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Elemental: Fallen Enchantress - Legendary Heroes 3.0 Release

Elemental: Fallen Enchantress - Legendary Heroes 3.0 Release

It has been awhile since we’ve visited the world of Elemental.  The last update to the expansion to Fallen Enchantress (AKA: Legendary Heroes) was in 2019. Hardware has continued to evolve, and with that comes the opportunity to further improve the game.

Our story so far…

Elemental: Fallen Enchantress – Legendary Heroes is a fantasy strategy game in which the player builds a civilization in the world of Elemental.  This world was nearly destroyed by the War of Magic, and it is up to you to rebuild it.

Unlike most civilization games, the Elemental games put you into the game directly as a character. 

 

The beginning

When the game begins, it’s just your character.  You are greeted with land tile information that displays the food, material and essence of that tile. Food determines how fast the city built there will grow, Material determines how fast it can build things, and Essence determines how many magical spells can be placed on the city. 

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In version 2.6 we have added a new faction structure called the Tower of Knowledge. It generates 1 knowledge per essence and can help jump start research.

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The Tower of Knowledge is above for reference.

To be honest, most of the work in this update has been in fixing bugs.  Players have graciously sent us saved games over the past year and we’ve used them to find lots of edge case crash situations or stuck turns.  Of course, when it happens to you while playing it doesn’t feel like an edge case, so it’s nice to get these found and fixed.

I have always loved how you can zoom in and see the people working on your cities.  It helps explain what’s going on and fleshes out the world.

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We also made a number of unit AI improvements, which should make tactical battles even more interesting.

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We also wrote some new code that should improve the turn times pretty substantially, especially on larger maps. 

 

The performance gains we had combined with the greater stability made us decide to increase the map sizes a bit as well.

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Changelog

  • Tile yield update on screen aborts immediately if the terrain is invalid for a city (perf)
  • Fixed crash bug where garbage characters could get inserted into a scene node
  • Increased the map tilt further so you can see more pretty stuff :)
  • 0Calc Military Might now longer force updates the battle rank of units. (perf)
  • AI city updating is now multithreaded (perf)
  • CalcBattleRank changed to automatically cache the battlerank of the unit (major perf boost)
  • Units now always get a battlerank of at least 1 to ensure caching of battlerank
  • Sub-units of an army are no longer recalculated unless expressly ordered
  • Thread safe city count method added
  • Fixed a crash deadlock
  • AI monsters less likely to attack a city on lower difficulties
  • Monsters now use a cached combat rating to determine city strength (performance)
  • Fixed multiple crash deadlocks
  • Unit vector sized at 10 at start to reduce increments. (perf)
  • Timer update increased from 1ms to 0.5ms
  • Conclaves provide more research but less production and money
  • Fortresses provide more production but less money and research
  • Towns provide more money but less production and research
  • New improvement: Tower of Knowledge. Provides +1 research per essence
  • Tiny map size increased to 5x3
  • Small map increased from 5x4 to 6x4 (20 to 24 sectors)
  • Medium map size increased from 6x5 to 7x5 (30 to 35 sectors)
  • Large map size increased from 7x6 to 9x6 (42 to 54 sectors)
  • Huge map size increased from 8x7 to 12x8 (56 to 96 sectors)
  • Wrote a replacement for toupper() that is much faster

 

Screenshots

 
 
 
 

 

788,383 views 87 replies
Reply #51 Top

You may want to try verifying the integrity of the game files. If its on Steam, right click, Properties/Local Files.

It helps, sometimes.

Reply #52 Top

Quoting Tuberski, reply 52

You may want to try verifying the integrity of the game files. If its on Steam, right click, Properties/Local Files.

It helps, sometimes.

Thanks, but I've done that multiple times.

Reply #53 Top

Verified files, started a new game, got another crash. I wonder if it's a memory leak or something like that, as it only seems to happen after I've been playing a while.

Reply #54 Top

The quest to defeat Delin, the Pyre of Man fails to complete in the same way as the one to defeat Vetrar does. Delin wanders outside of his burning lands, you kill him outside those lands, and the quest can never complete. In addition there's a lootable site inside teh burning lands labeled Remnants of the Inferno that can never be looted.

Reply #55 Top

Reply #56 Top

Publius, that's a D&D (Dungeons and Dragons) referrence, not an error. :congrat:

 

Edited to say that it represents a 20 sided die.

Reply #57 Top

Quoting Avatar137, reply 57

Publius, that's a D&D (Dungeons and Dragons) referrence, not an error.

Ah, got it, thanks.

Reply #58 Top

Yeah, I noticed the "discrepancy" as well (the image of 2d6's in conjunction with the mention of a d20), but I assumed it was done deliberately.  The image of a d6 is more iconic than a d20 -- or at least more immediately recognizable -- so it absolutely makes sense that they went with that. 

Honestly, I loved it when I got the Lucky Dice as a reward item for completing a quest.  It gave me a good chuckle. 

 

 

Reply #59 Top

Does anyone else find the "Offer Tribute" and "Demand Tribute" treaties confusing? Pariden says they want to offer me tribute by paying me 28 gold in return for 10% of my income? 10% of my income is a heck of a lot more than 28 gold, so who's paying tribute to who?

Reply #60 Top

Another undocumented change: Researching the Economics tech grants roads to existing outposts as well as newly placed ones.

 

I've also noted that the new pathfinding AI does not properly take roads into account, opting for straight line paths when much faster indirect routes are available.

Reply #61 Top

Quoting WIllythemailboy, reply 61

Another undocumented change: Researching the Economics tech grants roads to existing outposts as well as newly placed ones.


 

Really? I remember it always working like that.

It seems to match the in game hover info, or do you mean that it was just not listed in the changelog? And perhaps I remember the feature but not the exact tech that unlocked it. That wouldn't surprise me.

