Elemental: Fallen Enchantress

I'm finding that making a few specific adjustments in the settings really helps my ability to distinguish units in strategic view. The default settings weren't doing me any favors:

These settings can be found sprinkled throughout the basic and advanced settings screens:

1: Turn off Outlines. Although this is described as a feature that should make 3d units more distinguishable, I find that it does just the opposite when you have a unit in a forest and whatnot.

2: Raise the Unit Scale. I set mine to Large. This tends to screw up how things looks on the cloth map (units in adjacent squares tend to clip into eachother), but it helps a lot in standard view. You could also raise their size all the way up to huge, but if you have grid lines turned off it becomes nearly impossible to tell what precise square units are on, and also makes it very difficult to move a unit to an adjacent square with the mouse.

3: Disable Stylized Lighting. This is also another primary culprit in regards to my inability to distinguish units from the environment. There's just something about stylized lightning that makes everything much too dark, and simply adjusting brightness/contrast was doing nothing to offset this. My cities look less magical/bloomed out now, but at least I can see both friendly and enemy) units at a quick glance without being forced to repeatedly scroll in and out of the cloth map. Facial and cloth textures become much more vibrant and visible too.

I'm not Adam, but if it had an expansion on the level of Shadow Magic had to the original AoW2, yes.

Yeah, we do tend to disagree a bit ;) Thanks though!

I don't think that the issues I have with the game are forever insolvable due to deep-seated design issues, no. I don't know that the crappy writing/soullessness problem is going away terribly soon, but the biggest design problems IMO -- the lack of tension in early game and the too-huge benefit to elite units -- are problems of math, not design. Probably moddable into a better paced and balanced game, even.

It's weird to see a double post that far apart.

Hah! BF threw an error after I had walked away from my desk to do some other things, so I just hit post again.

Maybe I need to go RFTM (I couldn't find the answer in the Heirmageddon), because I can't figure out how to invade/take over/raze/whatever an enemy city. I'm standing right next to one of their towns, the only chumps they have defending are 2 city militia, and when I try to move my stack of doom into their town to initiate a battle my guys just stand in place and get stuck in a running animation, but nothing else occurs.

This town has no special enchantments or anything that I can see that would prohibit me from invading. I've also tried entering from a number of different angles, but no dice.

Another funky thing is that I can edit enemy city names, and although I can't remove items from their build queue, I can re-arrange the queue so that it's building things in an order that best serves me. When I advance turns the build queue doesn't change either, so that will probably need to be addressed.

That sounds like a bug to me. The game appears to be fairly buggy at present.

Looks like I needed to walk in and out of their border a few times in order to trigger a "Do you want to go to war or leave?" dialogue box. Once I officially informed those guys I planned to ram a sword through their citizens, I was then allowed to invade the city.

That's the good news. That bad news is that as soon as I took over the city these guys walked out of the fog of war.

Click the thumbnail:

So, I started relying less on my champions doing long distance scouting and began to put actual scouts to work using auto-explore. These scouts were dying very quickly, as monsters and enemies would immediately pounce on them as soon as they got near. To help keep these scouts from being eaten by the wild life so fast I gave them a trait that makes it so monsters are less likely to engage them, leaving them free to wander about for a while longer before dying to whatever random encounter happened to take notice.

However, apparently these scouts seemingly want to die, since in addition to scouting they'll go out and engage enemies they have absolutely no business tangling with. Here's an example of a scout becoming the aggressor and biting off just a little more than they can chew. Regrettably, I think I'm going to need to micromanage these guys from now on::

Woof. It never occurs to me to automate stuff like scouting or build orders in a 4X. The algorithms have always been terrible. Maybe not quite this terrible, but still.

I don't let a scout end a turn next to a neutral unless it's unavoidable to progress. You still lose scouts, for sure, but I've been able to at least get a decent look at my surroundings with building typically 2-3 scouts.

You weren't joking about the fugliness then. That scout portrait is just woeful.

Pro-Tip: The cloth map is a cheater's paradise. It reveals distant tile enhancements and enemy troops/units/monsters (and their movements) far out of your normal range/field of view. The only caveat is that you must have cleared the fog of war in the area first. I don't know if it's revealing everything in those areas (since I can't actually see this stuff on the normal 3d map), but it's enough to help a person monitor where certain troop movements and the like are taking place.

I try hard not to be a cheater, so I find myself trying to avoid using the cloth map at the moment.

I see Stardock's artists are still incredibly good at pulling unholy horrors from their collective butthole.

Yeesh.

Finally got time to play and the damn thing froze on me in between turns during the tutorial. Boooo.

EDIT: Then I reload from the save and it crashes on me. Boooo again.

