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Frogboy
Frogboy
Join Date 03/2001
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Questions for August 2009

July 27, 2009 10:56:57 PM from Elemental ForumsElemental Forums

So we're starting to put together stuff for the alpha. 

This week we're putting together the list for the private alpha group (basically a lottery).

The exact day of the release of the alpha remains to be seen. Part of it depends on the weather up at Higgins Lake (where I'll be on vacation until early next week). If it rains, I'll be going home sooner which means the alpha will likely come out a bit sooner. If it's nice, I'll be staying a bit longer and the alpha will have a couple more days to bake. Kind of a reverse groundhogs day.

In either case, we plan to start making public to those interested in seeing the sausage factory that is game development our internal bug reports.

Those of you not used to a Stardock beta will find these quite...something I suspect.  Most people don't realize how games are made. 

A game, at the end of the day, is a piece of software that is tuned to be "fun" where fun is a debateable concept.

On a new property like Elemental, that means the software is taking a bunch of technologies that have been developed over the previous year or two and integrated together.  

If a game takes say 3 years to make, 2.5 years of that time will be spent on the underlying tech. The lsat 6 months spent putting that tech together into a working "game".  That is where we are now, taking the techs and integrating them together.

You'll be able to see all our foibles in the journals area starting next week as the good, bad, and ugly of the game's develpoment starts to come together. 

So if you have any questions for the August FAQ, post them here. 

Cheers!

elemental
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Frogboy
Luckmann
Join Date 04/2006
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Reply #1 July 27, 2009 11:20:08 PM
from Elemental ForumsElemental Forums

We love you.

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Frogboy
Luckmann
Join Date 04/2006
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Reply #2 July 27, 2009 11:23:31 PM
from Elemental ForumsElemental Forums

Edit: What is with the forums today?
This time I even reloaded this page to make sure that I didn't double-post, and only reposted after checking. Bam. Double-post. Bah!

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Frogboy
SaberCherry
Join Date 03/2009
+5
Reply #3 July 27, 2009 11:27:14 PM
from Elemental ForumsElemental Forums

1)  How will Elemental keep the end-game fast and playable, and prevent tedium?

Late-game Master of Magic (and to some extent, Civilization and MOO2) tend to get bogged down in building reports, such that choosing the next building for many, many cities took 95% of my time.  Gal Civ II got bogged down with fort-building, and Age of Wonders got bogged down with gigantic battles involving dozens of units that started really far away from each other.  I never actually finished a game of Master of Magic or Civilization because of all the late-game city-management.

 

2)  How will the combat formulas work - and will the formulas themselves be easily moddable?  Such as "Damage = (Strength * Weapon Power) / (Total Armor)", etc.

This may seem really nit-picky or overly technical, but I find that games live or die by such basic details.  Diablo and Diablo II, for example, were horribly flawed in that armor only served to give a chance of avoiding damage, making instakills very common in the late game.  Titan Quest's armor system gave at most a 50% damage mitigation, which (as with World of Warcraft) made the actual armor rating the least important statistic on a piece of armor.  Gal Civ II's offense/defence formula - sorry to say, I loathed it, and it's one of the things that made me stop playing.  Age of Wonders had a REALLY bad system (once again based on armor evading rather than mitigating damage) that resulted in semi-invicible heroes avoiding 30 hits in a row, only to be instakilled by the next one.  If only I had had the ability to mod the combat formulas, I would have gotten a lot more enjoyment out of all of them...

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Frogboy
Darkodinplus
Join Date 03/2006
+20
Reply #4 July 27, 2009 11:30:24 PM
from Elemental ForumsElemental Forums

Darkodinplus' Top 7 Questions

  1. Will Channelers be able to duel?
  2. Can players create their own spells?
  3. Can multiple forces participate in a single battle?
  4. Can battles span more than one turn?
  5. How detailed will Channeler customization be?
  6. Can extremely powerful items be created by the player?
  7. What kind of special abilities or traits can Channelers gain?
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Frogboy
CapnWinky
Join Date 09/2008
+13
Reply #5 July 27, 2009 11:53:00 PM
from Elemental ForumsElemental Forums

Will there be different planes of existence or is it at least something we can mod? And by this I mean will we be able to warp between one map to another?

