Stardock's last chance... Elemental: Fallen Enchantress released

[mastroego]

It's more than decent with mods though.

 

[flyingjohn]

It's more than decent with mods though.

Any recs for best mods in terms of gameplay?

 

[mastroego]

Well IIRC XtraDeconstruct (or something) which is massive but not incoherent. It's a good mod all around.
See full thread here.
It either includes other mods or provides a way to integrate the worthy ones (don't remember precisely).
It's also modular and you can deactivate things you don't want.

I do remember that you have to CAREFULLY and LITERALLY follow the installation instructions, step by step and without presuming to be quick about it or able to cut corners on the process.
That's the worst thing about it, other than that, it's basically the go-to mod, last I checked at least.
I had good, legit fun with it.

Performance is also an issue though. I settled for a lot of graphical compromises to use it with decent map sizes.
I also remember I had to disable autosaves and press "next turn" after having zoomed out from the map, to avoid crashes and freezes (in later stages of the game at least).
I know it's not a pretty picture when put it this way, but the content is actually good and vast.

 

[index.php]

Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes v3.0 arrives

Version 3.0 of Stardock's fantasy civilization style game, Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes gets updated to add more quests, heroes, city upgrades and general performance and stability improvements.

Conquer your enemies and explore the world of Elemental in Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes! We've updated this beloved classic with a new Tower of Knowledge faction structure, some highly requested AI improvements, and some performance updates that we know you'll love.

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 of Magic, and it is up to you to rebuild it.

Unlike most civilization games, the Elemental games put you into the game directly as a character.

Over the past year or so, players have been sending us their saved games so that we can use them to determine certain edge crash situation or stuck turn scenarios. We know that when it happens to you while you’re playing that it doesn’t feel like much of an “edge case,” so we wanted to make sure to find and fix as many as possible.

To make tactical battles more interesting, we made some AI improvements and wrote some new code that should improve turn times substantially, especially on larger maps. Because of these performance gains and greater stability, we increased the map sizes just a bit as well.

To see everything we've added in v3.0, check out the changelog at the bottom of the post!

Changelog

• Tile yield update on screen aborts immediately if the terrain is invalid for a city (perf)
  
• Fixed crash bug where garbage characters could get inserted into a scene node
  
• Increased the map tilt further so you can see more pretty stuff
  
• 0Calc Military Might now longer force updates the battle rank of units. (perf)
  
• AI city updating is now multithreaded (perf)
  
• CalcBattleRank changed to automatically cache the battlerank of the unit (major perf boost)
  
• Units now always get a battlerank of at least 1 to ensure caching of battlerank
  
• Sub-units of an army are no longer recalculated unless expressly ordered
  
• Thread safe city count method added
  
• Fixed a crash deadlock
  
• AI monsters less likely to attack a city on lower difficulties
  
• Monsters now use a cached combat rating to determine city strength (performance)
  
• Fixed multiple crash deadlocks
  
• Unit vector sized at 10 at start to reduce increments. (perf)
  
• Timer update increased from 1ms to 0.5ms
  
• Conclaves provide more research but less production and money
  
• Fortresses provide more production but less money and research
  
• Towns provide more money but less production and research
  
• New improvement: Tower of Knowledge. Provides +1 research per essence
  
• Tiny map size increased to 5x3
  
• Small map increased from 5x4 to 6x4 (20 to 24 sectors)
  
• Medium map size increased from 6x5 to 7x5 (30 to 35 sectors)
  
• Large map size increased from 7x6 to 9x6 (42 to 54 sectors)
  
• Huge map size increased from 8x7 to 12x8 (56 to 96 sectors)
  
• Wrote a replacement for toupper() that is much faster
  
• Lots of new quests
  
• AI improvements
  
• Quest based champions added
  
• Units take slightly longer to produce to balance the availability of more champions.

 

[mastroego]

The real issue is mods compatibility with the new version.
I have a feeling mods are not being maintained here...