The crashes and exploits are just part of the authentic re-creation of Master of Magic.

Well, my ability to cheat and watch enemy units on the cloth map is no more after I exited the game. Upon restarting, the cloth map appears to be working as it should, and I'm unable to reproduce whatever I did that enabled the spy stuff the first time. I'm playing a save game from the same map too, so perhaps the issue is intermittent.

In other news, once I was able to reach (or have at least started approaching) what I'd consider to be mid-game, the almost intolerable slog of the very early game is starting to wear off and the pacing and gameplay is starting to feel much more appealing, rewarding, and compelling to me. I'm typically the kind of person that obsesses over and thoroughly enjoys the early games in other TBS games, but I'll also tend to burn out and want to start all over around turn 100-150 in a Civ V game, or about 3/4 though a Lords of Magic or Age of Wonders scenario/campaign. After putting a few hours into a random FE map (after a few false starts while getting my bearings in the game) I'm finally starting to feel the game drawing me in, but I'm not yet feeling it in the early game like with those other titles.

I'm not sure if the early game has felt so damn tedious to me because I just didn't know what I was doing yet (and in a sense had no specific goals in mind on my initial run throughs), or simply because the early game in FE really is just that tedious. I'll get a better sense of it when I've put in more than just the few hours I've already put into it. So far at least it's not the instant draw the Civ, HoMM, Age of Wonders games were for me. It doesn't exactly have to be, but I'm hoping not every new game I start is going to feel like I have to put in an hour of work before it starts feeling fun.

I would hold off on judgment for a game or three, Kerzain. I had a similar reaction after my first attempts, and now I rather like the early game. When things like scout micromanagement become second nature and you don't have to investigate every damn building to figure out what it does and where it goes in your build queue, you're free to focus on the fun parts of expanding your empire and stomping around with your hero stack.

You know, I think a huge part of my satisfaction (or dissatisfaction for certain games I started), was the utter magnitude of the literal randomness that the default settings tend to have when generating random maps. I had a couple maps where there was no essence in any of the city areas near (and including) my initial starting point on the map, and a couple maps where I didn't see a node for several screens in either direction, not to mention tendrils of land that are flung out across an ocean of water, some sections a mere one tile wide, with no resources or any discernible benefit (such as serving as a land bridge to someplace else) whatsoever. And this is from using default settings for the generator.

I don't expect the game to 'randomly generate' every map with a healthy starting city spot, replete with nodes and treasures all within two tiles, but it would be nice if entire swathes of the map weren't so freakishly barren. My next step, if this problem becomes a consistent one, is to fool around more with the auto-map settings, but I'd rather not feel forced to go in the opposite direction and just drown the map in resources in order to make sure every civilization has at least a fighting chance.

I'm an explorer at heart, and I think simply knowing that there will be something worth finding (in moderation) is motivation enough for me to eagerly dive in.

This sounds like something I'd really like to try, but since I never bought Elemental, this would entail giving Brad money. That's not going to happen.

Eyeliner and a wifebeater t-shirt. What's wrong with that?

I understand your feeling. I'm a little envious. Perhaps if it goes on sale for $9.99 then I'll be able to rationalize.

Great review and I don't doubt the modding aspect can happen. There are excellent tools in there already. I just hope it can be made a bit less ugly so it's more appealing to modders. Creating your own faction with the current graphic-set is painful.

This game has a habit of becoming an intolerable (to me) slog around turn 250+, performance wise. I'm finding it difficult to play much past this point, even on small maps, as everything just starts to slow down. It seems more difficult for my commands to be recognized (the game starts to seem unresponsive to clicks etc), and my frame-rate takes a nose dive.

I don't have a bleeding edge machine, but it does okay for itself. If FE isn't running well well on my Intel i5 2500k w/ ATI HD6950, I just don't really know what to say. I'd hate to think I just need to throw money at newer hardware... All my drivers are up to date from what I can tell, but the game just continues to slow down to annoying levels the longer it plays out. E:WoM had this same problem for me when I tried playing it at release.

When it gets real bad, typically quitting out and restarting the game helps, but only to a degree. Blech.

The game starts to slow down if you don't find the lost Elemental materials by turn 200.

Version 1.01 has been released:

So many much needed fixes in that patch. I'll have to try it out today or tomorrow. I had put the game on hold because of irksome crap like the stuff listed.

Even in the early game, the AI turns would take like 5 minutes to finish, but only sometimes. It just seemed like the game had frozen, but I could scroll around, click on things, etc etc etc. I hope this patch fixes it.

