Elemental: Fallen Enchantress Beta

[markec]

Release date: When it's done™

Stardock can't afford another War of Magic style fuckup,　so they're not releasing Fallen Enchantress until they're sure it's good.

So, never?

 

[Spectacle]

No, eventually.

 

[sser]

Well I ordered the game but it's taking forever to appear in their portfolio; not sure Stardock understands the point of digital distribution.

 

[sser]

First impressions: Lots of shit to do. Basically the Master of Magic spinoff I was expecting. Nice RPG elements, too, for the characters and parties; you can make your own character, as well as your own nations and units. Maps seem pretty fucking big so far, and I was just playing medium. Was pretty cool when I stepped into a northern wasteland and was presented with an art graphic of doom and gloom. I don't even know what that place was, but I suspect a central area for monsters and bad guys. Battles are fun and active; I think the mages/warlocks would be more interesting to play, at least thus far. I get fucked up a lot, so far. I'm not really sure how much I should be expanding, either. The game doesn't give a whole lot of explanation as to whether you should be building up your main character, or spreading out towns a la Civilization. I bet the end-game material is pretty cool once you have all kinds of nutty monsters running about.

Presentation is kinda murky/blurry and the art style plays a big part. I think there's a way to do cell shading and still have more definition in what's being seen. That said, the graphics are nice to look at, it's just that sometimes everything looks muddy as fuck, especially on the main map. As if you're playing a game from the past and the resolution hasn't been quite fixed. Just aren't enough icons and what not to differentiate between shit; they could learn a lot from Civ's interface. Game ran kinda clunky and slow when scanning about the map/between turns.

 

[JohnTheRevelator]

I'll have to ruin your mood a bit by saying that right now it's good only for game or two. AI is very, very weak, early game you just spam pioneers (no real penalty for overexpanding, also outposts don't even have maintenance cost so you spam them everywhere), early military is useless, actually military is more or less useless whole game, you don't need them. Which leads to sovereign and champions begin overpowered. I think monsters and other wildlife was supposed to thwart your expansion at least early on but monsters are too weak for that, also there isn't nearly enough roaming neutrals that would threaten your towns/outposts/units (also even if monster starts chasing you they are very easily outmanoeuvred since they only move one title per turn! You can easily grab goodies monsters are guarding without fighting them) . Graphics are nice but sometimes there is just too much shit going on and it can be very tiring for eyes. There is also a lot of balance issues in game (overpowered and too easily accessible high level magic for instance, or that one perk for civilization that gives you access to bunch of even more stupidly overpowered death spells) but that's to be expected since it is beta. One thing I'm impressed with are extremely short turn times, and that's on crappy, 2 core Pentium P6100...

 

[sser]

Dunno. I set the game to have a ravaged land filled with monsters. Gameplay seems fine to me. I'm getting my ass royally destroyed everytime. I finally 'retired' from a game and saw my ranking were basically flat lines compared to everyone else's jumps. Not sure what I'm doing wrong or how to improve; again, the interface is severely lacking compared to the natural intuitiveness of the Civ-games. Takes forever to build shit; to train shit; etc. My 'army' (usually just a band of heroes) gets utterly rocked everywhere it goes and usually has a pretty decent amount of -10fuckingeverything stat hits.

 

[Spectacle]

Heroes got nerfed pretty hard in the latest patch. Previously you could easily run around with a pack of heroes and rock everything, now you have to be a lot more careful when picking your fights.

 

[JohnTheRevelator]

Ohh there were patches to beta 3?

 

[hoverdog]

Beta 4 is on. Downloading. I'll post my impressions soon.

 

[sser]

The patch refused to find Elemental so I had to uninstall my game and then reinstall it from the Stardock or whatever client. Pain in the ass. Not even sure what beta I'm at as it still says 0.95 (but now the extra patching says it's already patched, so that's good...).


