Working on Fallen Enchantress 1.1

Published on November 27, 2012 By Frogboy In Elemental Dev Journals

As Fallen Enchantress rushes towards the 100,000 unit sold mark, we are hard at work on v1.1. We are hoping to have it ready before Christmas but I don’t want to make any promises.

The main changes in v1.1 will be memory and AI related. There are lots of bug fixes in the pipeline too such as ones that help with modding and just plain good old fashioned bugs that slipped by.

People have been asking whether Fallen Enchantress is “selling well”. It’s a hard question to answer since I don’t think it’ll ever be able to sell as well as Galactic Civilizations because we did, after all, give the people who bought War of Magic back in the day copies of Fallen Enchantress. I think if you combined War of Magic with Fallen Enchantress you’d have a much better story.

We are pretty happy with the reviews. We’re hoping to see a lot more as time goes on. I doubt we’ll release any more games in 4th quarter in the future. Very hard to get coverage with all the big console releases that come out for the Christmas season not to mention the Wii U. Winking smile

The Map pack is expected to be out in early December. They’re putting the final touches on it. I will confess I wasn’t terribly excited about it at first as I prefer the random maps. But having played Anthys (the new immense sized map) it really does become an amazing world. Anthys is also a great map for testing the AI on so if you don’t see me posting a lot over the next couple of weeks it’ll be because I’m coding on that.

And lastly, a random plug for those of you running Windows 8. You may already be familiar with Start8 which brings back the Start menu in Windows 8. We just released Decor8 today which allows you to change your backgrounds in the Start screen (yea, Microsoft doesn’t let you use your own backgrounds for this for some reason by default).

Anyway, lots of cool stuff coming up. Also, if you don’t already have Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion, v1.1 just came out. The merged development teams (IronDock? StarIron?) have really made something special with Rebellion. It’s really terrific.

Stay tuned!

Comments (Page 6)

Tuidjy

on Nov 30, 2012

bpalczewski

reply 76

From history point of view, more cities you have more grow should be there - large successful empires attract more people. Here you can have twenty cities and then you build like well and suddenly twice more people are coming to given city .... They all heard about well, and heck, who cares about capital, this tiny village has a well!!! It is all statistics, you can call buildings as well: growth 1, growth 2 etc.

Actually, it can make sense. The people who come are survivors living around the village. They see no advantage in joining in and paying taxes, until they see a nice wall and a well... As for the capital, food was the limiting factor for city growth in history. Every time there was a societal breakdown (Micean, Roman, Shumerian) the big cities died out because they could not feed themselves, and small cities popped up everywhere. Fallen Enchantress starts in such a period. The culture needs to advance before truly great cities can emerge. In game, that's infrastructure and research.

Of course this is just rationalizing, but at least it's easy rationalizing, as opposed to trying to figure out how the great wolf which barely survived a fight against the militia razes a town of 350 souls.

bpalczewski

reply 76

Either we are talking about a fun factor - that's why people fight so much against city spam

Some people fight against it, and some people fight for it. I have never been involved in a gaming community where 20% of players were not fighting against ANY successful strategy. Because someone brought it up a while ago, I visited the Dominions III community. Nothing has changed since 2008 but the user names and the spell names. The same discussions are going on, except that now it's Fomorians casting "Summon Morrigans" instead of Vanheim casting "Mistborn Wraiths" (or whatever, it's been a while)

bpalczewski

reply 76

Yet, then i feel like being punished for having few cities - they are always capped by food.

Seriously, why shouldn't they be?! How do you support a huge population when you do not control a lot of land? You may notice that more than two thirds of my cities are called "Farm #X". Makes perfect sense to me, and I enjoy it. Sometimes, I play in a different manner, but then you bet my race is tailored for it.

bpalczewski

reply 76

Speaking about victories, vanilla is easy to be exploited, so let me choose you a race and i want to see you winning on insane at all, not to mention with only 3 cities.

I have won insane with four of the vanilla races - Gilden, Resoln, Yithril, Tarth, and Altar. Make that five. I would probably not be able to do it with three cities, and enjoy it with anyone but Altar.

But what does it prove? You cannot say 'You can't win on Insane difficulty, with a particularl strategy and a race designed to be bad at it' and expect this to prove anything.

Fallen Enchantress provides at least three distinct mechanisms to allow you to win with a few, really strong, cities (henchmen, slave lords, arcane monoliths) I know that two of these are enough to win even on Insane. I do not like the Slave Lord perk for thematic reasons, and I have played it only once (I did win with a single city, but I did have monoliths, too)

bullyellis

on Nov 30, 2012

multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player, multi-player,

I have 40 hours into Conquest of Elysium 3 multi. Please don't make me play it anymore. PLEASE. I want to play this game. I truly do, but I want to play it with my family / friends. Nothing can match multiplayer!

bpalczewski

on Nov 30, 2012

Tuidjy

reply 76

Respect

I understand your point, i just somehow dislike the idea of cities development stopping abruptly - yes, not even slowing down, but just stopping dead - and forcing me to do civic research.

willie sanderson

on Nov 30, 2012

Just don't change that raiding monsters raze cities immediately and I'll be happy. It's a great balance and fair to the AI to be able to do this. Thanks

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