Carewolf

More bugs: Bad templates. Empire peasants and sentinels still have combat-speed 1. Kingdom peasants have access to equipment normal troops dont Wierd stuff available from loot: Ring of Essence (what does +1 essence do now?). Arm greaves, no longer available in stores, but available as loot. Gold from monsters. First fight one monster that gives you 22 gold. Then fight another ONE monster, that gives you 26 gold, and 22 gold. Then fight another ONE monst

[quote who="tjashen" reply="7" id="2830279"] Simply put, the Square/Square Root system heavily favors whomever has the higher value, with the difference changing things exponentially. Once one value is 20% higher or more than the other, things skew very quickly. [/quote] Quadratic! not exponential. Quadratic and exponential are both super-linear, but exponential is a special type of super-linear progress that is particular bad, so please don't use when you

[quote who="Mubunu" reply="12" id="2830990"]In real life, 100 peasants (club,no armor, no shield) engaging in the open 100 knights (longsword, full chainmail, oak shield) would get themselves murdered to the last one, occasionally bruising a knight's muscles here and there (give them forks, and there will be some action !). I haven't much played latest version, but I was under the impresion it was more or less what happened ingame.[/quote] You are confusing real life an

Also peasants can get superior equipment such as travelling boots that is not available to new design troops and template troops.

[quote who="wraithstalke" reply="45" id="2830106"]1) The AI does not appear to give a priority to defending it's children or spouses in war time, I seem to often be attacking a son or daughter who is wandering between cities undefended or finding a spouse armed only with a spear defending a town. [/quote] Yeah. When attacking capitals I usually find the king has run away with his tail between his legs and left his wife to defend the city.

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="45" id="2829927"] Movement mid to late game gets really annoying. Need some reasonable way to travel distances that aren't lame (i.e. don't rely on teleporting) [/quote] Have you considered horses?? I mean as a real resource in the world, and not just as mythological creatures only available to heroes in shops?

[quote who="CHiZZoPs" reply="31" id="2828695"]Equipping champions: You click on the hero's portrait, which says "equip," but then you have to click on another button inside the menu to actually get to the equip screen[/quote] I don't think it is the portrait saying "equip", it is a small button at the button of the portrait that takes you directly to the equipment-screen. At least I think, I have used it like that, though I know I have also missed it several times too.

Somehow in fixing this the war staff was broken completely. It is now both the cheapest and best weapon for a long time.

They did that in the unpatched release version, but got slammed for it by some reviewers who couldn't do percentage math :(

I find Terraforming pretty useless to begin with. Assuming you can still get it later through research I have not picked it as a starting spellbook. That said. Those 4 books are lot better balanced than the elemental books. Currently only fire is really usefull, many of the other elemental spellbooks doesn't even have spells that scale in any way with the number of shards you control. I think to fix this it is necessary to stop thinking fire==combat, we already have a c

1. In the early game I have seen the AI settle cities at "tactical" points where they could control the continent better if they were powerful in the future. The problem is that a 4X game is super-linear, so by choosing a city spot that is less optimal growth-wise just means I am going to walk all over them later in the game and their tactical points will mean nothing. The AI should only start meta-gaming when they can afford it growth-wise. One example: Magnar settles

1.1 Notes after playing a single game on "hard" map, with "extreme" ai. * The idle city popup is less than helpfull when you get two of them. You will building in a different city than what is indicated by the UI. * Some weapons and equipment is still poorly balanced. My wife got her hands on a war staff, and then invaded and single-handedly beat all the armies of the second largest faction in the world. Strength 20 and attack 15 essentially made h

[quote who="DKL" reply="24" id="2824340"]Why do games (including Elemental v1.0 and other major strategy games of 2010) not use multithreaded AI? Debugging. If multiple things are touching bits of memory, modifying variables, creating or deleting objects it can be a real pain to coordinate. The bigger the team, ironically, the harder it is to do. That just screams 'Haskell!' and transactional memory [/quote] No, it is not that complicated. Note that the threads are only

I am betting on that 1.1 will have greately improved gameplay. Removing many of the mechanism that was pushing the gameplay in the wrong direction, but there is probably still UI inefficiencies, and based on Kaels last/first dev journal, they are working on using more of the world lore in the next patches, so 1.1 is probably still light on athmosphere. But really, we are just being pre-election pundits, pulling predictions and comments out of our asses ;)

My review of this Dev Journal: Light on information, big on hope. Poor dev journal, nice feel-good post though. It is really good that you already are working as a manager and not just as a designer. What is your managing background?

