Elemental: War of Magic - Catch All

tboon wrote:

@LtWarhound - they mention on the podcast that there is a faction that wandering monsters ignore - could that explain what you were seeing as opposed to AI cheating?

If by faction, you mean 'kingdom' vs 'empire', then no. Example, the last game had a kingdom right next to an empire, both AI, and the monsters that were chasing my units around and attacking my cities were ignoring units and cities from both of those. This was on the Hard AI difficulty level, one step above Challenging. The AI rulers were Magnus, Vega and Relias, none of which have an advantage that causes the creeps to ignore them, let alone all three of them. That 'strength' is Stealth (causes wandering monsters to ignore your units, not your cities). Lady Irane has that, and she wasn't in that particular game (I custom pick the AI opponents, to include a mixed of stock and custom, and to avoid a few buggy ones).

Fair enough, was just wondering. I haven't played more than a half an hour yet, just been busy.

Might have missed it, but I still didn't see a mention in the changelog addressing the crash caused by trying to use Dispel Enchantment to remove a curse from one of your cities. Pretty major and consistant bug, and looking at the forums, it looks like its been around for quite a while.

Patched to 1.01, deleted all my old saves and rulers, made some new factions, tried to play. Hard difficultly, Win7 64, and the game crashed or locked up roughly every 20 minutes. Which it didn't do in the 1.0 version, was relatively crash free then.

Hmmm. Not promising. I've put in approx. 8-10 hours on it since Friday and was having a pretty good time with it. But I have not patched it yet.

What I like so far:
- I like big expansive games. This is a big expansive game (when played on Large world with only 2 AI factions).
- There is always an important-seeming decision to be made: cities level, heroes level, .
- I like that you can both find heroes as well as make semi-heroes (they act like heroes - can carry stuff you find in the world, learn magic, etc.) but aren't named and don't level like heroes but like units. So, if you cannot find a spell-casting hero, you can make something that serves the function (once you get the right tech).

What I don't:
- The game is bland. I think the game could do with about half the content and be a more focused, better game. Kitchen sink games are confusing and, because there is just so much stuff in them, everything sort of smears together. I think this is part of why I never really dug GalCiv: too many factions with too many powers with too much similar-seeming tech doing too many similar things. No personality.
- Tactical combat is repetitive. There's a lot of stuff in there but it all feels the same.

Overall, a huge, gigantic, colossal improvement over Elemental. Or even an early beta. Problems with the 1.01 patch though, not so good.

Yeah, they're looking into some patching issues. If you have the bandwidth and want to update, I'd recommend just downloading the full install.

Also, new monsters manual

http://www.elementalgame.com/monsters

I haven't crashed because of the new patch, but I did notice that when I loaded an autosave the monsters got a free move, which was kinda annoying but nothing gamebreaking.

Island Dog wrote:

Yeah, they're looking into some patching issues. If you have the bandwidth and want to update, I'd recommend just downloading the full install.

"Ah, patching issues, no surprise, full clean reinstall? Makes enough sense"

So off I go, delete the FE install, and tell Stardock to install the game from scratch...

What's this error message saying?

"SOFTWARE NOT FOUND

A supported release version of FE could not be found on your system. Reinstall and patch again."

WTF? No sh*t you can't find FE on my system, I'm trying to INSTALL it...

So, dig a little deeper. Oh. Instead of Stardock downloading the full install like it claims, its only downloading the 1.01 patch.

Hey, Island Dog, want to get your people on this crap? Or should I just delete Stardock and forget this ever happened? Patience has reached an end.

Where are you downloading from?

You can go here and download either the full install or update - https://store.stardock.com/myaccount...

Downloading it through Stardock Central, like I should. Log in, go to Downloads, put the check in the FE box, hit the 'Install 1 item' button that appears, get the 'can't install this silently, click the install button' screen, followed the Visual Patch 'Software Not Found' error pop-up. Manually inspect the file downloaded by Stardock Central, and its not the full install it claimed it was downloading, but just the 1.01 patch.

So, the one-stop go-to Stardock Central installer isn't working, on top of the problems with FE. Not impressed.

The v1.02 update was released yesterday. They also did some work on SDC so updating should be OK.

Full changelog: http://forums.elementalgame.com/436548

Highlights:

Added edge scrolling in tactical
Reduced memory consumption
Player created sovereigns get random traits based on their race when played by the AI
Custom faction unit and building colors are now retained between games
AI improvements
Performance improvements
Memory optimization

Just finished up my first real campaign game and actually had a great time. Medium-sized Tree of Life map, 4 opponents, Challenging difficulty (highest AI level with no bonuses). Rolled a custom Sovereign plus faction that emphasized improved units with Luck, Master Smiths, and Light Plate. Total time clocked in at 18 hours plus another 2 or so on a practice game with the same faction to get used to the game.

