Elemental: War of Magic

[rpanic]

Still can't run it on my vista 64 machine since beta 3. I think they rushed this out and should have waited a few more months to work the bugs out.

 

[heat901]

Still can't run it on my vista 64 machine since beta 3. I think they rushed this out and should have waited a few more months to work the bugs out.

Id contact their support and let them know. Either they will help you or you can ask for a refund. Back when demigod was a mess they were issuing refunds for people that didn't like the game or it was to messed up for them.

 

[murphy55d]

First patch already released...looking forward to more impressions.

1.01 just was released for Elemental: War of Magic. Hopefully it will correct my crash on saving a game! Heres some notes:


Elemental - War of Magic
------------------------

Welcome to the world of Elemental!

Elemental 1.01
------------------------

* Lots of new seed maps (particularly for medium and large)
* Enemy Unit caching modified so that they are released from the game after death (this should address the “game gets slower over time” issue some have reported)
* In tactical battles, the camera will only move IF the unit is off screen
* Fixed a crash related to city tiles on DirectX 11 based setups with a game within a game
* Removed non-terrain based tactical battle bonus modifiers (an interesting idea but unintuitive)
* There are technologies that will spawn more shards on the map.
* Fixed tactical heal spell to ensure that it doesn’t do any 0 point healing.
* Fixed issue that caused failed spells to say “miss”
* Disabled the use of the L8 texture format to use the A8R8G8B8 format as it was incompatible with certain video cards and causing the game to crash (fog of war issue)
* Worldly knowledge renamed to “Tech Knowledge” to be consistent with the manual.
* Fixed a crash related to children being born during a reloaded saved game that could cause a crash on 64-bit machines
* Fixed a crash related to reference counting on the Dynasty screen that happens on 32-bit Windows XP machines
* Tactical Battles now support edge scroll
* Fixed a buffer overrun issue that caused random crashing on SSD SATA drives while saving a game.
* Cosmetic fix to the object tool in th map editor
* Fixed a bug that would cause the goodie hut graphics not to be removed when they were no longer relevant.
* Fixed minimap bug where unhiding and dragging the minimap without first resizing it would cause the map part to get offset from the rest of the minimap window, leaving it blank
* Fixed bug on loading a game or starting a new game within a game where clicking on a city would leave its resource tab blank until it was clicked on again
* Improved performance of units joining into an army
* Hooked up the draggable window showing the list of players who have requested a new turn or not in multiplayer, automatically shows up in multiplayer but does not get filled or ever unhide in single player [NOTE: Multiplayer servers will NOT be enabled until AFTER day 0]
* Fixed crash related to very very fast machines loading up data.zip before initialization causing data to not be fully enabled which would result in a crash when the object in question was accessed.
* Ice Bolt spell removed
* New spell: Stab of Ice, short range spell, causes enemy to lose turn in addition to damage.
* Sion Unit given special abilities and rebalanced

 

[Sho'Nuff]

So I finally got Elemental to run on my rig last night. Word of advice to ATI owners. If you are getting a black screen -> CTD when you try to load the game, then try exiting out of ANY ATI programs running in the system tray. That was how I managed to work around the problem.

That said, I installed the 1.05 patch and played for about 2 hours last night. The game seems to be a hybrid of Civilization and King's Bounty with some magic elements thrown in. It definitely has some promise, but the biggest problem I've seen so far is that the game just isn't fun. I don't know how to explain it better than that. In civilization, the early game was always a bit slow, but there was the excitement of striking out, finding little villages to help you out, and sending out droves of cave men to beat the piss out of your neighbors. In Elemental, I feel like there is WAY too many things to find in the early game (i.e., too many "villages" with loot), which detracts from the excitement of finding anything at all (in economics, this would be called an oversupplpy problem). That, and the early enemy units seem to be ridiculously overpowered. Which make exploration downright dangerous and the possibility of an early conquest of one of the AI civ enemies a pipe dream.

With some rebalancing and tweaking, Elemental could be a great game with all the addictive goodness of civilization. But at the moment, its just . . . . . Booooooooooorriiiiing. Hopefully the later game will pick up.

Anyway, that's just my opinion. Reasonable minds can differ, and I hope you like the game.

Best

Sox

 

[Phobic9]

With some rebalancing and tweaking, Elemental could be a great game with all the addictive goodness of civilization. But at the moment, its just . . . . . Booooooooooorriiiiing. Hopefully the later game will pick up.

Anyway, that's just my opinion. Reasonable minds can differ, and I hope you like the game.

Best

Sox

Yeah, the game is technically alright (will be better after some more patches) but it lacks the addictiveness that the Civ series seems to bring. I'm not sure what it is but it's missing something. Maybe I can ask for a refund.