[quote who="Gwenio1" reply="163" id="2811961"] Lack of balance amd content are not bugs, so your point is moot. We are discussing why they do not work, and not why they are not as good as the classics.[/quote] I guess that is a question of point-of-view. If a game is fun and addictive enough, I will actually keep playing it dispite having to reload the game every few hours due to memory leaks (Victoria 2), or that the game overheats the GPU and blue-screens th

To those talking about hardware: BULLSHIT!!! You know as well as I do, that most of the problems with Elemental had nothing to do with hardware. The problems, was lack of balance, lack of content and great ambitions that wasn't yet fullfilled. I have one of the absolutely worst PC platforms imaginable, but still I've been able to play (on release date) the last two year: Overlord 2, Spore, Fallout 3 and Dragon Age: Origins. All games that tax the hardware worse than any

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="108" id="2795870"] It's not like it's hard to come up with really cool magical spells. Heck, I have the MOM manual here to crib from. It's easy to say you'd like a dozen completely different playable factions that are all fantastically different ala MOM. But units in MOM were 64x64 pixel sprites, each one took a couple hours to do. There's a reason why games in the 3D era of PC game design tend to have very very few races (and almost all huma

I only played FfH2 after playing the first released version of Elemental, without having tried 1.0.9, I would say FfH2 is a better Elemental than Elemental is. A lot of the game is cliché, but not too cliché, and what is much more important: It is fun. For instance. I never understood why Elemental included quests, they seems tacked on and odd, but playing FfH2 where goody huts are random and questlike in nature, it suddenly makes sense. The engine behind FfH2 never made

I agree completely with this post. Impulse is undoubtably a DRM system, it might not restrict users as much as classic DRM systems, but that just makes it that much more absurd in nature, because it doesn't even serve a purpose anymore, it just has all the downsides DRM has on users, but none of the supposed benifits for the publisher. It is solely a source of bugs and user frustration. Edit: Or to put it different: As a paying customer I usually have no problems w

Distant Worlds: A really ambitious galatic 4x game. The take confusing UI to an extreme, and it takes a lot of skill to really get into, but it works, and it is really impressive and it doesnt just kills time, it DESTROYS time.

[quote who="Gwenio1" reply="1" id="2792557"]There are buildings (pubs, inns, and the great theater for the Kingdoms) in the civic tree that give a boost to prestige.[/quote] The building effects are also doubled by royalty, making things even more broken.

I being more and more in favor of a system with limits per city-level (at most one basic production building per level). This would be the easiest and most safe fix from the current situation. If given free hands though, I would go more in a "colonization" direction. Simply define the concepts of employed and unemployed citizens. A basic building could then employ 10 people. A city with 10 people could thus have one mechants, one study or one workshop etc. You cou

[quote quoting="post"] Stardock, Frogboy, Are you aware that the warhammer now does 5 damage whereas the mace (a lower-tech weapon) does 6 damage? is this behavior in the latest hot fix/patch of 1.08 intended? [/quote] But maces themselves doesn't make any sense. They are slower than boar-spears (-0.25) and does less damage (6<8). Generally it looks like somebody is trying to "balance" weapons by looking at each one in isolation i

[quote who="Fenrirw0lf" reply="14" id="2773386"]I think we can all agree a sovereign's civilization disappearing after he is dead is a pretty stupid Idea. I think the devs realize this and I'm sure it will be fixed in one of the updates. Even if their is no line of succession the cities should still exist in some capacity. A war over succession would be awesome, with some warlord or unnamed hero fighting for control and taking over, That doesn't seem too likely though.