Elemental: June 2012 Status

from JoeUser Forums

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Greetings! It’s been awhile since we’ve put up an update on where things stand.  So without further delay, here are some answers to questions we’ve received recently:

When will Beta 4 come out? The best I can say is “This Summer”.  It definitely won’t be out in June but might make it in time for July.

What will be in Beta 4? Beta 4 focuses a great deal on the civilization aspect of the game.  Specifically, the way cities are constructed. A third prime resource, essence, will be introduced (grain, materials, and now essence) which will help encourage greater specialization in cities. The graphics and user interface will also see a significant series of improvements for Beta 4 as well.

Will there be a Beta 5? Probably. Depends on how we’re feeling about Beta 4.

Will Fallen Enchantress require Steam? No.  We plan to make Fallen Enchantress available to purchase on Steam. But it won’t require Steam to play.

What is the status of multiplayer? It is our intention to add multiplayer after release but it won’t be available on day 0.

What is the status of modding? We would like to open up modding officially during the Beta 4 phase. No promises though.

Will there be more spells? Yes. We add more spells as we go along.

When will the final game be released? We don’t have a release date yet. But we are hoping sometime this Fall. We want to make sure we have all the time we need to make Elemental: Fallen Enchantress as good as we can make it.

 

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162,299 views 66 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top


Excellent Info -- Thanks !   (Though I guess I lost my bet on when the Beta 4 will be released   :(   )


But one other question:  WHY does the new one-line Banner Ad for Elemental: Fallen Enchantress show a     4-masted Sailing Ship at the right end of the banner ?       Is this a not-so-subtle  "Preview of Coming Attractions" ??   

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

All your essence are belong to us.

 

Can you tell us the situation on outposts/pio spam?

Ashes of the Singularity II
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

No bugfix patch then  :pout:

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

What does essence represent?  What is does it "Buy"?

Just Curious. :)

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

I'm a little disappointed that Beta 4 won't be out in June, but I guess I'll keep myself busy with Sins, Skyrim, Civ5, etc. Too bad all I really want is FE. Oh, and Endless Space :)

 

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting NetNomad, reply 5
What does essence represent?  What is does it "Buy"?

Just Curious.
End of NetNomad's quote

 

Just a guess, but I'm betting that it will be generated or earned at a slow rate and spent on particularly great buildings OR on cities.

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

Essence sounds like a terrible name for whatever it does.  We will have to change that.

Reply #8 from Elemental Forums Top

My guess is that materials will now be applied to build times for non-magic buildings and non-magic troops.  Essence will be applied to build times for magic buildings and magic troops.  Who's with me?

Reply #9 from Elemental Forums Top

Very interesting, a third tile thingy.

Reply #10 from Elemental Forums Top

Didn't we have essence during the WOM beta?  It was used by the sovereign to create cities and imbue heroes.  This is NOT that essence.

Reply #11 from Elemental Forums Top


essence used to be for magic and reclaiming the land plus empowering your heroes early on in war of magic. Perhaps that offers some clue, however it really could be used as any sort of magical resource. I picture th eway they use materials for construcion speed, and grain for population growth. I suspect that essence would continue this trend and work towards expanding your zone of influence, the regeneration of the land and affect your magical resources in some manner.

 

I think that would give you a choice of population versus production versus magical strength.

 

Reply #12 from Elemental Forums Top

Does that image with the dragon seem kind of silly to anyone else?  What is that little fence suppose to do?  Is it keeping people out or the dragon in?  Cause either way it's making me giggle.

Reply #13 from Elemental Forums Top

Darn I was hoping for some sort of trade resource. Oh well I wonder what essence will do. I am guessing it will be required to build certain magical buildings, so that when you place cities you have to choose between normal and magical building proficiency.

Reply #14 from Stardock Forums Top

Maybe essence will determine the effectiveness of magical buildings?

Could be interesting if done in a complicated enough fashion.

 

I just wish we had more, simpler events FFH style, it's the one feature from FFH I'd love to see ported in.

 

Reply #15 from Elemental Forums Top

New resource to make cities more unique? If it's a resource it doesn't work that way, they will still all be the same. Only way to make cities truely unique is having surroundings have a meaning and having a table of insane uniquenesss+s for the city tiles.