As Tom Chick noted in his commentary on FE, the hybrid RPG and strategy elements do a good job keeping a consistent pacing throught a campaign. Early on you always have something interesting to do with your adventuring Sovereign. This gradually shifts to where your empire and generic armies take on greater importance by the end, though the heroes you developed earlier end up being fun force multipliers for your troops. The hostile environment makes the world feel quite alive and ties together the theme of post-apocalyptic fantasy with the mechanics well. The separation of the three tech trees (Civilization, Warfare, and Magic) forces you to specialize early on and does a good job differentiating from the traditional Civilization-style tree. Finally, I enjoyed the multiple victory routes and think they will be good for replay value. I went with the Master Quest victory which was a fun way to tie the narrative of the game back to the personal story of my Sovereign.

Negative wise there are many little things, though nothing that prevented me from solidly enjoying the game. The interface is still a bit cludgy overall and doesn't scale well to higher resolutions. The tactical battles are mostly boring, especially if you don't have any spellcasters involved to mix up the variety. This isn't universally the case, but at least 80% of battles once you get a couple strong units come down to just charging forward and exchanging blows. The global mana pool encourages you to not use spells unless they are really needed, which serves to further homogenize all but a handful of encounters. Even though there isn't all that much going on, the AI for the tactical battles was surprisingly impressive which is definitely appreciated.

My other two criticisms are the economy and strategic AI. Developing your cities simply isn't very interesting. Population serves only to give a level up with perk bonuses system to your cities. While certainly a neat idea, I find in practice that just about every city ends up languishing at level 2 (out of 5) for most of the game and the perks I've seen are generally not very interesting and with relatively minor effects. Cities choose to specialize between economy/magic/military early on which is also a cool idea too, though I find every type of city ends up developing more or less identically to others of the same type. A little more meat on the bones though could end up going a long way for the city economy, so I do have some hope for the future.

Finally I would say that the strategic AI is mildly below average, though not devastatingly so. I had a sheltered map position in my game and was able to peacefully develop without being harassed while the 3 AI opponents fought it out. Once I was satisfied with my position I switched gears and built a small force of mounted knights which were able to quickly conquer the entire map with virtually no opposition despite two of the other factions being larger than me and with more advanced fighting techs. Disappointing, but not all that different from most grand strategy games that give the player this much freedom to customize. Another couple games under my belt at harder difficulties should be interesting though and I have hope that Stardock will continue developing the AI for a while. Say what you want about Brad Wardell, but GalCiv 2 had one of the best strategy AIs around and he seems to be devoting most of his time now to the FE AI for now. So hopefully good things are in store in that department.

Overall I'd say Fallen Enchantress is worth giving a shot. It took a few hours for me to really warm up to it, but it didn't feel that bad due to the strong "one more turn" pull. There are definite niggles, but patching and maybe an expansion or two have the potential to dramatically improve things.

Das24680 did a really nice 'Lets Play' series with v1.01 which got me into it. Worth having a look at if you are interested in the game.

The v1.2 update is available for download now. This update focuses on AI and Balance, among other various fixes and improvements.

http://forums.elementalgame.com/439486

Highlights:

-Significant AI strategy updates based on strategies employed by players
-Spawned resources (like iron, gold, wheat) are more common but seeded further away from starting locations
-Powerful monsters have been adjusted to be less common in habitable areas but more common in the barren lands between factions
-Default number of players increased based on map size
-Lots of UI and gameplay fixes based on player reports and feedback

The Fallen Enchantress v1.3 update is available today.

Full changelog: http://forums.elementalgame.com/440201

There's new spells, hundreds of new unit designs, various fixes, and more.

LtWarhound wrote:

Might have missed it, but I still didn't see a mention in the changelog addressing the crash caused by trying to use Dispel Enchantment to remove a curse from one of your cities. Pretty major and consistant bug, and looking at the forums, it looks like its been around for quite a while.

Not seeing a direct reference to this bug in the v1.3 changelog, did it get fixed?

On sale today on Steam as well.

So, I've got the game via Stardock from when it first came out. Steam does not like the serial number, however. Is it possible to transfer it to Steam?

Robear wrote:

So, I've got the game via Stardock from when it first came out. Steam does not like the serial number, however. Is it possible to transfer it to Steam?

Believe not. The new stand alone expansion is supposed to be using Steamworks, so the key for that should work when it comes out.

I love Civ 5. Should I buy this? Need your opinion since I'm not a hard core 4x player, but love Civ 5.

I like it quite a bit, but I like 4x games in general, and I really like the idea of mixing rpg elements into it which I think they did an ok job of doing even if it made the AI a bit too hard to code and therefore a tad on the easy side to beat. If you are unsure I would wait until it goes on sale on Steam, or maybe wait until the expansion comes out as it is supposed to be even better.

Zaque wrote:

If you are unsure I would wait until it goes on sale on Steam, or maybe wait until the expansion comes out as it is supposed to be even better.

It's on Steam sale today, til 4pm Pacific Time, whenever that is.

davet010 wrote:

It's on Steam sale today, til 4pm Pacific Time, whenever that is.

Typically, I believe that happens about one second after 3:59:59 PM, Pacific Time, but don't quote me.

