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[Nivim]

The other options are[...]

*Scoffing. The kind with the nose.* You could probably go through the entire alphabet of viable options they have for the game. Those are horrible generalizations, and they don't support any particular point. Again, with more detailing!

 You guys are looking for what's cool and allows you a great deal tactics and strategy, right? Then when you use a statement to cover all the magic in the game, or worse, all the game mechanics in the game, you need to be a lot more open about it. What defines a spell being overpowered isn't itself, but it's relation to all the other aspects of the game; you can make it so every spell the player runs into looks horribly overpowered, but when they interact, it's the choices that matter. Creating this kind of thing requires testing and imagination; not any specific game mechanic.
 To have a discussion on game mechanics, you need details. Some kinds of spells might work really well under the control of the RNG, some spells might work really well when they're effects are hidden, while others could need absolute player control or need to be impossible to conceal.

 In addition to Lordcooper's simple questions, I ask this for those who play; what sorts of spells do they have flying around? Got a list?

[The Transcendent Tyrant]

I'm generally against that kind of randomness, myself.  Especially random bad things.  When random badness chains together, it can really screw you over; no matter how good you've been doing and no matter how smart you've been, blowing two important 1% catastrophic failure chances in a row is terrible and ruins the experience.

It can give too much power to your enemies, too.  If three AI players each think they're going to lose to the human, they might as well all take huge risks.  Strategic risks?  Cool.  Just plain rolling the dice?  Uncool.

The whole thing smacks of "spearmen defeating stealth bombers".  Don't give too much power to the RNG!

I was more suggesting set chances for effects on shards. ie. Give people the ability to harness shards or "unlock" them for more power. The power of the shard will eventually explode, however, devastating the area around it to a certain (percentile roll) degree. They should also effect the area around them JUST by being there.

I had a few other mechanics that I thought would be nice to have but would've been hard to represent in game, so random chance effects would've been better.

You guys are looking for what's cool and allows you a great deal tactics and strategy, right? Then when you use a statement to cover all the magic in the game, or worse, all the game mechanics in the game, you need to be a lot more open about it. What defines a spell being overpowered isn't itself, but it's relation to all the other aspects of the game; you can make it so every spell the player runs into looks horribly overpowered, but when they interact, it's the choices that matter. Creating this kind of thing requires testing and imagination; not any specific game mechanic.
 To have a discussion on game mechanics, you need details. Some kinds of spells might work really well under the control of the RNG, some spells might work really well when they're effects are hidden, while others could need absolute player control or need to be impossible to conceal.

Maybe I should've used "make players feel like they're overpowered". It's about giving players a feeling of "OH MY FUCKING GOD I AM SO DAMN COOL AND UNBEATABLE" instead of "+1 Production per Turn does not give me a boner".

Strategic spells in game are, to put it simply, dull and / or sucky. Tactical spells are useful to a degree, but you're better off getting a longbow / a sword. You're never given a feeling of power like you were in MoM. Even the volcano spell is massively underwhelming.

[Nivim]

 Have people brought this problem up in an ordered manner on their forums? Or, well, where the developers will read it?

[nenjin]

Patch notes for 1.09o.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Resolved Issues:

1. Fixes an issue where animals won't attack cities (looks like combat will start but then it ends without combat).

2. Fixed a crash when clicking on the game concepts or walkthru entries in the Hiergamenon.

3. You can no longer drink some quest items (like the magic flute).

4. Storm now correctly has a mana cost.

5. New diplomatic conditions: - You killed my kid -5 to diplomacy - You're wiping others out -2 - Seriously, you're out of control -5 - Early game +1 - Not very strong +1 - Focusing on other enemies +1

