Release is coming up, and it seems that things are just in the polish stage at this point. But...what if you could have one more feature added before release? What would it be? Personally, I would like to concentrate on things that can't be modded in or modded easily.
If we had more time, the main thing I would add would be:
Provide more interesting choices. It has been said that a good game is ultimately a series of interesting choices made by the player. Right now, Elemental has some...but not enough. Entire turns can go by without any interesting decisions being forced on the player. Things aren't dynamic enough, and there isn't enough to do. I'm all for keeping things simple, as long as simple is still interesting. Right now I worry that the gameplay in Elemental may be too simple. We don't need dozens of crazy stats that ultimately don't mean anything. However, more random events, dynamic quests, dynamic NPCs and groups, more things to deal with such as city morale, etc...this wouldn't be that hard to add in as the basic mechanics of these sorts of things could probably be handled by a modified quest system. Games like Civ, Europa Uni, King Arthur, etc, etc...they all have much more of this sort of thing and it lets the player do more, make more choices, and for me, it is more fun. My hope is that we will be able to mod this sort of thing in, and I can see ways to do it based on my limited knowledge of what will be needed to mod Elemental. So if we had more time, I would like to see this, but I think the community might be able to handle it...
However, some things might be hard to mod in. Based on that, my one last wish, based on Beta 4:
Make buildings and locations more interesting and interactive. Right now, buildings are just stat boosters, really. When I build an awesome world wonder...it is just a stat boost. This makes cities dull and generic. I want buildings to matter more and be interactive. So if I send a hero to a neutral ancient temple, have it provide a quest, or let him get a bonus from being there. If the hero is in a city, let him go to a building and maybe it will generate a quest or give him a bonus while he is there. Have many more neutral heroes wandering the map, and have them visit buildings too. So if I build the library world wonder, it will draw in famous scholars and mages. If I build the great market, it will draw in merchant NPCs and caravans. If I build a Tavern, it will attract adventurers looking for quests. If I build a palace and have my Sovereign stay in it, I will get a bonus to prestige or diplomacy or something like that. I think this would be a huge step towards making Elemental more in line with the vision of a living fantasy world, and less of the static situation we have now. I don't know how something like this could be modded without insane amounts of scripting (maybe), so I would love to see something like it added now.
So...what one thing would you like added before release?
