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. 

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.

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.

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

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.

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