Elemental - War of Magic

[Syt]

We need a new thread so I can drool about this game some more.
http://elementalgame.com/

*  Take control as the magical Sovereign, expanding your nation in a Fantasy Turn-Based setting
    * As a Channeler, your choices will either save or destroy the dying world
    * Recruit heroes, explore dungeons, and collect treasure as each game unfolds
    * Randomly generated worlds feel rich in history and ripe for conquest
    * Tactical battles, custom units, and world-destroying spells allow your might to be unleashed
    * Intergrated editors help to keep each game fresh and allow players full control over their worlds
    * Persistant multiplayer matches for up to 8 players
    * With a 64bit version that utilizes new technology, and an engine built to run on older machines, Elemental will seamlessly scale with your PC!

Probably people will object to the art style; personally I love it.













Scheduled for release in February 2010 it's available for pre-order already:

Limited Beta Test
Players who pre-order the game will be able to download beta builds via Impulse™. This enables them to give feedback, suggestions and even begin populating Elemental with their own creations via the integrated modding environment.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

I've been following this off and on for a while, recently pre-ordered.
This is gonna be good I think.

[Caliga]

Is this basically inspired by MoM?

[Ancient Demon]

I've been following this game for some time, I can hardly wait.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

Is this basically inspired by MoM?

very much so indeed

[ulmont]

Buying it now, and hopefully the beta will be 1) available and 2) fun.

[Syt]

Just pre-ordered and beta is not yet available. On the plus side, credit card isn't billed yet, either.

[ulmont]

Buying it now, and hopefully the beta will be 1) available and 2) fun.

Gah, not yet, come on open beta.

[Syt]

Buying it now, and hopefully the beta will be 1) available and 2) fun.

Gah, not yet, come on open beta.

From their dev diaries:

Tentative Elemental Development Schedule
By Frogboy Posted April 4, 2009 20:04:56

For those of you who have been through the development of a Stardock developed or published game, much of this will be familiar.  For those of you aren't, welcome!

Early next year we plan to release a new turn-based PC strategy game called Elemental.  Our games typically have 3 betas and then a private "gamma" and then release.  We use the beta to mean truly unfinished, not feature complete but playable (we also use the term "alpha" for truly unfinished but not playable before we move into beta).

Beta 1 is typically the engine test. Beta 2 is the connectivity/multiplayer test. And beta 3 is the balance/fun test. Gamma is where it's done but we're doing final bug testing on it.

For Elemental, we want to add a 4th beta that's earlier than we normally start betas. The reason for this is because we plan to do some pretty radical stuff with Elemental from a game mechanics point of view. Some of these ideas may look good on paper but not be remotely practical.  So for Elemental, we're going to add a beta 0.

Here is the tentative schedule:

Beta 0: June 2009.  This won't be fun and will only play on the cloth map.

Empire_Cloth_City_Wide

The idea being, if the game is fun, it should still be fun without fancy graphics. Finishing Spring and over the Summer, we'll be trying out all kinds of game mechanics, listening to people in the beta (anyone who pre-orders has the option to participate in the beta) to see what ideas they might have, etc.  It's a lot cheaper to implement an idea or concept when we only have to represent it with icons on a cloth map.

Beta 1: August 2009. This is the engine test where we insert the actual graphics engine. The cloth map will still be there for zooming out but now you'll be able to really play in the world and we'll start to build onto this.  The game still won't be fun at this stage but you'll be able to give feedback on the look, UI, and other game engine stuff.


Beta 2: October 2009. This is the multiplayer test. It still won't likely be very fun but you'll be able to suffer with friends on-line. Elemental's multiplayer model is client-server (which is the opposite of Demigod which is peer-to-peer). In Elemental's case, Impulse will host the actual games which means that (in theory) there should be no such thing as "connection issues". If you can connect to a web page, you should be able to play people on-line in Elemental.

It will be at this stage when we decide whether Elemental will make its ship date.  We have February 2010 or August 2010 set aside for Elemental based on player feedback (we prefer February but we don't want to feel rushed).  Right now, we're running slightly ahead of schedule.

