I'd say go for it in the mods, let the stock stuff stay fairly standard and noncontroversial. That's what mods are for, after all. Want to have armor made of linked M&M candies? Go for it. [e digicons]:D[/e]
If you are going to spend the $50, first make sure you can afford it so you won't have buyer's remorse later. Next, read the forum and site carefully and see if what you read of the game appeals to you and the existing bugs or unfinished AI don't put you off. Finally, if you spend the $50 on Elemental, think of it as a long term investment in a game you will likely play for quite a while. Bargain bin? Perhaps some of the store copies may end up there, good luck finding
I too have to add myself to the more crashes under 1.07 list. I already posted my error log. I was able to play 250+ turns under 1.06. 1.07 has more video load but I have not cut back on settings, I'm waiting to see what fixes come out. The crashes are sudden CTD and not PC stoppers thank goodness. Memory leak? Video issue? Who knows? They'll take care of it, I'm sure.
I mentioned this earlier responding to Brad's most recent post, but I thought it worth repeating here because this is the right place for it. I would like to see the minor factions be able to raise unique units which other factions, including the player's, could buy if the diplomatic relations were sufficiently close. I would also suggest that the minors have special spells of their own, which similarly could be purchased by others. Finally, the minors could have NPC's
Game crashed unexpectedly. Unable to post save to pastebin, sorry.
Brad's candor has a way of bringing you in to the family, so to speak. At least I feel that way. It hopefully will be so different an approach that buyers coming here with a game problem will quickly see that this is not your run of the mill gaming factory, operated by attorneys and marketing weenies. Brad takes it on the chin and hides little of gaming relevance from the public, as far as I can see. That alone has earned my undying loyalty to SD. The next SD gam
Brad- My wish for minor factions is that they have unique units with special abilities that we can recruit if we ally with the minor. That would give them a real reason to exist. Next, they might have special spells that can be purchased if the relationship is good enough. finally, a player who befriends them might get a boost to their diplomacy points (I forget momentarily what they are called in the game.) BTW I almost felt your angst about unanticipated re
I notice from the posted images that it is turn 279 and the Empire of Kraxis has a power level of over 1200. I've never seen an AI empire go over 500 and they usually overpowered me. I win by decapitation and city conquest anyway, avoiding their biggest stacks unless the sovereign is there. This was on normal, challenging and hard. Have yet to try higher settings, or lower. Funny how this game plays out differently for different people. Wonder why that is
The AI sometimes does get cruel but mostly I find it is with critters and brigands taking on my weaker resource outposts. It varies a lot from game to game. I play on challenging or hard and one game I assigned all hard to all the AI factions and the critters were intense, all over the place. Other games, I hardly see any. I wonder if it is because the AI is researching the critter spawning adventure techs first? I know I avoid them now until I've got substantial
The only solution I care to see is for the system to appoint the next heir in line to the throne and have that character lead the remaining empire cities as the new sovereign. This is a game about humans (of different ilks of course) and so this is the natural (and "historic") solution to decapitation. A really well working dynastic system would add a lot of depth and fun to the game, but it has to be tied to reasonable rules. It really does not feel rewardin
I play on normal, challenging or hard and do not run into the other sides until at least 20 and sometimes 100 turns go by. They may build up scary armies, but by the time they do, I can usually concentrate my own and take them down. I do not mean to besmirch your gaming skills, for I am hardly a pro, but most AI's can be defeated as long as you build up your force and by turn 200 you should have built up your sovereign and at least 3 to 6 squads of macemen, swords or archers.&nb
SD goes mainstream distribution, expect mainstream level trolling.
In several of my 1.06 games to date, I have encountered NPC's (all women) whose map icon is an infant in a cradle (same icon used for infant progeny of sovereigns). Is this deliberate or a bug? They have full powers, so they are clearly adults, but why the baby picture? It just seems odd to look at. In the tac battles they assume the shape of the adult form that they have on their info page. Second issue - Is there any check being made of duplicate NPC names?&n
[quote who="KillzEmAllGod" reply="11" id="2750311"]elemental wasn't finished and will never will be at least according to brad.. so i guess that means we will keep getting patches forever.[/quote] I think that is a deliberate distortion of what Brad said and meant. He was simply committing to a long time making tweaks and improvements.