 

[Pens1566]

2nd patch (1.05) is out, and still buggy as hell. Unplayable past turn 200 or so is more like it. FPS drops into single digits and CTD all the time. This is on E8400 (3.6) with 4GB ram and GTX260 ... everything else is stable. Game was definitely rushed.

 

[tedrodai]

I bought the game last night and was going to give it a try when I get home today, but it's disappointing to hear that they truly rushed the game out in such a bad shape. I purchased the game because it looks pretty interresting and I have a lot of respect for Stardock and their (so far) "suck it DRM!" attitude, but I don't care if it's my own children selling me a title--if you're charging people full price, it better be a full product!

That's an easy way for a company to lose my respect.

 

[Phobic9]

I bought the game last night and was going to give it a try when I get home today, but it's disappointing to hear that they truly rushed the game out in such a bad shape. I purchased the game because it looks pretty interresting and I have a lot of respect for Stardock and their (so far) "suck it DRM!" attitude, but I don't care if it's my own children selling me a title--if you're charging people full price, it better be a full product!

That's an easy way for a company to lose my respect.

Yeah, I bought their last big release, Demigod, and it pretty much had a similar release. The game kind of died off fast as a result. No doubt Stardock is getting the updates out there but it's going to be hard for me to buy another one of their games if this keeps up.

 

[rpanic]

Agreed this is the second game they have released that should have stayed in beta another 6 months. When they gave the release date and stuck to it I knew it was going to not be done. Game should be 50% cheaper since to me its still not complete. They have came a long way down in quality since I first started using Stardock for GC1. I will not preorder anymore Stardock games that’s for sure.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2010/08/25/elementals-disastrous-launch-stay-well-away/

 

[datalink7]

The game shows promise but a lot of bugs. Wait at least two months on this one IMO.

 

[Martimus]

I have been unable to play for more than 10 minutes since Beta 3, and I am downloading the release now. I guess I shouldn't expect any of that instability to be fixed.

I was hoping that they would take my suggestions on fixes seriously in the forums, but it appears that they did not. I did expect this though, since they were so happy that they were so far along, when it seemed to me that they still had a long way to go.

 

[bvalpati]

Bought it Tuesday night from Best Buy, patched it and started the campaign last night with zero problems. Machine is a C2D 2.5Ghz laptop with an Nvidia 260M and 6GB ram running win7-64.

No bugs for me thus far with about 8 hours played.

 

[tedrodai]

I played for a couple hours last night after updating--mostly in the campaign--and while it was playable, I encountered plenty of bugs.

*Some dialogs would continue to pop up long after they should have when re-crossing tiles where an event previously occured.
*Sometimes a unit wouldn't respond when given commands though he still had actions available in the turn -- this could usually be cleared up by waiting and/or clicking another unit or city and back.
*Also some menus wouldn't show up when selecting a unit or city as they normally do. Such as...you click a city, but the info tabs don't show up, the action buttons don't show up, etc. Clicking another city/unit or bringing up some other in-game menu then trying again cleared this problem.
*The worst bug I encountered happened during a battle -- I made a few clicks really fast and suddenly couldn't give commands to ANY unit or advance to the next turn, though I could still select different units. I had to reload a previous save after this (thankfully I saved right before the battle).
*I may have managed to get the quest stuck for the 3rd monarch you speak to, though I can't confirm this -- went to bed shortly after I had problems here. I'll have to check it out the next time I play.
*I only encountered 1 crash, but it was reproduceable so hopefully easy to fix. Unless I had the options menu up (this seemed to prevent it), it would crash each time I alt-tabbed to the desktop then tried to bring the game back up.


Like I said, it was playable for me...but it definitely still feels like a beta. Similar generic specs to bvalpati's cept a desktop with 8800GTS 512MB.

edit: added the "*Also some menus..." note.

 

[Martimus]

I played for a couple hours last night after updating--mostly in the campaign--and while it was playable, I encountered plenty of bugs.

*Some dialogs would continue to pop up long after they should have when re-crossing tiles where an event previously occured.
*Sometimes a unit wouldn't respond when given commands though he still had actions available in the turn -- this could usually be cleared up by waiting and/or clicking another unit or city and back.
*Also some menus wouldn't show up when selecting a unit or city as they normally do. Such as...you click a city, but the info tabs don't show up, the action buttons don't show up, etc. Clicking another city/unit or bringing up some other in-game menu then trying again cleared this problem.
*The worst bug I encountered happened during a battle -- I made a few clicks really fast and suddenly couldn't give commands to ANY unit or advance to the next turn, though I could still select different units. I had to reload a previous save after this (thankfully I saved right before the battle).
*I may have managed to get the quest stuck for the 3rd monarch you speak to, though I can't confirm this -- went to bed shortly after I had problems here. I'll have to check it out the next time I play.
*I only encountered 1 crash, but it was reproduceable so hopefully easy to fix. Unless I had the options menu up (this seemed to prevent it), it would crash each time I alt-tabbed to the desktop then tried to bring the game back up.


