Me the game world map come up as blank for the 3 highest resolution levels I can select. In the previous version it was blank on on the highest. I've been trying to figure out what causes this but to no avail. This is what it looks like.

My GFX card is a GForce 9800 GX2

and the problem resolutions are: 1600x900, 1680x1050

Odd I play at 1680X1050 and it shows up fine but I have a 8800 GT.

So it's likely that the game just doesn't like my GFX card.

Are your drivers updated to the latest version? That seems to be a cause of a few weird issues. If not, be sure to bug report it in the proper area if you haven't done so already.

Try a different build of drivers. If the newest ones are causing you issues try rolling back to the version before, or even the version before that until you find one that's stable with Elemental. Also try adjusting some of your advanced options like AA. Sometimes disabling some things can fix specific errors.

Okay.

Useless buildings: Slums(needs "much" more housing), Estate(needs more prestige), Mansion (needs "much" more prestige, Bank(needs "much" more gold), Tax Office (20% at least),

Perfect Features: Food, Villas, Houses, Average Tech Rates, Huts, Forges, Granaries, Barracks, Armory, Refined Housing (tech), Refined Farming (tech)

Near Perfect: Unit Training, Unit Design

It needs to be said that Conclaves (and its clones), Monasteries, and Town Councils are only Useful in a Size 5 city with at least 4 Schools or Universities. Its currently only possible to build one Conclave in a city (which makes sense) however it displays that 8 are possible ... instead it should display that only 1 is possible. If more than one Conclave were possible to be built, then Monasteries would automatically become the most useless building in the game, right before Banks and Tax Offices.

The idea of Veterancy, and the fact that Elite gives double HP (usually 20), is epic and awesome.

The Fail-ness is that currently Veteran, Expert, and Elite troops, while theoretically having extra HP, currently always have 10 HP.

Currently Road Construction Costs 10 gold per turn. WHAT!?!? Is Road construction SUPPOSED to be that expensive?? On the same note, currently Cities and Roads cost 0 maintanence. I suppose its to help testing, but still ...

Lots of bugs with City borders, City movement in general, among others, but City based bugs are the MOST annoying ... especially moving units out of a city.

Currently the limits on what building can be built when (as far as city size) makes a decent amount of sense ... however Pubs (and Taverns) should be allowed in ANY size city (imho). Also, it doesn't make alot of sense how soon we are able to build Monasteries, Conclaves, Galleries, and Town Councils ... given the "nature" of the building. I mean ... its just not efficient to build them before either size 4 or 5 ... and even then PROBABLY only in the capital (since I "think" that the Palace allows for more squares in a city).

Since this is a complete rewrite (with refined ideas) of a previous post, I'll again say that a Civil Engineering Office should be allowed at Refined Administration. I don't care what the materials cost is, but it should use 1 space, and provide +4 (or +5) space, to give a net of +3 (or +4) space. In this way it functions similarly to the palace by having the ability to stretch your cities into grand Metropolis. I would advise that the limit of Civil Eng Offices equal the city size. So a size 1 can build 1 and a size 5 can build 5.

There should be more Magic and Adventuring techs.

Weapon Variety and Balance is non-existent, of course. I know that its not going to be added for awhile (like boats and horses), but it sure is painful.

There should be a Diplomacy tech which allows for Roads to be built to Friendly Rival nations, as well as Trade Routes to be established.

A way to handle Experience Points (rather than 50 points per battle)

There should be a constant value of experience gained for enemy Combat Value. My numeric placeholders would be 2 x combat value. This experience should then be adjusted based upon number of kills and ratio of strength. However being stronger than your opponent should not cause less experience to be gained, although being weaker than your opponent should increase your potential experience points considerably.

This experience is then split into the participating units, proportionally based upon total damage dealt to the enemy x (1.10)^n where n equals the number of enemy soldiers* killed. *for killing a company, n would equal 10, and so on.

The actual experience that each unit gets is decided by taking the previous value that the individual unit recieved, and multiplying it by ( 1 + total enemy combat value/ unit's combat value).

In this case, if the individual unit is one third the power of the opposing army (that was defeated), then its experience gained is 4 times as much as its "share" of experience. However, if it dealt no damage to the enemy, then it recieves 0 share of the experience.

//example

You fight 10 enemy soldiers. Lets say it was a company of infantry with total battle rank of 150. We then multiply this by 2, to get 300.

Lets say you fought against them with a company of archers and a Champion. Lets say the Archers did 70% of the damage, however the Champion got all 10 kills.

The archer would have 210 base experience while the Champion would have 90x(1.1)^10 or 233 base experience.

