DerekPaxton

[quote who="legaceez" reply="9" id="2911343"]I guess my question is if Stardock is a middle-ware company, how come Elemental got AAA pricing when it was first released? Did it cost as much as a AAA title to produce and was the cost justified?[/quote] I can answer the question in general. Products that have a smaller market charge more because the production costs have to be divided among less customers. Its why a ticket to a movie that costs 100 mill

[quote who="FatNonFree" reply="1" id="2909706"]THANK GOD!! Can I still use the same save file?[/quote] Using old versions ave files is always suspect. This is pretty much your patch, we went through all your crash data to make it.

*** patch 1.19h is a beta patch *** *** patch 1.19h is scheduled for release on 3/22/2011 *** Changes: 1. Crash fixes. 2. Memory leak fixes.

Thanks for reporting these FatNonFree. We are digging into them.

[quote who="Sethai" reply="68" id="2907496"]i don't mean to sound impertinent, but why? some players (not me) just love to game the system. the old neverwinter nights boards were full of impassioned debate over how to build the perfect archer. randomising traits won't stop them from doing this, it will just slow them down a little and annoy them. better just minimize their potential for abuse by keeping the possibilities fairly balanced.[/quote] This is exactly the debate I had in my

We definitely need to make sure each trait has it's merits. I like the mix of some traits having prereqs (so players look for champions with different base skills) and some traits being open (so it doesn't become a fixed skill tree). Although its sexy to say that we will have 400 traits in big complex trees (and I hope a modder does something like this because I think some players will love it) I don't know that I want a player mapping out one units trai

I updated the first post with a lot of new information about traits. I completely forgot about all the conditional trait information when I wrote up my post yesterday.

[quote who="StevenAus" reply="41" id="2907038"]Can you have mutually exclusive traits or technologies (something that was not possible in WoM)? Best regards, Steven.[/quote] Currently traits can require techs, other traits or a race. Our design doesn't call for blocking traits, though we may be implementing mutually exclusive mechanics in other areas (not for our design, but for modders).

I take it you have never played fall from heaven. :) There are a lot of competitive multiplayer games out there. Balance needs to be reflected in every part of their design. We don't have that restriction, so let's have some fun with it. I'd much rather you tell a story about that awesome champion you had in one game because you got great traits and then loaded him up with so,e cool magical items you were lucky to find then have you noodling between decisions that all end up basically

[quote who="Werewindlefr" reply="22" id="2906747"] Quoting Derek Paxton, reply 15 Neither extreme. Some traits require prereqs (such as those that enable spells) so sions won't have access to them. But a lot of traits have no prereq so they are open to both Sions and Champions.What about pre-reqs in the form of a trait tree ? As in, traits that could unlock the access to other traits in the list at a higher level ?[/quote] Yeah, traits can require other traits so

[quote who="Alstein" reply="20" id="2906725"]Could traits be a function of weapons, or requiring a certain weapon or shield, or at least require a certain weapon to use? Are traits only passive, or are there active trait abilities? Example: A Spear unit could set Charge, enabling it to get a free retaliation before the first attack in a round, and a huge bonus on that attack vs cavalry. A Sword unit might have a Melee Foe trait it could gain, etc? T

[quote who="kenata" reply="13" id="2906669"] There is 1 trainable unit that gains traits when they levelup (Sions). We have an xml tag that says if a unit gains traits when they levelup or not, so it would be easy for a modder to allow all units to use traits when they levelup if they want. They could also create different levelups for different units by using the prereq system. Will Sions be able to access all of the base champion traits, or do all traits have prerequisites a

[quote who="kenata" reply="11" id="2906650"]I have one question about traits. Will traits be applicable to normal units? One of the coolest parts about Civ was the way that units could be leveled up to take on different traits. While you could have 20 knights which all had the base stats, these units could be upgraded to be slightly distinct from one another. In WoM, I can build a whole bunch of spear units with different armors and equipment, but outside of the HP bonus for leveling up, thes

[quote who="Ahara" reply="7" id="2906631"]Sounds really interesting. Allthough hestitant at first it seems FE is going to be a good game. I love the idea of random traits with varying commonality. Are the affected stats censored to prevent forum users to start yapping on and on about stat usage?[/quote] :) Not really, they are censored to keep from causing confusion. The actual screenshot shows detail stats that won't be displayed in the final game.

