Hmmm. This might be a stupid question, but does frogboy's statement "Multiplayer games will be hosted by us. Period." mean that there will be no lan games?

awww, I liked the bots idea.  I thought it was a great way to try to create a solid AI.   Oh well.   Such is the way of development I guess.

Well for the alpha, I hope that having all three of those games is not a prerequisite to being in "the pool". I have both Sins plus GC2 with all expansions. Demigod was not my cup of tea and I won't buy it just to be eligible for a possible alpha seat.

 I would hope some weight would be given to people who have been long time posters and active on these boards (maybe with some weight thrown to those who have posted some great ideas as opposed to people that post not so great ideas).

I am not talking about myself, but there are some folks here like Landisaurus, Wintersong, Pigeonpigeon, GW Swicord, and others who I think if they are not involved as early as possible you are doing yourself a disservice. Of course I want in too, I am sure everyone that posts here does - I guess I am just saying I hope that owning all three of those games is not a "minimum requirement" to be in the pool for an alpha seat. Frankly, not sure why you would want a demigod player or even a Sins player, it seems GC and GC2 players are going to be your hardore TBS players, and they are likely to be your most productive testers with valuable feedback.

That's my 2 coppers.

Questions and Comments

1. Multiplayer games will be hosted by us. Period. No peer to peer. Not even hosted on the user’s box. Our servers. No ports, no proxies, nothing. We’re hosting it.

We are revisiting the way the economy works in Elemental to simplify it.

I have some questions about this. Firstly, on multiplayer I am not that bothered ... but this is a turn based game. Why can't we have local hosted PBEM like Dominions 3?

Secondly, and very importantly I would really like some clarification on the economy point. As a Dominions / MoM / AOWSM fan I am looking for a deep sandbox experience, not necessarily a deep story. What do you mean about simplification?

Lan?  Will Elemental be "Lan-worthy"?  Several of my casual game friends are REALLY looking forward to this game, but mainly as solo and our weekend Lan parties.  Without Lan,  solo = always bots, right?  (I'm not sure how the game will work obviously).

I am awe struck by these reveleations and not a bit surprised. I am a big big Gaming Post-Mortem reader and here we have a quasi, and as yet incomplete Post-Mortem happening right befores our eyes.

There are always reasons why "certain game elements" (no pun intended) get shelved or simply left out of a games initial concept.

I think it is very cool to hear the "why" here and now, and not have to wonder "forever" until the Dev has time to sit down and reminise about the whole "if only we had more this and that, the Good and BAD, more time, more assets, etc., etc.

Thanks Brad. Stay the course, as you always do. Stardock makes FUN games and I look forward to Elemental more and more as I read about what the "Real" is becoming and how it is coming into being as opposed to saying some time in the future, "Shite! NO BOTS!" those buggers said we would have BOTS! :) 

I feel honored, yet I don't think I'm so... important? I'd agree about the others mentioned tough (and quite many others we could easily add to the list). Thank you anyways.

Alpha won't be tomorrow if it happens. And it may even be quite short (couple weeks? Hard to guess). In any case, just waiting a little bit more than a month, no matter if you haven't bought all the games mentioned for the lottery or if you did but weren't lucky, everybody that preordered will be able to play (and hopefully beta test). The waiting is hard but as long as we can get some updates, I myself will be quite happy while waiting. And maybe for then I'll have some more achievements for my dear Sedna.

wait... are these anti-bot claims from the Demigod forums or from the Elemental Forums?   I've been looking around trying to figure out where negitive feedback on the bots was sourced, however I could not find it.  I mean there is a lot of discussion of the bots in terms of final release, but a server based bot system in final release seems a little silly.  

Then I looked at the demigod forums and journals, which is where everybody hates bots.   And rightly so, its a real-time compeditive game where bots represent dropped players.  Totally different from a 4x strategy game.   Games like Civilization, Sins of a Solar Empire, and Alpha Centari need good bots because nobody wants ta play a 10 human player game on a huge map (well, we want to.  But the time required to do so does not become available that often).    I don't think I've played a game of the above mentioned strategy games without a bot (exception is 1v1 sins game.  But I wouldn't play a 1v1 Civilization or Alpha centari game unless it were to save my life) and I suspect that Elemental will be no exception.