Like I said, it was playable for me...but it definitely still feels like a beta. Similar generic specs to bvalpati's cept a desktop with 8800GTS 512MB.

edit: added the "*Also some menus..." note.

Can you post this in their forums? http://forums.elementalgame.com/forum/877

I am not sure they know of all the bugs, so this may help them track these ones down at least.

 

[tedrodai]

Yep, was planning to later...hopefully with a little further detail, but I can't access their forum from work. Just wanted to write it all down while it was fresh on my mind, cause I have a busy schedule through this weekend. I thought here was as good as any other place =).

 

[bvalpati]

I played for a couple hours last night after updating--mostly in the campaign--and while it was playable, I encountered plenty of bugs.

*Some dialogs would continue to pop up long after they should have when re-crossing tiles where an event previously occured.

I did notice this but the dialog only reappeared if I walked onto the trigger tile again before resolving the issue that triggered the dialog in the first place, so I didn't really consider it a bug.

I know a lot of people are having major issues with the game and I wasn't trying to be smarmy with my no bugs post but I really had very few things go wrong/unusual and certainly nothing which caused a lockup or forced me to begin from a previous save. Perhaps I simply haven't gotten far enough to experience some of the bugs as I'm only on about the fourth kingdom from the beginning of the campaign. I spent some time messing around with a sandbox game last night in addition to campaign play but didn't really play much just looked around mostly. I'll play more tonight and see if anything pops up.

 

[rpanic]

Elemental started working on my Vista 64 machine not sure what fixed it but these are the things that I did. This was all after I deleted all traces of elemental from betas before full release<< so this didn&#8217;t seem to help.

Launched directly from Element folder after I did this:

Launched elemental_docs_cleanup and elemental_wipe_prefs located in the elemental folder.

The game will start most of the time and even when it doesn&#8217;t it does not go into not responding like it was since beta 3. Could part of the issue be a network problem?


I would post this info on their forum but now I can&#8217;t post in stardock forums, not sure if it was because I complained about the game being released early. I got flamed for nothing, fanboys are raging on anyone not saying anything negative.

edit: If I click on anything in the impulse forum section I get logged out. <<edit started to work again.

 

[Martimus]

I managed to play through the first map of the Campaign, without any crashes with 1.05. 1.06 is being released tonight (might already be released), which they say fixes the white screen during tactical battles issue.

I did have an issue with the mouse cursor not changing back to an arrow after a tactical battle, when I leveled up. This made selecting what stats to increase very difficult. (I had to keep clicking around the general area until it actually took.)

EDIT: 1.06 is out now. I probably don't have time to D/L it though. I'll likely try it tomorrow.

 

[Slew Foot]

Not too many major bugs (I had the same thing with the mouse cursor as the post above, but the game plays like absolute shit. Interface is completely non intuitive, you cant easily tell whats going on or what you need to do. Its hard to know what options you have available to you, the graphics look like garbage. The whole game has that unfinished feel to it, it seems very unpolished for a major release.

 

[Pens1566]

Yeah, its safe to say its still in beta

 

[JSt0rm]

So they ran out of money and pushed it out. Sucks to be on the ropes like that.

 

[Martimus]

So they ran out of money and pushed it out. Sucks to be on the ropes like that.

If you read one of the first posts in this thread you can see that they pushed it out because their next window for release was February, 2011. (due to retail space availability)

To be honest, I don't think they understood how unpolished the game really is. I think they actually thought it was "good enough". None of the Stardock developed games have been very polished, but they always have had excellent support. I expect this game to continue to get polished for the next year and a half, like all their other games. (Their last release was Galactic Civilizations 2, and before that it was Galactic Civilizations 1; the other games they produced were developed by a third party (SoaSE and Demigod).) (They did make some cheap games like Political Machine in the meantime, but that is a very small production).

 

[Slew Foot]

Upgraded to 1.06 and it plays a little better. Still a lot of bugs in it and I wish there was a better tutorial.

 

[Craig234]

So they ran out of money and pushed it out. Sucks to be on the ropes like that.

Posts before said they had to get it out or they were locked out until like February.

 

[JEDI]

is there a demo available?