As of right now I love the concept of elemental and what I see will be a great game in the future once a few things are fleshed out.
In my opinion here is why I believe that Elemental is lacking in some respects.
1st - Magic - The magic in elemental is severely lacking. I personally cant speak for the majority of people that purchased this game but for me I was expecting it to be a spiritual successor to master of magic. What made MOM great was that it focused on MAGIC and had varied spell trees that each had its advantages and disadvantages. So far right now elemental only has a few spells per tree and lets face it they for the most part are all copies of the other spells. For instance you have a handfull of summon spells, a few direct damage spells, some terrain altering spells etc.. but nothing that really stands out as cool besides the flood and volcano spell. What I would like to see is perhaps revisiting MOM and using their spells as a template for success with very fleshed out spell trees and with each one being different.
2nd - Unit Abilities - We need to see more of these. Every fantasy based Turn Based strategy games has tons of unit abilities, yet in Elemental they are woefully lacking. Suggestion go through MOM and Age of Wonders and look at all of the abilities that they have and start coding in a few.
3rd- Lack of Units - See above. I personally would like to see many more creatures in the game yet all I see here are a few creatures such as Darklings, some lizards, wolves, spiders, elementals, dragons and a demon. What ever happened to undead, elves, dwarves, dryands, unicorns, werewolves etc.. and the list goes on and on.
4th - Lack of documentation when it comes to modding - Most of the modding that I have done so far is through poking around the files and figuring out things myself. What we need is a list of all of the variables, effects etc.. in the game and some basic tutorials on how to use the map editor, tile editor etc..
5th - And last I really hate micromanagement... hate it with a passion... So why am I forced to look at reports and dictate how my faction allocates its research or what spells to learn? Seriously this is work for secretaries and advisors not some wannabe despot. Some suggestions to the researching includes. Allowing the computer to pick which spell to research next, or when we click on research spell level it just researches all the spells in that level. As for technology I would love to see us have the ability to split our resource points into other technologies instead of it being all or nothing like it is now. Also there should be an option to hide research reports so that we dont have to look at them every screen.
