Fallen Enchantress

[DaviddesJ]

I'm torn; on the one hand I want to smack Aroddo because of his poor attitude. On the other hand I find "why are you here if you don't like it" and "why don't you make your own game then" to be the most annoying arguments ever.

I find armchair quarterbacking the most annoying argument ever. Frogboy/Draginol drives me nuts sometimes, but at least he's trying to do something, and he produces an actual product that people can judge on its merits. It's really easy to sit on the sidelines and tell developers how to do it better. Somehow, software development gets way, way easier if you're not actually doing it, just posting about it.

 

[Rub'Rum]

The best thing to do is to not waste energy debating with an armchair sideline criticizer, especially if you're a developer. That being said, I don't find that the industry needs sideline defensemen either, really. Half the time you see some thread of criticism of a game you have to wade through a list of posts like "When YOU can make a game then we'll talk". uuugh.

 

[Draginol]

Either way, whether one thinks the art style of different factions are too similar, it's not a game design decision. Kael, after all, designed FE. However, like in WOM, the technical limitations remain which is that there's a finite amount of memory and thousands of user designed units take a lot of memory.

Personally, I like player designed units even if it's at the cost of some visual distinctiveness. The Quendar certainly *play* fundamentally different than say the Wraiths or the Ironeers. But to each their own.

 

[Aroddo]

The best thing to do is to not waste energy debating with an armchair sideline criticizer, especially if you're a developer. That being said, I don't find that the industry needs sideline defensemen either, really. Half the time you see some thread of criticism of a game you have to wade through a list of posts like "When YOU can make a game then we'll talk". uuugh.

Why don't you ask Draginol how he handled criticism from his beta testers for WoM?
And I mean the kind of criticism that didn't praise this game.

@DaviddesJ
fanboy.
Moderator Action: This is considered trolling, which we don't appreciate here.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

everyone who doesn't hate Frogboy is a fanboy, that much is obvious

we all know how poorly he handled criticism with WoM, but this is another game and should be judged on its own merits. there's plenty of valid criticism that can be made against FE without having to resort to namecalling.

 

[DaviddesJ]

@DaviddesJ
fanboy.

I don't like how Stardock operates and I'm not satisfied with Fallen Enchantress. I think making a successful game today is hard, not easy, and yet FE isn't really good enough. How could that make me a "fanboy"? What does that even mean?

 

[Draginol]

I don't like how Stardock operates and I'm not satisfied with Fallen Enchantress. I think making a successful game today is hard, not easy, and yet FE isn't really good enough. How could that make me a "fanboy"? What does that even mean?

If you have any suggestions on either area (how Stardock "operates" or what you'd like to see improved in FE) I can pass those things on.

As someone who got into game development as a forum person (in this case, Usenet) it's been a real learning experience on the difference between *designing* a game and actually watching it implemented.

The original War of Magic design was supposed to be Master of Magic with a 3D engine and multiplayer.

I'm friends with a lot of guys at Firaxis and of course work with Jon Shafer and I can tell you, what gets designed and what actually gets released can be very different based on technical requirements, budget, etc.

Sometimes, making a game is a strategy game in itself where you marshal finite resources to get as close to the vision you want. Along the way you can have producers, artists, etc. who have their own ideas on how the game should work.

For instance, I know a lot of people like the way Elemental looks but it's probably the single biggest thing I don't like in the games. I much prefer the look of Civilization V to Fallen Enchantress (especially with a few sizing mods).

I know Kael didn't like how the champion system worked in FE (and is in the process of designing a new one for its expansion) because the champions seem independent of the civilization building aspects.

What I was trying to get at earlier with the 64-bit / 32-bit difference is that you can run into limitations that cause you to make a lot of "interesting choices". Unit design seemed like a fun addition to the original WOM but we were surprised at how quickly all those pieces of equipment added up in memory (and certainly with infinite time and budget and CPU power you can come up with work arounds for a lot of challenges).

