Elemental: Fallen Enchantress Developer Journal, Public Beta Delayed
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I am very excited for Fallen Enchantress. I am, of course, biased. But it is a beautiful game and it does some things that I have never seen done in a TBS game. But the change to the production system, random worlds, increasing the population of cities and some new features (outposts) requires work.
It's not implementation time, Stardock has an amazing team. Implementation is only 25% of the way there. The real focus now is in balance. Not perfect balance, not if a short sword should do 8 or 9 damage. But how quickly you gain research, what things modify that, how is that balanced for small empires vs large empires? How much does a fire shard affect your fire spells? What is the difference between a city with good production capacity and weak production capacity (and how long should it take to train a medium army in each)?
Random worlds are another big part. I love crazy randomness, in general I'm probably too far on that extreme. I'm amused if I start a game right next to an Ogre lair and he wipes me out on turn 4. It's a little less funny when I'm 200 turns in and I walk into a wildland and every monster in there streams out in a civilization crushing tide of doom. Randomness must have some control.
Unwilling to give up our random worlds we implemented controls on how close to starting spots certain things are allowed to be. You will never start right next to a quest you can't accept (which is frustrating) or a monster that can wipe you out. The farther out you go the more interesting it gets. A treasure chest won't be within 8 tiles of your starting location, a Hoarder Spider won't be within 12, and if you get far enough out there you may find dragons.
But it all takes balance and we aren't ready for a public beta on it while we still know what the issues are. We need to get those in and smoothed out, we need the game to play as it should so that when you start to play your feedback can be useful. It doesn't mean much if you think you are too weak if we know we are going to push some monsters away from the starting area, or if you think tech comes too slowly if we are going to be raising population (which affects everything).
So I asked Brad to postpone the public beta (sorry) and he agreed.
