Elemental: And now for something completely different
JoeUser Forums
It’s not the loudness
I’m a stalker.
No. Really. I am.
I don’t just read the feedback on Elemental in our forums. I read the feedback on lots of other forums. So I lurk on sites like RPG.net, Octopus Overlords, PCCohort, Qt3, CnardPC, WArgamers.com, rpgcodex.net, tacticularcancer, colonyofgamers, bay12games.com, Shrapnel Games, penny-arcade forums, etc.
And one of the most consistent concerns I read is that the hard core beta testers who post the most will influence the game to become too hard-core. There is nothing to fear.
I have happily debated, over the years, the merits of games like Space Empires V vs. Galactic Civilizations and such. And while Elemental will be “deeper” than Galactic Civilizations, players are not going to have to micro-manage sword production or something. Elemental is, at its core, a macro-game. Your stratregy will have more to do with your victory than tactical prowess.
That doesn’t mean that the battle system won’t be heavily modified to be richer than we currently have it but it does mean that we will not have cutting versus slashing damage.
Where things stand with the beta
We are officially at Beta 1-B. The economic phase of the beta. Several weeks have been schedule to work on this until we’re all happy with it. So expect more beta 1-B updates before we get to the initial AI skeleton beta.
Elemental Economics
My sovereign founds a city.
The city has an initial prestige based on the prestige ability of that civilization (typically 10).
Each turn, the population of that city grows by prestige/10 + existing population*prestige/10 % pre turn. The first number represents sheer prestige, the second one is meant to model natural population growth (babies). Sure, we could have a “fertility” rating but we are trying to keep the number of variables down to a minimum so that players aren’t having to build 20 different types of buildings.
Each citizen pays taxes at a fixed rate. There is no slider to increase taxes ala Galactic Civilizations. Instead, if you want to increase income, you need to increase the wealth of your city through improvements. Your money comes from people.
When you harvest a resource (food, metal, crystals, stone, whatever) your city gets M per turn. In addition, your other cities will receive Q per turn (typically 1.0). If they are connected by roads, they will get Q * R (road bonus which is typically 2.0).
You can increase these variables based on improvements you choose to build in your city.
Each citizen produces T technology units per turn (typically 0.10). You can increase this rate by building schools, libraries, and other improvements.
Building a new improvement in your city takes L turns for the labor plus S turns based on the supplies needed. So a fancy estate that increases the prestige of your city may take 10 turns to build due to labor + an additional 2 turns to get the 4 stone needed to construct it. Improvements also have an up-front cost that is the labor (in turns) X A for the labor cost per turn (typically 10.0). So that estate would cost 100 gold to build because it takes 10 turns of labor.
You can produce soldiers. Soldiers cost Z gold per turn to keep around. They are the main drain on your economy per turn.
Researching
We are playing around with different types of research mechanisms for Elemental. The current research screen UI is deplorable.
Here is a rough mockup of a new one that we hope to make available next Thursday.
The idea being that players would choose amongst the 5 research categories:
- Civilization
- Warfare
- Magic
- Adventure
- Diplomacy
When they chose a category, they would get a list of technologies that may become available when they make their breakthru. If the listed technology is green, then it will definitely be available when you make your breakthru. If it’s yellow, it might be available when you make a breakthru, if it’s red, it probably won’t be available.
Some technologies will require a pre-requisite. You can’t simply (by luck) get access to say plate metal armor. You would have to research warfare, then defenses, then armor and then after that you would have a chance to get plate metal armor. The more points you have in a particular category, the greater the odds that one of those techs will pop up.
So let’s walk through this:
I choose warfare: level 1 and I see:
- Barracks (green)
- Weapons (green)
- Defenses (green)
- City Walls (yellow)
- Archery (yellow)
Warfare level 1 costs 10 technology points (which at this stage means 10 turns).
I know I want to get to plate mail so I pick Defenses.
10 turns pass…
The breakthru window pops up and I choose Defenses. City Walls also showed up but Archery didn’t.
The research window comes up again and I see this:
Warfare: level 2
- Barracks (green)
- Weapons (green)
- Armor (green)
- City Walls (yellow)
- Archery (yellow)
- Fortify Position (red)
Warfare Level 2 costs 20 tech points (which at this point in the game is taking 14 turns).
14 turns pass…
The breakthru window pops up and I get to choose between Barracks, Weapons, Armor, and Fortify Position. Now, because it was red, it means I got pretty lucky that it is an option and next time, it may not show up as an option. Do I pick that now or do I go with Armor? I choose Armor anyway.
Now I see this:
- Barracks (green)
- Weapons (green)
- Leather Armor (green)
- Plate Armor (yellow)
- City Walls (green)
- Archery (green)
- Fortify Position (red)
As you can see, City Walls and Archery have become green which means they will always be choices because enough points have been put into Warfare that they’ve gone from being maybes to certainties.
Warfare level 3 costs 40 points (which at this point will take 20 turns to get).
The other thing about this system is that we can have a giant pool of minor but interesting techs that normally don’t show up in a game but when we go through the new game generation, we will randomly give them a slight chance to come up during a game. So, for instance, you might get a tech called “Forest Defenses” where if you have it, it will give your units extra defensive bonuses in a forest. All players would have access to such a tech (i.e. it’s not per player though we might make some race-based).
We’re finding this system to simply be a lot more fun to play and give the player a lot more interesting choices.
The idea here is that you’re researching an area of technology, you have breakthrus and the player can then choose what that breakthru was.
Next Beta opening?
For those who are pre-ordering, we will probably let more people join just before Christmas. But that really depends on the state of the game. Right now, we’re still working out basic stuff like crashing, memory leaks, and low level game mechanics. I don’t anticipate the game being “fun” until Beta 2 and even then it’ll still be pretty raw.
A typical “beta” program that is open to the public wouldn’t start to what we are calling Beta 4. So others might call Beta 1, 2 and 3 “alphas” if you’re into the semantics of this kind of thing. But it gives you an idea of the distance that must be traveled between where we are now and where we expect the game to be something that a sane company would want its fans to see.
Why are we torturing our top supporters?
Stardockers are a rare breed of power user / gamer. Most of them know what they’re in for already. The reason they got involved is because they know that we’re reading their “walls of text”. We may not always respond, but we’re reading them, thinking about them, and will make real changes. We’re making the game with them.
When all is said and done, every game design decision the game has will have to be defensible to the main base. Hence, there will be posts arguing that the magic system should be different or that the research system should be different. The question is whether the design decisions that are ultimately made can be logically defended and whether most of our target audience likes what we ultimately have chosen.
Elemental Forums
aww well i've already bought the game 
Stardock Forums
Or at least, I wish we'd get that for regular resources and to hell with manufactured resources resources like swords. You have convinced me at least that shipping raw materials to industrial cities to manufacture them into manufactured goods, which then would need to be shipped to other cities to equip troops would be pretty bad. But if you just make everything require regular old resources, I think that'd be perfectly manageable, fun, and extremely strategic.