6. AI: AI is more thread safe (fixes crashes).

7. AI: Monsters will run away from tougher enemies.

8. AI: Intelligent monsters tend to band together with other types of monsters

9. AI: Intelligent monsters will actively target weaker units (or cities) -- beware

10. AI: Intelligent monsters will run away from tougher units

11. AI: AI significantly better at choosing new city locations

12. AI: Pioneers update their paths to avoid accidentally attacking other settlements

13. AI: AI more intelligently evaluates the value of an area of land.

14. AI: AI somewhat better at choosing which unit to build in a city

15. AI: Monsters more intelligent regarding selecting victims.

16. AI: Monsters are more aggressive.

17. AI: More Monsters are spawned early on.

18. AI: Pioneer behavior is more intelligent in selecting area.

19. AI: AI more effective at defending cities.

20. AI: AI more effective at reinforincing cities that are under threat.

21. Some strategic buff spells now have no range requirement (easier for human and AI players).

22. Non-capital cities have a population storage of 10 (instead of 0 for the outpost which caused problems).

23. Bows reduced from:

    Crude Bow: Attack 6, Accuracy -2, Range 8
    Cedar Shortbow: Attack 15, Accuracy -2, Range 8
    Cedar Longbow: Attack 23, Accuracy -2, Range 8

      New stats:

    Crude Bow: Attack 4, Accuracy -2, Range 6
    Cedar Shortbow: Attack 9, Range 8
    Cedar Longbow: Attack 12, Range 10

24. Pioneer Packs are available when designing units.

25. Redesign of the CombatRating calculation to give a more accurate reflection (not perfect but much better) of a unit or army's effective combat strength.

26. Renamed "Quests" to "Lore Recovery". Ancient Lore renamed to "Greater Lore"

27. AI better at valuing trade offers

28. AI: AI now intelligently casts strategic spells

29. Procipinee thong crisis averted.

30. Improved performance of moving units into and out of cities.

31. New Improvement: Library. Studies upgrade to libraries when a city reaches level 3 and the player has civics. Libraries provide 2 knowledge per turn. (Fallen version added called the Master Archivist).

32. Gold Mines now require Harvesting tech to use

33. Lost Libraries now require Lore Recovery to use

34. Ancient Temples now require Arcane research to use

35. Schools now only require civics and level 2 (was level 3) to build and can be built in 10 turns instead of 15.

36. Inns can now be built by level 2 cities without a prerequisite.

37. Removed the range requirement for more strategic spells

38. Diplomacy dialog text changes based on who they are talking to

39. Close borders now has a -2 weight (was -1)

40. Different ideology now has a -5 weight (was -1) since AIs were getting a bit too buddy buddy with each other.

41. Implemented the Tremor spell.  Strategic earth spell that immobilizes a unit in your ZoC for a turn.

42. Implemented the Slow spell. Strategic water spell that reduces the movement of an enemy army in your ZoC to 1 per turn.

43. Military Policy crash fixed.

44. Dead players no longer show up in the faction window.

45. Storm lightning bolt no longer appears to hit the caster (cosmetic).

46. When a city is conquered enchantments on the city are canceled.

47. Titans call is now correctly a level 5 spell.

48. When you access the spellbook from the kingdom report window (either through the tabs on the side, the shortcut in the actions area when nothing is selected, or from the little icon by the spell research status bar in the main tray wnd), it now sets the local player's sovereign as the caster, so that the spells can be cast without needing to expressly select a spellcaster on the main map

49. Fixed bug where tech category was always reset to Civilization after loading a save game.

50. NPC hubs updated to not exude influence, which improves calculation time and lets you walk up to a NPC city.

51. Fixed bug where ZOC was not accurate after loading a game because the city tiles didn’t recalculate their values after loading.

52. Updated the ZOC save/load code that is not currently used by Elemental.  ZOC is currently re-calculated from the sources, which works since influence does not linger after a source is removed.  But if that changes, we’ll need this code, and I initially thought that it would be necessary to save/load the ZOC data.

53. Royalty talent reduced from +100% to prestige to +10%.

54. Archery is no in the equipment line and required for ranged weapons (previously it was possible to learn ranged weapons and have access to bows but be unable to build archery ranges so you couldnt build archers).

