I hope you are right Xan.

Fallen Enchantress has two problems left.  One is minor, the other is huge.

The minor one is that heroes (Sovereigns and champions) are always more effective at everything than trained troops. But the developers have made great progress in Beta 5 on that one, and anyway, that's a problem that can only influence early reviews POSITIVELY.

The second problem is a lot more serious. Because of something in monster/AI interaction, the player can be attacked, without having made any mistakes, as early as turn 30-50, by monsters that he cannot scratch, let alone defeat. Fortunately this does not happen every game. Unfortunately, when it happens, it is beyond frustrating, especially if it happens enough that you learn to recognize it. This can SINK a review.

The good part is that the developers are working on this, and will probably fix it by release. If they do, the game can get REALLY good reviews from 4X people.

Do I wish the game was more polished? Hell yes.  I'm already enjoying it, so of course I would love someone to be enhancing it even more.  But honestly, FE is ready for release... and if the second problem is fixed, it may do very, very well.

 

This is what I worry the most about.  The game can seem unfair and arbitrarily difficult, and that makes it seem poorly made.  Some of these monsters might be impossible for a lot of players hundreds of turns into a game.  

Can someone define "polish" for me?  If we're talking about a clean interface, then Civ V was polished the day it came out.  If we're talking about having lots of bells and whistles in the UI, solid AI, and perfect balance, then yeah they're still working on it.

 

I don't know, I think about polish meaning minor things like fixing minor graphical bugs, clear and clean UI, making sure tooltips say what they actually do, having all abilities work as designed, balance minor combat things, like weapon damage, accuracy. Little details like that.  But Brad or Kael surely have a better definition.

For me, there are two really major area of issues.

1. Bugs which force me to restart game - world elements (water, chests, lairs, even places where I can settle new city) disappearance from map after save/load or long gameplay, extremely low performance after 3-4 save/loads or long gameplay, disappearance of action bar in combat (sadly, can't describe exact steps to reproduce).

2. AI/monsters interaction. Seeing AIs freely moving through hordes of roaming monsters and having my own units attacked by anyone is not fun. Cities attacked on turn 50 by Fel Dragon and Obsidian golem suddenly coming from unexplored terrain and ignoring AI on the way is not fun even more.

 

All other issues can be polished later but above just kills wonderful game for me.

Also I hope that released version will have tutorial or at least help screen with keybindings and guide to camera moving and switching camera views (if it possible at all).

Polish is a metaphor from making a car. It is the last minute detail to the exterior and is the main thing the customer sees. It is Balance, UI, Graphics, Bugs, Pacing and Fun. Making sure all of these things are as good as they can be is generally what boosts the metascore. I would put AI on the list, but too many games have gotten into the top 95% with terrible AI by comparison to FE.

Obviously you never played with the MoM multiplayer patch. AI basically received 3 turns for every 1 you took. MoM AI was decent for a world of expansion. It fell apart when borders clashed.

Stardock has the expansion AI aspects completed very well. There is still lots of work on the diplomacy side.

So ya, it does speak volumes.

Thanks for your support.

 

The  AI and monster problem is completly different. The argument is not that the ai is making bad choices, that can be fixed. The problem is that there is an underlying core engine mechanic with simulatneous turns that breaks all sorts of things about the ai and even some stuff with the player. Anyone right now can go play a game and on end turn keep your unit selected and move the unit right at the start of your next turn and essentially make that unit invulnerable to interception. 

 

You can't go in and change the code and tell monsters to be "more aggresive" when they can't even intercept a unit. There are two distinct levels of randomization here the random roll to determine if a monster or npc attacks a unit and whether or not a collision/interception happens when those units move.

This has been the main discussion thread for this topic

https://forums.elementalgame.com/432712

 

Also problems like this I would attribute to the mechanic -

https://forums.elementalgame.com/423829

 

Mods and patches can easily fix the first problem, nothing but a core engine change can fix the second. Elemental is not a traditional "turn based" game it is a hybrid turn based simultaneous movement game.  The problem is that all the code that should be there to handle the inherent problems with simultaneous movement aren't there and its causing all sort of anomalous problems one of which I believe is the AI going tower build crazy. Go play with cheat enabled, reveal the map ctrl-u, then hit ctrl-z and watch the ai play the game. Leave your computer running for an hour or so and come back and follow an AI player and watch it move, also relative monster behavior and movement to that npc, and you will see the issues first hand.

