Exactly.
I was thinking about those but it's kinda messy with sequential turns as with the current system.
The focus can ping pong back and forth several times during "your turn" as each spell is interrupted, the interrupt counter-interrupted, and anti-counter-interrupted.

That is fine with MTG as that's all you're doing there.   That game is centered around spells and summons and 2 players interacting pretty much constantly.
The pace is wrong for the WoM battles.

And if you consequently implement the instant/interrupt mechanic, then every axe swing and bow shot would have to be interruptable as well.

That's why I adapted the general idea to the sequential turn tactical battles.
With multi-turn casting times for powerful spells, the opponent would always have a chance to "do something about it" in his next turn.
What he does about it is irrelevant. That can be defensive (scattering the units targeted by an AE spell) or offensive (nuking / interrupting the caster) in nature.

This would not weaken magic at all.   On the contrary - it allows the implementation of stronger magic that would be completely imbalancing without a commonly available counter.
And not just magical counters.  Bows and/or melee attacks would have a certain chance to interrupt as well.
Anyway, this would only pertain to the Big Mag (tm) spells like Chain Lightning.   A mere Firebolt would still be instant.   Simple.

There's no law saying that you have to be able to cast one Chain Lightning every turn.  You should know.  You make them. =P

And last but not least, I think it would be pretty damn stylish that the channeler is reciting a powerful spell for 2 or even 3 turns before it goes off.
Maybe you see some light effects around the caster to signify the school of the spell.  That's also a good way to build a sense of impending doom. = )
It gives magic more grandesse.  Right now it's a glorified bow.  With colours.

Come to think of it - the multi turn "action" could also be applied for catapults or comparable siege engines, even crossbows!  Helluva punch but slow to fire/reload.
The system itself would end up having more than one application.

What version will allow the AI to play on a map of Islands? To me that's a major mile stone for the AI, plus shore hexes, ships, harbors are still a mess and haven't improved from Beta 2.x.

I think you & the other developers really need to go play Civ 5 for a day, then go back and play Elemental, because right now as of 1.08, Elemental is unbalanced & boring, I don't see anything in what's listed that's going to change that. There's nothing listed that expands the RPG or strategic elements. I've never seen an expansion pack announced, where new content and gameplay elements wasn't clearly defined. What you are calling an expansion pack now seems like little more than just another patch.

One has to wonder, is Stardock so busy patching patches, that the vision of what Element was is getting lost?

Yes! Countermagic! Me wants

Thanks for the update, appreciate it.

Is this 64 bit version still coming??? I haven't heard about this any where anymore.

Thanks for the update I hope the memory errors get fixed soon!

I wonder what will 'UI refresh' include. It's a nightmare to play some Homm or Civ and go back to Elemental. Many thinghs needs polishing or even reworking.

Also city development at late game is just..borring. Just spam every improvement and go on. If there were more mega-structures (civ wonders kind) allowing deeper specialization. And more dependancies of the resources that'll be cool. Early economy started to be challenging at 1.08 but I guess leveling arcane is too simple.

THIS is why one NEVER starts shooting a movie without a complete script . . . the story becomes a hodge-podge of ideas that don't translate into a single, unified whole.

Elemental is like a small budget Hollywood picture that wants to be a summer blockbuster . . . but without a complete script, actors, and a director that has a compelling vision.

Global Mana Pool?  That's sooooo much crap, I think I need to call in Triumph, the Comic Insult Dog just to give enough poop to cover that idea.

Expansions?    Nothing seems expanded about that stuff to me.  Patching Patches, as a previous poster said is more rightly what you're doing.

Following your drama thread and your apology, I figured you had smelled the coffee and were going to make some major changes in direction . . . adding fun factor, color, play-ability.  Beyond the art mention, I don't see any of that in your list.  Instead, you've turned us into any failed game's audience that hopes for the best . . . beta testers that paid you for the privilege to try out your newest ideas.

