Re: IGN: Elemental: War Of Magic - Preview
 

Beta has started.

Re: IGN: Elemental: War Of Magic - Preview
 

Elemental Beta Gameplay

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3KSD...e=channel_page

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Ahhh if only I wasn't so broke I'd preorder the **** outta this game.

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So far it looks cool. The beta intro screen was pretty funny LOL and I really like the menu screen. The art style they are going for gives the game a unique feel. The part of the game we can play right now is 0 fun and moving the view around the map is clunky. So far I don't like any of the existing game mechanics except for the way cities are expanded upon (Taking up more of the map).

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Got a long way to go. For the record, here's the schedule.

http://forums.elementalgame.com/363845

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After reading through this thread and being horrified at the attention that concept art was getting, I had the guys whip up come cooler peices to replace the....questionable ones ;)

Like Kofiman says, we have a long friggin' way to go, but thanks for everyones interest in Elemental!

(Producer @ Stardock)

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OH MY F****** GOD!! A STARDOCK DUDE JUST WROTE IN MY THREAD!! THAT IS SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO COOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL!! OMG OMG OMG*jumps up and down while screaming*
MAEK LOEV 2 ME!!!!!

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Well at least now we know he won't be coming back.

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Ha ha ha :D

boogiebac didn't give the link, so I'll provide it once more:

http://elementalgame.com/media.asp

It's much more appealing now, I think. The troll is very cool!

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Heh. I get a feeling that those new images are kind of sarcastic:rolleyes: like parodies of blizzards artwork or something

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Well if that's the case it's sad that the parodies are way better than what they had.

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No sarcasim intended :D...the actual character work was done a few months ago, with the background color-wash and border linework done last week. We love and worship the stuff that comes out of Blizzard :bow: Our only sin has been to put up crappy model sheets as concept art and not replacing them sooner ;)

Glad the new artwork is more pleasing :)

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Oh hey, I forgot, this is an astoundingly entertaining read:

http://elementalgame.com/journals.asp

Frogboy rocks! Love the 'scope, man.

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Ok:D Wish I could worship blizzard as much as you but i can't. Their games are awful for my taste;)

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Boom head shot? :p

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Diablo_3 and Starcraft_2 will not allow LAN games... it's too bad Blizzard doesn't love us back.

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I'm spinning in my grave! Can't this game come out already?:cold:

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You aren't dead, so how can you be spinning in your grave?

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So far the beta group has a been a little disappointing to me. They want things taken out like perma-death for Sovereigns and want things added like Legolas elves. I hope the only version of an elf we have in the game is a pointed-ear head atop a spear. And when your Sovereign dies, I hope the game formats your computer.

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When people discovered he was the enemy, they buried him alive with a laptop and a internet connection.

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Haha:D

They actually tried to smash my head in with the laptop(an Acer Aspire 8935G btw;)), then left it there when they thought I was dead.
I got the internet connection by plugging in a Staff of Storms into a radioactive dinosaur corpse.

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Perma death for the Sovereign is not an issue to me. Game over on sovereign death is. It's a gameplay issue because Brad Wardell says himself the ai will have lots of computation to do to avoid being killed and therefore he's looking for ways to make it hard to kill a sovereign, which means he's designing the game around a core feature and then trying to work around that core feature because the ai won't handle it.
The current implementation of sovereign death is also particularly annoying: When you kill a soevereign, all his cities just vanish (but not the units).

Now many players in the beta think game over on sovereign death is a good idea, and I haven't seen anyone asking for Legolas elves on the beta forums.

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There are many threads asking for stock fantasy races. The reason I like the idea of the Sovereign dying = game over is because the sovereign is supposed to represent you, and also it adds an element of danger to the game that makes it more exciting. The cities vanishing is lame, and I hope they change that.

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It's not unreasonable expecting fantasy races since it's a fantasy game. In my opinion it doesn't have to be stock fantasy races, but anything is better than having only human good and human bad.