55. Summoned units don't have essence anymore (so they cant summon other creatures).

56. Clicking on a players entry in the Faction Power window opens diplomacy with that player.

57. Fixed an issue with combat damage for spells, ranged damage and special attacks like crushing blow.

58. Fixed an issue with gold being given out from combat (to much was being given).

59. All factions given a starting tech:

  Kingdom of Altar- Exploration
  Kingdom of Capitar- Trading
  Kingdom of Gilden- Civics
  Kingdom of Tarath- Training
  Kingdom of Pariden- Arcane Research
  Empire of Yithril- Tools of War
  Empire of Umber- Reunion
  Empire of Magnar- Mapping
  Empire of Resoln- Lore Mastery
  Empire of Kraxis- Proper Living

60. Hovering over enemy units in tactical will give you your hit odds and damage ranges.

61. Logistics and City Defense tech order reversed (formorlly you got the command post to build groups early but couldn't build it because it required a rank 3 city).

62. Fixed a bug where tactical battle maps would not render props after multiple battles.

63. Villa Improvement added (replaces apartments), +60 pop, -1 food.

64. Houses moved up to the Economics tech (they were coming way to late).

65. Slums food cost reduced from 4 to 2 (to make slums efficient, if not pleasant to live in).

66. Slums moved back from the Proper Living to Majesty tech.

67. Fixed mounted archer animations.

68. Fixed bug that allowed you to talk to yourself, NPC player, or creatures if you select the unit and hit the Talk button (for NPCs and creatures, this would crash if you then tried to trade with them).

69. Added the Summon Ice Elemental spell.

70. Added the Pillar of Flame spell.

71. Added the Inferno spell.

72. Added the Summoners Boon spell.

73. Fixed a bug with Natures Bounty that allowed it to be cast on cities that weren't producing food.

74. Removed Leather armor Shirt, Chain mail shirt and scale mail shirt.

75. Implemented changes to Prestige generating improvements (and city hubs) as follows:

  Outpost base prestige: 0.3
  Village base prestige: 0.4
  Town base prestige: 0.5
  City base prestige: 0.6
  Metropolis base prestige: 0.7

  Capital Level 1: 0.5
  Capital Level 2: 0.6
  Capital Level 3: 0.7
  Capital Level 4: 0.8
  Capital Level 5: 0.9

Kingdom

  Beacon of Hope- +1 prestige
  Fortress- +1 prestige, 1 per city, city level 5
  Pub- +1.5 prestige, 1 per city, city level 3
  Inn- +1 prestige, 1 per city, city level 2
  Theater- +2 prestige, 1 per city, city level 4
  Palace- +2 prestige, 1 per faction, city level 4
  Great Arena- +4 prestige, +25% prestige in all cities, 1 per game, city level 5

Empire

  Tower of Civilization- +1 prestige
  Imperial Throne- +2 prestige, 1 per faction, city level 4
  Statue of Kir-Tion- +25% prestige in all cities, 1 per game, city level 2
  Monument- +0.5 prestige, unlimited, city level 2

This is to make population more critical (since it won't grow as quickly).

76. City levels changed from 25/100/400/1250 to 10/50/250/1000.

77. Added a mana maintenance window (so you can see where all your mana is going and disel any enchantments easily if you don't want to pay the maintenance cost anymore).

78. Number of monsters spawned now based on world difficulty level.

79. Reduced base Sovereign mana from 3 to 2.

80. Added a new Sovereign talent, Channeler, which increases mana by 2/turn.

81. Assigned the Channeler talent to Procipinee.

82. Increased Shard Shrines from 1 mana/turn to 2 mana/turn.

83. Moved Shard Harvesting/Shard Domination to later in the tech tree.

84. Fixed a mousewheel scrolling bug for some mice.

85. Fixed a bug where NPCs that spawn as an army weren't creating their subunits as champions.

Should be due sometime late, late tonight.

A couple of these changes have me going >.>

Mostly the ones relating to monsters. Monsters out of the box are tougher than your sovereign, roll in larger groups and require actual investment in your military to deal with. NOW they're going to smarter as well, and "douche bag bandit the game just generated next to your ZoC" will now go directly for an unguarded city. They'll also attack cities that are guarded if they have a good chance of victory, which means you'll now need to create defensive forces just to keep the massive amounts of creeps from wrecking your cities. No more "one pioneer goes off in to the wilderness and starts a mega-city." Now they'll need escorts and guards to protect the city while it grows. And they're going to add MORE monsters at the start of the game? Ugh. I like the creeps a lot but there have always, always been too many of them from the start of the game to mid-way through. At the very least, I wish they would go after NPCs too. It doesn't seem like they ever have.