The nice thing about 64-bit is that it'll eliminate one of the biggest obstacles facing strategy games. 32-bit is why we don't have a 4th race in Sins of a Solar Empire. It's why we have limited skeletal models in Elemental. It's why so much of the equipment in Diablo 3 is the same but with different stats.

A decent 3D texture now is 2048x2048 by 32bit color (4 bytes per pixel). That's just one texture. I remember playing the original Civilization at 320x200x8bit color and thinking that was pretty great. Today, the Civilization V icon uses more memory than displaying a full screen of Civilization I.

Anyway, sorry to ramble.

 

[Red Key]

Anyway, sorry to ramble.

I think it is interesting to hear about the design decisions and trade-offs in video games.

 

[EddyGamerLP]

Unfortunately, you can see in the steam hardware polls that there are almost 14% of users using win7 32bits and another 3.3% on vista 32 bits... So even after getting rid of XP there will still be a significant number of 32bits systems out there.

 

[DaviddesJ]

The nice thing about 64-bit is that it'll eliminate one of the biggest obstacles facing strategy games. 32-bit is why we don't have a 4th race in Sins of a Solar Empire. It's why we have limited skeletal models in Elemental. It's why so much of the equipment in Diablo 3 is the same but with different stats.

Does that mean you also envision system requirements going way up? It's hard to imagine that addressing more than 2GB is going to make much difference on game performance if you've only got 2GB of physical memory. Even if you have 4GB of physical memory, your process isn't realistically going to use more than about 3GB of that, and it's hard to see a 50% increase making a qualitative difference. It seems like you really need systems with 8GB of physical memory before you are going to be able to realize these benefits.

 

[LDiCesare]

32bit systems can only address 2 (or 3 Gbytes) of virtual memory. 64bits can address way more. However, pointers are also twice as big in a 64bit program so they eat twice as much memory. If most of memory used by the program is art/textures, then it's not really a problem, and 3 or 4 Gbytes of memory should be enough to have a program with more features than the 32bit 2Gbyte program. On the other hand, if a lot of memory is used for pointers, then indeed you will need more than 4 Gbytes in order to have more usable memory, so it's likely you'd need 6 Gbytes minimum to see a difference.
However, if most of the memory required is for art that is seldom displayed or accessed, then it really doesn't matter that you have only 3 or 4 Gbytes of actual RAM. The rest will be cached on the hard drive, and if it is rarely accessed, then the game will run smoothly even with little actual RAM and the hardware requirements may not be that high, except the requirement for a 64-bit OS obviously. The point is the program can address more memory. It doesn't require it to be actual RAM. Hard-drive memory works as well, as long as there are not too many accesses to it.

 

[Draginol]

Does that mean you also envision system requirements going way up? It's hard to imagine that addressing more than 2GB is going to make much difference on game performance if you've only got 2GB of physical memory. Even if you have 4GB of physical memory, your process isn't realistically going to use more than about 3GB of that, and it's hard to see a 50% increase making a qualitative difference. It seems like you really need systems with 8GB of physical memory before you are going to be able to realize these benefits.

On a 64-bit OS like Windows 7 or Vista, the process can see 4GB if you just use the large address aware parameter when you compile.

And one weird thing is that on Windows 8, that "32 bit" program can somehow see the entire 64bit space (I'm not sure how MS is doing this). But it means you don't actually have to make a "native" 64-bit game so all your existing libraries and tools will still work.

 

[Draginol]

However, if most of the memory required is for art that is seldom displayed or accessed, then it really doesn't matter that you have only 3 or 4 Gbytes of actual RAM. The rest will be cached on the hard drive, and if it is rarely accessed, then the game will run smoothly even with little actual RAM and the hardware requirements may not be that high, except the requirement for a 64-bit OS obviously. The point is the program can address more memory. It doesn't require it to be actual RAM. Hard-drive memory works as well, as long as there are not too many accesses to it.

Yea, and this is where it bites strategy games in the butt. Players expect in a Civ style game to be able to see the whole map (or big chunks) and aren't likely to tolerate lots of hard drive crunching to bring in and out pieces of memory.