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Frogboy
kyogre12
Join Date 07/2008
+100
Reply #6 July 27, 2009 11:54:07 PM
from Elemental ForumsElemental Forums
  1. If I send you cookies, will I get in the alpha?

Ok, all joking aside, here are my real questions. I outlined these in another post, but I imagine you don't have the time to browse the forums too closely

  • What sort of things can you put essence into? Is it limited to other units (champions, priests, etc) and making land livable, or can we do other things with it? To use the Lord of the Rings example, can we imbue our fortress to create a Barad-dur-like indesructable tower, or create something like the One Ring? (I know, not everyone likes LotR/Tolkien, but it's the easiest way to get this idea across without a very long-winded explaination )
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Frogboy
pigeonpigeon
Join Date 11/2008
+71
Reply #7 July 27, 2009 11:58:01 PM
from Elemental ForumsElemental Forums

More details on magic! Do you plan on rigid magic trees? Something ala AoW:SM (which I think is similar to MoM)? We know you intend for much of faction diversity to be a result of the magic system, but does that mean we won't have as much freedom to mix and match various types of magic?

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Frogboy
Denryu
Join Date 07/2006
+93
Reply #8 July 28, 2009 12:05:15 AM
from Elemental ForumsElemental Forums

Quoting Luckmann,
reply 2
Edit: What is with the forums today?
This time I even reloaded this page to make sure that I didn't double-post, and only reposted after checking. Bam. Double-post. Bah!

Feel lucky; my posts are all getting eaten. I spent half an hour writing a huge epistle in response to GW, and it was pretty well written I think and it got ate. And I unwisle had not copied to clipboard before hitting submit.

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Frogboy
Denryu
Join Date 07/2006
+93
Reply #9 July 28, 2009 12:24:28 AM
from Elemental ForumsElemental Forums

bah

 

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Frogboy
Hawawaa
Join Date 09/2006
+33
Reply #10 July 28, 2009 12:36:57 AM
from Elemental ForumsElemental Forums

Ohhhh Please... I want ALPHA! ...I dont think I could wait.... ok ill stop.... or will I?!?!?!?!??!?

Need a new TBS game to play!

My questions however have been mostly answered so am good.

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Frogboy
CapnWinky
Join Date 09/2008
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Reply #11 July 28, 2009 12:43:55 AM
from Elemental ForumsElemental Forums

Quoting Darkodinplus,
reply 4
Darkodinplus' Top 7 Questions

Can players create their own spells?

Yes, players will be able to create their own spells. They've went over that numerous times in the modding dev journals. Not trying to be mean but I dont want to waste a FAQ question on something that has already been answered (ex: July FAQ's..."Will there be mounts?"). Unless of course you mean something like creating a spell while you're in game.."Create a spell, spell"

 

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Frogboy
Denryu
Join Date 07/2006
+93
Reply #12 July 28, 2009 12:45:47 AM
from Elemental ForumsElemental Forums

How many spells do you expect a player to have access to in a given game?

Are spells available based on faction?

Are spells made available based on the number and type of nodes?

Are there going to be spells that require access to multiple elements?

What other sorts of options at game creation will add replayability to the game?

Do you foresee including any player created content (from beta) in the Canon release?

Is February 2010 still looking likely as a release date, or have the various setbacks this summer made that unlikely?

Do you often read posts in the forums?

