Saturday build (1Z1) is available

Excellent! I wasn't making it more than 20 turns without a crash. What was causing it?

Can we have one more (minor) item on the list before beta 2?

#5 Exit to main menu/End current game button

Right now if I want to just stop playing the current map and start from scratch I have to exit the entire program, and it takes a bit of time to finish loading.

This is from the team:

the problem has been resolved[4/9/2010 8:04:53 PM] the issue was that when the empire tree went to add the city entry, it thought the city belonged to another player (the city hadnt changed owners yet) and so it deleted the entry

So are our crashes being reported automatically? Or is their a submission process we can follow to help your QA team out?

Like email the .zips you are talking about to a specific place?

See the beta forum, there's instructions there. Cheers.

Stability is better. I'm getting about forty turns in now. Thanks! : )

Thanks for taking the time to push an update on the weekend. 

Good stuff.  I'm checking this version out.  Thanks!

Good stuff man.  Brings a question to mind though, which requires a slight preface.  It was my understanding that this patch would fix the 'City Conquer Crash.'  In response to that, I've tried to load my game that crashes when around turn 153 (depending,) whenever I try to capture a city, but the game is deciding to hang up now instead of load it.

Does the new build invalidate prior saves, or am I just having problems loading again?

Edit:  Whoa, the new build definitely invalidated my saves...  I lost my Sov again, probably my Empire, so that would explain why my Save Games aren't loading and are causing it to lock up.

New version won't start for me.  First time it loaded to movie then stopped, now everytime since it loads a black screen and the father cursor and just stays there.  Tried uninstall/reinstall.  No luck at all with this version.  Have been able to run it in the past with ease.

I've not noticed any fewer crashes. I'm a turtler though, so it just crashes out of the blue on me, usually when I'm building stuff or clicking the End Turn button.

And also, I've not had a child in any of the games I've been playing so far, since the 1Z update. Or a wife, for that matter.

My impressions so far...

First, stability is much better than previous betas. I can play for several hours (usually) without a crash. Could I beat it right now without a crash? Possibly. But only if I just bee-lined right for the enemies and killed them with my sovereign.

Biggest stability issue right now is memory consumption. I keep crashing with out of memory errors. Mind you, I have 8 GB of memory (Win 7 Ultimate 64-bit), so memory is not a problem. The game only seems to be able to tap about 2GB of it before crashing with an out of memory error.

Saved games are not loading at all now after updating to this new release from today. That includes saved games that are saved on this release. Maybe it is because of memory corruption as they are getting saved. I am just trying to load the auto saves after it crashes out, so they are probably after something bad has gone on that won't let it continue with the current game.

Some of the game mechanics are not far enough along to do multiplayer yet. For example:

1. The quest locations keep popping up on islands or on mountains or even sometimes in the water.

2. Ruins are coming up in the water, too.

3. There are too many issues with unit icons disappearing while trying to move them or when scrolling.

4. Too many issues with enemy units and friendly units stacking on the same tile and not being able to attack.

5. Friendly units should not be able to sit on top of cities without being a defending unit of the city.

6. When moving units out of the city, they must actually move out to where you clicked.

7. Many times, on large cities, they move out in some other random direction.

8. You must be able to click on the other side of a city that is placed strategically and have your unit go into your city and then come out the other side and continue on its path instead of being blocked by the city until you manually move it into the city and out the other side.

9. How the heck do we cast spells? I cannot seem to obtain any mana to use for casting spells.

10. Banks need to generate more than 1 gold since a market does 4 and takes the same space.

11. Markets should do 5 gold, at least, or they are no better than building merchant buildings.

12. Mansions and Estates should be more people. Slums should be more people. Right now Villas are the most cost effective. Slums should be most people per space used, but still penalty to prestige. Mansions and Estates need more people per unit of space used, but not so many that they are more efficient than Villas because they also add prestige. But, right now, they are so inefficient and prestige is so useless that they serve no purpose except to eat valuable tiles.

13. Prestige is too useless. It needs to take longer to grow without it than it does now or there is no incentive to add it to the city.

14. Gold deposits need to add 5 gold, gem deposits 6 gold or 7 gold. They take too many squares for too little gain.

15. Armories need to be 4 space and should require a barracks in order to be buildable. Should be a limit of 4 barracks and 2 armories per city.

16. Conclave and the other like-type buildings need to be global bonuses, not individual city bonuses.

17. We need boats.

18. We need mounts for added speed.

19. We need more weapons and armor options (cloth, leather, padded leather, studded leather, hardened leather, iron chain mail, silver chain mail, various types of plate, different materials for each of the types of metal armor, scale mail armor, etc).