Lets say that the archer company had a battle rank of 50, while the melee Champion had a battle rank of 200. According to our equation, the archer would get 210 x ( 1 + 150/50) or 840 experience. The Champion would get 233 x (1 + 150/200) or 408 experience.

However, if the archers only dealt 30% of the damage, and the Champion dealt 70% of the damage and killed all 10, then the Champion would get 953 experience and the Archers would get 360 experience.

As another example, if that same champion of battle rank 200 fights a spider of battle rank 30, then it would get 76 experience. (30 x 1.1 x ( 1 + 30/200)) = 76 (rounded) ... I would prefer for experience to at least store 2 decimal places during calculation, and round to the nearest whole number before applying to the unit. Then units would only store experience as integers. Also, Units should probably level up as a whole.

Don't hassle me with stupid suggestions like that. Not and idiot and I know what I am doing. That was part of the first things I tried.

When I start a new game, I see only white color instead of a cloth map. Win XP Professional (32 bit)  Athlon XP 3800+, NVidida Geforce 7800 GTX.  I will try the game on a different computer.

I think your suggestion is not bad, but it does not work well for supporting units. Let us say you have a hero, that specializes itself in supporting magic (the magic increases attack values of your units, let us say archers for instance).  Thanks to the spells archers can quickly kill all the opponents on the battlefield. Your hero spent all the time by casting the supporting spells, so all XPs go to the archers and no XPs to your hero, even if the magic of your hero was the reason, why you won. 

[edited for formatting purposes  -Rosco_P]

No, you don't understand the problem. The archers in that example did all the damage, but they were victorious, because support spells were cast on them, so were able to kill the enemy before he was able to reach them. 

I know how computers work just fine, I'm a certified technician and I've still managed to open my case up and switch out a power supply before I realized that it was plugged into an outlet that is controlled by a switch that was in the off position.  It makes sense to cover the basic problems first, right?

After play testing it all weekend and so far here are some general things I have noticed. While I could of easily wiped the enemy at any time on most of the maps I choose to play it out to see more the development cycle of R&D and city building.

1) Civic/Military route seems to be the only real viable option currently. The others give little to no benefit past a first few R&D items.

2) Magic relies to much on finding the shard to use it and is very long term late game if like the original post says you can finish a match in 61 turns then good luck getting a spell researched. But if you get them then they are way over powered. 1 Mana to change a single plot of terrain means you can easily make mountain ranges to block enemy advance and they have no counter since you control the only earth shard. Or get air shard and charm and army of ogres with 200+ HP which I did and got several. I think there needs to be a LOT more spells.

3) Adventuring Tech is very unclear with the raid lair, ruins, and etc. How and where do you do this? Very few adventures show up and most of them I can't hire because I need really high CHA. This I see as a problem since the only way to level is via combat so a potential stay in town management type Sovereign with high CHA would have trouble raising it past their original starting amount. Perhaps an adventurers training hall building in this tech tree to help train them?

4) Diplomacy Tech seems broke as all the options appear to be available without actually researching them. I can offer treaties to the enemy without having to research them first. Also the diplomacy tech seems like a quick knock off of other games and not that useful or in depth. I think there is a lot of room for improvement perhaps with the whole dynasty options and such. Add maybe neutral cities to start with, master of magic did this and so have many other games. You can sway them to your cause through diplomacy/dynasty options.

5) Remove the "Cheat Sword". One with 10 ATK and no cost. I made it a point of not using what I refer to as the "cheat sword" as I don't recall it's real name. But it's rather hard to test how things play and pace when the AI players use Soldiers with those and I choose not to. Though it did reveal that a bunch of peasants can over take them. It's also good to start working on for balancing since starting monsters around your cities are a little harder if you don't pump out a ton of free units with 10 ATK.

6) A lot of buildings need to have their output increased. For example I research up to Iron so I could have a full suit of iron with and iron sword and it cost me 115 metal PER unit. Well the mine only produces 1 metal per turn so I gotta wait 115 turns for a single Knight in full armor. Also judging by the Regiment, Platoon, Company, and Legion options it seems late game your expected to build large armies with the Legion using up 1,000 troops!?! It would be hard to field anything but basic peasants with those kind of numbers.

7) Party, Company, Platoon, and etc have a number on their icon which seems to indicate how many of them are in the unit yet they only have 10 HP and die just as easy as a normal individual unit. The only bonus I've noticed is they seem to do a bit more damage even though thier attack stats still says 1. I imagine it's cause they get extra attacks in combat but that doesn't really make up for their cost considering they die so easily.

8) Combat is based on a static which is easy to predict and abuse. The units go from right to left in terms of which ones die first. This means you can pad the end of your army stack with a bunch of cannon fodder peasants to take the hits. This seems ripe for abuse but I imagine won't be as much of an issue when the 3D engine for combat is put in.

