diamondspider

Reply to Elemental v1.06 Released (now with 100% more hotfix!) in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

My computer is 2 years old, and running at the highest settings, I get no performance issues at all. I'm wondering if folks with performance issues are turning down their graphic settings and seeing if those issues go away?

Reply to Elemental v1.06 Released (now with 100% more hotfix!) in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

Great! Balance issues are my big thing at this point, but there is one bug that is really hurting me: -When I click on one of my own stacks, hovering over the small circular icons for the units in that stack will display the "card" on the right, allowing quick view of stats. For enemy stacks this doe NOT work. Hovering over the icons randomly does or does not display the "card" a few times, then gets stuck on one of the cards, requiring that I not only click on each icon, but mu

Reply to Elemental Game Impressions in War of Magic Stardock Forums

Also, auto resolve is only good when you use heavy melee like you do. If you try archer or magic (which are so gimped atm there is little reason to) you'll see how bad auto resolve is with ranged or conserving mana.

Reply to Elemental Game Impressions in War of Magic Stardock Forums

Well said.. except that I do make a "taxi cab" king that uses organized/adventurer and teleport to get my main army around quickly... so, magic isn't quite useless ;)

Reply to Elemental Poll is up: How do you like the game? in War of Magic Stardock Forums

Yes, I can't vote in that poll, since it lacks the obvious option: "I cannot recommend Elemental at the moment due to bugs and balance issues, but it has the promise to be a classice that I'd recommend to everyone without a huge ton of work."

Reply to Elemental: A busy Wednesday in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

Post editing seems crashed for me, so sorry for not adding this to prior post: -An important area here also is the tooltips getting fully fleshed-out. There is a ton of stuff that is quite opaque at the moment, and loading-up on tooltips should fix this completely. My sense is that the tooltip/help-link system is about 50% done. When I can get good info it works pretty well, but lots of stuff needs better descriptions and/or a display of the calculation used to determine the value (whi

Reply to Elemental: A busy Wednesday in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

Yes, this game has terrific promise. My requests: -Please focus on bugs first an stop with the features for a bit. -Please then focus on balance, and my 15ish hours of play over the last few days means that this is going to become important fast. I already have a set strategy that seems pretty obviously "best" and that is a real sign that balance is far off still. The Action Point feature is great, but needs a lot of work... with a good amount of TLC, all of the tools are

Reply to Stardock’s Response to PC Gamer UK and RPS in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

Nice that you took responsibility for your comments... then again, the after spending about 10 hours with the lastest hot-fixed 1.05 version, it is still loaded with bugs. Consumers have ever right to expect a fairly bug-free experience, after all, my money came to you 100% bug-free, and the game isnt there yet. Therefore, I have to agree with the critics, and feel you actually didn't go far enough in taking responsibility for the current state of the game. It is a bugfest, and it's pr

Reply to Elemental: Day 0 Preview in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

[quote who="CHiZZoPs" comment="112"]diamondspiderreply 45Well, played the day 0 fully patched version fpr about 6 hours, and while I'm really glad you released it, please focus on a bugs for a while!...My wife turned into a different person...Sorry dude--That's supposed to happen! [/quote] Ha! Good one ;)

Reply to Elemental: Day 0 Preview in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

Well, played the day 0 fully patched version fpr about 6 hours, and while I'm really glad you released it, please focus on a bugs for a while! I found oodles of them. Some easily worked around, many not. Big ones: 1) Imbue Essence asks if I want to give up 3 essence, and then takes a lot more, probably due to my having many shards and essence towers, and so the champ is recieving 3 and getting a nice multiplier (up to 5 in my case) and so it took 5. 2) graphics get

Reply to Elemental: Interim PRE-day 0 update in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

I'm running pretty smooth... few things: -100% crash on Alt-tab (direct X error) -In some cases, hitting the "back" arrow in the docs (hiem..whatever) crashed the system. Might want to have a feature that says IF no object to browse to DO nothing, I was pretty deep in nested browsing at that point, so trying to debug all that might take a while. -I had a case where it kept saying "must build on open tile" when I was on open tiles. After wasting 6 precious turns wandering

Reply to Elemental Beta 3 Walkthru in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

[quote who="Frogboy" comment="264"]Someone asked earlier the difference between public and private betas.That's a long answer.The short answer is, in the public version, you guys just finally got horses. In the private build, they're already riding Wargs.It's about the AI, man. People poo poo this stuff but it matters. Can't put this stuff out there without at least basic AI knowledge or it might as well be a tech demo. Sucky AI still is 100X better than no AI.[/quote] Agreed! Just let

Reply to Elemental Beta 3 Walkthru in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

...for my preferece, I'd be glad to fight Helm's deep over about 5 battles of 200 v 200... I'd just imagine it times 100. 5 fairly long battles is plenty epic for me :)

Reply to Elemental Beta 3 Walkthru in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

