this point, the best path is to look ahead and work together on making Elemental the great game we all know it can be.

Re Master of Magic. If we had done a Master of Magic 2 it would have been MOM with updated graphics and MP. That was the design document I had written and submitted at the time to Atari. If you call your game II it better be true to the first game. Elemental, however, was never intended to be MOM 2. Then again, Elemental was not intended to be Elemental v1.0. That isn't to say v1.0 wasn't considered complete (I get a bit annoyed when peo

I've been working on a new manual for v1.1.

[quote who="Gene1966" reply="29" id="2817355"] Quoting _PawelS_, reply 6 quoting post We will create a consistent design, we will document that design, we will march toward implementing that design. This is what Stardock should have done from the start Hear! Hear! Well said and all that Jazz...[/quote] We always had a design document. That wasn't the problem. The problem was our ability to technicall

Yes but it's done via resources. So you'd find an area that has some rare resource. This is something we're going to do a lot more with in the future.