jpmcconnell

I've been following Elemental for a long time now (with occasional periods of increased activity when my job allows it). I loved Master of Magic and have been craving a spiritual successor for almost 20 years. Elemental had the potential to be just that, but fell short on a number of different metrics, and as most people will agree was somewhat of a disappointment. However, I'm excited about what I see with Elemental Fallen Enchantress and with the improvement we've s

You have better eyes then I do.

True. I was just trying to make it as simple as possible. Change instead to, build a workshop for every 4th building in all cities until you have x amount of materials per turn, x being max amount of materials you can use per turn creating units/buildings etc. Bottom line is that its not difficult to come up with some simple rules, which were the AI to simply follow them under all circumstances would lead to better cities then what its currently churning out.

[quote quoting="post"] - A.I. cities are not well-planned (no specialization) and are usually loaded with monuments (if empire). [/quote] This is probably the most unforgivable missing piece of the AI. Its as simple as, have AI set a flag on each city: Tech city, arcane city, gold city, materials city. Build those types of buildings in that city, select those % bonuses for that city, if city reaches population max then build a hut, continue until out of fo

Agree with that as well. Dramatically altering the world in those ways, raising impassable mountains, or casting land beneath the waves should be extremely powerful, high level spells, that cost a lot of mana. Low level spells should create forests, drain bogs, raise low hills, change grasslands to dessert, or dessert to grassland. Things that, in an ideal world, would have effects on the usefulness, production value, and defense value of the terrain involved. See an ene

Looks gorgeous. I've always really liked the art style of Elemental; it has a very dark fairy-tail like quality. Not sure if that's what your going for, but it works.

Everything I've seen coming out about fallen enchantress is making me feel good about the game. It looks great, but I'm was wondering about a couple things that haven't gotten very much attention that have always bugged me about Elemental. Terrain -- it doesn't matter in E:WofM, will it matter in FE? One of the things that bugged me the most about elemental was simply that there was really no strategic decision regarding where you placed your cities. The e

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="10" id="2952353"] Quoting Bellack, reply 9Really because GAL2 was light years ahead of GAL1.. Dammit Frogboy now I really want FE.....How long do we have to wait:) The beta should be out in about a month. I shouldn't say this (not publicly anyway) but FE is a little discouraging to me as I don't think anyone is going to want to play WOM after FE is available. I was hoping that FE and WOM would just be different but FE is ju

Brad, Just want to say that we appreciate everything. I've been a Stardock fan for awhile now, since GalCiv 1. I was initially disappointed in Elemental, but the support you guys have given it since release, and continue to give, has really renewed my faith. We all stumble sometimes, you guys have been able to pick yourselves up and drive on.

Unfortunately, its more than just about changing a few specific numbers. If it were just tweaking a couple spells here and there it wouldn't be much of an issue. The problem lies in the fact that the entire system is simply out of wack. There needs to be a serious reassessment of the various damage levels and powers of spells of each level vs. how they stack up against equivalent conventional forces at the same relative point in the game. I.e. a level one spell should in general consume x amo

Option to run in a window is not functioning properly. Selected option, restated, now cannot enter the game. The application is running but attempting to access it produces no result (other than that I can hear the music playing in the background). Where are the options menu selections stored so I can go in and change manually back to full screen? Thanks

What does this say that even extremely devoted players of the game, people who are playing the beta, people who are contributing on the forums, etc. cannot answer very basic questions about mechanics from a new player? I think elemental has a huge amount of potential, but the fact that many of these questions are still unanswered (unanswerable?) is a little ridiculous. Unfortunately, I can't offer any better answers. Rayres, I wish you luck. I think there is a great game waiting

This is a broader problem with terrain in general in Elemental: it doesn't make a difference in any way. Does anyone really care if they happen to found their city in the middle of a swamp, or in a clump of hills, or near a forest, etc? Answer no. For all intensive purposes you can completely ignore terrain other than resource clumps. The only real effects are slightly increased movement costs and slight defensive bonuses, neither of which have any bearing on city placement. Right now