Adding an element of danger with the Sovereign dying can be done without meaning instant game over. The dominions series did it correctly because the death of the pretender has a serious penalty.
In Elemental I'd hate to suddenly lose a game because another player got lucky casting a volcano or because some Balrog was released by independent adventurers. Whether or not a player loses the game by the sovereigns death means the sovereign will be more and more likely hiding deep in a tower during middle and late game.

What other recent TBS games makes you believe tying a win/lose event to a single unit would be successful?

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For years we have seen games drift from being hard to being very easy. It's refreshing when a game comes around that offers challenges such as the sovereign death = game over. I think Dwarf Fortress is a great example of how a game can be fun and very difficult. It shouldn't be a matter of naming current TBSs that use the mechanic, and the reason why is because I don't want to play a game that has to have rules that have been done before in a TBS. I don't mind if this game strays away from the ordinary. And it sounds like losing your Sovereign isn't going to be a thing that just happens on a dice roll. It sounds like it is going to be very difficult to lose a sovereign. It creates another win/lose condition to the game. Enough people are clamoring for it to be gone that it doesn't matter anyway. They will remove the feature or they will make it where you can toggle it on and off.

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I certainly never thought Total Annihilation was a bad game because Commander death = game over.

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I'm pretty sure that they won't implement stock fantasy races into the base game. They have the tools that will allow the modding community to do that kind of work for them. As far as the sovereign thing, it really depends on the game balance, especially because the game touts the kind of decisions where your sovereign spends his essence on things which is supposed to make him weaker. Age of Wonders had that game mode where if you lost your "king" hero you lost the game. It was fun actually, but I'm not sure it should be the default.

Either way, keep the impressions/updates coming as new stuff gets released. :up:

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time and time again I try to get into Dwarf Fortress.

I *don't* care about graphics..
(I loved Rogue, and hack, and asciTrek)

But damn I just can't get into it. What was that//? again?

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Oh you should try it with a good graphic mod pack. it makes the game more fun for me :). Go to the forum and there is bound to be an excellent one on the first page of the modding forum.

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It didn't. I'm confused.

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And thus there's no reason why the sovereigns death cannot be an optional setting. Personally anyone who feels a game should only serve their purpose is being selfish.

Stardock has a solid history of being able to provide very difficult games. As I mentioned earlier having the Sovereign's death tied to losing a game means the player will use him less and less likely during middle and late game. If you need to better visualize the effect than picture what would happen if the next Dominions_3 patch meant instant game over upon a pretenders death. The first result would be no pretenders with low hitpoints(10 or less) and the second result would be no pretenders being used as SC's during middle and late game.

And with a toggle on/off option the game still has the instant lose condition... simply it doesn't force everyone to play the same way. Personally all this instant lose condition will do is have players hide their sovereigns since even being unlucky while traveling can kill you. I'm all about providing very difficult games where the AI opponents have a strong advantage and sovereigns death being game over would be more useful for the human player than any AI opponent.



Total Annihilation was an RTS, big difference from TBS.

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I totally disagree with the asertion that sovereign death = game over makes the game harder.
On the contrary.
Kill 1 unit of the ai, and you've won.
I never managed to like Dwarf Fortress, but in roguelikes, when you die and it's over, it's cool because you're playing one individual, because it makes the game harder.
In my opinion, Elemental is adding a mechanism that the ai can't handle to defend itself, and I am not interested in playing an individual but a nation in such a game.

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If I understand correctly, the talk was now having an exceptionally poor workaround for avoiding sovereign death: if defending, the sovereign automatically retreats to the nearest friendly city, instead of dying. That seems to me to be a particulary poor way of removing penalties for risky use of a sovereign.
Even though I would much prefer to have the game end (or some very serious penaly) if my sovereign "dies" -- perhaps he goes to some MMORPG-type of purgatory from which he must return -- I would be satisfied if this were an option I could turn on without having to mod. I believe it would increase the RPG-type of feeling.

