Elemental Beta 1B now up

from JoeUser Forums

Don’t get excited. It’s still primitive. It will still randomly corrupt your boot disk, kill random pets, and make small children cry. But here’s what’s new:

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Change Log - Beta 1b Update (0.25.015 on Impulse)
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[Refreshed 0.25.014 build to fix an intermittent crash bug on launch and to change unit costs to 1 gp per turn.]
- New Features -
+ Info Cards Displaying rollover data
- Game objects, such as Units, Cities, Caravans, Goodie Huts, and Resources all send mouseover messages to pop up the info card
- Caravans will show their destination, goods carried, and time to reach city
- Units will show their stats, current action or destination, and unit count
- Improvements show time to complete and required materials
- Resources list what tech or known improvement is needed to harvest them
- Cities show net income and basic stats (still needs to show resources coming in)
+ 'Turns to build Improvement' Calculations implemented
- Improvements can now require resources to construct (though none do ATM)
- Gold Cost to Build = Labor x GoldCostPerLaborPt
- Time To Build = Labor + Difference in Resources Available vs. Resources Provided
- These calculations should be displayed in the InfoCard when you roll over an improvement in build mode
- Improvements are now built in a queue
- Gold to build an improvement is instantly removed from the treasury
+ City Context ACTIONS Tab now lists all available actions for a city
- Medallion buttons hidden
- Train Unit action now listing in the TRAINING tab
- Construction action now listing in the BUILDING tab
- images made for city actions
+ Cleaned up Internal City Resource management
- made it easier to tell what is going on, both code-wise and for display in the UI
- City Details now lists details on how to reach the next level
+ Smarter Caravans
- Only one caravan per city link
- That caravan will drop off goods from the home city, then bring back goods from the destination city...rince, repeat
+ New Resources
- Twilight Bees and Wild Wheat are rare resources can be build upon by a farm but provide more food than a Fertile Ground tile
- Twilight Bees' 'Apiary' improvement added
- Forests can now harvest lumber with a Lumberyard
+ New 'Save Unit Design' dialog
- lets you set up a scene to (eventually) use as that unit's medallion image
- background can be flipped
- stance for the image is used for the pewter pose
+ Map Generation is now Data Driven
- Maps are moving towards a system where all generation options are moddable, right now only the main features are hooked up
- Maps should no longer look like big blobs, but may end up looking like big spiders instead (it's a work in progress)
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- Tweaks -
+ Texture Atlas: Forces generated texture to a smaller size to help with cards that were struggling on startup
+ Research Screen: Time to unlocked milestone changed from PERCENTAGE to TURNS
+ Lowered the speed of units
+ Evil Factions disabled as opponents until we get more of their assets ready
+ Tweaked Tech costs
+ Logrithmic representation of Techs
+ Roads take 5 turns to build per segment
+ Citizens only produce 0.01 research pts (used to produce 0.05 RPs)
+ Iron Deposits visible right away
+ Most 'Negative Treasury' logic implemented, so if you dont have enough gold, you can't build more Cities, Improvements, or Units
+ More Art Assets Implemented for Tech Tree and UI
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- Fixes -
+ City Build Mode: Improvement Icons stay flat to the Terrain (they were floating 50 units above)
+ Grid lists fixed to properly display dangling entries
+ Players History daa gets Saved and Loaded
+ Changed advanced choose faction screen and advanced choose opponent screens to use shorter strings for the filter buttons
+ Various Typos

 

We plan to do an interim update next week to finish out Beta 1B.

I’d say have fun but…well, you know…

42,136 views 19 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

Hurray!!! :rofl:

Reply #2 from Demigod Forums Top

i do wish you'd stop saying it corrupts boot disks, gets me everytime.

otherwise, *happy finger dance* w00t!

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

I am having lot of crashes, I will post some debug.err files later on.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

It will still randomly corrupt your boot disk, kill random pets, and make small children cry.

So that's what's causing it... and I was thinking it is baby colic... O:)

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

If you get crashes make sure to get the crash log zips too, for fogbugz (unless it's an obvious duplicate of another easily reproduced crash like the load-game crash or the research-no-milestone-tech crash).

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

Ahhh! I wish I had my laptop back!X( Why did the graphics card have to overheat now?XO

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

Your Changelog says:

+ Evil Factions disabled as opponents until we get more of their assets ready

I have 2 evil factions in my standard enemy list, I just can't add more of them to the tableau. If I deselect these two, I can add them again afterwards. Is this intentional, or should I have only good factions as my enemies?

Reply #8 from Elemental Forums Top

I can add them again afterwards. Is this intentional, or should I have only good factions as my enemies?
  May be a throwback in your prefs.ini...try deleting that file and see if you can still select them.

I meen, it's not the end of the world if you can play as them...we're just trying to weed out bugs related to missing assets.

Reply #9 from Elemental Forums Top

Last night I got the new build and still had my startup CTD of doom.  This morning there was an additional fix and it worked :rofl:   Finally I can get back to real beta testing!

Reply #10 from Elemental Forums Top

Yey! Still can't get it to run however :( but one day soon, I know for sure!

