A trip through the fantasy worlds I enjoy
DerekPaxton's Articles In Elemental Dev Journals
April 22, 2012 by DerekPaxton
  Unreleased Features:   + Captured cities give an Occupation unrest penalty if you arent the player that founded them.  This starts at +50 Unrest, and after 20 turns begins to drop 1 per turn until it hits +25 where it stays.  A player never has an occupation penalty from a city he founded (if he retakes it) + Added the Arcane Monolith spell.  This is a Pariden specific ability which allows them to place outposts with a spell Bugs: ...
May 17, 2012 by DerekPaxton
The last of the Beta 3 series is now available to download. Below is the change log that goes over what's new versus the build from 2 weeks ago. Foreword  from the frog Beta 3 has been the faction differentiation beta and we will continue to refine the different factions between now and release. At this stage, each faction has some truly distinctive features that should make the game play experience different for each one. To recap: Magnar, home of the demon elves, can ...
September 17, 2012 by DerekPaxton
  Stardock's Art Director, Paul Boyer, will be working as a Game Designer on one of our projects.  Paul has been around forever and has a ton of experience.  At Stardock we believe that "everyone is on the design team" so just because Paul was the Art director before didn't mean that he didn't contribute to the design of every game he has worked on.  He has been a great asset to me and is second only to Brad in people I ask for feedback on FE design ideas. &...
August 14, 2012 by DerekPaxton
  Important Note: If you get an error trying to run after updating please check the following fix:  https://forums.elementalgame.com/429402     Features Added a new tile yield, Essence. Essence is the limit for how many enchantments that city can support as well as modifying some improvements (Clerics lower Unrest by 5% per Essence) and enchantments (Inspiration gives +1 research per Essence), or enabling some Improvements (you can't build a G...
June 29, 2012 by DerekPaxton
Beta 4   Beta 4 focuses on cities.  But that really means it focuses on the games pace.  Production, economy and research come from your cities.  When we change them we change the game.  First let's talk about a few of the design issues we have been wrestling with: 1.            Lack of city specialization.  Materials and Food are okay, but in general you want to build the same things in every city,...
May 3, 2012 by DerekPaxton
    We did a lot of work on the AI this week (and by we, I mean Brad) and made some significant changes.  I even had to ask Brad to tone down the aggressiveness based on a game where I got dragged down and beat like the Goonie kids, if they'd accidently wandered into the Hellraiser movies*.   But the trouble with testing the AI in a game that contains as many moving parts as FE is that it can be very situational.  It also has a lot to do with balance.  Som...
April 20, 2014 by DerekPaxton
  This will be a fun week for Legendary Heroes.  On Tuesday we will be release the 1.6 patch as well as updated to the Quest, Loot and Dead World DLC.  Overall this is a balance patch based on lots of playing (this is a process that can go on forever in games like this).  But we also have a few good things in store. There is a fix that improves the randomness of item generation which is a significant fix, especially if you have the DLC’s (the more items you have, ...
May 19, 2013 by DerekPaxton
The full story of Legendary Heroes is a long one, but it started with a promise.  In November of 2010 War of Magic had shipped, it wasn't doing well and Brad promised to provide 2 free expansions to anyone who had purchased it.  This is a very unusual thing for a company to do, but as an outsider it impressed me that Stardock was that committed to their games and their customers. So I went to Michigan to meet with Brad and I accepted a job at Stardock making video games for a li...
February 4, 2013 by DerekPaxton
    What is Legendary Heroes? It's an expansion for Fallen Enchantress that adds the following: 1. A new Champion progression system.  Instead of random traits your champions have a trait tree that they can use to select traits as they level  up, grow your champions the way you want. 2. The ability to recruit special non-human champions.  Champions aren't just humans anymore.  Rare opportunities or quests may unlock champions of various mons...
October 31, 2012 by DerekPaxton
  Happy Halloween from all the folks at Stardock.
October 9, 2012 by DerekPaxton
>   As you may know, we've set a release date for Fallen Enchantress. It's October 23, 2012. These past two years have been quite a journey. When I joined Stardock, I asked Brad how much freedom I would have with the Elemental universe.  Could I make it a new and different game than War of Magic? He said, "Do whatever needs to be done, take whatever time it needs, make a great game." He meant it and that brings us to where we are now. Fallen Enchantress isn&#...