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Frogboy
Tamren
Join Date 03/2008
+34
Reply #13 July 28, 2009 1:52:06 AM
from Elemental ForumsElemental Forums
It will be interesting at any rate. The finished game can only get better.
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Frogboy
landisaurus
Join Date 06/2008
+154
Reply #14 July 28, 2009 2:22:50 AM
from Elemental ForumsElemental Forums

Apparently I'm obsessive about certain questions, so I'll avoid those, even if they have not been addressed yet

 

So, if we want to buy paraphernalia (shirt, poster... uh, mouse pad?), is there any chance we will be able to buy them from an official source?  (I remember a teaser of some sort of shirt whipped up by marketing)

How many different landscapes are planned to be included?

I remember somebody asking about computer wall paper in the last "ask your questions here" thread, I realize I'm fairly interested in this as well.

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Frogboy
StoweMobile
Join Date 11/2004
+5
Reply #15 July 28, 2009 3:55:03 AM
from Elemental ForumsElemental Forums

What I really want to know is

How extensive will the RPG elements/loot system be?

Will the game have dynamic "minor" factions?

Are there other way to gain essence besides leveling up?

How easy will it be to level up?

----Pretty much any info about the RPG part of the game would be appreciated. We still don't know hardly anything about that part of the game yet.

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Frogboy
Wintersong
Join Date 07/2006
+235
Reply #16 July 28, 2009 4:49:57 AM
from Elemental ForumsElemental Forums

Quoting landisaurus,
reply 14
I remember somebody asking about computer wall paper in the last "ask your questions here" thread, I realize I'm fairly interested in this as well.
Memememe. I change wallpaper more often than avatars (well, not always true and sometimes is just cycling through a bunch of them) and this game deserves some cool and nice wallpapers. It has been deserving them for quite a long time now. I won't ask for some early Elemental mp3/MIDI/ogg tough... but wouldn't mind it.

1- Pure -->hypothesis<-- but in the case of the game selling (really) well, microexpansions a la Sins of a Solar Empire would be considered? Could some of those microexpansions be eye candy only? Could some of those microexpansion based on eye candy be about premedieval stuff and/or hightech/scifi/modern stuff? Or could the microexpansions be limited to content that fits the basic Elemental "visual/tematic feeling"?

2- Population as resource for your army and it's impact in the hamlet/town/city. I have a long document about it (but that I don't dare to post), about possible things and problems it supposes. Quite difficult to make it clear enough and that makes sense when many details interlock themselves in different points of different situations.

3- Who isn't in the alpha? A complete list, please.

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Frogboy
Shurdus
Join Date 06/2009
+3
Reply #17 July 28, 2009 5:36:26 AM
from Elemental ForumsElemental Forums

How many different resources will there be on the map?

How will these resources interact?

Are you considering allowing players to 'upgrade' resources - as in, will you allow means of transforming two metals into a metal that is better than either one metal that was used to create that metal?

Where is the main focus of the game? I understand that the economy will be very simple - which is disappointing in my book since I take complex and rich over simple anytime. So since the economy will not be a major focus - since managing it will supposedly be very simple - will the focus of the game lie in the battles?

I am not sure if this has been asked before, but here goes. In elemental, the story unfolds as the player plays. Will the story develop with each and every game?

Will the story only be available in the campaign or will it be present any game?

How adaptable will this story be?

Is it possible to avoid any form of story altogether and dive right into the game by playing a standalone game - like the custom games in Civ IV?

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Frogboy
Tridus
Join Date 03/2008
+110
Reply #18 July 28, 2009 5:56:06 AM
from Elemental ForumsElemental Forums

How do you determine what spells you have access to? Is it random, or based on what shards you can hold on the map, or based on picking "books" to specialize in at the start of the game?

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Frogboy
lordkosc
Join Date 12/2006
+6
Reply #19 July 28, 2009 6:45:02 AM
from Elemental ForumsElemental Forums

i hope for much rain, and a lotto win into the alpha!

