Good thing Elemental is a single player focused game then, that allows player freedom and imagination. The devs have made it clear since day one that is where the focus is.
That is all well and good... right up until you finish the campaign. Then what? It isn't like your staunch refusal to see it will just make Multiplayer go away. It isn't tinkerbell, you can't disbelieve it out of existence.
MP keeps people coming back to the trough. And limits on what any one character can achieve is what makes the game interesting.
That is why fallout 3 was such a freaking snooze. You were 'free' to chose whatever you wanted... but the 'right' choices became painfully obvious and dominated the playscape of the game. It was sad to be honest.
Your argument is flawed. You are saying that because some abilities are more useful than others, people should be forced to chose bundles of inferior abilities. The far preferable solution is to address the inferior abilities, not to force people to play cookie cutter templates that artificially spread the useful abilities around, and limit player choice. Id rather see a list of abilities that are all useful.
If it were really the character "classes" themselves which were so good, once again, there's nothing under the classless system that prevents you from creating those "classes". On the other hand, a class system keeps you from visualizing some character concepts, like an assassin/healer priest, who worships the concept of holy judgment, and gives aid to the righteous, while stalking the wicked and poisoning him.
Elemental is a game deigned to give you the freedom to envision your own armies and narrative. The biggest problem is that the Soverigns need *more* options right now, and better ways to make generalization more costly, like increasing spellbook costs to keep people from having more than one or two, and to have more special abilities available. Likewise, the attributes right now are all more or less tied to combat. There should be stats and abilities that support more alternate strategies, like diplomacy. There are other ways to discourage overly effective generalization, than imposing a cookie cutter class system.
As for MP, even in class system games, it is inevitable that one class is *better* for MP than the other ones. It is inevitable that a few main strategies will rise to the forefront, each with "optimum" builds to support them. When that happens, the devs look at it, and make balance tweaks. There is no RTS or MMO that does not do this over the entire course of their lifetime. In the big picture, one could say that Elemental is *perfectly* balanced for MP, as at least players are free to make the exact same sovereigns and use the exact same strategies if they so choose.
Besides, even setting aside the fact that the game is single player focused, designed around player freedom, there are far better ways to address balance for what Stardock has determined time and again to be a *minority* MP audience for their turn based games, than to impose a rigid class system on the single player game. As you correctly say, expecting "balance" with custom characters is folly. There are far too many permutations to ever account for. "Official" multilayer matches should be limited to the stock kingdoms and sovereigns that *can* be reasonably balanced against each other. Allowing custom characters, content, and mods can be done, but any pretense to balance goes out the window.
I've yet to ever play the "campaign" in Gal Civ , btw. It is a sandbox game, and thats where the appeal is, sandbox mode. These games have almost infinite re playability, even without MP.