I posted this on Qt3 a few days ago (yes, I still read and post there), in case anyone is interested in a review by someone who felt pretty burned by the initial Elemental release:

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THE GOOD THINGS

Flavor: I was pretty disappointed when I discovered that the alleged successor to MoM would not feature any true fantasy races, just various kinds of humans, vaguely divided into "Kingdoms" and "Empires." And in the original Elemental they indeed turned out to be painfully, terribly bland. Kael has worked wonders with that material, though, and has brought to bear the same dark tone and suggestive writing that was on display in Fall From Heaven. At the same time, he worked hard to differentiate the factions mechanically. The result is a game world that, while still too flat and bland for my taste, is at least different from any other fantasy game world out there, populated by interesting factions that feel genuinely unique.

Unit customization: This hasn't really been done well since Alpha Centauri, and it works pretty well in FE. The best part for me is that Kael has created custom units for each faction that you can use "off the shelf" when the right tech is researched, and each is tied into its home faction with a bite-sized chunk of flavor text.

RPG aspect: Tooling around the map, leveling up your leader and champions, and tricking them out with loot can be an engaging parallel exercise. Leveling up in particular is very well done, with a variety of paths and perks to choose that really lend a sense of purpose and personality to each character.

City growth: Although the mechanics behind city growth are needlessly complicated, the results of a city leveling up can be interesting, especially when it comes to the distinction between a Town, a Conclave, and a Fortress. Add to this the fact that a given city can host 1 city enchantment per Essence, and you end up with cities that feel pretty specialized, a plus in my book for any 4X game.

THE BAD THINGS

The world: It's boring. So boring. There is pretty much nothing of interest or distinction about the landscape and its various "features." Generate a hundred maps, and each will feel like the same flat surface broken into chokepoints by a regular pattern of ridges and rivers. I don't know if it's the 3D engine, the terrain generation algorithms, the barren appearance of everything, or what; all I know is that none of the table-like islands I've conquered have had any geographic character to speak of. FE's random map generation does not come close to MoM, or AoW, or Warlock, or any of the Civ games, going back to the original Civilization. These are the most boring maps of pretty much any 4X game, ever. And for a game ostensibly set in a thrilling fantasy world, that's a major lack. It should be noted that Kael's "Wildlands" -- custom-built map zones -- are in fact interesting and unique, but they feel shoehorned into the surrounding terrain.

Magic system: This may just be a matter of taste, but I want all of the spells tied to the magic research tree. Every other fantasy 4X does it that way for a reason. I can't tell if FE bucks its predecessors here just to be different, or if there is some sound reasoning behind the choice, but the end result feels unintuitive and confusing. Recruited champions could still know spells that have not yet been researched, but those spells would only become available to all spellcasters of the proper school when researched (cf Age of Wonders). In general, the magic side of the game feels like it lacks a coherent underlying philosophy.

Champion injuries: When a champion loses a battle, it is assigned a random injury and then has to spend some a few turns recuperating in your nearest settlement. This sounds cool at first, until you realize that it both lowers the tension level of any given battle, while making you feel like you're saddled with the Legion of Handicapped Heroes. There is no leader or champion death in the game, which imo is an awful mechanic in a game about fantasy warfare. Yes, I will grow attached to my heroes and may not want them to die, but when they actually cannot die, just become lamer with each lost battle, guess what? I wish they were dead so at least my losses would feel dramatic. In any case, the random injuries break immersion when they have no apparent relationship to the fight at hand (cf my assassin who contracted pneumonia after fighting a fire elemental).

Diplomacy: Influence is a redundant resource that apparently exists for purposes of flavor. Influence and gildar can both be used to purchase favor with an AI player, so why have them both in the game? In any case, the end result of this purely numerical approach to diplomacy is that it feels more like cold math than negotiation. Brad's talent as an AI coder was never applied to the diplomatic aspect of Galactic Civilizations II, and it remains missing here.

Tactical battles: These are just about as bare bones as tactical battles can get. Although enjoyable to a point, after that point the lack of terrain effects (beyond simple chokepoints), and the lack of range penalty for ranged attacks render tactical battles a mostly tedious and uninteresting exercise.

Roads: Roads just pop up between your cities and outposts when you research certain techs. The roads themselves conform to a ruler-straight grid, as visually uninspiring as the rest of FE's landscape, but the real drawback here is the way this mechanic kills immersion. I understand the need for certain abstractions, but if it takes me literally years to build a single granary, while a massive continent-spanning road network appears overnight, in a single stroke you've erased whatever feeling I might have had that this world is being built up piece by piece from the ashes of the Cataclysm.

End-of-turn auto-move: When you end your turn, any units on pre-set paths will carry on, but if they reach the end of their pre-set path with movement points remaining, the game will not stop to tell you, so you lose those movement points. Both Civ V and Warlock will auto-move your units, but not end your turn if you have any with movement left, and prompt you to check on those units. It's frustrating that FE does not do the same.