I'm glad I've got Windows XP on a dual boot here, cause if it's TBS Fantasy loving I need, Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic is all I'm left with.  And hey, right out of the box?  No CTDs, a WORKING Random map generator, and tons of factions that are fun to play.  Things I expected Stardock to improve upon.

So, have fun with AoW: SM

___________________________________

Thx for update. Good to know.

Now...Could anybody turn the wheel of time to the Mid of October, pls? 

yep thats true atleast for the first expansio

• New Combat System (To Hit stat with damage being rolled separately, lots of other changes)
• New Tactical Battle System (removal of action points, combat speed determines initiative and how many times a unit gets to perform an action in a given tactical turn)
• Tutorial
• Visual Overhaul
• Lots of other goodies which we'll discuss later
• Due: End of November
• Free to everyone who buys Elemental: War of Magic

nothing new fresh just fixing old errors

That is because range and obsticals matter in AoW, and spells are much weaker than in elemental.

Does there really need to be global (one side at a time) turns. Kings Bounty handled this very well. Units (Not sides) moved based on initiative. Some units had special abilities that negated counter attacks, or triggered other effects. Counter attacking is already in. Its just one side moving all of there units before the other does allow for a half turn win. Didnt have time to read entirre thread, apologies if this is redundant.

AND a global mana pool. Wich is the first thing you address. Wich leads me to think that you too should have some direction in mind before posting.

{edit: heroes had their personal mana as an added pool, wich is something Elemental should have too}

edit: also AoM:SM is a standalone expansion. Go play AoW 2 and tell me if the quality of those games is the same-

there have been some great posts on settlement magic and combat mechanics already, so i won't repeat anyone here.

personally though, i wonder what specialist slots are and whether the game needs them. personally i believe this game has tow many reesources already. i personally don't really see the need for crystal and elementium to be separate resources but that's just me.

question in point: if mana maintenance is coming in for spells, then will enchantment slots remain also? aren't they sort of the same thing also? if they are a "perk" for levelling characters that could be something i suppose. if they are a settlement thing (ie you either build this building here or this one) then i don't like that so much. i think it overcomplicates things. i think the game will work better if players only have one or two developed settlements and then small farming/mining villages on the peripheries, and this will just encourage lots of big cities.

FB

Thank you for the schedule, suggest you sticky this or a thread like it (with periodic updates) so this communication isnt lost to the whole community over time

I assure you that by Elemental V we will have our "vision" perfected.

What we want to do with specialists is use them to reduce the # of resources in the game.  

Basically, the concept comes from our other game that's in long-term development called Society.  In Society, the core mechanic is what do you do with your people. Your people are the key resource and what you do with them determines the fate of your society.

In Elemental, we had intended to have people as a resource but it didn't work out so well in a TBS (Society is RT) and specialists allow us to abstract it.

Let me walk you through it so you can see what I mean:

Once upon a time in Elemental BETA 1...

Your Kingdom rose and fell based on the decisions you made with your cities.  You could build multiple merchants, studies, etc.  In this way, a player was inclined to only build a few huge cities and the AI was designed around this.

However, in time, it became untenable because we couldn't cap any of this because, at the time, the game engine wasn't as flexible as it is today. So users ended up making 1000 gold per turn and 1000 research per turn. When I'm making AI and game mechanics, I work with what I've got and thought I had found a satisfactory work around for the limitations -- only 1 of these buildings per city. Of course, that didn't work because players would just build multiple cities. So then we made cities have an administrative cost. But then it just slowed down the game so we started putting in maint. cost on some buildings but not on the early ones (like merchants).  But that didn't work because as long as you can get something for nothing (a merchant in v1.0) there's an incentive to crank out lots of cities which corrupts the balance.

