Elemental: Fallen Enchantress Developer Journal

We have a new developer journal for Elemental: Fallen Enchantress to read through this weekend, and this time lead designer Derek Paxton covers the fixes, improvements, and feature additions they’ve prepared for us in the game’s fourth beta build. On improvement upgrades:

In Beta4 improvements can upgrade. Your Cleric upgrades to a Shrine which upgrades to a Sacrificial Altar (for Empire players). Since the old improvement is replaced by the new one, we get a few benefits:

1. City size stays relatively contained. We added 40 new improvements and cities are about half the side they are in Beta 3.

2. Cities look more advanced as they upgrade to higher tier buildings. A cleric is a modest building, the Shrine is more pronounced, the artists can go all out on what the Sacrificial Altar looks like. Upgraded buildings don’t get lost in the jumble of the same buildings the rest of your cities have, they look more unique and specific to their purpose.

3. You can’t get to the higher tier buildings of particular types unless you have built the earlier versions. You can’t build the Treasury Vault unless you have gone through the economy boosting improvements on the way. So you have to decide, do you want to build a Study, then School, then College and University? If you do you won’t be getting access to the best economy improvements without spending the time to go through the base one and their upgrades. You are rewarded for specializing your cities and your cities build lists become very unique from each other. Build lists also don’t become huge since you only see the highest tier you have access to (you only see the Pier, not the Dock and Harbor it upgrades to).

4. Faction achievements and World Achievements are at the end of upgrade chains. You can’t build the Ironworks just because you unlocked the tech for it, and you can’t build it in every city. It will only show in a city that has specialized in what it does.

5. Resource improvements upgrade too. The first shard shrine only produces 1 mana per turn. With the correct techs you can upgrade to ones that produce more mana. The same goes for Crystal and Iron mines. If you have enough iron mines to train your units maybe you don’t need to tech up the side of the tree to unlock these improvements. But if you do want to have your iron come in faster, the research options are there for it. This fixes a big issue for us by allowing us to control the pace of mana and resources as the game goes on, we can trickle it in in the beginning, then ramp it up as the player gets access to more expensive units and more costly spells.