Doing multiplayer without these things would be annoying. Worst of all are the stability and usability items. The added content stuff could wait until another future release, but the interface glitches and crashing and memory issues need to be addressed before doing multiplayer.

Things are looking up with 1Z1 or .299.

I was also wondered about Marriage, but then had a Child, very late in. Crazy thing is I don't remember the Marriage screen ever popping up.

Here is a 341 Turn Conquest Victory with 2 enemies. Needed 2 reloads though.

http://img138.imageshack.us/img138/2985/elemental1z2.jpg

I look forward to this weeks additional updates.

If you research enough Magic, then you get a building to add to any Town, "Arcane Study??? (forget the name), that each add to your Mana pool per turn.

At this time Boats would have zero use or practical application. Beta 4 sounds more reasonable.

Please see the answer to #17.

Egable1,

I agree with every item on your list. The following need to be added:

1) Items picked up (treasure) need to be distributable from the party leader to at least other units in that party.

2) Many quests even when within walking distance (which is rare) don't resolve when you arrive at the indicated location. The beasties are defeated but the princess/victim doesn't resolve properly, some due but not all.

3) Cities need a quick glance card when the mouse hovers over. I shouldn't need to drill down several menues to see how many free squares exist when selecting building choices. The delta between the current max population potential (based on huts built) and the next level needs to be very clear (to ensure sufficient space is reserved for huts).

4) Research is painfully slow and the interplay between RP, mana and crystals is still too vague.

5) Use of items (treasure from encounters) is buggy, several times I would click on an item and it would simply dissapear, poof.

6) Building upkeep is not as clear as it needs to be. I had one game where I was in a negative 6.5 per turn gold income and did not realize I even had a problem till I went negative (overall).

7) Many creatues seem to teleport, there is no rhyme or reason to how they move.

8) Buildable watch towers (outside of cities) would be very helpful. If they exist I haven't figured out how to build them.

9) Lots of the tech is still in a place holder status which makes conducting research frustrating, esp given the length of time research takes. Not knowing which tech paths are dead ends wastes valuable time and resources.

10) Recruiting seems to work fine and is vital early game as unit construction is still a slow and cumbersom process.

Many thanks and keep up the hard work.

Darvroth

0.299 compared to 0.298 is less stable for me..sadly. Random CTD + lock-ups after ending turns. I've reported these problems already.

Tormy- did you try complete uninstall and then bring the whole mess down again? I had that same issue on the previous group of updates. A clean start fixed quite a bit of stuff. Just a thought...

This is a ONE click synopsis of a Town. Free squares are noted in the PIC.

http://img412.imageshack.us/img412/9030/elemental1z3.jpg

So THAT's what that icon means. I was wondering. Took me a bit to figure out the food icon as well. The interface definitely needs work. Mosing over the icon (not the number) should tell us what the icon means. In a tiny tooltip.

John_Hughes,

Thanks, I'd actually figured that part out on the next "game" however I've discerned an interpaly between civic techs and city growth. It is actually quite easy once houses are obtained but dreadfully unclear prior to that. Also there are so many dead tech trees that it is largely a process of trial and error to figure out what is related to what and in what order they are required to make progress.

Devs,

Moving units esp stacked units into a city is easy. Pushing a stack of units through a city is very challenging. The units need to be removeded one unit at a time and seemingly randomly pop out on the city edge and not necessarily the edge that continues along the line of intended movement. This in practice means it takes several turns to push the desired units to the correct side and restack them.

Also, the AI seems to have cracked the code on tougher trained units (20 health), I however had maxed out the veteran/expert troops tech path and was still producing 10 health units so there is a problem.

Once there are lots of roads and lots of caravans, turns slow down, a lot. I doubt it is a number of unit problem which means the animation that moves the iconic spoked wheel is suspect.

Are trolls supposed to be squatters? Without spells or improved tech it is not possible to dislodge them if they happen to choose to squat in a narrow pass or neck of a pennisula.

Darvroth

Forgot three points, the  AI will route friendly units around an owned city instead of the much shorter path through it. The fix might be gates to allow a shorter path calculation but I leave the details of how to solve the issue to your steady hands.

The city defensive techs (walls) need to be much sooner in the tech tree. It is painful to both take and lose cities with one unit.

I have yet to have pioneers occupy a shard (and a number of other territory types), only a city will insure use, and only if the city center is within 4 or 5 (can't recall which) squares of the shard. Was this planned or still a WIP?

I would offer only this.

.299 of a 100

Hm...I can give it a try.