I don't even believe the people who hate bots in the demigod forums would hate bots in Elemental.   The gameplay is just WAY too not the same.   Demigod forces teams... if one team has a bot, they are at a disadvantage of the other side.  Elemental doesn't (or had better not) force teams... so bots exist as toys with whom the players can play.   They can ally with them, but that doesn't put them at a distadvantage, because they had to build the trust with the AI player in a way that only can happen with Bots.  Sure, if there were only like 4 players in the game, and 1 of them was a bot, and 2 of the players allied, then the 1 player stuck with a bot would be hurting...   but based on the scale you guys are talking for this game, I seriously doubt that will come up very often.

In RTSs no one seems to want bots in their teams. Just ask in the DoW2 forum. The fact that the AI was dumb* is also responsible tough.

*Right now improved but I doubt it'll ever be at the same level of those pro players.

What it comes down to is this: People dont play MP to play the computer. We can put the saved time into a better in-game AI, but developing the external bot architecture, just to have people complain that they end up playing AI in MP, is a waste of resources.

As for the streamlined economic model, dont worry about there not being enough depth...we're floating a few systems around ,but it wont be a complete departure from what was originally proposed.

Only reason why people were complaining about playing AI in demigod is because they were in a forced position to do so to finish a game.

As someone who enjoys a competitive game AI's just weren't for me. Of course there are new players who just want to mess around with their friends versus AI's. So having them in your multiplayer would just be making the game more accesible to the various types of players out there.

probably for the best at the least then will you be giving us the ability to mod A.I. scripts and/or be able to send feedback/post-game dumps to stardock so they can tweak the in-game a.i.

Thanks for the reply.  I still say it would be a very good thing if external AI's could be coded, but I realize how much of a programming timehog it would be.

Glad to hear that the depth in economics is still staying in the game, it sounds very awesome so far.

"What it comes down to is this: People dont play MP to play the computer."

I disagree, drop the word 'cooperative' in there and people love to play multiplayer against the computer. But that sort of thing could equally be catered to with modes akin to tower defence. Gratuitous helpings of moddability should help too.

Be careful with the story in sandbox games, I'm sure you're all well aware of how jarring these things can be when the gameplay tells a different story to the text.

Anyway, I remain dead excited about Elemental.

Indeed. If you look at Sins for example, lots of people play comp stomp games online with friends. Granted the same will be possible without the bots but as Brad mentioned in another journal, the MP AI will run off your servers, not locally. So if you allow AI modding, without having the bots AI mods would not find their way online unless you periodically update your AI library so they become selectable, no?

Awesome single player gaming is at the top of my list. A decent multiplayer is a nice bonus so the bots thing does not concern me as much.

But I am among those that wants a detailed rich game so dumbing down the economic model does concern me. Is this because of the DemiGod issues or another reason? That would be a real shame Id be willing to wait even longer if we could keep the cool economy ideas. Dont let DemiGod kill Elemental please!

you'd have to test in single player I guess.   Then when its ready, you'd update it .    I mean, it shouldn't be hard to periodically update your AI library will it?

I am very happy to hear that the solo player game is the focus. I am not against MP at all, but a lengthy, turn based game (at least any that I would want to play would be lengthy) It is too hard to keep all of the people able to devote large chunks of time, and as you say, people do not play multi-player to play against bots (except to do some co-op bot stomping).

I am not even all that interested in having a campaign. For this game I am all about the sandbox. Give me a randomly generated or player created map, and the abililty to rule. Let me micro manage, but don't force me to. Give me many paths to victory (with the option to disable any that I don't care for, of course). Suspend disbelief. Make my armies not just pieces to be moved about the map, but characters witht heir own personalities.

You have already promised magic that will be "world changing" - that is perfect! and to make those abilities truly epic the path to attaining them should be long and difficult. I hope that a large game might take 40 or more hours to win.