Have people brought this problem up in an ordered manner on their forums? Or, well, where the developers will read it?

The SD devs actively read and respond to forum threads. Where your specific issue is on their mega-list of things to do is another matter though.

[nenjin]

Patch 1.09p is out, and the patch notes generically said "hotfixes and balance adjustments."

And the game got whackier than ever. The crippling bugs, so far, seem to be gone. But tons of non-synchronicity errors have been introduced (unit killed in combat doesn't actually die and get removed from the map until next turn) and more minor in-completion errors like buttons getting deactivated if you happen to be get interrupted by pop up messages and announcements.

Monster balance is completely off now. Now monsters play the game like chess, and check your ass the second it's a sure bet. To the point where I've had large monster armies within the first 5 minutes of game come out of the wilds and just wreck my city. Since my sovereign is cowering there to avoid getting picked off, alone, in the wilds, that equals game over.

I'm going to start calling the game Elemental: War of Iterations. To be fair, Stardock is doing a lot of work and making a ton of changes, in a short period of time. (A ton of crap has gone live since November.) But it's like winding a clock spring too tight. The tension and stress and mistakes end up somewhere, and each patch improves as much as it utterly shatters other things. Given that many players are familiar with MMOs, and how content rolls out, I'm still surprised how rocky each patch is. I guess I expect things in smaller but more stable chunks, which is not what Stardock is doing. They're massively revamping the game to meet fan expectations post-launch, and have basically said goodbye to Quality Control. This business of "well these are beta patches we're releasing...." no longer flies with me. Stardock wants its cake and wants to eat it too; they want the luxury of being forgiven for a beta product while getting the credit from people who have made the purchase for the work they're doing.

That's not how it works, fellas. You gave up the right to that kind of "doing this out of my basement" treatment when you started charging what everyone else does, and signed book deals, and painted all sorts of rainbow pictures that no one has yet seen.

If Stardock weren't so hung up on their "reputation" they would have made a closed, or at least an open, beta for the 1.1 patch process. Instead, they're making the patches available via Impulse if you check the "view beta releases" box.

If they were running an MMO, they'd have been nailed to the wall for this level of performance by now. They're not charging subs, but they're still streaming content out to customers who have purchased, that's craptacular when all is said and done. It's not the content, just the amount of time and professionalism that's been allowed to go into it before it's released for public consumption.

Stardock needs to figure out which is more important to them, putting out a game that represents the best of what they can do, or placating the masses with content as fast as they can make it. Either one stands the risk of losing them fans and customers, either because they're sick of waiting, or they're sick of playing the same game over and over again with a new, broken patch.

For me, I'm on the verge of walking away from Elemental for a solid 6 months. I'll download my "complimentary" expansion pack, and wait for that to get patched. Because my bitterness and disappointment with the release is just kind of increasing with every patch, even as the game finally gets closer to what it was supposed to be (and you can tell SOMEONE is up in there now with an eye toward fun ideas.)

Because when patches just get thrown out there, and stuff is repeatedly broken, you begin to question the faith you have that these guys can produce something you'll really enjoy. Even if they seem like they're on the same page as you and your tastes, there's a basic level of competence you expect out of a paid developer. And as the 1.1 deadline looms, if Stardock stopped all new development and just squashed bugs and performance problems, I *still* question whether or not they would get it done in time. I'm already prepared to hear "1.1 was just another step on the path to the Elemental game we promised you."

[forsaken1111]

Sounds like it's a good thing I returned my copy. I'm still watching to see if it ever becomes worth trying again. I do like the IDEA of the game but the handling has been spectacularly unbelievably bad so far.