 

Reply #62 Top

Quoting BlackSmokeDMax, reply 62

Really? I remember it always working like that.

It seems to match the in game hover info, or do you mean that it was just not listed in the changelog? And perhaps I remember the feature but not the exact tech that unlocked it. That wouldn't surprise me.

Yes, it was there.

Reply #63 Top

Quoting Publius, reply 51

Found another problem with 3.0:

 

Well... that's very strange. See, bugged text is not a variable in a formatted description.

Code: xml
  1. <DisplayName>Summon Lightbringer</DisplayName>
  2. <Description>Summons a level 5 (+1 per life shard) Lightbringer.  When cast in Tactical it blinds all surrounding units, giving them a 25% penalty to Accuracy and Dodge.</Description>
  3. <FormattedDescription>Summons a level %d Lightbringer and blinds all surrounding units, giving them a 25% penalty to Accuracy and Dodge.</FormattedDescription>

You can check the text in CoreSpells.xml. So what the game engine should do is just take the string from the file and replace "%d" with certain value.

I would not state that the file on the disk is corrupt or there's a hard disk error, but that's possible.

Otherwise it should be very strange bug in the game engine, which just corrupts immutable part of the string for no reason.

Reply #64 Top

Quoting avb81, reply 64

I would not state that the file on the disk is corrupt or there's a hard disk error, but that's possible.

I've verified my files multiple times, so if it's a corrupted file problem it's corrupted on the server as well.

Reply #65 Top

Quoting BlackSmokeDMax, reply 62


Quoting WIllythemailboy,

Another undocumented change: Researching the Economics tech grants roads to existing outposts as well as newly placed ones.




 

Really? I remember it always working like that.

It seems to match the in game hover info, or do you mean that it was just not listed in the changelog? And perhaps I remember the feature but not the exact tech that unlocked it. That wouldn't surprise me.

 

Could be that the bug was only in the Arcane Monolith outposts that the Paraden get to cast with mana rather than using settlers, as I play with the Paraden most of the time.

Reply #66 Top

I've now run into a bug twice that, now that it has happened to me, I recall existed in FE:LH before the 3.0 update and did not get fixed. In tactical combat the game occasionally, but rarely, gets stuck and the only way to progress is to click on the auto-resolve button.

The first time I saw it on 3.0 was in a battle on the small map with only 3 tiles across in the middle of some Fallen type territory with basalt columns on either side. The two sides had blocked up all the available tiles in the middle, and on the AI's turn a spider moved forward one tile to where all the tiles in front of it were blocked by other spiders and it could neither attack nor move any further forward. That AI turn then got stuck, no other AI units moved and control did not pass to any of my units. I had to click the auto-play to get out of the battle.

The second time was different, on a much larger and more open map.  My Bard had the Rabisu's Horn, which grants the Maul ability. He attacked a group of militia and killed them on the second strike. The animation for their dying started, the human characters faded away, but there was still a little cloud on their tile so it looked like the animation never finished. Once again I had to click on auto-resolve to get out of the battle.

In both cases, for what it's worth, the auto-play button didn't work, it just made all the units jiggle around on their tiles like they were trying to take their turns but couldn't do anything.

I hope this helps.  Since the bug happens in the middle of a tactical battle and rarely happens, I can't send you a saved game that exhibits the problem.

Reply #67 Top

Quoting Publius, reply 67

I've now run into a bug twice…

I just experienced that last night too!

Reply #68 Top

OMG u guy/gals are awesome. going to have to dust it off and give it a go.

thanks for all your hard work and continuing support for this amazing game.

yes it has been a long time since i was last here. glad to see u all are still at it and shout out to frogboy and all the amazing people that work with him.  

Reply #69 Top

Thanks guys.  Currently working on an update to it now in fact as I type this.  Just going through crash reports and some of the bugs.

Reply #70 Top

Quoting Frogboy, reply 69

Thanks guys.  Currently working on an update to it now in fact as I type this.  Just going through crash reports and some of the bugs.

 

Cool! And thanks for reviving my interest in this old game, forgot how much I enjoy playing it. :congrat:  

Reply #71 Top

Quoting Frogboy, reply 69

Thanks guys.  Currently working on an update to it now in fact as I type this.  Just going through crash reports and some of the bugs.

*Bows deeply*

You, sir, are an unsung hero of our modern times. I love the game to bits, and seeing it still get some attention today is something really precious. Thanks a bundle for this!

Reply #72 Top

I am delighted to hear that the game might get further updates, I've just started a new game as a custom undead race to see how that goes.

Reply #73 Top

Quoting avb81, reply 63


Quoting Publius of NV,

Found another problem with 3.0:

Reduced 88%


Well... that's very strange. See, bugged text is not a variable in a formatted description.

... skip ...

You can check the text in CoreSpells.xml. So what the game engine should do is just take the string from the file and replace "%d" with certain value.

Late reply, but the case was the character escape bug. In case of FE XML you should use double "%%" if you want to put percent sign into formatted description.

So correct string for the XML should be kinda that:

Code: xml
  1. Summons a level %d Lightbringer and blinds all surrounding units, giving them a 25%% penalty to Accuracy and Dodge.

Hope SD will include this really minor fix in the next patch, which Brad mentioned above.

Reply #74 Top

BTW, I've made a series of tests and added additional info about AI summon problem, which may help to nail down the bug.

https://forums.elementalgame.com/498192/page/1/#3831039

I hope this will prove useful, if not too late :)

+1 Loading…
Reply #75 Top

Hello all! It's been a few months since the last post, and I was wondering how the 3.0 work is going. I know people have lives outside of this project (no kidding!), but curious if there's any news to share regarding further features, etc., or if most of the planned items have been completed. Cheers!