Zalusithix

[quote who="Fuzzy Logic" reply="182" id="2758540"]I don't understand how you can be close to this game, play it, and not see how serious the problems are.[/quote]When you invest thousands of hours of your life into something, you're no longer impartial to the state of it. It becomes "your baby" and you're less likely to see faults as they are. Similarly, since you've been involved with it for so long, you know the mechanics by heart, and don't see usability problems the same as somebody just

[quote who="solidsmooky" reply="176" id="2758447"]It's still more amusing about how much people care about the company more than the people actually.[/quote] You of course do realize that the company *is* people right? Caring about the company is more than just caring about Brad or some such. There's a lot more people working at Stardock than have been laid off. Unless you think all that's left to Stardock is Brad and a bunch of robots doing his bidding. =P That and I haven't

I don't get what confuses people so much about the financial situation here. The gaming division isn't producing enough revenue to sustain another independent team, and potentially not enough to sustain the current size of the Elemental team. Regardless of this, Brad will invest profits from the other divisions to continue to keep enough people in the gaming division to develop and improve upon Elemental. He won't, however, throw good money after bad and try to keep two teams fully up

It's truly a pity for those who had to be let go, but on the bright side, Stardock should hopefully be a better place to work in the future if they get hired back. It's probably in everybody's best interests in the end. Another Elemental debacle would no doubt end up with far more layoffs. Better to cut what's needed now and fix the problem that created the current situation to begin with. Just don't lose track of what makes Stardock what it is when all the re-tuning is being

[quote who="Xiara" reply="15" id="2753926"]Running fraps....is game locked at 65fps? I'm stuck at that on menu's. Usually in the 300's on menus. Notice theres no option to unlock frame rate now either.[/quote]Framerate over your monitor's refresh rate is 100% useless.

[quote who="Jharii" reply="26" id="2748707"]Ummmmm. It's a book.[/quote]I can't tell if you're being serious or not...

[quote who="solidsmooky" reply="23" id="2748663"]It's actually really racist and it makes me wonder about Brad.[/quote]Obviously all fantasy books/movies/games should now involve pink and purple evil races so as not to potentially offend anybody. Oh hell, who am I kidding... then it would be considered anti-gay or some equally insane thing. You people read waaay too much into things.

[quote who="Gravedancer" reply="12" id="2747337"]Thing is, it would be helpful if Impulse would show patch notes for the available update so you could make a decision from there. Even then, the hotfix should have had it's own notes vs. a footnote to the 1.06 patch notes.[/quote] Right click on game -> view history. Though it wouldn't have helped you in this case for the hot fix, as that information was unfortunately only on the forums. This much Stardock is most certainly at fault fo

[quote who="EsamMoney"]Let's see... nothing more they can do... How about not require 4 separate patches in like a week?[/quote]They don't require anything. You apply them optionally. You don't like having 4 updates in a week? Don't update 4 times in a week. Telling them to halt bug patching is stupid. [quote who="EsamMoney"]Oh I know, offer to revert back to previous patches. Yup that would work too. [/quote] Oh please, how many devs release undo patches or have their patches perform

[quote who="surlybob" reply="26" id="2746875"]What you describe is pretty much every software developers wet dream. It's the next logical step from the "you aren't paying for the software, you are buying a license to use the software" SCAM that they've already rammed down the market's throat.[/quote]A publisher's wet dream, perhaps, but I'd say it's a developer's nightmare. He wasn't trying to make a normal subscription service where there's 1 current version that gets all updates and then yo

To maintain bug and balance patches independently of a stream of additional features would require the source tree being constantly branched out on a monthly basis and each individual branch to be maintained separately. Fixing a long standing bug in the main trunk might not be easy to resolve in earlier branches without a lot of manual leg work. That and each branch would have to be tested individually to ensure no regressions. That's a crap ton more work to be done by a limited staff. <

Bad idea. Like Kravick said, you shouldn't have to pay for bug fixes, balancing, etc. Significant new content is deserving of a one time fee, but the expansion/DLC route has this covered quite well. Could you imagine if people had to pay again within the next month for fixes to the game? There would be exponentially more complaining going on. (And rightfully so.)

Outside of Stardock implementing some sort of warning popup in Impulse, there's nothing more that they can do to keep you from messing things up for yourself. You selectively patched the hotfix in without checking what it would do. To be fair, the change log doesn't bring up the hotfix info, but the information *is* there via the website. Patches can and do break saves at times, and this is hardly something unique to Stardock. If the only way to fix a core bug is to break the saves, t

If you have a physical copy of the game, you can install the gold version (meh), but outside of that, you're pretty much out of luck. It's best to read patch notes before blindly updating, especially since Impulse doesn't force updating on you. Outside of that, you could archive the game using Impulse before updating which would allow you to roll back at the expense of hard drive space.

[quote who="Voqar" reply="3" id="2743540"]Some people are in denial of reality or play the game in such a way that the vast number of issues in the game don't bother them. Game can be fun but it needs a lot of work to get anywhere near its potential.[/quote] It doesn't necessarily require them to be in denial of reality. They can acknowledge the problems, but at the same time find the experience fun as a whole - warts and all. A person enjoying the story/acting of a movie will b

[quote who="SapSnark" reply="13" id="2742170"]This may also work with gildar / turn and army maintenance. If somehow one's income could forcibly be dropped well into the negatives, one may be able to build a massive army without regard to maintenance. This remains to be tested.[/quote] I can't test with the current version because it wont allow old saves to be loaded, but in previous versions this was not the case. The AI could use negative Gildar for infinite army and city expansion,

It's really not that odd that the serial numbers are different. (Mine are as well) I mean, a system where the printed package is matched up to the already generated serial attached to your account would be a bit on the complex side. What's odd is that there is a serial number at all. You'd expect that the batch being sent out from Stardock wouldn't have one at all. It's not like you need one. Perhaps they've just disabled all of the serials assigned to the batch instead.

Couldn't load the last auto-save, but I could load the manual saves. Uploaded affected game save and debug.err in 7z format here just in case it could be any use to the devs. Also happens to have the negative Gildar bug in the save, but that is unrelated to the crash given manual saves with the bug still load fine.

They are... Your Stardock/Impulse account has every game bought through impulse on it. They can check what you've bought, correct problems etc. A pirate wont have a valid game key tied to the account.

Bugged negative money game saves. I've compiled a series of 3 saves into a 7z archive. Save 3 is from before I met the afflicted empire (By forcing a meet with them in the current game version from this save, they have very little Gildar, but at least it's still positive.) Save 4 is from after I met the empire and they have a negative, albeit comparatively small Gi

Yep, I had the same thing happen to me. I found it odd how the one empire expanded at the rate that it did, and when I went to go speak to it, I noticed the negative Gildar bit. Unfortunately, you cant take advantage of the glitch yourself. I offered all my Gildar for the entire negative Gildar debt that he had. I got the negative debt, and he retained his debt... However, I couldn't actually do anything with the debt. Apparently us humans aren't worthy of such exploits. ;) It's not r