Fearzone

I understand campaigns are kind of low priority for Stardock, but they add a depth and flavor to the world that a sandbox can't, and lets you tell a story and Elemental seems a lot about story. Plus, campaigns are how most people learn the basics, and forms their first impression of the game (probably reviewers too). When it comes to bugs, you can control campaign elements better so more polish in a shorter time. The Relias campaign set the context of the elemen

/signed. Yeah females in Elemental are wearing way too much and aren't shapely enough. It looks like half of them are going to the prom. What's up with that?

The game is about building an economy and for that you need cities, I mean even for the adventuring victory condition you are going to need squads which means cities and economic development. However if adventuring gets better and players want to focus on that, I'm wondering if it would work to assign a proxy sovereign who will build up your kingdom and run it like the other AI's, while you focus on particular aspects of the game and maybe some high level decision making li

Usually with the AI's main army running around between cities, I'll have my army (usually substantially smaller because I was researching adventuring or something) pop into an enemy city with little resistance, destroy all the buildings with the shovel, and then pop out of the city the same turn and get out of Dodge before the enemy AI can counter-attack. If the enemy AI's main force does happen to be in a city I'm attacking, I just cancel the attack and then head to a different city.&n

Nice. Agree 100% with the main points. I think boolean essence with a shared mana pool with go a long way toward addressing the essence concerns of the OP, hopefully. For a fantasy game, you shouldn't have to research the ability to go adventuring. Also, cut it with the sparkling tiles on the map you can barely see--I want a quest-giver with a question mark over his head. Okay that's just me, but I totally agree that tech trees shoudn't be unlocking core featur

As for magic suggestions, I'm looking foward to Boolean Essence and the shared mana pool. I think it would be funner though if using magic and learning spells were dependent on having the crystal that powers it. Like, you need to have a fire crystal to cast infernal. Maybe have a few spells which aren't crystal dependent, but just a few. Given the similarity of the different elemental schools, I think maybe that was an original design decision. Since ri

It would be convenient that when cities are founded they automatically have a peasant squad stationed within. I think it would be consistent wtih common sense and fluff--I mean people aren't going to idly sit by while bears attack their houses, workshops, and arcane labs. Otherwise, my cities just get attacked when there is no unit stationed there for defense.

I'm not disappointed in Elemental, since I don't think any of the players who were following the course of the game and getting their feet wet with some of the betas, really thought it was going to be ready for release in August. I'm actually happy because it is better than I was expecting. I agree with multiple posts here that Elemental fell victim to a profound lack of self-critique within Stardock. The self-flagellation on this thread almost underscores the sense of nar

This extrapolates perfectly my feelings and experience with the beta and the game, especially the UI discussion.

Performance, AI, and content enhancements, plus: 1. More customizability of controls, especially hotkeys, changing mouse buttons and inverting axes. I think I went through the entire campaign without touching the keyboard once. 2. Better UI, hard to be specific here, just simpler and more intuitive. Playing find-the-pixel for an action so common as unloading units from a village is an example that springs to mind. 3. On tactical maps, highlight t

I second this. Is there any .lua we can change to invert the x-axis and also invert the mouse scroll direction?

Yeah. The pre-day 0 release was unplayable for me, but the day 0 release is stable and running fine, and so far I'm having fun with it. I know it is too late to say this, but when games hit the shelves two days too early, just let it ride. We all know we are taking risks when we pre-order, that kind of thing being one of them. But to release something unfit for public consumption creates a terrible first impression that will no doubt have ripple effects. I'm sure

I just reinstalled the August 24 version and that fixed everything.

I have something similar. I'm running Windows 7 64-bit, but nVidia GTX 295 (with SLI turned off so StarCraft 2 will work--Geez, is this how it all ends for PC gaming?). UI looks good. But when I load a game it only shows the cloth map. So I hit options, and when I make a change to graphical settings or even cancel without any changes made, when I return to the game I'm in the regular view map, not the cloth map anymore. At this point I can scroll around an

I think the story and the races should be kept mostly in Stardock's hands, and you should put the effort into developing those with your original vision. I think it is best for the game overall, and will give it a strong single-player foundation. I'm sure whatever customization tools you give us will be great and the player base can branch out with stories and races from there.

The first thing I notice about 1Z is that I could build a workshop right away, but it took advanced research to build houses and farms. "Hmmm," I thought, "now what is the blacksmith going to eat, and where is his family going to sleep?" It feels wrong in 1Z. We are in an apocalyptic landscape. First order of business is survival, no rushing the unlock of a marketplace for more gold. We need to start with farms and houses. Either place them early in

Don't know how you can work this into Elemental, but here is my most memorable D&D engagement: I was a ranger, wood elf I think. This one time our DM was playing a game where he would send us private notes about the events going on. We could share the information with others, or we could keep it to ourselves. I protested, saying this was a terrible group dynamic, yet still, my party members mostly kept the information to themselves when they got it, and my party

[quote who="DariasDruss" reply="4" id="2560243"]I have a fairly new I7 build and it locks up and crashes on me all the time. 6 gig of RAM and a big pagefile on Windows 7 64bit and it still goes tits up almost every ten minutes. No real bad lock ups like you are saying occur but this is what we are doing. Testing [/quote] Ditto.

Thanks, clicking "show pre-release versions" fixed the problem of it not showing up on my list, naturally. Would be helpful if that were on by default, or the email mentioned it. [e digicons]:banhammer:[/e]

Alright! Looking foward to it!

Are these names set in stone? Words like "Lothlorien," "Celeborn," and "Silmarilian" roll off the tongue. Words like "Calebethon" and "Hiergamenon" are hard to even pronounce. The former stays in mind from things I read over 20 years ago, the latter I doubt will.

Obviously, downtime has to be minimized, because downtime is no fun, and sitting around waiting for others is not why we play games. In a game as big as elemental, I imagine turns can start to get pretty long. Worse, if someone is losing they can just maximize the downtime until the other side quits in disgust. To minimize downtime, I'm thinking the game should be designed around simultaneous turns, particularly if it is there be more than two people playing. A

That's a good pet peeve.

I saw "porcupine" too. I didn't really see any tragedy in her story though. "Looked upon with suspicion"? Maybe "dishonored and cast out from the mortal realms" or something a little stronger.

Galactic civilizations... check. Sins of a Solar Empire... check. Eve Online... check. Now, what does it do that is new? What is there to get me excited? I'm not saying it's a bad game, but your description has a been-there-done-that feel to it. On the subject of graphics though, I've been playing AI war over the last couple days, and damn it feels to go get back to good old fashioned game design where gameplay matters. *** Okay I ch