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Frogboy
ScottTykoski
Join Date 03/2001
+132 sdemployee
Reply #20 July 28, 2009 6:52:23 AM
from Elemental ForumsElemental Forums

1- Pure -->hypothesis<-- but in the case of the game selling (really) well, microexpansions a la Sins of a Solar Empire would be considered?

I really didn't want to answer any of the questions (leave that to Brad) but this is one that I keep going back and forth on. It's definatly more rewarding, for us and the players (I beleive) to do meaty, full blown expansions where we stuff all the goods in.

On the other hand, it's A LOT of fun to have a game that supports lots of different play-styles that can be toggled on and off to make each experience even more unique. Carcasonne has this, where we can play with rivers, kings, towers, dragons, trade goods, etc etc, which are all interchangable and balanced.

I'd be curious what you guys think about this subject as the beta's move forward...big expansions or micro?

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Frogboy
DrGuppie
Join Date 03/2006
+6
Reply #21 July 28, 2009 7:00:52 AM
from Elemental ForumsElemental Forums

Quoting BoogieBac,
reply 20

I'd be curious what you guys think about this subject as the beta's move forward...big expansions or micro?

Both?  

 

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Frogboy
ScottTykoski
Join Date 03/2001
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Reply #22 July 28, 2009 7:03:13 AM
from Elemental ForumsElemental Forums

Where is the main focus of the game? I understand that the economy will be very simple - which is disappointing in my book since I take complex and rich over simple anytime. So since the economy will not be a major focus - since managing it will supposedly be very simple - will the focus of the game lie in the battles?

Gah...I can't help it.

Just because the economic system is simplified doesn't mean domestic management won't be engaging...streamlining economics was done to prevent tedium, not to de-emphasize the importance of a strong imperial backbone. If we do it right, 1.0 will have players that ONLY want to build massive, sprawling cities and have their fun focusing on growing settlements and keeping their cities prosperous.

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Frogboy
ScottTykoski
Join Date 03/2001
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Reply #23 July 28, 2009 7:03:59 AM
from Elemental ForumsElemental Forums

Both?

Horrible answer, but I forgive you bacause of the smiley face 

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Frogboy
DrGuppie
Join Date 03/2006
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Reply #24 July 28, 2009 7:15:03 AM
from Elemental ForumsElemental Forums

Quoting BoogieBac,
reply 23

 

Both?

 

Horrible answer, but I forgive you bacause of the smiley face 

Well, I'm only half-kidding

If the quantity of quality, player content is large enough, then micro expansions might not be that interesting unless they were gameplay expansions.

 

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Frogboy
Denryu
Join Date 07/2006
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Reply #25 July 28, 2009 7:29:21 AM
from Elemental ForumsElemental Forums

Quoting BoogieBac,
reply 20

1- Pure -->hypothesis<-- but in the case of the game selling (really) well, microexpansions a la Sins of a Solar Empire would be considered?


I really didn't want to answer any of the questions (leave that to Brad) but this is one that I keep going back and forth on. It's definatly more rewarding, for us and the players (I beleive) to do meaty, full blown expansions where we stuff all the goods in.

On the other hand, it's A LOT of fun to have a game that supports lots of different play-styles that can be toggled on and off to make each experience even more unique. Carcasonne has this, where we can play with rivers, kings, towers, dragons, trade goods, etc etc, which are all interchangable and balanced.

I'd be curious what you guys think about this subject as the beta's move forward...big expansions or micro?

I tend to favor fewer big meaty expansions over many micro expansions.

Derailing Brad's thread, tsk tsk.

I am NOT praying for rain, my guess is this will be the last chance for some R&R for Froggy for some time and I hope he thoroughly enjoys it. I actually like rain when I am camping, I really love being in a tent inthe rain for some reason...OK he didn't say he was camping, but to me going to lake means campping and fishing!   And even though fishing sucks in the rain (it's yucky AND the fish don't bite) like I said give me some interesting reading material and a tent (and NO cell phone!) and it doesn't get much better.

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