Hey guys. I'm an enthusiastic player of Elemental, and like creating custom groups and such, but I've done some looking around in the game and existing mods and it's pretty much bogged down in a strict Tolkienesque good vs evil. That Lovecraftian-type Lizardman mod idea sounds interesting but I haven't downloaded it yet, mainly because I've been playing Sins of a Solar Empire's Maelstrom mod incessantly.
A mundane tech tree needn't be boring, despite the name. Nor, at least in my opinion, should it be restricted to steampunk. I can envision two mundane tech trees - they'd still need a Sovereign with his/her magic and the bloodline - but aside from the dynasty and any champions, a strong anti-magic philosophy for both would be needed. Also, although usually such is restricted to humans only, I would at least like to see the Quendar and Wraith as optional for these as well.
One competing idea is your standard steampunk fantasy faction. Da Vinci's scripts merged with Tesla-inspired mad science and such. The other idea, derived from an IMNSHO good idea nonetheless scrapped in the game Heroes of Might and Magic III after the fanboys of that franchise got irate out it, circled around an artefact ingame called the Heavenly Forge (in a game called Might and Magic VII: For Blood and Honour, and whose activation was part of the Evil Ending of that game), that was supposed to give relatively futuristic equipment (however this would very much need to be finely balanced) to a typical fantasy evil overlord (Might and Magic apparently liked the science fiction-meets-fantasy genre like I do - I never played the games however, was a bit young back then, my being 23 years old as of the time of posting). I know the steampunk civ would be readily embraced, but the semi-future one a little less so. So I'd basically phrase the semi-futuristic stuff as "fantasy world version of Galactic Civilisations II's Thalan Empire", and it would be balanced to have more of a fantastical aesthetic (archery, but futuristic fantasy crossbows like the Archer Maiden unit from Red Alert 3: Uprising, for instance - sorry to invoke an example from a game by Electronic Arts but I couldn't think of similar ideas elsewhere...) The steampunk architecture could be Victorian Gothic, or whatever else would fit. The futuristic guys would be more Art Deco, I think.
As for the terrain-warping, I'd say the steampunk factions would make dirty-looking deserts, not like the Fallen ones, more just ordinary pollution and soot, as per real-world industrialism (1880s London, 20th century Detroit, etc). The futuristic guys could make the terrain colder through some sort of ingame explanation - generators in the cities that make the land more arctic, so their futuristic machinery can work better (maybe needing persistently cold weather to more efficiently cool their machinery, so a generator starts drawing heat away).
I'd definitely make stuff like this myself, except for one problem - while I can understand the basics of scripting, the sort of project I am putting forward is far beyond my abilities, also I have some real-life hard decisions and such I am also going to be facing following the Christmas break, so I don't think I'd be doing any of this myself - I'm a storywriter, not a programmer. So, I am simply suggesting this idea; anyone or any group who can, I allow them to use these ideas as their own, since I derived the futuristic-type idea from the Might and Magic universe anyway, and steampunk is, well, anyone's game these days.
What do guys think of these ideas anyway?