Brad, First off, great work so far on all the updates. This is actually a game now whereas the release version was a complete mess. I'll be honest, after about 2-3 play throughs of the initial release version I simply gave up and stopped playing. The added features and stability have actually made this a game worth playing past the first few turns. 1.1 is by far a better game than 1.09 or the release version. Hands down, no question. However, if your

AGREE wholeheartedly. Faction differentiation is needed badly is all respects. Right now playing any kingdom faction is nearly identical to playing any other kingdom factions. Empires are very slightly different but not much. Bottom line is that Elemental needs more differentiation in almost everything. Even within a faction there's really only two different units to build: sword + shield or two handed weapons. Thats it, thats all the differentiation there is. Yea, there are a

Ditto, I actually tried testing this out in a couple games. If you and your spouse channel then children will channel 100%. If spouse doesn't channel then no children channelers. Need to go back and test to see if the decision point is on birth or on maturity, but right now this is the basic problem.

Agree, wholeheartedly. By the time cities reach level 4-5 the game is essentially over. Playing a game on extreme right now where my cities are finally hitting level 4. I have already conquered two other civs, and as a result my scores is > 2x any opponents. One problem seems to be that the game is "over" to quickly in that once you start expanding victory is inevitable. There is no real penalty as you Empire gets bigger and bigger and bigger. Food would be the only constraint, but

[quote who="AlLanMandragoran" reply="10" id="2842288"] On a side note: I got rolled a number of times in GalCiv2 by the hardest AI setting - they were staking claim to systems and planets before I even discovered them. What that game did allow, however, was buffing of the home systems via space stations. I had one epic game where all I had was 2 systems each with 2 planets but they were located in the 4 corner region of tiles. I ended up making like 12 economy bases and 3 military

Problem with the defense aspect is that as long as there is a relative cheep spell like teleport defense is rarely really a concern. My Sov and his stack can be anywhere within a turn. Nerf that and it gets a little better.

@ Malsqueek Agree. In general trying to balance at Ridiculous is a rather silly endeavor. Playing on this level is an entirely different game than playing on normal, challenging, hard, even extreme. The game needs to be balanced on these levels first, then worry about the small subset of people that are playing on the highest levels (I'm one of those subset, used to stick to hard/extreme but have forayed into Ridiculous a couple times, but I realize that asking the devs to b

Okay, just want to just see if I'm the only one out here that feels this way. There is currently no real strategy process that has to take place when deciding on an initial placement and settling order of cities on the map. This is a pretty bold statement so I'll attempt to back it up. Upon game start we are usually met with a small clump of resources immediately around our capital: a shard or two, a fertile land, maybe something else if we're lucky. Plop you first city down her

Same here. Most of my worlds are rather boring. I get one or two opponents within a few tiles. Then a few scattered resources in various locations. Ultimately, I end up going to war with the nearest ones within 50-60 tuns, usually wiping them off the mad (both extreme and hard difficulty, ridiculous is just too ridiculous). After that the locations where I would want to settle cities are blindingly obvious. Two fertiles + an clay pit, arcane lab plus a goldmine. Ther

rwemack, Absolutely LOVE this idea!!! perfect easily implementable fix for the fact the Resources often simply become a non-issue in late game. After around turn 150 or so and I have 3-4 level three cities I just really don't care about materials, gildar, or mana for that matter. The numbers just skyrocket up into the hundreds and then the thousands. Resource use can just never keep up with resource production. I actually like the fact that once you hit mana storage capacity y

I am able to damage and destroy units of other empires that I have non-agression pacts with while they are in my territory using direct damage spell. I used pilar of flame as the test. Seems like this is a bug, or are we supposed to be able to do this? Also, pilar of flame was only doing 2 damage. I controlled 1 fire shard so should have been doing 4.

A few ideas to make the other tech trees more useful/interesting Diplo tree- Make the creatures made available by this tree more interesting. Problem is that the creatures made available are generally not worth the price of admission. I'll research up to dragons just because they're cool, but if I want to win the game then I'm going to just go up the war tree. A couple problems/potential solutions- 1) When you unlock each one you can only build in one cit