With first person shooters or RPGs, you can do a lot more on the fly loading and unloading of assets without it being noticeable.

 

[LDiCesare]

Yea, and this is where it bites strategy games in the butt. Players expect in a Civ style game to be able to see the whole map (or big chunks) and aren't likely to tolerate lots of hard drive crunching to bring in and out pieces of memory.

With first person shooters or RPGs, you can do a lot more on the fly loading and unloading of assets without it being noticeable.

Then again, there are LOD's. I only use the cloth map in Elemental, and in Civ V only the strategic/simplified view. Civ IV lacked that level of detail, but zooming out would let one see the world with less details (but with nice clouds which hinder vision...).

 

[Akka]

I'm torn; on the one hand I want to smack Aroddo because of his poor attitude. On the other hand I find "why are you here if you don't like it" and "why don't you make your own game then" to be the most annoying arguments ever.

I agree that these are poor arguments, but in this specific case, Aroddo is so antagonistic that I'm willing to overlook it.
It's not even that his points are unsound, but he's just a jerk in how he tells them.

I'm not really digging FE either - too much centered around heroes and lacking in 4X, and honestly for something inspired by MoM I hardly find anything in common between both - but I think we can express our dislike without being impolite, especially as being able to discuss on equal foot with designers is a great opportunity that should not be wasted.

 

[Draginol]

Then again, there are LOD's. I only use the cloth map in Elemental, and in Civ V only the strategic/simplified view. Civ IV lacked that level of detail, but zooming out would let one see the world with less details (but with nice clouds which hinder vision...).

Definitely. Without LOD, we'd have been screwed years ago. We've been stuck with the 2GB limit for a decade. Even GalCiv II had trouble with it and that was in 2006.

A lot of our memory issues in WOM/FE were sheer ignorance and naivete on our part. When you've only made space games, the realities of doing a land based game are breathtaking.

I remember thinking you couldn't improve on DirectX 9 back when we did GalCiv. But it was with WOM that we learned just how limited it is. In DirectX 9, only one thread may access the GPU. DirectX 10 and above solve all that. Any thread can touch the GPU which means you can avoid losing frames due to CPU hogging stuff.

Another thing DirectX 10 has helped with is by letting developers use much more expensive texture compression (CPU wise) which saves memory.

In Civilization V, Firaxis wrote their own engine that works practically underneath DirectX. But DirectX 10 still helps immensely in terms of smoothness because they don't have to worry about different threads touching the GPU.

Every time I see smooth animation when the game itself is obviously CPU bound I cry in jealousy.

If I had a time machine, I'd have made two requirement changes in WOM:

1) Require DirectX 10.

2) Get rid of the player designed units.

 

[Draginol]

I'm not really digging FE either - too much centered around heroes and lacking in 4X, and honestly for something inspired by MoM I hardly find anything in common between both - but I think we can express our dislike without being impolite, especially as being able to discuss on equal foot with designers is a great opportunity that should not be wasted.

This is something Kael and myself agree with you on. I like FE quite a bit but the disconnect between the heroes and the civilization building causes one to ask "So, what exactly is this game trying to be?"

When Kael first joined us, he went over the original game design for War of Magic that I had written up. First question: Why didn't we make THAT game? Since it was, essentially, Master of Magic + Multiplayer.

It's amazing how seemingly small additions have unforseen consequences.

In early meetings, we went and agreed that it woudl be fun to have player designed units like we had in GalCiv II. But that meant limited skeletons which meant every race would look similar. And it meant that we couldn't create a weapon or a spell that coudln't, theoretically, be used by every race.

When I went to work on Sins of a Solar Empire and then Demigod, a lot of other additions got made to the game such as quests, recruitable champions, underground dungeons, dynasties, real-time tactical battles, etc.