9) Population and Prestige are meaningless late game. Sure early on they are important cause it's leveling up your city they are worthless. Once I hit level 5 I realized your cities don't De-level so I demolished most of my housing in favor of production buildings. I got Metropolis with less then 100 people in them. And Prestige buildings are just as worthless cause what's the point of having high population growth with a population that is already capped out? There should probably be some kind production penalty if you don't have the population to sustain the level of the city which would make players want/need to keep their population high. As for Prestige maybe something more then just population growth? Perhaps a kind of soft cap to population where if you don't have enough people will start leaving thus the need for inn, taverns, and town halls once you reach population cap.

10) People in cities should pay taxes so that market's are not your only source of gold income. Plus they don't do much right now other then act as XP for your city... Oh yea and you use 1 every 5 turns to recruit an army unit.

11) There needs to be more to "do". The start of the game is nice as there are lots of treasure items laying around. The monsters are nice starting challenge as I usually have to recruit some peasants as backup. The few quest run out fast and their doesn't seem to be a way to get more. But after all that I explore to the edge of my small corner when I run into AI. After that it's pretty much queue up buildings and hit end turn button over and over. Which I do until I feel like going to steam roll the AI or it crashes and may save won't load which is often the case . I figure if I use the cheat sword on my units I could steam roll right from the start but that's no fun and not much for good testing.

12) New monster lair spawning would be nice. Once you kill them they don't come back and your left with a peaceful, calm, and boring empire to run.

13) The later the game goes in turns the longer the save seems to take to load and the greater chance it seems not load.

14) The world gets smaller the longer the game goes on. Since cities count as a single space as they grow pretty soon you have it where you can leave one city and step right into another. The exit that city on the other side covering about 8+ spaces with units that only have 1-2 space movement.

15) World gets smaller part 2. Basic units easily get 3-4 speed and some of my faster units had 12-14 speed. I'm not sure but it seemed like something, probably military tech, was increasing it. I had units which said they had 6-7 speed with all the equipment I put on them but when they were built and moving around it was more like 12+. This was great for the fast pioneer units I made to run around and capture all the stuff on the map for kicks in one of my late games that lasted until turn 300 when it crashed and the saves were unrecoverable. This makes it a lot easier to move whole armies around quickly and I'm sure will come in handy on larger maps.

@ John Hughes ... the reason that the "total" experience is different is because it deals with the relative strengths of the units.

This is where  Experience x (1 + Their Strength/ Your Strength).

In this model, if you are weaker than the opponent, your portion of experience will be boosted more-so.

In many games (Fire Emblem among them) if a Stronger unit gets the kill, then he gets less experience (than if a weaker or equal unit got the kill).

What I am doing here, is a similar system, only using many buffers in order to not penalize the "stronger" unit TOO MUCH for getting the kill, however I am still giving the weaker unit more experience for equal effectiveness because it deserves it.

In the case of support units, I suppose theoretically you could try to calculate the amount of damage the Support spells caused, however we have an alternative option.

This alternative option is to take Mana Spent on X and divide it by Damage done by X. if 50 mana was spent on X, and X dealt 500 damage, then value would be 0.1

If the value is less than 1, then you multiply the number by the experience that "would" be gained by X (in this case the archers), take that value and add it to caster experience, and subtract it from Archer experience.

so if the Archer "would" have gained 100 experience, and the Mana/Damage value was 0.1, then 10% of that experience is taken away from the archers and added to the Caster. In this case, Archers would get 90 experience and caster would get 10 experience.

If, however, the value is equal or greater than 1, then the caster "steals" all of the experience. Meaning that the caster would get 100 experience and the Archer would get 0 experience.

OK got that.

I would think it would be better that when 2 indentical groups fight, in this case, twice, the final XP share should always come out to be the same.

A relative strength modifier, when using an RNG to determine hits and misses makes tracking/figuring out, any

groups true strength nearly impossible, or at best confusing. The absolute value of XP for any given group of

soldiers, when you kill them, once, with the same group, should also be the same the second time?

Otherwise one can NEVER know what the true power  outcome will be when setting up a fight...especially

concerning large # of troops, so the extra math done for the relative strength modifier, become superflous

in the end.

One forseeable issue that comes to mind is if my Sov and 3 Peasant (with clubs) face off against 6 peasants

(equal battle ratings) with short swords.

Under the realtive strength modifier rule, If i lose my Peasants to a fluke roll set, then when my SOV wins,

I will have under achieved what could have been the max. allowed XP gained. Same applies if the SOV wipes

out the 6 by himself despite my having fodder in the mix in order to maximize the XP possibilities.