There is a good game nested somewhere in this title, but it's lost in the murk of too much expanse. Paradox's Warlock is a much tighter approach, whereas Elemental can't seem to decide if it wants to embrace the epic or settle for the gamey. On one hand you have heroes traversing dangerous landscapes and exploring cool caves and doing quests. On the other you have pioneers spamming the world and quickly wrapping it up with the territories of the players. And there's tons of other little niggling faults just like that. Kinda stupid; and frustrating, because it's so damn close to being really good.

 

[markec]

They should make city building like in the first The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth RTS. In that game you could build cities/forts only on predefined spots, that would eliminate city spamming and bring focus more on other gameplay parts.

 

[Malakal]

That also helps design maps based on strategic points and gives more strategic approach. I like this idea. IRL only certain points had enough allure to become cities, why games should be different.

 

[Marsal]

I like the idea, but not the proposed implementation. "Hard" caps and counters are always bad, IMO. They should tweak their map generator to produce fewer viable places to found cities and/or tweak the upkeep/maintenance/corruption mechanics. But, if you, for some reason, want to place a city in the middle of the desert, you should be allowed to do so.

Civ 4 had a pretty good system, IMO. You were often forced to choose between a good strategic placement of a city (on a hill, near a choke point, on the land bridge connecting 2 land masses...) or optimal economic placement (resources in a fat cross, on a river, closer to the Capitol...). Distance penalties and upkeep really limited your empire growth and you had to carefully balance expansion with military expenditure and science.

 

[Dim]

What was wrong with the food system from E:wom?

 

[Mortmal]

I played last beta 4 as well , still not what i am expecting it to be, not as good as Master of magic yet . Why cant they give more personalities to the different races ? all we we got is human races with some cosmetic usless racial feat, compare it again to the game that was released 18 years ago, each race had unique units , unique buildings, different growth rates, different affinity to magic, sure races were not equal, but you know what balance is not fun. Now all we have is humans with barely different skins, and the same dull armors. Its not that bad , IA is acceptable and is a decent challenge now , its an ok game , nothing more .Some part are still really basic, the pioneers spaming is absurd, no maintenance on outposts no supply roads , no distance penalty, just take every ressources on map as fast as possible and its certain win.

 

[drexciya]

I played last beta 4 as well , still not what i am expecting it to be, not as good as Master of magic yet . Why cant they give more personalities to the different races ? all we we got is human races with some cosmetic usless racial feat, compare it again to the game that was released 18 years ago, each race had unique units , unique buildings, different growth rates, different affinity to magic, sure races were not equal, but you know what balance is not fun. Now all we have is humans with barely different skins, and the same dull armors. Its not that bad , IA is acceptable and is a decent challenge now , its an ok game , nothing more .Some part are still really basic, the pioneers spaming is absurd, no maintenance on outposts no supply roads , no distance penalty, just take every ressources on map as fast as possible and its certain win.

The pioneer spamming should be cut out, i agree there. It makes me think of Civ 2 or 3 when you got into a race for territory at some point. What I also like to see is a bit more aggressive monsters when you or the AI put up Outposts or cities close by. A bit more differentiation between factions should be nice as well. I think they're a bit too focused on balance for that to really work out. For now, most strategies and hero builds work with multiple factions.

Comparing this game with MoM is a bit overdoing it; classics always look great if you remember them and nothing compares. I think this game is quite ok, but it needs some polish here and there. Note that MoM only got great after a large number of patches. So there's still room for improvement.

 

[sser]

The game has another update. 0.952 or something like that. Downloading now.

Elemental has also shown up on Steam, but Stardock refuses to give keys to people who have purchased it already presumably because they are a bunch of greedy pricks who still don't understand the gravy train that Steam has become.

 

[KoolNoodles]

As a fan of all games even remotely related to this "genre"(I just picked up Warlock: Master of Arcane for a couple bucks), how does this game seem to be comparing to say...Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic. That is probably my all time favorite, followed by Warlords 3.

 

[Misconnected]

As a fan of all games even remotely related to this "genre"(I just picked up Warlock: Master of Arcane for a couple bucks), how does this game seem to be comparing to say...Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic. That is probably my all time favorite, followed by Warlords 3.

Not very easily. They're pretty different games. You might think of it this way: in EFE you generally win by being the best at exploiting the game's systems. In AoW you win by outplaying your opponents directly.