I see it use roads about 60% of the time, but mostly if the target is in a rough line from the start point and the road parallel to that same line. If the target is off to the side, the AI will go off on that vector, even if there is a road that might save a bit. I checked two different units, one kept on the road manually and the other allowed to go the way the AI wanted (cross country) and they ended up getting there at the same time. Maybe not so dumb after all.
Reading through all this prompted me to add an ohbytheway. People posting complaints here seem to fall into three categories: 1. People who cannot play the game due to stability/compatibility/hardware issues which may indicate that the game was not yet optimized for their particular platform combination. 2. People who can for the most part play the game and have gripes about gameplay issues, AI, UI, balance, programming glitches, unimplemented f
[quote who="cygnetsong" reply="2" id="2748807"]Since the sovereign is the only caster (snip)[/quote] That may be true in the beginning but I have purchased NPC's that had lots of mana and the ability to cast all the spells that I had learned to that point. Check out the NPC's stats when you encounter them (press on their icon on the map and then press the big picture of them at the center bottom of the menu bar.) You can see that some of them already have high intelligence
More good news from the SD team. Excellent! I too put in my vote for conquered sovereign's remaining cities to go independent and not just magically disappear. The remaining cities should remain to be conquered or to be negotiated with, but leaving the map with a bunch of barren tiles is just not cool, aesthetic, challenging or "realistic" (for whatever that means in a fantasy game.) More choices going into auto-resolve would be nice, e.g. whether to allow ch
Part of the problem is that Elemental seems to be a very different beast on different machines. At least from the stability side of things. I do sympathize with those of you out there with the "wrong" graphics cards or chipsets, that is pretty raw and no fun. Being told to be patient does not make it better, or right. We can only hope that Brad tries to QA the game on a wider variety of machines next time (and right now would be good too, if the problems are to go away.)
[quote quoting="post"] (snip) Right now: the perception of this game is that it's unplayable, and that buying a Stardock game isn't worth it until at least a year out. (snip) [/quote] I cannot say that I agree at all. First of all, it is only one opinion. Second, my own experience is positive. I am about 250 turns into a large map playing 1.06 and have had but one crash and I was able to recover from the autosave (I save each turn.)
I've seen my armies lose hit points mysteriously, even when not in combat or adjacent to enemy units. They get into a town and recover immediately all their lost HP so I assume it is a bug and if I've noticed it I'm sure others have too and so it will be fixed over time.
I really like the 3D game engine of Elemental. I can spin it around, zoom in and out and see units and towns with wonderful clarity and seeming depth of field. Suddenly it occurred to me what it would be like to play a modern tactical TBS war game with this engine. Today I was playing the game and spinning around and zooming in and out and suddenly I could see trees, towns, clearings and roads in the WW2 Battle of the Bulge's Ardennes Forest campaign in front of my e
Thank you Brad, for taking time (and risking life and limb should you wife discover you on the PC while ostensibly on vacation) to send us your thoughts. It is good to see the plans for 1.1 laid out so soon and I look forward to hearing more about it. Rest up and come back refreshed and rarin' to go, OK? [e digicons]:sun:[/e]
While I am perfectly content with Elemental as a game right now, given that it is bound to improve over time, I do have to admit that I have concerns about possible blowback against Stardock from mass market store retail purchasers who are going to be unhappy about its initial state. Going mainstream to the big box retail outlets means that you will reach a vast market of potential buyers, but many of these buyers are also not SD fanboys, TBS geeks, PC savvy or especially patient or eve
On Normal, I have seen the AI remove stacks which included the Sovereign out of danger. In the case I saw last night, the stack was approaching one of my cities, presumably to attack it and I moved a large army led by my own regent into it and the AI teleported out (I saw it blink) when I hit the turn button. One annoying thing I also noticed was that the AI would send Pioneers (of all things!) to attack my resource hexes. It was mostly on my border and there was thi