Some additional items that I forgot to mention:

1) We need an alert if a friendly city is conquered. One of mine got conquered three times in one game and I went several turns without even knowing. Once was because an AI declared war and attacked while I had no defenders. Twice more I lost the city because a unit was sitting on the city instead of inside the city and they stole it out from under me.

2) We need an alert when the city runs out of things in its build queue. We don't need alerts when buildings finish, just when the build queue is empty. I have had way too many times where I've had a city sitting idle just because I did not realize it was done building things.

3) The "ancient library" resources (whatever they are called) need to produce more than one RP. They are a waste of tiles right now. I'd rather build 4 single-tile libraries for 8 RP than build on one of those resources.

4) We need a few more of those enchantment generating resources. They seem to only appear a long distance away from the starting location and I have to bee-line to where they are to ensure I get one.

5) We need a way to build armor and weapons and re-equip a unit that is already built (like the sovereign) so that those of us who don't want to start with a sovereign that spends all his/her points on equipment can actually get decent attack and defense later in the game without relying on chance discoveries.

I will post some more items if I remember what they were.

After the Saturday patch, for the first time ever, I got a "Out of Memory" CTD. Hasn't happened before on this system. I'll report it if I don't see anyone else reporting it. Then again it might be specific to this setup and need reporting anyway.

I guess they aren't enough cheesy since I was able to get a conquest victory against 5 AI (and I killed all of them) in 28 turns

Well, the faster your sovereign can move, the faster you can win. I think im going to try to make a Sovereign with Max Speed (foot trotter/ globe trotter) just to kill everything as fast as possible.

That being said ... my "real" goal is to try to build optimized "perfect" cities ... or rather, 1 perfect cities and the rest of the cities will be support cities.

The best city, by definition, meaning to optimize science output, so that I can then slay the entire tech tree, and win the game in a way that I would prefer.

A few things I have noticed ... is after initial stages of the game don't build ANY money producing or wood producing or troop producing buildings, as it just detracts from the overall value of the city. There is simply not enough space to build anything other than Prestige, Housing, and Science in order to optimize a city. Building next to trees is sub-optimal, and building next to non-science unique features is sub-optimal (im not even sure if building near a Science unique feature is optimal or not).

So far, with my limited experience, it seems that Schools, Houses, and Town Halls are the only optimal buildings, and I have a theory that Estates will become more optimal than Town Halls (unless estates only give 1 prestige, yeck).

Slums would become "useful" if they used significantly less food than 4 houses. I understand the initial idea, that slums cost ALOT less gold ... however Space and Prestige are far less renewable than gold, so I think I'll pass until slums are at least as low as 12 food. I don't care how cheap or expansive slums are as long as the Food/Space ratio is more optimal than normal housing. Otherwise the -1 prestige simply isn't worth it for my giant Science city.

I would imagine (in a perfect world), a blend of Estates, Slums, and a few houses, with (at least) 4 schools and a couple enclaves, as my brilliant city of science. Of course, the common denominator is maximizing for space. And the ratio of Slums to Estates will be dependent upon Food availability, while keeping a reasonable amount of prestige. There will still be alot of houses, as the default for when Food/Prestige ratio is at equilibrium will be to merely build more houses.

Therefore, theoretically, if there is significantly excess prestige, and extra space for more building developments, however low on food, then we will buldoze some housing, build a slum or two, and have enough food for a few more houses. This, of course, would be IMPOSSIBLE with the current 15 food required for a slum. If slum was 12 food, or 10 food, then it would make more sense.

I propose for Slums to hold 200 people, cost 12 food, and have -1 prestige. OR Slums can hold 250 people, cost 16 food, and have -1 prestige. OR Slums can hold 300 people, cost 16 food, and have -2 prestige.

In otherwords, if a Slum is "in some way" worth an extra house, either by providing that amount of housing OR by requiring that less food, it is worth the -1 prestige. IF!!! however it provides anough housing for 2 houses, then -2 prestige is acceptable.

The "middleground" of costing 12 food and housing 250 people, still is worth 2 extra houses by costing food for 3 houses and providing the housing of 5 houses. That would be worth -2 prestige, because of the combination of extra Space and extra Food.

This is a perfect example (that I have provided) of food, prestige, and space working in equilibrium. In an Expanded addition, all 3 permutations of Slums would be available (theoretically) and it would depend on the relative available portions of Food, Prestige, and Space needed that would determine which of the three slums the player would build.

In the base Elemental, however, picking one of the 3 provided Slums options is sufficient, as well as the Dev team deciding a gold cost that fits into their "balance" calculator. Materials cost is completely outside of my current calculations ... as they are renewable resources and thus FAR less valued than Food, Space, and Prestige.