If you want 1 model = 1 soldier scale, then it's going to be graphically difficult to have a 10k battle, no matter how you do it. At some point, one has to use abstraction. That is, just like a single chit in a wargame can represent a division, I'd have to have 1 model = 1,000 soldiers in my own mind. With a flexible mod, it would probably be possible to recruit and label that unit as 1,000 soldiers, all outfitted the same. At that point, you could have 20,000 soldiers in one grid, but

Reply to Elemental Beta 3 Walkthru in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

I'm happy with 200 vs. 200... that's up to 400 person's in a battle, which is quite a few. Has anyone tried counting up the number of units in that screenie posted earlier... bet it is around 200 and that looked pretty epic to me. Don't forget that, just as in any war game, an entire battle doesn't have to happen in one "hex". This could be one segment of a long line of battles, composing 1,000 of units. The system is just focusing you on one "area" at a time. For m

Reply to Elemental Beta 3 Walkthru in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

I play games on the highest difficulty level I possibly can. This means I usually cannot afford to lose a single unit unnecessarily, much less have to worry about an AI inflicting "massive losses" on me. I know quite a bit about AI and especially if there are spells and such involved, autoresolve will never be able to get anywhere near manual, intelligent, play. Wish it weren't true, but it wasn't an exaggeration that I've tried this on over 30 TBS games and it has never worked where I

Reply to Elemental Beta 3 Walkthru in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

[quote who="Raven X" comment="163"] That's why You can End the Battle Any Time YOU Want. If you don't want to play through those long battles, YOU don't have to . Just hit Auto Calculate which you'll be able to do at ANY TIME. See what I'm getting at here?There's No Need to gimp the game for those of us who DO want to play through the long battles when those who don't want too don't have too.[/quote] As I've said, I believe 3 times now, autoresolve is not an option for a serious games

Reply to Elemental Beta 3 Walkthru in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

I have to pitch it with the guys here who are saying that you've got to be really careful not to confuse zillions of cities/units with epic. There are epic battles in mythology that were 1v1 e.g. Hercules vs. Cerberus. A game that is bogged down in 2 hour turns and managing 20 cities tends to feel, to me, more like work than like epic. Civ IV, for example, suggests the minimum number of players for a given map size... I think it is 12 players for huge. That's because the

Reply to Elemental Beta 3 Walkthru in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

On big battles: You can always just imagine that one troop in the game counts as 1,000 men/creatures... then you're set :) I read that the target number of cities in Elemental was going to be about 4-5 per player. I also really enjoy Disciples II, which has a limit of 6, yes 6, units per army. I'd be fine with a 10 unit limit, especially if a unit is basically a tile placement, which could have many troops grouped in it. Very few TBS games (if any) use much more than 10 mov

Reply to Elemental Beta 3 Walkthru in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

Therefore, trogs and humans are indeed "races", not species. I guess if I'm a halfbreed and started a new game, It would randomly pick from the multiple race tech trees, just like genes are randomly assigned at conception :)

Reply to Elemental Beta 3 Walkthru in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

[quote who="Raven X" comment="137"]This, my friend, is why we can hit "Auto Resolve" ANY TIME WE WANT. You don't Have To Play Long Battles If You Don't Want To. That's fine.[/quote] It's so not true that hitting autoresolve is an option in any serious game. I've played at least 30 TBS games where I've tried autoresolve, and not one of them does half as good as manually playing it out. Unless you don't care about losing units, autoresolve just isn't a viable option.

Reply to Elemental Beta 3 Walkthru in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

"Vulcans and Romulans are the same race (technically species but that’s a whole different discussion)." Too true... Species are creatures that can interbreed and create non-sterile offspring. So actually, since humans, klingons, vulcans and romulans (among many others) can interbreed in this fasion, they are all the same species. They could be called different races, but the term "race" is not a scientific term. Not sure if the applies to how the marriage and breeding work

Reply to Elemental Beta 3 Walkthru in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

[quote who="Annatar11" comment="127"] For a game that basically advertises immense moddability, the tactical combat system definitely has to be able to decently accomodate most "normal" (meaning, not "Hey for kicks and giggles let's do 10 million vs 10 million fight!) mods.[/quote] Most games, even moddable ones, have a target battle size though. I think that many people would be surprised how small battles were prior to modern times. If the population of the biggest city is capped at

Reply to Elemental Beta 3 Walkthru in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

In the beta so far, there seems to be several factor that might make battles faster: 1) Raising armies takes a long time. For me to raise an army using mostly the Warfare tree, it took me until about turn 125 to have ONE unit with 10 reasonable troops in it. 2) Don't forget that Warfare has grouping technologies that put more than one troop in a tile. Those same 10 troops were in 3 groups... so, fighting with 3 units isn't going to take long. Big cities only have, what, 1,000 pe

Reply to Elemental Beta 3 Walkthru in Elemental Dev Journals Stardock Forums

[quote who="Raven X" comment="113"] For Multi-Player All the Battles could be Auto Resolved and I wouldn't care,[/quote] While there's nothing I care about more. I like large and epic battles also... I also wouldn't mind playing a 50 turn battle on a 5 minute timer. ;) This timer would obviously be off in SP, so I could take my sweet time with it.