Each idea was cool in itself but required compromises to other game mechanics. When I came back to WOM, I nixed the dungeons (if you look through the XML you can see still references to dungeons). The tactical battles were supposed to be real-time but turned out to be not fun and had to be scrapped and redone.

We saw the results with WOM.

When Kael came on, he focused the design. Dynasties went away. The champions were no longer wandering. The quests were more tightly focused. Tactical battles tightened and refined with an initiative based system (instead of each side taking a turn).

Basically, Kael made massive improvements to the WOM mish-mash.

So with FE out, now we've been able to sit back and look at the loose ends. Plus, Jon and Soren have been able to weigh in.

Jon doesn't like that the terrain is still largely irrelevant. I agree with him on that. And Soren says that there should be more civ-wide accomplishments (i.e. fill up a box of accomplishments and get a prize) like the way culture and golden ages work in Civ IV and the way policies work in Civ V.

So we're working on an expansion to address those kinds of things.

 

[GoodGame]

Just weighing in as a FE and FFH2 (Civ4) customer who actually completed several games of each (probably not on hard setting ):

FE comments:

1. I like the hero emphasis (leveling, perk choices, item management) in FE generally, because the alternative would be a purely fantasy re-skinning of Turn based 4X, a la Civ4/Civ5, which would be a marketing failure in my opinion (case of being an also ran when a giant has already bagged and tagged the target audience). I agree there's room to tweak the hero/henchman power relative to the units power (hero-henchmen armies with XP-leveling perks seem a bit overpowered), which is probably going to come out of making more option levels for regular units' size/ower and making those available earlier with tech focus.

2. The fantasy turn-based genre is obviously really diverse in game play. I'm sure the WoM boards are full of discussions of it. There's MoM, HoMM, tactics RPGs, etc.. Having one engine being capable of tackling all of that is pretty sharp in my opinion. But obviously the default version of the game would have some focus problems trying to hit all the sub-genres. But there's lots of DLC opportunities if the game engine is done right and has good word of mouth, with DLC that hits all tastes (4X TB, role-player, tactics player). Just saying. I don't feel that FE is really failing if it is not MoM X. There's a lot of audience variety to target in the macro-genre of fantasy turn-based. Much more so than the sci-fi, Masters of Orions mold.

3. I like the attempts at role-player story-telling in FE: unique quests attached with unique locations, random fetch-quests, simple quest-line as an optional victory path. The multiple victory options go beyond straight 4X, and also agree with 4X trend of more than just conquest victories. FE has a good balance of victory options in my opinion, and easily check-marked for a competitive PvP match if there was one. The only negative is that the story telling is still pretty shallow overall, but that is moddable. Branching story-quests (Choose Your Own Adventure on the 4X turn-based tile world), maybe?

4. I like the perk-leveling in FE, which is what passes for computer RPGing these days (thanks Fallout/D&D3.x). It adds to the RPG feel. One weakness of it is perhaps out of control leveling through XP-leveling perks (e.g. semi-logarithmic growth). This is the main way henchmen/heroes break the game in that a unit with one hero backed by mostly henchman with training XP perks will quickly level themselves to a steam-roller victory, just by playing them on random exploration and popping enemy attacks.
This is definitely curbed by injuries, and unit farming has to be careful, but a proper henchman design can give them a head start to the XP-perks. I don't feel this is an insta-win but feels like it has that potential to break the game. It definitely makes Champions stand out as an odd-man, only of value if there aren't henchmen recruiting options.

5. The design your own unit stchick is a pretty powerful attraction for a gamer. I know WoM was semi-influenced by the power Spore had in that dept, even in being an overall failure at being a game (referencing Spore). MoM and Alpha Centauri both had the design your own unit thing going on very well in one way or the other (MoM by the on-the-fly unit spells and race-unit options). I wouldn't write it out. I know it was a powerful part of my enjoying Gal Civ I and II, and the other 4X space games. The lack of unit design (excepting the capital ships and tech research) made me less interested in replaying Sins of a Solar. I'd say FE has just enough unit design options thanks to spells and the tech tree, but there's just enough lack of variability in models and unit design that it's noticeable. Or lets say that the hero-henchman get the bulk of the unit variability because of the unique quest items. But overall there's some negative replayablity in FE just because the variability is still pretty limited and not new/interesting after about half-dozen to dozen play-throughs.