[nenjin]

I think the decision to start multi-threading the AI, while all this other junk is going on, was a baaaaaaddddd idea. It's greatly improved performance; but the ordering of what's supposed to happen when is now completely screwed up. I could be talking out of my ass on this one, I don't know enough about the subject. But stuff not updating when it should be (a chronic and growing problem in Elemental) seems to have gotten much worse since the multi-threading went in.

[Tilla]

This game is still buggy as fuck. I killed a random goon and got millions of gold.

[Sowelu]

Sounds like they need to roll the engine back to 1.0, then throw the game away for scrap and spend a year or two working on the "sequel".

[Neonivek]

This game is still buggy as fuck. I killed a random goon and got millions of gold.

That isn't a glitch, obviously that goon had the winning lottery ticket.

[Urist McDepravity]

If Stardock weren't so hung up on their "reputation" they would have made a closed, or at least an open, beta for the 1.1 patch process.

Instead, they're making the patches available via Impulse if you check the "view beta releases" box.

Well, but these patches are exactly 'open beta'. Wtf are you ranting about?

[GaelicVigil]

I loaded up Elemental over the last weekend for the first time in about 2 months expecting the game to be a lot better.  I was wrong.

The performance has gotten much worse.  I was playing on my slightly older desktop PC a few patches ago and was having no problems at all with 0 anti-aliasing.  Now, the game hangs for up to a full 60 seconds every 2 minutes or so.  Every time I click on a unit, every time I move a unit, every time I click on my city, every time I open inventory, etc, etc, etc, the game just completely locks up for no reason.  Even lowering my resolution to freaking 1024x768 and lowering all of the game details to incredibly low levels, it does no good.

Tactical battles are worse.  Half the time, my units stop responding to orders and I have to auto-resolve.  The game is chock-full of bugs at this point.  Resource spawning seems wacked out - I sometimes get 3 gold nodes within a single square of each other.  The Zone of Control is effed up now with the radius expanding far too quickly and extremely artificially.  Monster spawning seems really weird as well, with creatures being either way to sparse or way to dense.  Stuff worked a lot better at patch 1.07 than it does now. 

I have seriously HAD IT with Brad Wardell and his incompetence.  The guy is an utter buffoon, spouting off bull-crap and promises every few days about stuff that never actually happens with the game.  I just get the feeling that these guys have no idea what they are doing.  They are simply flailing around with ideas that have only been partially thought through.  And what of this so-called god, Kael, everyone keeps talking about?  He was supposed to fix a lot of problems with Elemental, but since he has gotten hired on, I haven't heard so much as a peep out of him or anything he has accomplished thus far.  If he was supposed to be the new guy "in charge", it sure doesn't seem like it.  As far as I can tell, Brad is still calling the shots, as he is the only person I hear from.

The excuse I keep hearing is that we shouldn't be playing the "beta" 1.1 patch.  WTF?  This game has been out for 3 months and you're telling me I can't play it?  I'm sorry, but once you put your game on store shelves and take people's money for it, you have no more "good will" insurance anymore (unless you're running an MMO).  The game either works, or it doesn't.

I was hoping after a few months that they would have this thing patched up and working to a fair degree.  When the game actually gets worse over time, you know something is seriously, SERIOUSLY messed up with the people running the show.

[Viken]

That's the whole point of it being a 'Beta' patch.  They are making significant changes, and none of it is optimized yet.  If you don't want to have to deal with it on an older PC, then don't install the beta patch.  That's a failure on your part, not Stardock, or even Brad Wardell; sense he's passed it to the new guy and is strictly AI coding now. lol.

[Sergius]

That, people, is what we in the programming business call an Alpha Version. Which is where anything can change in the next update, including the game suddenly becoming a third-person shooter set in a post-apocalyptic future. Maybe the next patch will change it into Madden 2011.

[forsaken1111]

That's the whole point of it being a 'Beta' patch.  They are making significant changes, and none of it is optimized yet.  If you don't want to have to deal with it on an older PC, then don't install the beta patch.  That's a failure on your part, not Stardock, or even Brad Wardell; sense he's passed it to the new guy and is strictly AI coding now. lol.

No, this is the whole point of a beta version. Shit like this should have been ironed out prior to launch, not strung out months after launch.