SorcererKing Forums
Just wondering what was in store for the future in the next patch and when we could expect it. Love this game, just wondering 
Well, they didn't even bother to tweet that they cancelled this week's dev stream
That kinda pissed me off
They announced a week or two ago that they would be ending for now.
What I'm wondering if whether support has ended, and whether there will be no expansion (I'd understand if no expansion- it didn't sell well, but I'd want to know now if that's the case)
Also will LH 2.0 be finished.
I call B.S. on that. On the last stream barely two weeks ago, they said they were going to be doing a three week long stream on modding the game.
And if it's true that they stopped, Stardock has gotten the last of my money.
I'm a bit annoyed that they've said next to nothing about SK, put a beta version of LH 2.0 out and haven't finished it, and seem to be way too stretched thin to get anything done.
I'm losing a bit of faith here, too.
WELL, there is ashes, and gal civ III is still actively being tweaked, i would guess SK is a bit in the bored zone at the moment, May take a while to come back to it, or figure out it's not worth doing much else with it at this point.
A pity. I prefer LH over SK. I don't play either now as SK needs work. If it did not sell well then why bother? Too bad they didn't further refine LH, it was great.
Oh well, I guess it's back to RTS...
Yeah happy starcraft day, in 2 minutes
Well, they have. LH is in a 2.0 beta right now.
Well, they have. LH is in a 2.0 beta right now
Yes, I meant another expansion. Every year for a decade!
SK can be great too.
Thete is little economic incentive to allocate resources on something that generates little or no revenue.
So, it may be a while before they do anything with SK.
Incorrect. They don't just blindly make a release then budget for updates on the fly. Before releasing a game, if Frogboys comments towards LH and galciv are of any indication, they always have a budget set aside for updates until a certain point. If they do not support a product fully after launch, regardless of its performance, they will lose customers and their reputation. Regardless, I'm not sure where you guys are getting this whole ''didn't sell well'' stuff. I can't imagine sales of SK were much different than LH which was the third installment and still got support till 2.0.
I didn't say, they've abandoned SK, but they have certainly put it on the bottom of the pile.
Furthermore, a budget is just a reflection of what management would like to do. If circumstances change, if unforeseen events occur, or revenue projections don't meet expectations, management will adjust it's priorities to maximize it's revenue or minimize it's SG&A.
Finally, it's been general knowledge for a while that SK didn't sell as well as they had hoped. Straight from the horses mouth...you just missed it.
well... if the devs aren't going to invest a lot into the game I do think some mods can fix a lot of the numerous balance issues which make the replayability not as high as it could be
although if you have more fundamental problems with the game, maybe there's little hope
the cool thing about SK is that you don't have to make the AI understand anything when you change the stats of stuff. it'll just work
these types of things are probably solvable just by changing some numbers:
it's been a while since I've played the game, so i don't remember the name of everything that's way too strong/weak, but here's some examples:
archers were basically useless on insane difficulty. a lot of the units (even special ones for different sovereigns or from quests) were really underwhelming compared to paladins. it made maps with the prerequisite paladin resources (i think metal + crystal) way too easy and maps without those way too hard.
clould walk eliminated most of the challenge in the game. it could probably cost 5 times as much and still be a must-have. paired with that ability which let you move twice, it basically broke the game.
raising mountains might also be way too cost-effective compared to actually making real defenses.
the city aura enchantments were too good, especially when a city has lots of essence slots. maybe these could grant something like (10 + 1*N) instead of (3*N) in additional stats where N = number of essences.
the dwarf hero had this move which teleports all enemies next to him and then he could spin around and hit all of them and then take an extra action. there was no reason not to get that as soon as possible.
the guardian's ability to make outposts cover 81 tiles instead of 25 was also something i got very early every all the time.
Yeah, sorry about that one, which was actually my call...I got crunched suddently and had to use that time to get something out the door 
Right now the core SK team has been spread onto other vital projects (Ashes and CEO stuff for Brad, Ashes and a mystery project for me, mystery project and LH for Charles, secret GC3 stuff for Jonny and Rich). These wont take forever, though, and we can jump back onto SK with fresh eyes and a renewed vigor
In the meantime, I'll keep focusing on Modding on the streams, so join us with any questions you may have!
Do tell! Isn't Charles one of your AI guys at Stardock? (Or did I hear that incorrectly on the stream yesterday?)
If so, is he working on some AI stuff in LH, or is he working on back porting some more SK stuff to LH? Either one would sound great!
Well, I can work on units first since that is what I'm working on currently. I'll be releasing Version 2 of my unit mod sometime soon which will tweak some of the player units. There are lots of ways to improve the units simply through giving them some of the abilities in the game. Examples:
[*] Soldiers now gain the Defender1_Level ability (higher defense when defending).
[*] Pikemen now gain the Endurance1 ability (gain additional HP per level).
[*] Archers now gain the ArmorPiercing ability.
[*] Sentinels gain the Swordsman ability (increasing their counterattack damage).
The game, unfortunately unsurprisingly for many of us, tanked.
You can check the status of the game at Gamespy, and it's not healthy.
When you put two elements which typical 4X gamers hate the most (timer, little AI interaction), it is not going to sell well.
It's a shame if it tanked. There are some interesting ideas there, and it's fun to play in parts, but I'd have to agree it isn't as fun to play as Legendary Heroes, and some of the design choices are a bit odd. The strangest thing for me is to make things simpler and then to come up with the most mind-bogglingly complicated crafting system I've ever seen, especially for making basic equipment for your normal troops.
I'm not sure if simpler was necessarily the way to go; I wouldn't have thought it's really the target market, but if you do want to make things simpler it's surely not a good plan to replace micromanaging new unit types with micromanaging armour production.
I enjoy playing it, I'd played Legendary Heroes to death, and Sorcerer King is quite challenging, especially with the recent improvements in AI. It's certainly a quicker game to play than Legendary Heroes. The roleplaying elements are the best part, there are a lot of quests, and I had great fun playing as the Tyrant and deliberately being a bit of a bad guy for once. The biggest problem is the lack of replay value and variety. The different leaders do play surprisingly differently, but you still know pretty much exactly how the end game is going to go. Level up your heroes with quests and then when you have good enough heroes and as many Paladins as possible send them off to attack the Sorcerer King; game over. Building up cities is not particularly interesting, and the lack of variety in troops means that there's not really much point building anything except Paladins at the end. You can try building ranged troops, for example, but their low hit points means it's very hard to keep them alive.
Whether the Doomsday Clock was a good idea or not I don't know, but at least it makes a change. Playing on Fast forces me to push harder and attack with smaller armies, making battles more interesting, when normally I would build up an unstoppable force and then sometimes not lose a unit in the final assault.
Of course it took several years and several iterations before Legendary Heroes became as good as it did. I'll be interested to see what they do with Sorcerer King. I assume it wasn't incredibly expensive to make, as its game core is clearly taken from Legendary Heroes. I don't know if they'll keep working on Sorcerer King in the way they did with Elemental etc., or whether they'll decide to cut their losses and take some of the best ideas and put them into a new game; Legendary Heroes 2 with crafting and more roleplaying, for example.
When you say "You can check the status of the game at Gamespy", what do you mean? I couldn't find anything. Do you have a link?
For me, the most disappointing thing, is the clear lack of follow through with the lore. You had a lot of wonderful sites and things in LH (at least from the little I found having gotten it recently) but then none of that makes an appearance in SK without playing the campaign. I also think they could have done a better job editing the units because there is so much room for improvement there.
And of course, I'd say how I wish they allowed the steam workshop integration, which would make it easier to mod and get things out there for people.
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