Now, fast forward to now.  Now it's relatively easy to add new types of resources and I can get in the concept of specialists which are essentially your population -- every 10th citizen can be a specialist which you can then be used to have a merchant (instead of using food) or a study (instead of it costing gold) and so on.  Right now, the ONLY resource I have to work with that doesn't  "store" per turn is food which is too limiting. As a result, you end up using food, materials, metal, and lots of other resources in weird ways to try to achieve balance.

Thanks for the insight into your thinking.   I hope that you won't be discouraged too much by the moaning from the forums.   Many of us really are excited to see how Elemental evolves.  

Would specialists be on a per city basis or a global resource? If a global resource would not the automatic best strategy be to build all of your resource producing buildings in single city that also included any percentage resource multiplier buildings? Thus you'd have a single very large city (or at least a single large city per resource) and a massive sprawl of small cities who exist only to supply specialists. Also what would happen if you lost a city and and went negative in specialists?

Thanks Brad that's a detailed explanation on Specialists. I actually think the ratio of 10:1 might not scale that well for larger cities. A 900 person city will have 90 specialists, a ratio of 15:1 might have a better balance giving a population of 900 - 60 specialists.

Unless you're charging $30 for these, they're patches, not expansions.

I still expect two free $30 expansions as an apology for this disaster of a game, the fact that I can't return it to you because I chose to buy from Amazon, and my general feeling of wasting $70.

I had a city with 2000 people in it once, that would make like a billion specialist, well I'm not good at math, but I know it would be a lot.

My main concern is with the density of world exploraiton points of interests. I always compare things to MoM (its the standard) and there you had so much to do on the terrain outside your city. In ElementaL everything is just EMPTY. Well, ok, mostly. There are so many areas which are plain boring without any point of interest (except maybe a broken caraven for +5 gold, woha! ) Please make the random maps more alive by putting more stuff into the world! Just play MoM over and over again It will make you understand.

Even better: Give your lead designer a 2 week vacation with the duty to play MoM 8h a day :P   Then let him come back and redesign the random world

Dungeons, Watchtowers, teleporters, fountains etc.  STUFF to visit and where you can do things....  MOAR! *G*

Sorry if I come off as being a half-empty kind of guy, but...

I'm not convinced that these specialists would change the current city spam dilemma. What would stop someone from making an outpost, add a house, and produce these specialist? With the current description of the system, wouldn't that just be an outpost that cost 1 food to maintain that makes 7 specialist that you can then use? Doesn't that make things, um... worse?

As for the people complain about the "patch" and "expansion" terms. Brad already explained elsewhere that the reason it's called an expansion is because there will be many gameplay changes, and they don't want to force people to use them. In otherwords, a "patch" seems like something you should always get, and an "expansion" is an optional thing that you can if you want, but don't have to get.

I agree with this.

And this, that sounds like a great idea.  Although you would have to limit the scope of when these instants could be used to prevent tedium/cheesing.

This is understandable too, but it might be helpful if you said it in the original post, because people take what you say as fact.  You're the CEO after all.

Analysis like this makes me feel like my money is in good hands.

And last but not least,

I agree with this to some extent.  I don't necessarily expect you to give me $60 worth of free stuff in addition to all the other work you're having to do to fix the game. I can identify with ebonstone's worry, however, because the expansions do seem like they'll be a bit small in scope, but without further details it's impossible to really say at this point.  I'm not sure how you can produce a full expansion in 2 months, though, even a $20 one.

I would like to eventually see Elemental get as much content as possible, though, just like GC2 did, so I would be pretty happy about either a very expanded 2nd expansion, or a 3rd expansion, even if I had to pay for them.  If, say, expansion 2 became a $40 expansion and I got it half off instead of free, or something.  Or if the first 2 expansions stay free and there's a third expansion for $40 in a year and a half.

edit: my first quote is all jacked up, it should be Heavenfall post 38, not frogboy.

Brad did list -Lots of other goodies which we'll discuss later- under expansion 1

I am hoping this means a sh_t load of new content and features. Races, sliders for world creation, quests, dungons,equipment etc.