EFE combat is weaker than AoW's. Smaller battlefields, more limited combat mechanics, no genuinely hard counters, and none of the gruesomely epic and match-wrecking cheese. But also better balance (or at least, rapidly getting there), better AI, and none of the gruesomely epic and match-wrecking cheese. You might think of it as kind of a cross between HoMM and AoW. It's sadly nowhere near as good as either, but it's also a hell of a lot better than anything Civilization has ever offered. If you expect AoW you'll be sorely disappointed. If you expect Civ you'll be delighted.

EFE empire management is far beyond AoW. EFE is a genuine 4X. Empire management is the heart of the game. AoW is more a wargame in 4X clothing. The differences that creates in this area of the games are every bit as vast as you'd expect.

EFE questing feels like it has same point of origin as questing in AoW, namely MoM. But the games took the concept in opposite directions. Where AoW added a tiny bit of seriously underdeveloped crawling, EFE has instead added dialogue. There's a shit-ton of potential in EFE's approach, but while it's far more developed than AoW's approach was, most of that potential is still unfulfilled. And I doubt SD can/will really deliver until after release. The good news is SD has a track record of doing just that. The bad news is I can't imagine they can if EFE flops. But EFE ought to be a success. It's certainly not without its fair share of flaws, but if it was remotely balanced right now it would be a great game (FYI: current schedule is the next beta will test balance/polish. Current beta tests a fairly major redesign of the empire management systems).

I don't really know how much this helps. Like I said, they're not that readily comparable games. If you think you might like a ton of traditional 4X (Civilization, MoM, GalCiv, etc.) in your AoW, or a sprinkling of AoW in your traditional 4X then EFE is an easy recommendation to make. But it's hard to make any recommendation based your love of Warlords 3 & AoW.

 

[KoolNoodles]

*comparison stuff*

That actually does help quite a bit in getting a feel for what kind of game it is. Since I'm a big fan of Civ(all the way back to 1), I think a focus on the 4x element in a fantasy setting sounds pretty great. I'll keep my eyes on it, that's for sure. Wish the combat were more robust, from the sounds of it, but maybe that doesn't matter so much in a 4x.

 

[Jarpie]

Will this be worth to buy or should we just forget this?

 

[Ulminati]

Will this be worth to buy or should we just forget this?

Too early to tell. It will probably be shit on release. But depending on moddability there's enough of the right stuff hidden in there that modders may eventually turn it into a pretty tight MoM successor. Part of the reason people were so butthurt about War of Magic being shit is because beneath all the utterly imbalanced and broken mechanics are the elements of a really good game. If some workable interplay between sending heroes off to adventure, raising armies, building cities and casting magic can be reached it could be a classic. But all theiterations so far have had one of the steps so blatantly broken and the others so underdeveloped that everything quickly fell apart.

I think they need to make heroes weaker stat-wise and give them more utility skills so that a mix of heroes and armies would be more potent. And the citybuilding and resource gathering needs tweaking. But I haven't played the last two betas so maybe I'm entirely on the wrong track compared to how things stand today.

 

[sser]

Will this be worth to buy or should we just forget this?

I cannot recommend this game unless you are a huge 4x-fan who needs an updated MoM-fix.

 

[Misconnected]

Will this be worth to buy or should we just forget this?

SD seems to be having an extremely hard time balancing the production, looting, army, hero, mundane, magic, research & questing elements with each other. Ideally the relationship of those elements should create all sorts of interesting synergies. As they are, they're at most hard counters to each other and a few are stupidly much more effective than anything else. It's very much like the situation with Endless Space, just greatly mitigated by there being more complex and more numerous sub-systems.

Whether that makes it worth buying depends on your preferences, I guess. But honestly... Wardell has shown himself to be exactly the kind of asshole caveman the world needs a lot less of. So if you decide you just can't live without EFE, I'd suggest you buy used or pirate it.

 

[Kruno]

What's wrong with Wardell? The guy is giving away the game to those who have purchased the first Elemental instead of doing the EA thing by telling people they got a deep and meaningful game.