No118

Just played a game of 0.77, here are my thoughts I had a couple of bugs, but no crashes or even slowdown. I've reported the bugs separately in the support forum. The AI still seems rather passive. Nobody made much attempt to oppose me (on Challenging), even though they were (according to the power charts anyway) ahead of me. In reality, they weren't really ahead of me, so maybe they were being smarter than they looked! Once I declared war, I didn'

There is no animation for the second strike of double strike, it looks like you only hit once. Also, the enemy's health bar only updates from the first strike (he looses the correct amount of health, but the bar over his head doesn't reflect that).

There is a large pause (several seconds) between selecting the Block (Defend? I forget the names) and Sweep abilities, where the units just stand there doing nothing. Interestingly, this doesn't happen for the Forest Drake (? big green wingless dragon) when it uses sweep, and I saw some AI units using Block with no delay.

I also had this. Killed everything, killed all the dens, and the territory was still belonging the the monsters.

When you report a bug like this, it's helpful to explain how exactly it 'doesn't work'. Does it not increase the damage if it succeeds? Does it not damage the caster when it fails? Does the ability option just not show up at all?

I don't see what's so bad about level caps? It seems to me like the simplest way to ensure that they stay in step with the tech tree. At the moment you have two parallel methods of increasing the power of your units: Research and levelling up. At the moment, levelling champions massively outpace research. Sure, you could nerf experience in some way, but then you run the risk of overcompensating and just having the exact opposite problem. Even if you manage to

I definitely agree with having a hero level cap that increases as you research certain techs. That should help keep them from getting too far ahead of the other units.

After reloading my crashed game and finishing, there's a few more things I noticed: - Health bars do not refresh correctly. I've had enemies deal damage to my units, only for their health bars to apparently increase as they catch up with earlier healing (I wonder if this may be due to spell that gives gradual health increases over time? I have that cast on a lot of my units) - I had all my caravans appearing in my 'units' menu on the left, pushing everything el

Seconded. It's a little ridiculous. I've seen it just keep on going for 5+ hits in a row. The accuracy drop off needs to be faster.

Tutorial Full marks for this. I like the format of video followed by gameplay to try out the mechanic yourself. Honestly, this is the most polished section of the game at this point! My only issue is that it didn't seem to cover some quite important stuff (diplomacy in particular). Maybe this will be covered in the campaign though? Character/Faction creation Generally good, although I have a couple of minor gripes, and one big one.

The plan, as I understand it, is to make a demo based on the 1.1 patch when that is released (some time this month). The reason being that (hopefully!) by then all the worst of the bugs and playability issues will be fixed.

Well, I know I've seen a 'Faction X has been destroyed by monsters' message early in the game. Whether this is just because they foolishly attacked a monster stack before building their first city or not I don't know.

Bit of a strange one here. When I fight tactical battles, there seems to be a long delay between the attack starting, and the attack animation and so on actually completing. Oddly it doesn't seem to affect the first attack, only subsequent ones. My computer does not appear to be whirring away so I don't think it's a performance issue (which it really shouldn't be anyway, since this happens even in 1v1). This bug pretty much prevents me from fighting tactical battles with any more than

[quote who="p22" reply="9" id="2758043"]I think, for start, it should be possible to make harbor "outside city walls". I mean not connected to rest of the city, similar to resource buildings outside town . That way it may easier to both make cities at optimal positions, without compromising very rare beach tiles, or being forced to build cities up to the beach, just to be able to get harbor. Here is now I was forced to build one town, just to be able to get the tiles that can suppo

It's just there's no real way (AFAIK) to work out whether your memory has been freed up or not in a unit test. I suppose you could check out the overall memory usage before and after doing something, but since you don't know what's using the memory exactly it's hard to tell whether or not it's legitimate memory use or not. It really needs a human eye.

I'm making a point of posting in all aar/let's play posts because we NEED MORE! I noticed that the music was a bit tinny though (presumably because it's getting recorded second hand via the mic?). I don't know much about recording gameplay videos, but isn't there some way to record the in game sounds directly to the video? Also, this may just be because I've played the game already, but you seem to take a little too long explaining each and every detail. Not trying to

Er... well yes. I already said that (twice!). The question was, why isn't it being used to guard against the stuff that it DOES work on?

Well personally I think that cutting out unit testing because it saves time is a false economy. Sure you save some upfront costs, but unit testing pays itself off many times over when things get to the debugging stage. Not only do they quickly tell you that something is wrong, but they can often lead you to the exact part of the code WHERE it went wrong. When making a change, unit tests are actually a time saver, not a time waster. Take my example of the shard damage calculator. Say y

I work as a programmer in the boring, non game related industry, and there's something I've always wondered about what happens on the other side of the fence, as it where. Do game companies make use of Test Driven Development stuff such as unit testing, or do they rely entirely on manual QA testers? In my work, if we release code with bugs in calculations, it can lead to some really nasty real world effects, such as someone building a multi-million pound wind farm in a place with no w

The reason that there is no 'allow movement' treaty without getting the non-aggro treaty is to reduce player cheese- getting the free movement treaty, putting your units next to the AI cities and then invading with no warning.

Good work, I love AARs, and I think that it's really something Elemental could lend itself to very well, so hopefully more of these will start popping up. Although I can't help but play devils advocate, and point out that Lordaeron first showed up in Warcraft II, which predates Civ II :p

My plan was originally to use landmark in-game events (e.g. the death of his first unit, birth of his first child) to slowly develop him from a selfish nobody into a great and powerful king. It would probably have taken me forever though, as its suprising how long it takes to type out just a few lines of text for a couple of turns of game time!

My pro tip is to start small. I'm sure you have some big idea about an epic game that will change the face of gaming IF NOT THE WORLD forever. Now, I'm not saying to give up on that dream, but for your first game you should aim a little lower. Make a tetris clone or something. The advantages of this are: You can get something showing on the screen more quickly. This will help your motivation- nothing kills your spirit faster than staring at text on a screen which some day in th

My question is why WOULD you pick more than one spellbook? Since a lot of the spells are just the same spell with a different effect slapped on there doesn't seem to be much point picking up the other spellbooks when those points could be used elsewhere. The only real reason to get multiple spellbooks is to cover you in case no shards of your selected element are near to your starting location... only shards don't work at the moment anyway.

Episode 4- Meet the Neighbours First thing’s first, I grab myself a weapon. It’s not much of a weapon, though. Time to do my King thing, and order my loyal subjects to get me some better equipment.