Releases March 17, 2026
Journals
Dev Journal
Tactical Combat discussion continuation
Originally, Elemental was going to have continuous turn combat. That effectively meant real-time. Ultimately, after playing around with it, we decided to implement turn based (simultaneous turns based on combat speed) with tiles. The evolution of tactical combat in Elemental owes a lot to the beta program. 9 Months of public beta testing of the game engine with corresponding debates has led to some important changes that would not have happened otherwise. A lot... [read more]
Dev Journal
Elemental: Beta 1 retrospective
This is going to be long. I beg for forgiveness up front. So for those of you just tuning in, Elemental has just completed a marathon 8 month Beta 1 cycle. The purpose of which was to explore all kinds of new game mechanics and try different things out. It went so well that in our next game, I’d like to bring the beta people in even earlier. For Beta 1, we stripped out the graphics engine forcing users to play on a “cloth map” interface. We went through considerable l... [read more]
Dev Journal
Explaining what Elemental is to people
During the past couple weeks of heavy *playing* Elemental (as opposed to just coding) I’ve come to the conclusion that Elemental is very different than any strategy game I’ve played before. It’s different in a very very good way. But that is going to be a challenge for “marketing”. The Technical Game play Difference In my view, Elemental is simply the natural evolution of PC strategy gaming IF PC games were being made explicitly for the PC still as opposed to cross pl... [read more]
Dev Journal
Elemental – coding coding coding
Lots going on this week. I’m scheduled to fly out on Monday on a media tour to start showing off Elemental in preparation for its anticipated release date late Summer. Here are some of the things being worked on in preparation for beta 2. Memory use. We’re consolidating our mapping of how every byte of memory is used in the game. Performance. We’re setting things up so that we can begin handing over builds to the full QA lab for compatibility ... [read more]
Dev Journal
If Stardock were a real company, a guy like me wouldn’t be allowed to put up dirty laundry like I’m about to put up. For those of you who know me, I’m a bean counter. It’s probably why I love strategy games so much because tactics are for amateurs, logistics is for experts. So one of my ongoing angst with the Elemental budget overall is just how large a percentage of the budget thus far has gone into “modder tools”. Don’t get me wrong, I love modding. But in my day, moddin... [read more]
Dev Journal
Please don’t get mad when beta 2 comes out
There is quite a bit of concern (mostly from marketing) that people will be angry when beta 2 comes out because of how much we crippled the betas. I hope those of you in the beta understand why we did what we did with the betas. Elemental is a new game. It’s been many years since there’s been a new fantasy strategy game made from scratch. As a result, it was important to us that we not rely on 3D graphics or multiplayer in order for the game to have good game mechanics. Now,... [read more]
Dev Journal
Elemental: Good News Everyone!
After a lengthy meeting with the Network team, it was concluded that it would require a considerable amount of effort (read: expensive) to release beta 2 with it crippled (like beta 1 is) for the public. Therefore, Beta 2 and 3 are being combined so that from here on out, all builds will be the “full beta” (minus the Workshop mod options and campaign). This way, the network team doesn’t have to put a bunch of code in to turn off certain parts for the public build versus what we use ... [read more]