Elemental: War of Magic

[juv3nal]

It's the Master of Magic inspired thing by Stardock.

Apparently retailers were breaking street date, so he opened up the direct download for "pre-orders" ("pre-order" in quotes because I bought today and was able to start downloading this evening. There was some delay though so if you buy right now you may not be able to download right away)

Anyone tried it?

[juv3nal]

So it's getting skewered over on Rock Paper Shotgun.

But having put about an hour and a half into it, I can't say I've personally run into any bugs or unfinished-ness.

The UI is completely impenetrable though and there really isn't anywhere near enough tutorial and/or help.

Strange that no one here has taken a chance on it though. I would have thought turn-based strategy would be in the idlethumbs wheelhouse.

[Murdoc]

Maybe describe what the game is and your impressions rather then bugs and no tutorial.

I saw a screenshot at Shack, but I'm too lazy to go read up on it, but if someone said "Hey I like this and this about it" it might spark interest.

[Grufff]

I saw a post on Twitter about this saying that one of the bugs lets the player marry a drake, have a drake child, and put him on a horse

That's where my knowledge of the games ends.

[juv3nal]

I saw a post on Twitter about this saying that one of the bugs lets the player marry a drake, have a drake child, and put him on a horse

That's where my knowledge of the games ends.

That sounds like an amazing feature, not a bug.

Getting dissed on pcgamer as well.

As for what I like about it, I'm still wrapping my head around the UI, so I can't really say (there's these weird modal menus so that menu x might only appear if you have thing y selected but if you just want to do thing z without knowing what menu it's on or what thing you need selected to get that menu to show up, you can end up fruitlessly trying to click or rightclick any and everything on screen to find it).

I can say that the notion of a turn based strat game in a fantasy setting appeals to me in general and I like GalCiv & GalCiv2 which is why I'm giving it a go.

Again, to reiterate, I personally haven't had any issues with bugs, but I'm only playing the single player and one of the crash inducing bugs is caused by alt-tabbing which I haven't really felt the need to do.

Unless one of the bugs being that menus disappear and can't be found/opened again. If that were a bug it would explain a lot of my difficulties with the UI.

[Murdoc]

I saw a post on Twitter about this saying that one of the bugs lets the player marry a drake, have a drake child, and put him on a horse

That's where my knowledge of the games ends.

I have no idea what this game is, at first I see strategy, now I see awesome bestiality(?) children on horses, lets just say I'm more interested then ever.

Basically what game type is this? I have a vague knowledge of galactic civ; is that anything like civilization? Am I controlling a squad, an army, a guy(kings bounty?) or an entire civ?

Is there economy? Towns? States?

Basically whats this game about and whats your experience with it Juv?

[juv3nal]

Mostly my experience of it is frustration with the UI so far, but from the single player, it's more on the Civ end of things than King's Bounty.

You start out controlling an individual dude, you meet and pick up some followers and found a town. The town has improvements that can be built and it can build units which you can "design" by picking out equipment loadouts. This includes settler units to found more towns. There are map resources which benefit your cities. The city makes money which can be spent on stuff (more equipment bits to build more advanced units for instance).

There's tactical combat, but my limited experience of that has been a real drag because my dudes could only move 1 square at a time and the enemy had a ranged attack (none of my guys did) so I said screw that and just ended up auto-resolving.

I'm going to guess it becomes more interesting when you have some better units and/or spells, but I'm still very much figuring out how to control the game and at that point just wanted to move on to figure out how to do something else.

As the title implies, there's spells but I haven't really delved into that yet other than flipping through some menus to see what options I had for research.

I know you research spells. I've read on various forums that you research other stuff too, but can I just say yet again the UI seems to hide parts of itself for seemingly no good reason?

I'm sure I'll get used to it/figure it out eventually, but right now figuring out the UI is like it's own little puzzle minigame.

[juv3nal]

Oh also, like civ there's "areas of influence" around each town. There's no cultural victory as far as I can tell, but the area of influence I think determines where you can build improvements and how far away a resource thingy you can exploit.

I read somewhere that random bandits/monsters can't spawn within an area of influence so it's to your benefit to sort of tightly nit your cities so there aren't any gaps in between the areas of influence. But I only have one town and haven't seen a random spawn at all, so I don't know that from experience or anything.

[Murdoc]

After founding a town are you still controlling a dude? or is that like a settler?

Sounds interesting, but its so close to civ 5, that I'm not sure if making the leap at this point would be worth it. Also, though probably limited, ironhelmets online dealy sounds like it'd give me my fill of fantasy strategy.

Ill follow this thread if you want to post your play through

edit; Watched a video, yeah it's pretty civy, but not really. It's kind of interesting and as much as I like a simplified turn based thing, I can't help but think I'd like to so much more in a full on dawn of discovery view.

Edited August 25, 2010 by Murdoc

[juv3nal]

Powered my way through the single player campaign which is more or less an rpg-lite tutorial variant on the actual game. It's weird. You do build some cities, but no one ever attacks them, it's all about you dragging a bunch of troops all over a map. The cities in the sp campaign are just there for you to get reinforcements it seems.

I get the feeling that the sp campaign doesn't really prepare you sufficiently for a proper game. Research doesn't happen and you never get attacked. It's just monsters sitting around waiting for you to gather enough troops to dust them. I felt really silly about wasting time training up garrison troop once I figured that out.

Still, I had a pretty fun time of it once I got the hang of the UI. It's not going to hold a candle to Civ5 I imagine, but it's not near as bad as the reviews make it out to be. I haven't had a single crash, for instance.