Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Urist McDepravity]

So, does anyone participate in Elemental:FE open beta? I've heard game became much better.

[nenjin]

I made a promise to myself I would pay no attention to the game until release. But yes, glancing at a couple beta tester threads, several areas of the game have been dramatically improved.

[inteuniso]

I made a promise to myself I would pay no attention to the game until release. But yes, glancing at a couple beta tester threads, several areas of the game have been dramatically improved.

Considering anyone who bought elemental in 2010 will get FE for free, I'm waiting til release to focus on it.

[EuchreJack]

Third, metal is your friend, although there are viable tactics if you don't have it.  The advanced equipment uses metal, so if you want your troops to have the best of everything, you want a metal mine.  Otherwise, go for groups of troops (create squads instead of single soldiers, thus creating an entity miltiple times as good as the default) that are highly trained (training boosts hitpoints only, but it's worth it), and you should still be fine.

Wait, what? I recall magic equipment in 1.2 with sick stats, like one hero with 50+ attack ripping enemy armies to shreds singlehandedly. It doesnt require metal, right?

Also this game was still SOO horrible at 1.2 so i deleted it and dont plan to try new patches. Such a waste imo (no surprise, I hated GalCiv series)

Seroiously, when i have itch for this genre I can always fire up AOW2 or FfH2.

Looking back, I was basing my comments on version 1.11.  Sorry about that.  Anyone know how the game plays at 1.4?  I'm guessing "horribly", but it would be nice if the AI was at least able to present a challenge.

[Bluerobin]

Hmm, I've got a link to download the FE beta somewhere... maybe I should try it out.

[lordcooper]

Hmm, I've got a link to download the FE beta somewhere... maybe I should try it out.

Definitely.  I need opinions on this one.

[Bluerobin]

Alrighty, downloading. It's a bit over 2.3gb, so it's going to take a couple hours to download. I'll let you know when I've played a bit.

[Bluerobin]

Ok, played for a few hours. My first impressions are pretty good. I think they're still working on AI a bit, but FE is already more polished than Elemental was at launch (and probably at patch 1.1) and I'm playing 0.77. Apparently 0.80 is a bunch of AI work. One thing to note is that they've said there's no multiplayer and no intention of adding it until maybe an expansion. It has to do with the way they did the tactical battle apparently, I dunno. Check out the forums for more on that.

It seems like it's a little light on content, but, again, better than Elemental was. There's still an issue of delays when you click on things, both on the world map and in battles, but it's not enough to stop me from playing for three hours like I did. Battles themselves feel really good. At first I was a bit disappointed that my mage only had slow and counterspell and one other thing until I realized turn order was determined on a per unit basis (Final Fantasy Tactics style) so slowing down an enemy could give my other units multiple turns per enemy unit turn. After a few level up bonuses and one spell I managed to completely eliminate in-battle spell costs, but that might be a bug, I'm not sure (stacking two 25% reductions and a 50% reduction gave me 100% instead of ~28% like I kind of expected). Champion leveling is fun because instead of just distributing stat points you pick one of 5 random-ish bonuses, some rarer and better than others, ranging from common vanilla stat boosts (+3 to a stat), uncommon combination stat boosts (+1 to dex, +3 to initiative), common magic tiers (unlocks new spells), and random other things (increase gold income, decrease cost of casting spells) and I THINK the first level you has you choose a path for the hero to guide what bonuses they get.

I think there was something weird with the map I started with (I started almost completely blocked in by mountains and with only a little fertile ground, which is now required for founding cities) so I'll probably try fiddling with options and see what happens.

[nenjin]

I've read that the distinction between spell caster and hero is actually important. Whereas in Elemental, there was no reason NOT to make a hero a spell caster....the two paths are divergent, but you still need meat shields. And leveling them is fun (as mentioned above) rather than just generically adding more strength, dex and health per level.

Argh, now I'm tempted to check out the beta....but I really want to judge the game based on its day-1 performance, with no prior knowledge of how the game works. I don't want to influence my impressions like I did with Elemental, where I was thoroughly up to date and in some ways, excusing the bad and hoping for the best. (Which, it turns out, didn't materialize either.)

[thvaz]

I've been playing the beta since 0.85 and I must say the game is on the road to become a great game. It is already much better than War of Magic at the 1.4 patch, has more content, it is more balanced, more stable and the AI is surprisingly good. There a lot of small issues, but I hope they will fix them until the release (there is no date for the release yet)

[Niveras]

Will the expansion be adding random map generation, or is that something that's already been included in one of the patches? As I recall, one of the myriad issues was that maps came in only a couple dozen layouts, with only the features and resources being randomly placed. This seemed a pretty big weakness in a genre that has had random map generation from pretty much the beginning.

[thvaz]

It is not an expansion, though at the moment it feels like one, as they are using a lot of assets from War of Magic.But yes, there is a proper random map generation.

[LoSboccacc]

I've been playing the beta since 0.85 and I must say the game is on the road to become a great game. It is already much better than War of Magic at the 1.4 patch, has more content, it is more balanced, more stable and the AI is surprisingly good. There a lot of small issues, but I hope they will fix them until the release (there is no date for the release yet)

oh noes don't get me all hyped up again on this!

[gimli]

FE is already much better compared to WoM but it's still nowhere near decent. It feels boring and uninteresting after a short period. The magic system is pretty average, it's nothing awesome. The are almost no difference between the factions....even in Fall from Heaven 2 you feel the difference between the sides and it's a mod only. The tactical battles are nowhere near as fun as the AoW2 battles...etc.
So it's a mediocre game. I would give it 5-5.5/10 right now. Comparison: EWoM is 4-4.5/10. MoM is 8/10 and AoW2 - SM is 9/10.

[lordcooper]

I'm gonna keep bumping this thread until someone tells me it's worth buying.