That said, I am greatly disappointed with the little bit I have been able to see in Beta so far. It looks like the combat -- and hence the entire mechanism behind military victories, behind constructing units and research military power -- is vastly undercomplex; it looks even less promising that the combat system of GalCiv2. Or maybe I am misunderstanding everything.

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Give them time, the real combat system isn'tt even implemented. what we have now is but a placeholder.

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I wander about the whole sovereign death thing; my rather fuzzy memory suggests that the game had a dynastic focus, especially in regards to diplomacy. So the simple solution would be to make full use of that and require that you have an heir to keep playing if your sovereign dies. This could lead to a more interesting diplomatic system, what if you married your only heir to a competing royal family, what are the consequences of having an underage heir and so on.

Just seems as though the developers aren't thinking everything through from what I can see.

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The dynasty thing is a rather late idea. The core idea has always been to play an almost divine individual. Dynasties are for vassals.
Now I don't say that it's consistent, but we will see whether vassal dynasties diplomacy has any meaning if it all revvolves about killing enemy sovereigns.

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Thats the general idea ala Total War series. Where it strays from it is the idea is that you are the sovereign, not his/her heirs. So you can have kids, grandkids etc but when you die, your out of the game. This may have already changed or probably will change as the community molds the clay to look more like other TBSs but as of the last time I read it, that is the way it worked.

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lol @ my lack of apostrophes and commas.

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Been a while now and still no EW:M.... Starting to feel slightly depressed:hurt:

Here's a picture of a cat just to prove the authenticy of this post

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3282/...c8cae16f_b.jpg

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The kitten rules.

In other matters, the one thing thus far that I don't like in what's been shown of E:WoM is the inability to limit world rulers (okay, I want to say pretenders, so I will!) to specific spell groups by type. What I mean is something along the lines of what Master of Magic and Dominions 3 do: you take X many books/levels of Nature, and you get Y many Nature spells. Other pretenders without Nature chosen at the start can't get those spells. Tends to make for more customized and distinct pretenders, in my opinion.

Otherwise, I'm very interested in the way E:WoM is going. And Stardock has a history of turning out games with excellent AI, so I don't think we'll see a repeat of the problems along those lines that dogged MoM.

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I used 4 death gems to animate this necromantic thread...

How is beta 1B so far? Likes? Dislikes?

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I've found the beta to be, so far, tiresome. It is much less of a beta as it is an alpha. Stardock pushed back the release date from spring to fall of next year so as to extend the "beta" phase, and so it feels as if we goons are there for free sandbox testing for them. So far, the game does not feel inspired; it feels like a bare-bones CivIV without religion. Of course, the product will turn out to be vastly different, but you asked how the beta was going so far, and basically, it is still in its diaper phase; haven't learned to walk yet, much less talk.

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My experience has been the same as happygeek so far. One of the newly implemented features I do like is how you can customize your soldier's description card, including pose and quotes. It's the little things that I think will set the game apart. I doubt I will actually enjoy the beta until you can actually fight stuff. Right now fighting looks like Leylines combat system.

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sounds cool, I remember seeing the first previews and I was kinda impressed. it certainly looks and sounds better now, which is good :3

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Heh, I found this quote interesting:

As Stardock CEO Brad Wardell mentions in another post about Elemental on the Impulse web site. " . . . beta 1 will NOT be fun in any way. We are not kidding about this. Our objective with this first build is to get the parameters on which the game runs, how well it runs."

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^that is usually the case with early beta versions ~~

I remember M&B being quite barren when it began.

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Will this game have hotseat multiplayer?

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M&B beta compared to now; WOW completely different game!

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The more it's like MoM, the better--except for the much improved AI, of course. ;)

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Actually, I thought MoM's AI was pretty damn good.
Sure beatable. But varied, effective, and never a pushover.

That said, I wouldn't care one iota if the game shipped without an AI, and was just mp.

I know I'm in the minority on that one.