It has been awhile since we’ve visited the world of Elemental. The last update to the expansion to Fallen Enchantress (AKA: Legendary Heroes) was in 2019. Hardware has continued to evolve, and with that comes the opportunity to further improve the game. Our story so far… Elemental: Fallen Enchantress – Legendary Heroes is a fantasy strategy game in which the player builds a civilization in the world of Elemental. This world was nearly destroyed by the War...
Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes is getting an update. Changes include: Unit movement engine optimizations AI update to be more greedy about getting goodie huts Early game technology costs reduced Default unit movement increased from 2 to 3 tiles. Sovereign default combat speed increased from 22 to 32 Sovereign default HP increased from 20 to 28. Several bug fixes to late game instability Release date: Now! Screenshots (at 5K)
Brad recalls the days of Elemental's rough launch, what we learned from it, and how we did our best to make it right for all of our future games. Check out Episode 3 in Ars Technica's "War Stories" series here .
Overview Years ago, Random House asked me to write a book around the Elemental universe. As a first time author, I was assigned an editor, Dave Stern, who soon became a good friend of mine. Over the course of writing the book, now sold on Amazon , Dave and I would go back and forth on the story along with Random House's requests to ensure that the book was commercially successful. I will be the first to admit that my vision of the story may not have been as comm...
Author’s note Some years ago Stardock developed a game called Elemental: War of Magic. We loved it. Unfortunately, it was a bridge too far. Too ambitious and it largely collapsed under its own tech. The name Elemental was tarnished and we moved away from using it. The original plan was to have: Elemental: War of Magic (2010) Elemental: Fallen Enchantress (2012) Elemental: Legendary Heroes (2014) Elemental: Sorcerer King (2016) Ah the b...
Sorcerer King Beta 4 is starting to come together. We expect to release it in early February. There’s a ton of changes coming to it, most notably the new crafting system and summoning system. Below are two screenshots that give you a taste of some of the visual changes coming too.
I need more analytics in the game to do this properly but this is a start. How long should a game last? That depends on the game. Sorcerer King, for me, as the designer, is meant to take elements of Master of Magic, Star control and FTL and put them together. While those games may seem dissimilar, they each have key ingredients that I think can be blended together to create something really spectacular. And Sorcerer King is turning out spectacularly. Map Size Ra...
Years ago the world was at war. Ceresa, The Fallen Enchantress, had unleashed an army of the undead upon the Kingdoms and Empires of Elemental. The adventurer, Relias, managed to acquire the necessary pieces to build the Forge of the Overlord and with it, defeated Ceresa and her allies. For a time, there was peace. Then, one day, a powerful Sorcerer named Mirdoth found the ancient artifact, Curgen's Bane. It was thought that the bane had been lost in the cataclysm. This ...
The tentative name for the next DLC for Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes is Battlegrounds. A little background on the world When a map is generated, we use tiny pieces of land called “stamps”. The stamps were one of the first things we made when developing Fallen Enchantress and haven’t bee touched since. Needless to say, if you’ve played the game enough you start to recognize pieces of the world. Moreover, in the years since they were made, we’ve found th...
A pet peeve of mine of fantasy strategy games is how weak magic often is. It makes sense if every side is supposed to be equal. Can’t have 8 players wrecking the land, it would be a pure luck of the draw on who won. But in Sorcerer King, it just you, the Sorcerer King and the peanut gallery. The other players are effectively as powerful as they are in other 4X games. But you are incredibly powerful (and so is the Sorcerer King). The player in Sorcerer King starts out, on tu...
The below spells are ones that I think can be implemented that have come from players. Spell that creates a Swamp tile (slows movement) Spell that turns a group of tiles into ones that do damage if you walk through them. Meteor Strike – spell that destroys everything in it, leaves crater. Wall of Fire – tiles do damage to anyone who walks through them. Tsunami, huge wave of water is conjured up that wipes out units Your spell idea here… (will be reading com...
All he wants to do is give you presents.
Simple example of the Dungeon Master punishing me for being a total jerk in the game. http://screencast.com/t/tYwgUWtpc http://screencast.com/t/WvqCML5VJD
Once upon a time there was Master of Magic Back in 2008, Stardock was just finishing up its work on Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor . We had been in negotiations with Atari to acquire the Master of Magic rights (to the point that we actually own the domain www.masterofmagic.com ). We had a game design all planned out for it complete with Halfings, Gnolls, High Elves, the works. To be safe, we were not going to stray very far from the original design other ...
Q: What's the deal? There's a ton of awesome 4X fantasy strategy games to play. How is your game different? A: This game assumes you’ve already played those games. And lost. Q: Wait, what? I already lost? I haven’t even loaded up your game. A: Yea, sorry about that. Q: What the hell happened? A: So to recap, in games like Fallen Enchantress, Age of Wonders, Worlds of Magic, Master of Magic, Warlock, Endless Legends, etc. you are trying to build an empi...