tjashen

I've yet to have an empty build cue under the new build. In E:WOM, I always was able to keep both build cues busy, but as you pointed out the number of structures has been pared down a bit. I don't think that is necessarily a good thing. I thought the goal was more city differentiation, not less... Larger armies/army groups helps mitigate random results in combat a bit, so I'm a proponent for letting players build units to their hearts content, as long as

I just finished pulling out some information from the Core Ability Files. I haven't had a chance to properly format this, but I figured I'd post it so that everyone could have a better idea of what is going on under the hood. I tried to break things up under appropriate headings, but some abilities are simply uncategorized, and it took me a few entries to get a hang of the category breakdown thing. I also probably missed an ability or two while scrolling down to fi

In the previous incarnation of Elemental, you were allowed to build structures and train units simultaneously. In the current E:FE builds, you have to choose between one or the other. This obviously was decided upon for a reason, but the effect is that if you don't have hostile neighbors giving you grief you have time to focus on city upgrades, but if you are under threat, and are focused on troop building, you will slowly fall behind in the late game as far as city developm

On a related note, it would be nice if once you've chosen a path for a city, that you could see what level ups you've done previously in the level up screen. Once you get more than a few cities under your belt, from builds and conquering enemy ciites, it can be easy to lose track of which cities are supposed to be focused on what. Also, now that cities don't train and build simultaneously, I think that the 'gives bonus when idle' traits are less useful than t

I've looked over the traits list in the .xml, and it is pretty extensive. And there are some traits (besides spell lists) that have other traits as prerequisites, so there is a loose tree of sorts for a few of them. I would recommend decoupling the stat boosts entirely from traits. While it is fine to have a stat boost included in a trait, the trait really should have another purpose (increased damage or whatever). As has been pointed out before, some of the curr

Note that some randomness is fine, but excessive reliance on randomness makes the game feel, well, completely random. Combat by definition should have a random factor in it, after all, this isn't chess, Advanced Civilization (the boardgame, not the Sid Meier thing), or Diplomacy. But results in combat should have some factor of player skill, as opposed to excessively falling back on the luck of the dice rolls. If you want a truly random combat system, I suggest

Being a whiny cry baby of sorts (overstated for emphasis), I do know that there were a lot of changes made to Elemental based on fan feedback, after the initial release proved to have some crash issues, which really changed the initial design, after the initial design proved buggier than expected. Brad and the team have already apologized profusely many times for this. It worked fine in the lab, but didn't survive contact with the huge number of variations with various graph

Repost from another thread. These comments seem more relevant to this discussion, hence my cut and paste: I did some research and balancing exercises a little over a year back, before getting distracted by other things and putting Elemental aside for a bit. My initial solution to better balance combat was to add 5 to the attack and 3 or 4 defense values of all u

I figured this was as good a place as any to post this. The current .86 build of E:FE seems to hold together fairly well, but after many many turns I do occasionally see crash to desktops. There isn't a consistent pattern to this, and I have an older machine (Turion X2 64, 32 Bit Vista, 2 GB Ram, ATI Mobility Radeon HD2600), and it isn't happening often enough for me to find annoying (autosave reloads just fine, and I can continue on without issue). If it hap

I did some research and balancing exercises a little over a year back, before getting distracted by other things and putting Elemental aside for a bit. My initial solution to better balance combat was to add 5 to the attack and 3 or 4 defense values of all units, before modifiers. My rationale for this number was simple. Str at that time provided a damage bonus equal to Str/2, after the first 10 STR, so the 5 would be 10 STR/2. Similar rationale for defense (Con/3)..