Event log: The column of icons on the right side of the screen is supposed to be a handy and helpful guide to what has been happening in your empire (or kingdom), allowing you to click on a given event and jump to the associated map tile. This icon stack is missing the only two icons I want to see on it: one that will show me the site of an outpost that has just been razed, and one that will take me to a city that is idle. I realize that an idle city's icon on the left side of the screen shows a little "ZZZ" when it is idle, but it is a royal pain to have to scroll up and down to check for those cities once the number of city icons overflows the vertical limit of my screen. Alternatively or in addition, it would be helpful to get a warning dialog if I end my turn with some cities still idle (which could be checked on or off in options, of course).

Limited AI players: I was frankly stupefied when it finally sank in that the AI players do not pursue quests or clear out monster dens. This realization sapped my desire to continue playing. Without an AI that plays by all the same rules as the human player, FE just isn't a 4X game in my book. How am I supposed to have a feeling of accomplishment when my opponents are not playing 40% of the game? It's a drag to negotiate enemy territory in the late game that's completely overrun by wandering monsters. I'm still flummoxed by the rationale for this "feature." Talk about a dead world.

Minor niggles: Why are XP awards so all over the map? How is it possible that I get a defending archer unit in a city before I've researched archery? Why is the land uninhabitable after a city is razed? Why are the hotkeys so dodgy, and in some cases non-functional?

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I lost what faith I had in Stardock as a game developer back when the original Elemental was released, but I have held out hope through each successive version of this game that it would eventually, against all odds, deliver on its original promise. Fantasy 4X is my favorite genre, and I really want to like this game, despite the way Brad handled the whole debacle and made those of us who pre-ordered feel like utter dupes. For me, Fallen Enchantress 1.0 has too many problems to sustain my interest. I have the greatest respect for Kael and his team for the great work they have done to date, and I will definitely check out the promised expansion when it arrives, but until then there's not enough in this game to keep me playing.[/QUOTE]

Excellent write up. There's little to no chance of me playing this because I think the owner is a scumbag, your review was really well done. With me being a huge TBS 4X fan, I'd probably like this if I did buy it.

Version 1.1 dropped today.

If anyone still cares, it's expansion time:

http://forums.elementalgame.com/439970

Sounds like the suckers who bought Elemental will finally be getting a Steam key for their free copy:

Hopefully Elemental: Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes will finally deliver the fun gaming experience I've been waiting three years for. FE was a step in the right direction, but amongst several other smaller problems, the map generator was so bad it made playing generated maps a big multi-hour gamble that ended up screwing the player half as not; however, based on the info provided for the new champion delivery system slated to be in E:FE:LH, that alone should help a lot to remedy much of the imbalance from one random map to the next. Stardock sort of addressed the unbalanced-generated-maps issue in FE, by creating a small hand-full of extra hand-crafted maps a few months after release, but then they decided to sell the fucking things instead of patching them in like they should have.

Also, given how their revamped tactical battle system continues to suck, I think it should have been stripped out completely before FE's final release and replaced with better auto-combat AI. However, another problem is that FE has such terrible auto-combat AI you're pretty much forced to play through tactical battles manually unless you don't mind losing powerful units in what should be lopsided battles in due to seemingly random attrition. I can only continue to hope that either one combat system or the other actually improves to the point where I'd look forward to using it at any stage of the game.



Personally I don't care about the art updates they're planning, I could always adjust my settings to get a playable look from the game, and I actually liked how (for lack of a better term) fucked up things could look. But they were such a source of contempt for other folks that I can understand why Stardock would spend money and time trying to update them even further. If a more generic looking world was what people wanted, it certainly looks like they're going to get it.

As for the homogenization of various weapon-type damage into one singular damage type, I'm all for it. It always felt like a half-baked system in these games (given how poorly the armor system seemed to allow players to plan and deal with it), and I'd rather have axes that do shit like "Cleave" rather than continue on with individual type-damage weapons.

Personally I'm looking forward to the next title: Elemental: Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes: Wrath of the Dragons: Rise of the Ninjas.

No pirates?!?! I'm out

E:FE:LH:WotD:RotN:The Darkening:Revenge of the Dark Dragon:Special Edition+Alpha:Complete

All of the changes in the new expansion sound good to me - but they're also changes that make the game a little less distinct and a little more like Civ. If we continue in this vein, Elemental will turn into Fall From Heaven 3 in a couple of more expansions.

Which is awesome.

That should be a design goal.

I'm just glad that kerzain is willing to continually beat his head against the Elemental wall so the rest of us can sardonically chuckle observe the array of changes the game has undergone in its attempt to be enjoyable.

I already paid for it years ago, might as well try it when it's released.