Q: What is Stardock’s plan for Elemental going forward?

A: For the immediate future we’re going to go down two paths. First, the v1.0x versions will continue to focus largely on compatibility (crashing or weird video issues) as well as bugs and turning on multiplayer.

Then, we will work on v1.1 which will serve as our answer to player feedback. Enhanced AI, improved UI, a tutorial, updated quest system, new magic system, numerous other tweaks. This version will serve as the basis to make a demo version of the game.

Beyond that, we will be looking at player feedback. That will work towards v1.2 (October) and v1.3 (November). Once we are satisfied that the game has met reasonable expectations, we can then focus on the first expansion pack: Elemental: War of Magic – Book 2, Cerena.

Unlike Book 1, which is fairly short because it’s only meant as a kind of introduction (the game is mean to be played in sandbox mode. GalCiv and Sins of a Solar Empire didn’t even include campaigns, we are generally not very pro-campaign-y people as you can gather, campaigns have limited replayability).

Book 2, Cerena is the excuse to introduce more far reaching game mechanic changes and begin to add in the multiplayer modes we have long been thinking of (from custom servers that yes, will work on your LAN that has no Internet connection) to tactical-only modes.

That first expansion pack will be free to everyone who owns the game at the point of v1.3.

---------------------------------------------------
----------- Elemental v1.08b Change Log -----------
---------------------------------------------------

We are on the process of putting up v1.08 of Elemental: War of Magic.

Here’s a change log over v1.07:

+ LOD optimizations across improvements and tile designs
+ Continued memory optimization
+ AI handles its sovereign more intelligently
+ AI more effective at going after targets of opportunity
+ AI sovereign is more careful about going into enemy territory
+ AI has new APIs for determining whether there are targets of opportunity in the area
+ Balance pass on resource distribution
+ Base tech cost changed from 4 to 5
+ Merchants/Money Changers now require 1 food to construct
+ Study/Archivist now require 1 gildar per turn to maintain
+ Gildar deposit now seeded near starting location
+ Tracker talent cost changed from 15 to 10
+ Organized talent cost changed from 10 to 20
+ Combat Rating calculation altered in an attempt to be a more accurate gauge of lethalness
+ Fewer resources spawned per 1000 tiles.
+ Fewer minor factions spawned.
+ Added scalars to attack and defence for units who are in home territory or foreign territory, modifiable in ElementalDefs.xml
+ Territory scalars now work as Empire v Fallen (e.g. Kingdom guy on Fallen territory gets penalty, etc).
+ Updated formula for gildar given when killing a given unit
+ Child essence is no longer modified by spawn rating, but is instead a value between 50% and 100% of the more powerful parent's essence.
+ Updated TerrainTypes.xml to make Forests and Swamps take 2 moves
+ Changing the “IncreaseMorale” modifier attribute to “AdjustMorale. It’s more clear for the modders.
-Revamp of the way offensive spells hit/miss and deal their damage
+HIT/MISS is deteremined by an attacker roll (minDamage – maxDamage) and by the defender roll (0-DEF)
+Values can now be specified as a MinValue and a MaxValue rather than just a Value (support for constant value spells is still supported)
+If a MinValue and a MaxValue is specified, the Value is defined by a rand roll between the two numbers based on the modifiers internal rand roll.
+Updated descriptions for all core spellbook spells to show bonus damage from INT and bonus damage from shards in the spell description.
+The SpellbookWnd has been updated to properly display the damage range if there is one, and the constant damage if there isn’t one.
+All core spells that were using stats to calculate the value but didn’t have a ValueOwner specified have been fixed.
+The elemental shards unit stats now default to 0 instead of 1. The calculations in the existing spells have been redone to reflect this.
+ Fixed BURNING BLADE spell to appropriately increase attack.
+ Fixed SHIELD OF FIRE spell to appropriately increase defense.
+ Fixed CRUSH SPIRIT spell to appropriately decrease morale.
+ Fixed BRAVERY spell to appropriately increase morale.
+ Fixed DRAIN LIFE spell to appropriately transfer HP from target to caster.
+ Changed the display code for the main UI bar to round attack and defense rather than truncate.
+ Hooked up the CTRL+ARROW and SHIFT-ARROW camera rotation and movement hotkeys to tactical.
+ Added save game descriptions
+ Fixed bug where dialogs from triggers in the campaign (like moving beyond where you should build a city) would pop up many times when a unit moved into that tile.
+ Fixed AI bug where it was doing deficit spending and creating units still
+ Removed the max spell points entry from the affected stats in the level up wnd, since it isn't affected by any unit stats anymore
+ Fixed bug where non-aggression pact wasn't being checked for when left-clicking on a unit in attack mode
+ Fixed modifier in Refined_Economics_Amarian_MP to modify A_Gold player ability instead of A_Wealth (which doesn't exist)
+ Fixed golem animation pack (commented out an animation that was missing and causing t-poses)
+ Fixed crash when making a mountain in map editor
+ Fixed trading your spouse (if she was a recruited NPC) in the regular unit trade
+ Perceived value stuff gets hidden when arranging marriages, instead of showing whatever was selected last
+ Entries for kids when arranging marriages now use a male and female icon to denote boy and girl, instead of the words in parentheses after the name
+ Fixed "..." from string overflowing for the divider title when trading or arranging a marriage
+ Fixed the divider title not ever changing from "And" once the arrange marriage screen was shown
+ Fixed display of tooltip text and color text on Customize Faction window
+ Tweaked SetToolTip to calculate the necessary size of the window more accurately, to fix bug where tooltips were sometimes being truncated
+ Fixed bug where clicking a new destination while the unit was moving would cause the unit to get a free move
+ You can no longer set a units destination while it is moving
+ Fixed Refined Housing and Refined Economics techs (and their fallen equivalents) so that they correctly provide the bonus they say they do
+ When a unit inside a city or an army is selected and asked to cast a spell, that is the unit that is used for spellcasting now, instead of having it just fail (in a city) or try to cast the spell from the leader of the army
+ Fixed bug where summoning a unit while in a city would cause that unit to be summoned in an army with you within that city (causing weird behavior), now just stations the unit in the city with you
+ Fixed bug where raise land spell would not work on all land category terrain types, like swamp or rugged terrain. Now, if a land tile is not hills, it raises that land to hills, instead of checking for only some terrain types
+ Fixed a bug where, in the faction editor, you could select ability bonus options for free by selecting and deselecting them, and then spinning the race spinner, caused by deselection not updating the faction config correctly
+ Fixed units that finished training on the same turn as an autosave not being there when the autosave was loaded
+ Fixed players not being able to select their city level up bonuses or tech breakthroughs on loading an autosave if they were earned that turn, by having the local player mark themselves as needing to get user input for these things instead of unhiding the windows to allow the choice right away during CWorld::EndTurn, and not letting the user choose until after the next turn starts and the autosave has been made. If one of thses autosaves is loaded, the local player will be allowed to choose their tech breakthroughs and city bonuses once the map is unhidden. This keeps us from having to delay an autosave and the start of the next turn by waiting for the user to choose their bonuses, instead making that choice part of the start turn logic after the autosave has been made and saving the mark saying the player will get to choose at the start of the next turn.
+ Fixed treaty turn counts not matching if an autosave was loaded
+ Based on confusion in the forums, removed ability to automatically unlock a spell in the learning queue if it makes it to the front of the queue when the player has enough research to buy it, so that users rearranging their spell learning queue don't have their spell points silently taken away while shuffling spells around, if they didn't intend to learn that spell next
+ Now it always takes at least one turn to learn any spell
+ Fixed bug where tile highlights in tactical battle would disappear after an ALT+TAB
+ Fixed bug where trees would not look correct in all cases after loading a gamesave.
+ Fixed an issue that was allowing counter attacks against units with abilities of type DoesNotProvokeCounterattacks.
+Fixed an issue that was causing modifiers applied in tactical battles to persist after the battle.
- This fixes the bug that causes XP and Gildar rewards after battles to be negatively skewed if the enemy unit combat rating was lowered due to debuffs.
+Fixed an issue with skipping turns in tactical battles that would cause a stuck turn if done when the unit being skipped was in motion. - Pressing spacebar now sets a tactical units moves to zero AND cancels their destination.

For those who want to play v1.08 in multiplayer mode, you will need to set Impulse to show Pre-release versions:

image

We designated multiplayer as “beta” because we disabled playing against AI until next week. I had written a lot of AI code this week that is in the single player version but had not been adequately tested for MP. We didn’t want to give players the impression that was considered the feature set in multiplayer as being all that’s coming.

Next week we anticipate releasing v1.09 which will continue to address issues that were not found in the initial release, improve computer AI further and provide it and other new MP features. After that, we will begin focusing on v1.1 which will be the first post-release update that is designed specifically to extending game play.

Anyone who has performance or technical (stability) problems with this build please make sure you you let us know. At this stage, the technical issues that were present at launch should be fully addressed. If this isn’t the case for you, let us know as much as you can about your system as we will personalize our efforts as much as possible.

We are anxious to move forward to begin our traditional policy of extending the game to suit the desires of the gaming community.

Version 1.08 should be up on Impulse sometime this evening.