We had a LOOOOONG discussion about this last year, but to recap, there are those of us that felt many 'special/acquired' weapons were waaaaay overpowered. In my E:FE playtesting, this very much still seems to be the case. There are several examples of this, but what it comes down to is that with the way combat is calculated, a +22 weapon is exponentially more powerful than a +11. And a +44 Weapon? Don't even bother to show up with that +11, if defenses

Before, in E:WOM, I noticed that familiars and summoned creatures would be able to remain useful for a time, but at some point because of all of the upgrades that champions, units, and sovereigns were getting, they became less and less competitive. With Mr.Familiar(tm) at least, his resummoning cost was low enough that using him as a distraction/redshirt while the more powerful units jockeyed for position was an option I took advantage of a lot. The current summon nature spell s

I for one would like definite traits trees, rather than the random, Magic The Gathering style traits thing we have going on now. But I've already commented to that effect in two other threads. Your idea of a traits tree, similar to the tech tree, would be nice. Displaying it in the GUI would require some redesign, though. A compromise for now would be to have the traits that appear be directly tied to the initial traits you choose (assassin, adventurer, warlord

The one thing that is annoying me the most in level advancement, be it sovereign or champion, is the randomness of the traits you get to choose when you level up. Level advancement should not feel like a Magic: The Gathering game, where you are hoping for rare cards and are disappointed when you get a common one instead. That's all fine and good for a card game, but this is more of a wargame with roleplaying elements thrown in. Now, I could buy into a 'you have t

I've been playing a bit more with Fallen Enchantress. I cranked the difficulty down to beginner so I could focus on exploring instead of city defense. Some of the combat 'flaws' from before are still there (for those of you that remember the whole square/squareroot debate), it seems. But I do like the way auto upgrades of equipment is implemented, so that you don't have to keep redesigning your uber units. One thing from the original E:WOM that allo

Hey guys! So, I've been playing around with the new Fallen Enchantress build. I know that I'm in a huge minority here at this point, but I find myself missing the original World Of Magic... I still remember my first go rounds with my Sovereign. I had a plethora of summoned creatures available to to my bidding, and I remember fondly the time I completed that Dragon quest, so I had my Familiar, Fire Giant, Fire Elemental and Dragon all cruising around with Ja

I had the download end suddenly at around 630 megs the first time. I'm about 73% done this time around as I type this. As I only have about 5 GB to work with for the month (wireless internet), here's to hoping I get all of it this time. Firefox 8 BTW. I'd be curious as to why 'resumable downloads' aren't happening, as it would have been nice to be able to resume my previious download, rather than having a corrupted 630 meg file...

double post

Ahhh, that explains much. Went to www.stardock.com, logged into my account, and there it is! Thank you, kind sir! [e digicons]:thumbsup:[/e]

I just checked for the beta email, and checked the Impulse/Gamestop site for an update, no joy. I purchased Elemental in August of 2010 from Best Buy. What do I need to do to get on the beta list? Note that I released a couple of mods for Elemental in 2010! I ended up taking a long break after that, though...

I know we are still about a year out, but being a fan of Political Machine 2008, I for one am looking forward to Political Machine 2012. What I'd really love would be to have the game break down into two phases of play. Phase one being running against other presidential hopefuls in your own chosen party, culminating in choosing a running mate to help ensure your victory at the convention. Phase two of course would play out pretty much how it does now (Dem vs. Rep). W

Did anyone catch the Nova special on Watson last week about Watson, the IBM Supercomputer that plays Jeopardy? Quite fascinating AI development! Most of the concepts don't apply to Elemental of course (parsing sentances and such)... Imagine what Elemental would look/play like with a Watson-sized supercomputer crunching away! Jeopardy! sit-in Watson, a supercomputer, will be using DeepQA technology to procure Jeopardy!</

I find AI work to be oddly fascinating. I very much enjoyed reading the article. While Elemental is a turn based game, as opposed to real time, I have to point out that a lot of the concepts still apply. Probing the enemy for weak points, and exploiting them still applies to Elemental. The only difference is you do that evaluation per turn, not per second. As does capitalizing on resources, or taking them away from the enemy. As does maximizing your

I didn't buy Elemental because it was a spiritual successor to anything. I bought it because the game looked interesting on it's own merits. Plus I like Stardock... Elemental needs to be it's own game. Borrowing good ideas is fine, but I'd rather see Elemental breaking new ground rather than rehashing old ideas. As for dungeon crawls, someone mentioned having questers disappear for a few turns. What if, instead, you spend a

Hey Brad! While this doesn't directly relate to Elemental, I thought I'd share with you, seeing that AI development is a passion of yours... http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/01/skynet-meets-the-swarm-how-the-berkeley-overmind-won-the-2010-starcraft-ai-competition.ars