Well, each kill increases the total Exp by a stackable 10%. The "lower strength units get more exp" is just there so that lucky kills still mean something, since in most games if you just rolled three 20s in a row to crit the Boss, your going to get a Helluva lot of Exp. given the examples, there are three basic factors that would allow for XP. One is number of opponents (number of kills). The other is percentage total damage given.

Think of it this way, if you shoot someone in the arm and then in the gut, and they are lying there, and someone else shoots them directly in the head, how is that going to feel? How is it going to feel compared to if you see someone lying, bleeding on the ground, and YOU shoot them in the head. Different memory? Which one is more memorable? Which one would be a more scarring experience? This might be why actually making the "kill" usually counts for extra experience ... getting the final "kill" is always somehow important.

Anyways, if your peasants die then they are gonna die ... Its an age-old adage that the higher level you are the slower it will take to level, but that is no reason to not fight with your Ace. Extra HP for overcoming the Odds is only meant to reward the lucky survivor, a badass is still going to get a decent amount of Exp ... they will get a fair Exp for the battle they fought, and they get extra exp for each kill to boot. Since this is continuous turns, as well as the level at which the RNG factors, I would say that "min maxing" Exp is going to be the least of your problems.

I would focus more on minimizing my losses (going with the strategy that has highest success rate of victory ... as long as that victory involves no significant losses) rather than maximizing my HP. Also, I would rather have one bad-ass leveled unit than several decently leveled units. Increasing Combat Speed is Uber by the way, I just love it.

I wish I could code, to add this experience system to my Beta Build right now ... getting 50 exp per battle is just annoying. Especially since everyone involved gets the same amount of Exp no matter how many are involved. Champions winning a fight = 50 exp. Unit winning a fight = 5 exp. It is redonkulous. Well, somehow something different is going on, cause killing a Sovereign or a Troll (at level 1) can bump me up to level 3 in no time flat. So its hard to say what is actually going on.

Relative Strengths of the units just means Combat Rating. Combat Rating is (of course) an imperfect system, however I would rather have an imperfect system be integral to the experience calculator than having a seriously flawed, in no ways accurate system.

Personally I like systems where getting the kill matters. I guess its some-what run-off from Fall From Heaven 2. In FFH2 if someone atacked you with a HUGE number of units, it doesnt matter how weak they are, if you won, you were going to get ALOT of Exp. Having a (1.1)^N seems like an awesomely valid system to get similar results while not being "quite" as numbers dependent.

There are a lot of ways that you can try to determine Exp by "how hard" the battle was, and almost every such system is easily manipulated. For instance, if your % health remaining at the end of the battle helped to determine total Exp gain ... there are a lot of ways to "game" that system, even if many are risky.

Now, killing a "Big Bad" can sometimes be harder than killing an army of weaker creatures. Therefore, some instances will simply not give "enough" experience for the participating Champion. Therefore, certain scripted boss battles should have a set amount of "bonus exp" that victorious champions wil receive atop their normal experience. This can be 50, 100, 1000 .... whatever best fits. For instance, if a Sovereign leads an army against a Dragon, and kills the Dragon (NPC, not player) then that amount of determination and investment needs to be rewarded. Thus 5000 gold "Dragons Hoard", 1000 "personal prestige" and 10,000 experience points for the Sovereign (On top of all other self-inherent rewards).

I  have to turn off Anti-Aliasing to get a non-blank cloth map section of the screen.

Based on this, I doubt it is a driver issue.

Granted I have an older video card GF 6800 GTS.

It seems a pretty good bet that this system will never make it to GOLD. So I guess when a system does

get applied we can revisit and see what makes the most sense.

Kapeman you where right. It is anti0aliacing causing the problem. I just tested it out and turn it off. The game worked at 1650*1080 resolution no problem on the first try.

For the devs this is a DxDiag if it help you find the problem.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/nmu4uwwktgn/DxDiag.txt

Hmm, there was a bug like this in older NVidia drivers that was causing too much memory to be used and the texture memory was getting blown out.  What level anti-aliasing were you using? Can you get it to work with just 2X if you were using a higher level?

I can start the game on x2 aliasing, but it will normally crash repeatedly after 6 to 12 turns. With it off I made it to 50+ turns.

Before I was using x4 and x8 also does not work.

I've contacted NVidia so that they can check to see if this is a bug in their drivers or if it's something that we need to fix in Elemental.

Nice. for you, Cari.

Well I can play other games with aliasing no problem.

That may be true, but we are seeing a pattern with the 8800, which is why I contacted NVidia, and there was a similar bug with anti-aliasing when we were working on GalCiv2.  We're still looking into it, but it helps to have NVidia looking at it on their end as well.  Luckily, they're very responsive over at NVidia, always ready to help.