One nice thing about Beta 2 is that the multiplayer features we're adding into Elemental will also be made available in updates to Demigod for multiplayer users and anything else that uses Impulse Reactor (our development platform).



Beta 3: December 2009. This is when the game better start getting to be fun. This is where we balance things, etc.



Gamma: January 2010. This is often called a "release candidate" by other developers but these are private builds where we think everything works but expect there to be some last minute bugs that need to be fixed.



Release: Mid-February 2010.

They hope for a late June alpha release; they're a bit behind schedule, because they had to throw a few programmers over to fix Demigod's multiplayer. For the alpha (Beta 0?) they'll randomly pick 100 people who pre-ordered, weighter by how many Stardock purchases they have; plus 12 valued members of the community.

[Syt]

This leaves me confused:

Unlimited expansion by us and the players
By Frogboy Posted November 28, 2008 12:28:45

Some of the concepts we're talking about will be hard to envision without actually having the game but one of the real innovations we're trying to introduce with Elemental is the concept of unlimited expansion.

The key to this is not hard coding civilization capabilities but rather leaving them open-ended.

So let me start at the beginning:

When someone first gets into Elemental, the relationships will be simple between things. A player who wants to design a horse mounted knight will need to have researched animal husbandry which lets them train horses. They will need to have a city that has used one of its tiles to make use of a herd of wild horses on the map. They will need a mine on a metal deposit to create the armor.  And once they have all those things, it'll be a matter of training and equipping the knight.

The above example is one of the more complicated relationships one will see initially in Elemental...

But what about users who want to keep making more and more sophisticated relationships?

Maybe I want to have knights equipped with sunfire dread chain mail riding tamed Demon steeds and the knights have a secondary power of carrying tomes of unmaking which vastly increase their damage in battle?

Well, there would be a host of technologies one would have to have researched. There would have to be spells researched as well and new city buildings that produce these tomes and then have been enchanted to make these tomes magical. The demon steeds would require various technologies and the finding of demons to be tamed in the first place and so on and so on.

How do you control the level of sophistication here so that it doesn't become too complicated?  The answer is with a new series of game options that are practically games unto themselves.

Because, did I mention, that all the things mentioned in the second example were things produced not by us but by players and broadcast to all other players so that you have access to them automatically? No expansion packs needed. No paying for mini-content needed. It's just thousands of players creating cool stuff and broadcasting it to one another.

So here's how players control it.  They have a screen called the Bestiary where they can control what types of creatures are in game. When someone broadcasts content, Stardock moderators rate and define it more closely. From this screen, players can decide what types of creatures they want, the quality of the submission desired (we will rate the broadcasts in terms of production values as well), etc. These creatures will have associated technologies that are attached to them that are required.

There will be additional screens for managing resources, techs, etc.

So for most players, they will probably stick with what we include or maybe a handful of expansions that Stardock provides. Others will insert some content made by other players. And still others will go for a truly huge scope experience.  But the point is that players control this.

Now someone might say that a lot of this sounds too ambitious. But Stardock already does a lot of this, today, right now, on WinCustomize.com with its non-game stuff.

Now what is the gameplay result of this? One of the cooler things that will result is that the units that players make use of will really be different from game to game. And there will be a real pay off in the battles for players who have managed to assemble the necessary components to create some of the truly sophisticated units.

In multiplayer, the default it going to be the least common denominator settings. We will probably have other options but we won't know until we've had a chance to play it online with you guys to see what other settings are the most fun.

So it works like the custom contents for Spore or Sims? 

[Syt]

And I love this size comparison:

[Jaron]

[sbr]

Damn, I will be keeping my eye on this, looks very interesting.

[DisturbedPervert]

Probably people will object to the art style; personally I love it.

I love it too.  This is probably the best map I've ever seen in a strategy game.

[vinraith]

As one would expect of a Stardock-developed 4X TBS game, it looks very promising. I'm not quite willing to preorder (still tending to that nasty burn I got from Sins) but if the reviews are favorable I can't imagine not getting this.