Reply #11 from Elemental Forums Top


------------------------------------
Change Log - Beta 1b Update (0.25.015 on Impulse)
------------------------------------
- New Features -

+ Info Cards Displaying rollover data

- Game objects, such as Units, Cities, Caravans, Goodie Huts, and Resources all send mouseover messages to pop up the info card

I love these, but currently they get in the way sometimes of trying to select things on the map. Need a way of making them disappear (maybe a corner you can click on to "discard" it).


- Improvements show time to complete and required materials

I've noticed they all seem to show an unmodified time to build. Not taking into account things like lumberyards that speed them up. They also don't reflect what is in queue before them. This was a feature from Galciv that would be nice to have.


- Cities show net income and basic stats (still needs to show resources coming in)

It would also be nice to know what shuffling gold and food between cities is supposed to be doing


- Gold to build an improvement is instantly removed from the treasury

The treasury is being weird with building development and seems to flux a bit more than it should. Something I'll be paying more attention to in future games.

+ Smarter Caravans
- Only one caravan per city link
- That caravan will drop off goods from the home city, then bring back goods from the destination city...rince, repeat

I still don't get the point of shuffling gold and generic food between cities.

In the future I'm sure it will be nice to attach a guardsman to these caravans.

+ New Resources
- Twilight Bees and Wild Wheat are rare resources can be build upon by a farm but provide more food than a Fertile Ground tile
- Twilight Bees' 'Apiary' improvement added
- Forests can now harvest lumber with a Lumberyard

They work! I bugged the lumberyard because I was able to build it across two available "large squares" of development which prevented them from being properly used.

If I find wheat why can't I transplant it to my regular farms? Might make a good higher level ability for farming tech. If Wheat was only grown where it was originaly found we'd be out of luck because they don't farm it in the middle east any more.

I'd like to see special resources in mountains (Iron, Gold?), forests (honey? other crops, earth shards?), and the ocean (good fishing areas, crabbing, dye harvesting, etc)

Reply #12 from Elemental Forums Top

Don’t get excited. It’s still primitive.
I'm going to get excited anyway, and you can't do anything about it.

my boot disk needed a good corrupting anyway.   And who doesn't love the sound of a crying child.

Reply #13 from Elemental Forums Top

Even after playing this, I still have no idea how the economy works. It would be nice to have more calculations shown in the city/empire summary so that I can know what's going on and how I can change it. Specifically:

-What does food do?
-How do I improve population growth?
-What determines city revenue/cost per turn?
-What do caravans do?
-What determines how many buildings I can build in a city? (Apparently I can only build two structures per city at the beginning?)
-Are there any other variables I should be paying attention to?

Does anyone know the answers to these questions or where I can figure them out in the game? 

Reply #14 from Elemental Forums Top

this is true my rabbit was dead this morning...

 

 

woohoo i want more

Reply #15 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting ikros, reply 13
Even after playing this, I still have no idea how the economy works. It would be nice to have more calculations shown in the city/empire summary so that I can know what's going on and how I can change it. Specifically:

-What does food do?

Apparently it limits the total number of people you can have.  Population growth tends to stall when amount of food produced reaches the number required to feed your cities.

Quoting ikros, reply 13

-How do I improve population growth?

More food and (probably) more prestige equals higher growth.

Quoting ikros, reply 13

-What determines city revenue/cost per turn?

Income depends on number of people, inns, palaces and road connections. Cost is a mystery for me.

Quoting ikros, reply 13

-What do caravans do?

Move existing resources between locations.

Quoting ikros, reply 13

-What determines how many buildings I can build in a city? (Apparently I can only build two structures per city at the beginning?)

Four per tile. Two tiles per city level up to six in beta 1B. Resource improvements take whole tile.

Quoting ikros, reply 13

-Are there any other variables I should be paying attention to?

Probably. But there's a real shortage of clearly presented information about the economy so far (both in and outside the game), so it's hard to point into any given direction. You won't find any neat screen summing it all up, the best basis for guesswork seem to be 'city details' screen and infocards for improvement.

Reply #16 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting cycholka, reply 15

Quoting ikros, reply 13Even after playing this, I still have no idea how the economy works. It would be nice to have more calculations shown in the city/empire summary so that I can know what's going on and how I can change it. Specifically:

-What does food do?


Apparently it limits the total number of people you can have.  Population growth tends to stall when amount of food produced reaches the number required to feed your cities.

I think it has to do with growth rate, but I'm not sure yet.

Quoting ikros, reply 13
-What do caravans do?

Move existing resources between locations.

Food and Gold do not have "locations", they're universal resources.

Most of this stuff still needs reverse engineering to figure out what is really happening.

(No, don't assume the devs know what is really happening. They just know what they intended when they coded it. If everything worked the way they wanted it to they wouldn't need us!))

Reply #17 from Elemental Forums Top

Food is needed to level up your cities.

It's the housing that limits hte number of citizens you can have

Food HAS a location : you can see the stock in each city.

Gold is universal resource.

Reply #18 from Elemental Forums Top

It will still randomly corrupt your boot disk, kill random pets, and make small children cry.

I’d say have fun but…well, you know…

Forget the small children, it's making ME cry....

I'd be doing more beta testing but it's hard to test something that crashes before you can finish a game or get a accurate test of the economics model...

The stability needs SERIOUS work.

Reply #19 from Elemental Forums Top

Man, my cities keep capping out at extremely small sizes.  I'm like "good location - build 2 farms" and its like "guess what, you can't expand now because you get no houses on that farm.  HA HA HA HA"