It will be interesting to see how the economic model works out. This is definitely the most excited I ahve been about a game in YEARS!

Well, I guess the difference is that people don't want to play multiplayer to play the AI when they're *trying* to play humans.

If I want to team up with a friend and play against a few AIs, that's one thing. But if I'm trying to make a 1v1 game against a human and an AI comes in, thats not really what I wanted. It's effectively the same as a single player game at that point.

I certainly do.

This.  If I'm out to play competitive multiplayer, then no, I probably don't want bots.  The way I play Civ4 multiplayer, though, is to create a team with a friend, throw in a bunch of AIs, and work together to beat them.  I honestly don't care about any other kind of multiplayer in a 4x. (Standard disclaimer: No, I'm not saying my kind of multiplayer is the only one that matters; just that it's the only one that matters to me.)

Regarding Stardock hosting the games, and no one else... I can understand wanting to go that route after the Demigod fiasco, but please continue to evaluate this as you go forward.  I see no reason to believe Stardock is in imminent danger of any kind, but Flagship justified not developing LAN play specifically because they'd "built this great online service" to play on, so "who needs it?"  There will, inevitably, come a time when the Elemental servers aren't worth the cost, and use has dropped off dramatically.  Some will still want to play, and at that time, we'll have been done a service to be able to host games ourselves.

I'm not primarily a multiplayer player, if I'm giving that impression.  I played Civ for years, strictly solo, and I anticipate playing Elemental solo, too.  But when I want to play multiplayer, I want to play it WITH another player, AGAINST the AI.

I've seen two general lines of complaint against AIs in Demigod:

 1. The mechanics of Demigod, and the fact that the AI is ... not very smart ... mean that if one team has an AI and the other doesn't, the team with an AI is at a severe disadvantage.  Because you get gold for kills and the AI is easy to kill, it's not only unhelpful, but actively bad for your team to have one: the other team will get a huge amount of gold from killing the AI over and over, buy the most powerful items in the game, and proceed to crush their opponents, and there's very little you can do to stop it.  The result is generally losing in an extremely non-fun way.  I basically agree with this point of view.

 2. Some people want AIs out of multiplayer totally, always, under any circumstance.  Personally, I've had some seriously fun games that included AIs, as long as both teams had them, so I don't subscribe to this opinion.  I think this group is people who want to form a big competitive ladder and brag about how much better than everyone else they are, something that doesn't really interest me, but since I don't understand their point of view I won't speculate any more.  (the only reason I like the ladder is that it's a way for me to get games against people who are about as good as me, instead of ending up in a wildly mismatched round where my team or the other team gets horribly crushed)

I don't think either of these applies to Elemental.  On the other hand, I'm not especially attached to the concept of the external bots; if skipping them means we get more cool in-game stuff, I'm all for it.    (EDIT: I should be clear that I'm talking about the idea of pluggable AIs that run on Stardock servers -- I assume it goes without saying that we can add AI players to the game!)

I really want confirmation if this means no AI to play against in Multi-Plkayer at all or you're just nixing that coold bot idea you guys had.

I really want confirmation if this means no AI to play against in Multi-Plkayer at all or you're just nixing that coold bot idea you guys had.

I'm very dissapointed to hear that you are killing off the bot idea. When I first heard about it in that journal post of your's I was quite excited for it.

A game like Elemental is a perfect fit for bots. The reason everyone hates the bots in Demigod is because they suck for that genre of game and they simply are not fun to play against. However, in the TBS/4X genre bots are (IMO) far more fun to play against than humans (in my limited experience with Civ's online everyone just rushed and zerged you with early units - which is boring as **** ).

Sweet I got all the games and beta tested most of them... hopefully that helps my odds. I would like to alpha test.

I just got an idea if some one drops or someone needs to leave game how about the game pauses and a slot opens up so in min or so someone fills it and the game continues... (or if the player whos about to leave clicks a button and plays on until someone accepts to take their spot.)

I would like a complex econ game but if its goin to be simplified I guess I am ok with that but still if its challenging to control your econ its still cool.

Good to hear you guys will support our multiplayer. This should help out loads in the long run.