Overall, I'd say doing away with design-your-own-units would kind of be laughing in the face of pretty successful trend in 4X turn-based games (Civ4, Alpha Centauri, and nuances in several Civ-clones). It also tend to scream cynical DLC ploy to the cynical PC gamer. Prime examples: the Total War series DLC unit, which is pretty much only forgivable during the Steam sales when they're on 75%-off sale.

6. The tactical combat is a little weak in FE, but its still pretty well thought out (i.e. kind of a good tease, but could use more). The initiative, spell casting length, and counter-spelling was pretty fresh in my opinion and made the inclusion of battle winning spells balanceable (e.g. the neutral creep AIs being able to cast insta-kill vampyric Despairs, but that could be countered by a combination of charging with super-heroes and counterspelling). The options of choosing between avoiding target defenses, counterattacks, extra attacks, extra dodging etc is pretty well thought out ("interesting choices", no absolute steam roller omnipotent choice). There's a decent amount of tactical options from strategic options, which is good game design present in FE, imho. I'd just think there could be more of this (e.g. flying (terrain effect negation), more nuances in combat effects. This strategic choices influencing tactical micro-options and ultimately battles and the game is maybe a bane of the AI programmer, but what made MoM special, imho. More in balanced moderation would be good for future FE DLC, I think.

Along Brad's complaint about terrain, I'd say add tactical map terrain effects. All terrain effects currently are all or nothing (block movement to create channels) which isn't bad but even simple tactical tabletop battles (e.g. Hordes of the Things) have rules for terrain slowing, terrain providing cover/damage resistance. Age of Wonders and MoM had functional terrain defense when defending bona fide castles (walls/gates had to be besieged/flown over and siege units were significant). These are noticeably missing in FE tactical, such that I only manage tactical battles to ensure the battle has reached a turning point after an opening combo.

Terrain definitely influences strategy though. Box canyons, walls, channels, limited city sites (infertile/impassable zones) make FE definitely play like an original TB game and not a Civilization-clone. And the world features idea was a great implementation in FE to make terrain be part of the setting, questable, and reward even with new cities/city sites. That is good game design in FE imho.




My last 2-cents:

If there's one mod/DLC I'd like to see for FE, it'd be "King of Dragon Pass" (1999 game based on Glorantha setting, available on GOG). Call me weird, but that's a great combination of RPG fantasy setting, story-telling, and turn-based civ strategy (although more like Hammurabi than 4X turn-based). I'd actually like a scenario mod that emphasized agrarian economy (herd size) and de-emphasized the Civilization model of spamming and log-growth management of city growth. This definitely tackles the "one city challenge" is a different, interesting way. Elements of this should be in 4X games, imho.

 

[Rub'Rum]

If there's one mod/DLC I'd like to see for FE, it'd be "King of Dragon Pass" (1999 game based on Glorantha setting, available on GOG). Call me weird, but that's a great combination of RPG fantasy setting, story-telling, and turn-based civ strategy (although more like Hammurabi than 4X turn-based). I'd actually like a scenario mod that emphasized agrarian economy (herd size) and de-emphasized the Civilization model of spamming and log-growth management of city growth. This definitely tackles the "one city challenge" is a different, interesting way. Elements of this should be in 4X games, imho.

Unrelated but you might be interested in this, although it's over: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/224590870/the-guide-to-glorantha A big book about the awesome Glorantha.

 

[Akka]

First question: Why didn't we make THAT game? Since it was, essentially, Master of Magic + Multiplayer.

To be honest, I would have vastly prefered this - even without multiplayer.
MoM is still by far the best in its category, and I'd even prefer a straight-up copy'n'paste with only diplomatic and SOME balance adjusting than an attempt to reinvent it.