 

I.E. It is a "We-Go" system without the distinct phases

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turns,_rounds_and_time-keeping_systems_in_games#Simultaneously-executed_and_clock-based_turns

 

I think even further at the root of this problem was the mutli-threading deisgn philosophy. I think it was a great idea but anyone who has written any IPC (inter-process communications) code can tell you the signaling is incredibly complex, If you ever learned C and got really turned around by semaphores this is essentially whats going on but instead of multiple processes its a single process with mutliple threads, same signaling problems. I applaud them for really going for broke with multi-threading and designing an engine from scratch, I just wish they had time to get it to its potential.

 

Very good point jam3. Simultaneous enemy move is a big issue. TBS means turn based strategy. It means each player takes a turn not a rapid real time strategy that is paused until the player hits "turn" and then it happens real quick and pauses again.

One more issue to add to the list of things that NEED to be solved before the game goes gold.

The game really needs more time I agree. It is a good beta but not ready for release yet unless some major changes/fixes happen within the next 2 weeks.

 

I say good luck, and I hope that you have plenty of sales to reflect the great amount of effort that you put into this project, as well as honoring your commitment to excellence towards your customers.  The level of fun and quality of the game that I'm getting out of FE exceeds my expectations, especially those of a year or two ago -- by quite a bit.  I've had a lot of fun in the beta of FE, and have likely played it more than any of the other released 4x's that have come out in the last few years.

I can still see plenty of little things and balances that would make the game better, but I know there's more patches before the release, and the game's not about to be abandoned after.  A part of me wants to urge you to get it to an even more "perfect" state to have the best reviews possible . .but at some point it has to be released.  The balance passes have already made the game shine a lot more.

Again, congrats at getting to this point!  You've made a game I feel like I could recommend to friends, which is the highest praise I could give.

Jam3 -- While I agree there *might* be a core issue with how elemental makes decision; I do not agree it is related to this phrase: --- I think even further at the root of this problem was the mutli-threading deisgn philosophy. I think it was a great idea but anyone who has written any IPC (inter-process communications) code can tell you the signaling is incredibly complex, If you ever learned C and got really turned around by semaphores this is essentially whats going on but instead of multiple processes its a single process with mutliple threads, same signaling problems. I applaud them for really going for broke with multi-threading and designing an engine from scratch, I just wish they had time to get it to its potential. -- As someone who has written 30,000 line programs heavily threaded with synchronization points - it is not that complicated if layered correctly. Also I think you are assuming this is elemental issue and I would leave it to the developer to comment in that regards. - There *might* be an issue with the underlying model (simultaneous turn) but that is a *different* issue than the actual method of implementation and I think they should be dis-entangled to avoid causing confusion. - As a player I find the issue minor (though it appears that it can lead to a certain 'be fast' exploitation). I believe that the model could be changed slightly if the developers feel this is a core problem without changing the threaded nature of the program.

Yep I have worked on VPN software also heavily IPC intensive, although I happen to think any type of internal or external signaling between threads/processes gets incredibly complex and is definitely more time intensive. I didn't mean to imply the decision was wrong or they should change it, I actually agree with it, but they are kind of alone from the perspective of the number of game companies that make truly multi-threaded games and I think it is tied to the turn based/simultaneous movement. I am just saying they need more time and they need to fix the underlying problem which might mean digging through some pretty deep layers of signaling code.

 

And of course I am making assumptions I am not the type of person to preface everything with "in my opinion" and other obvious statements, never claimed to know anything about the source code or what exactly their doing, I can however judge the results and make educated guesses. And what I am looking at with the AI looks directly related to the "turn" system which I can't even put an exact name on because it doesn;t match any turn system I can think of its definetly a hybrid of a couple of methods. They could even get it to work with enough effort.

Unit movement isn't threaded btw.