In 10 days, Elemental: Fallen Enchantress will be released to the public.
Building a new 4X franchise is a challenge. If you look at Wikipedia’s 4X chronology there aren’t that many, particularly if you focus purely on turn-based ones.
What features matter depends on the person. For me, I want to feel like I’m building a civilization. That’s why I was drawn to Master of Magic and Civilization.
Creating a strategy game that focuses not just on warfare but magical ability, technological research, diplomacy, questing, etc. means that the computer AI has to be really really good. And having spent the better part of 20 years writing AI, Fallen Enchantress has been the biggest challenge in my career. It’s the first AI I’ve written that is explicitly multi-core which lets the computer players do a lot more strategic modeling (basically, playing out different scenarios) than anything I’ve written before.
The biggest challenge has been simply getting good enough at the game to translate my “skillz” to the computer players. That’s where you guys come in. I read your reports and go “Aha! That’s a great strategy!” and soon it shows up. I don’t expect to stop improving the AI on this game for a long time – well after release. I think we’ll see some really interesting player strategies post release that will simply be too tempting not to incorporate.
With that in mind, here’s a video that demonstrates some of the improvements made in the past few weeks that have been getting checked into the code base in preparation for the October 23 release date.