And what if you are not in the US and don't give a toss what time it is in the Pacific TZ ?

davet010 wrote:

And what if you are not in the US and don't give a toss what time it is in the Pacific TZ ?

Then you just have to look at the handy countdown timer they put on the game's store page.

I took the plunge since turn based strategy games are one of my favorite genres. I played FE for many hours over the weekend on a relatively easy difficulty level and I agree with many of the quotes above. The game feels like a collection of systems that don't always come together cleanly. That may be because I don't fully understand the game at this stage, but I doubt it. For instance, here are some things I found that I just didn't like or maybe I just didn't understand:

- The victory conditions could use a lot of work. The game pushes you towards the easiest victory condition, the I-win spell. It makes no sense whatsoever that this isn't the final spell of the game. In two games, I've casted this twice and never bothered to see the final spells. I'd like to cast something like volcano just to see what happens, but at 2000 crystals and 10 turns, I can just cast the I-win spell and the game is over. I'd turn this option off, but then winning is going to be even more tedious. The diplomatic option is often not viable because of the limited diplomatic options available in the game and the manic-depressive AI. A military victory requires complete domination, which makes the endgame tedious. There's an economic victory condition that I haven't explored, but overall these unbalanced conditions hurt the end-game by dragging it on to long (military) or being far to easy to achieve (I-Win Spell).

- There may need to be more stuff in the research tree because it feels like I can fly through it with little trouble. I don't have enough experience with the game to understand which techs are must have ones and which ones aren't, but because they come so quickly for the number of techs in the tree I don't feel that I'm making any tough decisions when picking my next tech. In a game like Distant Worlds, you are forced to make tough tech decisions. The same goes for the Civilization series. I don't get that vibe in FE. So I research stuff pretty much at random, which doesn't hit the proper strategy vibe that I want.

- I finally minimized the city grid on the left hand side and started opening my city journal every turn to see which cities were idlle. I don't mind the UI, but it could use a little help because it isn't helpful managing large empires. I also turned off the end-turn and turned on the place buildings, which made city expansion a bit more strategic. The UI doesn't scale particularly well to big monitors either.

- The art style was a bold choice - sometimes it works - but sometimes it doesn't and the game looks muddled. If someone comes out with a graphics mod, I would give it a very close look because it can be difficult to tell what is happening on screen. I missed entire enemy units because they couldn't be easily seen.

- If I'm traveling from point A to point B and there's nothing in the way, the pathfinding works fine. But if a unit that I can't see is on that path, the game will redirect me halfway around the world to avoid that unit. The game should realize that I can't see that enemy unit and not redirect mine. This creates pretty massive problems and is beyond annoying. I turned on autosaves after ever turn simply so I can easily restore when the game decides my units need to go around my ass to get to my elbow.

- In both games I've played, I had my Sovereign and one hero unit that I get on the first turn. From what I've read it appears you can have more than just that one hero, but I have yet to see another one on the map. Combat is more interesting with a hero unit, but I can't find a way to get more. It would be cool if hero units were more common, but they had a cost in gold/materials. I know the expansion is supposed to change the way the hero system works, but as it is it's unwhelming.

- I had one game that I started where my Sovereign was placed on the map with no resources in sight. I didn't know if that was a bug or a feature. I just quit and restarted.

Ok, so those are the warts. The upside? It can be a fun TBS strategy game with neat options to design units and a decent fantasy feel. So for right now I'm enjoying the game, but I'm glad I paid $14 and not $40 for it. With expansions or mods this might be a great game, but I'm not sure if it has the depth I want from a 4X game in its current state. Still, it's not a bad game - probably on par with Warlock, but with more overall potential from mods and expansions.

I'm looking for a little help. I preordered Elemental in November of 2008, but when the reviews came out and all that hoopla, I mothballed the box and didn't try it. I still have my activation code in my email, but that was when everything was on Stardock Impulse pre-GaStopo. Apparently I can download Fallen Enchantress for free, and some other upcoming expansion? How do I access all of those?

It should be available to you if you log into store.stardock.com. At least I see it there.

Hmmmm....that doesn't work for me. I've logged in but it still shows BUY NOW.

.....Wow, Stardock Central still works. And it has Elemental: War of Magic and Fallen Enchantress in my account. But it doesn't show any of my GalCiv or Sins purchases. Looks like I've got to email them.

Keithustus wrote:

.....Wow, Stardock Central still works. And it has Elemental: War of Magic and Fallen Enchantress in my account. But it doesn't show any of my GalCiv or Sins purchases. Looks like I've got to email them.

Yes, do email them, I had to, and they were prompt and helpful. Good customer support.

If you do play E:FE, you won't get as good a result as you'd like until you've played through with as the stock Sovereigns. Once you've worked through, designing good units, then the AI can put up a decent fight. Stock AI sovereigns with stock units are unimpressive. Then avoid the I-Win buttons: Tornado, Volcano, stacks with high level heros & high level cavalry, any stack with a dragon (just say no to Dancing with Dragons). The AI just can't handle those.