Reply #16 from Elemental Forums Top

I am looking forward to this. I liked how Warlock had lots of variety in bonuses you could attatch to your city, while the only unique thing about your city in Fallen Enchantress is your city level up buildings. Those are pretty bland in most cases, so I never get get attatched to my cities.

Reply #17 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting vesa2, reply 16
New resource to make cities more unique? If it's a resource it doesn't work that way, they will still all be the same. Only way to make cities truely unique is having surroundings have a meaning and having a table of insane uniquenesss+s for the city tiles.
End of vesa2's quote

Actually it's quite easy to make the cities more diverse using the base resources, assuming the three resources are interdependent. You'd just have to make sure you can't get high resource of each type in one city. For example, if you have 5 grain, you can't have more than 3 mat (and 3 essence), that would make that city into a farming/population type of city where you build mainly tax offices and the like. Just the same, high production city (5 mat) might not have high grain/essence, and the same for high essence cities (whatever that does). That would pretty easily make 3 distinctive types of cities. Or more simply, maybe use some sort of "resource cap" per tile, where you can't exceed say 9 resources, so if you have 5 of one type, the other two would be low... and finally you'd have general cities that has average of each (3,3,3) making essentially 4 types of cities (or 7 if you count 4/4/1 type cities).

The problem right now is that so much of the current city leveling system is linked to grain, and so much of the production is linked to mat. If you relax the requirements for both of those (have some base buildings that generate both food/production without needing the linked resource), and instead focus the three resources into three differing paths of city development, I'm pretty sure you could make an interesting system.

Don't get me wrong though, I'm not against making more use of surrounding terrain, I've been saying something along that line for a while now. But that's not the only way to make unique cities.

Reply #18 from Elemental Forums Top

Thanks for keeping us updated. Haven't played in awhile, some of my summer classes are finishing and 2 more will start soon. Can't wait to see the changes.

Reply #19 from Elemental Forums Top

I like updates.  Thank you.

Reply #20 from Elemental Forums Top

I'm pretty bummed we have to wait several more weeks for Beta 4.

 

I am positively thrilled that we are seeing this degree of thorough development and willingness to totally re-envision clunky aspects of the game.

Reply #21 from JoeUser Forums Top

It all sounds great, but what about fixing the main issue of the game crashing before it can be finished? Putting a bunch of hours into playing this great game only not to be able to finish it is soooo frustrating... note my comments that I posted in the wrong thread the other day https://forums.joeuser.com/423812/page/8/#replies   also to add one more observation of a pathing bug, it would be sooooo great if you could move your units and unit stacks through your cities whether or not the city is full of other units. Not being able to really is a pain in the ass.

Would love to get back to moving units in ships... not to mention naval warfare, how cool would that be? However, recognizing the huge undertaking that this game already is, and how great its becoming, I would be playing it for hours just the way it is, assuming everything worked! Can't wait to see if that gets achieved :)

Reply #22 from Elemental Forums Top

Keep up the fantastic work guys!

Reply #23 from Elemental Forums Top

It doesn't really feel like the game needs yet another resource. Some of the "resources" that are already on the map could be more meaningful already. More buildings and more tradeoffs to building those buildings would go a lot further in my opinion. Essence is going to be a hard sell to myself, and I suspect a number of other players.

Reply #24 from Elemental Forums Top

It is a tile resource like Materials and Grain.

Reply #25 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting mmorley, reply 22
It all sounds great, but what about fixing the main issue of the game crashing before it can be finished? Putting a bunch of hours into playing this great game only not to be able to finish it is soooo frustrating... note my comments that I posted in the wrong thread the other day https://forums.joeuser.com/423812/page/8/#replies   also to add one more observation of a pathing bug, it would be sooooo great if you could move your units and unit stacks through your cities whether or not the city is full of other units. Not being able to really is a pain in the ass.

Would love to get back to moving units in ships... not to mention naval warfare, how cool would that be? However, recognizing the huge undertaking that this game already is, and how great its becoming, I would be playing it for hours just the way it is, assuming everything worked! Can't wait to see if that gets achieved
End of mmorley's quote

 

For a lot of people the game isn't crashing very much any more at all. But if you do get a crash, please attach files to dropbox and explain the details.  That's the only way those types of bugs will be fixed.