Releases March 17, 2026
Journals
Dev Journal
The Design a Spell contest was launched today. I'm excited to see your ideas. I know a lot of people will want baselines to create within, after all its hard to design an implementable spell if you don't know exactly what can be done. But I encourage you to forget the technical limitations for the moment and just design spells that you would love to play with. Sure it means that some great ideas might not make it to the final 5 because they aren't pr... [read more]
News
Elemental “Design a Spell” Contest!
We are excited to announce a new contest for Elemental: War of Magic! The “Design a Spell” contest gives you the player the chance to have a spell included in an upcoming update, and a chance to win some really cool prizes like an ATI video card! Submit your own spell and the top 5 chosen by the contest moderators will be posted and the community will vote on a winner. First Place: ATI Radeon™ HD 5850 1GB graphics card AND have your spell implemented into Elemental: War... [read more]
Dev Journal
Fixing the Zone of Control (Influence)
The Zone of control (ZOC) code has always been a bit odd since it was written for GalCiv2, with weird little bubbles, twists, etc. But it mostly worked in GC2, and I didn't have time to give it a lot of love when porting it to the new engine. The code to update the ZOC is also fairly inefficient, which is why it only updates at the end of a turn. The ZOC expands based on the influence of the city and the player's influence ability. It works by specifying a source, which has a power and a ... [read more]
Dev Journal
The longest part of my day is waking up to early to head into the Stardock office. I'm anxious to get back to work. What a great job. I spent yesterday helping to make the spells more exciting, but so far my focus has been on process. We will create a consistent design, we will document that design, we will march toward implementing that design. Flexibility is important in creating games, if something isn't working it has to go, but we... [read more]
Dev Journal
Brad’s reign of terror ends
Greetings! My reign of terror has come to an end. Now, Kael’s reign of terror begins. I’m not disappearing entirely but after v1.1, Derek Paxton (Kael) will be calling the shots on the day to day on the game and design implementation (at Stardock, the Project Manager aka Producer is the god of the game). I’ll be returning to my traditional role at Stardock on our games (AI and high level design input). We’re working to get a beta of v1.1 out the door as soon as pos... [read more]
News
Gaming Nexus Interview with Derek “Kael” Paxton
GamingNexus.com has a new interview up with Stardock’s Derek Paxton aka Kael about his new role at Stardock and Elemental: War of Magic. First off congrats on the new gig. Why did you choose to go to Stardock? Could you talk about what your role is going to be and what your day to day duties are going to be? I choose Stardock because they focus on the types of games I love to design and play, PC strategy games. Since Stardock is both the developer and publisher they make th... [read more]
Dev Journal
Today we’re talking about different ways we can streamline the creation of resources. A long time ago, we wanted to put in a system where I could mine ore which could be turned into ingots and so on. Basically, one resource being turned into another resource. [read more]