How to report a problem
Elemental Forums
If you're having problems running Elemental, please provide your debug.err file. It will always be located in My Documents\My Games\Elemental and is recreated each time you run the game, so make sure to grab it immediately after experiencing an issue. You can upload it to pastebin or a similar text hosting service and post the link they provide in your help request thread here on the forums (please don't post the debug.err's contents straight into a thread, as they can be very long).
If you have a crash, please check your program data folder for a zip file which will be named something like Elemental1_0-2010-08-26T11-11-06-474 and post it using dropbox or a similar service.
On Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Stardock\Elemental - War of Magic
On Vista/Win7: C:\ProgramData\Stardock\Elemental - War of Magic
If you have a save game that reproduces the problem, please upload that as well. Saves can be found in My Documents\My Games\Elemental\Saves.
Please try to give as much detail about the problem when reporting it as possible. For example, did it just happen immediately following a tactical battle? Was the battle over a city? If you include a save game with your report, how many turns (approximately) will it take to reproduce the error? If we have to ask you for more info, it will take us more time to help you.
Do not reply to other people's posts if you are having a different problem. This will make it more difficult to notice your problem and it will probably take longer for you to get helped.
Some tips:
1) If you are missing fonts, try rebooting. If rebooting doesn't work, you may need to copy the fonts from the Fonts folder into your windows\fonts directory.
2) If you notice tags in the text that haven't been replaced, or String not found, make sure that you backup your debug.err because the debug.err gets overwritten every time you start Elemental.
3) Exclude Elemental from your anti-virus and security programs, and add an exception for it in your firewall to get ready for multiplayer.
4) If you get an error logging in via the Impulse overlay (for multiplayer, achievements, etc) about not having access, you may have used a different e-mail to order Elemental than what you logged in with. You can contact [email protected] to have your accounts merged.
5) Make sure that you have updated video drivers. NVidia is now releasing beta drivers for their laptop cards which may help you.
6) If you change your desktop resolution (like if you buy a new monitor) and the game will no longer start, you can change your settings manually in the prefs.ini located in My Documents\My games\Elemental. Set DisplayWidth and DisplayHeight, and you can set Fullscreen=0 to run in a window. Running in a fullscreen window will still appear fullscreen.
7) If you can't get the game to run at all or further help is needed, you can get a support ticket from https://esupport.stardock.com/ .If you keep replying to the ticket, it will get moved to the bottom of the queue, so please be patient.
8) You can also try asking in #elemental on irc.stardock.com. If you're not familiar with IRC, click on the community tab in Impulse, then click on chat at the bottom of the screen. We'll be adding #elemental to the dropdown menu, but in the meantime you can type /join #elemental to join the elemental channel. Please be patient if you ask a question in IRC as we may be helping other customers or in the case of the developers, actually coding. :)