I love role playing game’s (RPGs). At its core Fallen Enchantress is half 4x strategy game and half RPG. The best mechanics for Fallen Enchantress are applicable at an RPG and 4x level. In particular we are trying to push the RPG side of the game so that it feels like a 4x game set in an RPG world. There are a lot of game mechanics and implementation details (flavor) that support this focus. But one of my favorites in Fallen Enchantress is

*** 1.19g is a BETa patch *** *** 1.19g is scheduled for release on 3/17/2011 *** Changes: 1. Memory fixes. 2. Crash fixes. 3. Texture fixes. Prior memory fixes pushed textures out of managed memory so they would be stored in the video cards memory, if the players video card didn't have enough memory they could run into texture issues. This has been address with this patch.

[quote who="LightofAbraxas" reply="75" id="2905977"]Here's a random question... who is the snake lover on the design team? I count three variations on that list. Not that that's necessarily bad, just... a bit repetitive, maybe?[/quote] That would be my fault. If you are going to make animations/rig you might as well use them. But I probably shouldn't have included all the snake creatures in FE in one post. It does look a little unbalanced in a small samplin

[quote who="RogueCaptain" reply="73" id="2905915"]So plaguestalkers will get lots of initial movement points due to a special ability, interesting. Two questions please. In FE will movement points be counted separately from attacks per round or will they be fully integrated together like some previous games[/quote] Attacks are a separate stat than movement (ie: moving doesn't consume attacks). [quote]In FE will all attacks per round be manually executed

[quote who="ClaytonHollowell" reply="3" id="2905459"]Why is it dieing at 1.2 GB, why can't it even make it all the way to 1.5 GB before crapping out? I hope you don't release v1.2 like this, it's utterly unplayable (to completion) on large maps, and an excruciating exercise on a medium map.[/quote] Yeah, we are playing with your saves. So far where you were starting at 903Mb, with our latest changes we can load it up in about 700Mb. we are still working on it.</

Thanks for this Clayton. Your fresh loads are about 1Gb of memory, so it just looks like there is to much stuff in the game. But we are looking through your included saves to see what can be done to reduce it.

[quote who="TheProgress" reply="65" id="2904797"]What if the adventure tech was replaced by a contextual "lore" tech - players can find ancient scrolls / tablets / whatever from dungeons and quests and then bring them back to the city. The lore screen would then display all collected items, and the research progress on each item - each item (or perhaps a collection of items) would reveal possible hidding locations for ancient relics once fully researched. Ancient relics would be ob

I agree that it doesn't make much sense for monsters to be coupled with techs. We will talk abotu what is happening there later. My instinct about quests was the same as yours initially. But the problem isn't that quests are unlocked by techs, but that they such a weak part of the tech structure. It's not that choosing to focus your empire on quests is a bad idea (in fact its one of the most elegant ways to marry the RPG and 4x

Great feedback, thansk for posting this. I will make sure it gets to the developer that has been working on the memory issues.

The first debug you provided isnt an OOM. You may have run into a crash, but you never go over 600 meg of memory. The second one is an OOM but Elemental isn't even using a Gb of memory. So it is an OOM, but because something else is taking up your memory. Still we are checking it out to see if there is anything we can improve on our end. I know the developer is lookign at your graphic issues, that nvidia card

[quote who="Alstein" reply="43" id="2903201"]If they're following the same restrictions, and there is a global mana pool- how are you going to fix this problem: In quick combat (And tactical)- the AI does not cast spells. If the AI cast spells, it would likely deplete its mana pool way too easily, I can't see the AI handling mana management well at all.[/quote] The AI has to be taught how to effectively use mana. This is the same issue regardless of the