You can make alcohol and hallucinogenic drugs from bits o' cactus. From your post, I'm pretty sure you already know this though.

Those cactus looks like earthling ones but are not the same. There. Mystery solved. Next week: "Space Cows. Why and where?"

(in any case, educative/informative post, landisaurus... )

Landisaurus, you clearly have too much time.

Go outside. Breathe. Throw some balls. Go swim.
Just do something!

Edit: Don't listen to him! It's just a clever ruse to generate karma!

Well, that and the casti appear to be encircling a dungeon or aritfact, so it's also possible that we are dealing with the great Cavern of the Cactus..... or that essence revitalization results in irregular plant growth.

Maybe because its not zoomed in all the way you can't see the smaller plants at the base of the cacti?

When I looked at the first picture in your post, Landi, I thought that was going to be your point - that 50 foot-tall cacti, especially in ruined land, is not OK. And that I completely agree with. However, I don't care if saguaro cacti only survive in one tiny part of the game. If they called the cacti Saguaro and included a biological description and summary of necessary environmental conditions for them to grow in-game, then I might be a bit annoyed to see them growing like weeds in every desert I see. But as it stands, this is a fantasy game, with fantasy people, fantasy animals, and fantasy plants. If some of those fantasy plants happen to look like Saguaro cacti, so be it.

I still like your point about having a difference between fertile/unfertile and terrain type. It'd be really cool if there were unfertile and fertile varieties of every terrain type, so you don't necessarily turn vast field of sand dunes into lush grassland.

Oh, and:

The scientific definition of a desert is an area that receives on average less than 250 millimeters of rainfall each year. So... they are not misnamed deserts, they are definitely deserts. In fact, most deserts are not covered in those stereotypical sand dunes we always see - they are often rocky, and they are often covered with low, hardy vegetation. I have been in many deserts like this, and let me tell you they feel very deserty - they might not get crazy sand storms like in the Sahara or parts of the Gobi, but they dry you out into a prune very quickly. The Gobi is often portrayed as Land of the Sand Dunes, but in fact only about 3% of it is covered in those big, sweeping dunes.

tundras like antartica are totally called deserts.   If you search "cold desert" its one of the 1st places that comes up.

they are misnamed "deserts"  because the term suggests that it is "desert" and the term "desertification" describes when land is being converted into the stereotypical sandy-dune type places.  So like the Arizona deserts suffer from "desertification".  Yes there is a definition of "desert" that fits Arizona... that is why its called a desert, but the word itself is missleading.  There is more than one definition to it.

(another misnamed thing would include the mississippi...   it should be the missouri river from St. Louis south, its just explorers found the mississippi and labeled it as such on all the maps down to New Orleans long before they explored west of it to discover the missouri is actually longer)

Well, one thing I wanted to point out is... normal cacti don't really look like that (when I say normal, I mean cacti not found in the Americas).  They look more like Agave with many bodies coming from a single source:

or just bizzar

But we usually think of American cactus.

When I think of cacti, I think of prickly pear.  A bitch of a cactus they are, those little hair like spines will bury themselves in anything.  You can't even use gloves around them, all you do is find the spines later instead of immediately...

Elemental: Even the Cacti are given consideration.

that is exactly my point.  It isn't unpopulated or abandoned.  A "desert" able to support cactus has to be VERY populated, and in the case of the desert that holds saguaro, more populated than most temperate forests (going on a number of different species per area rather than pure density of seperate entities, 'cause you can't compete with grass).   "desertification" turns areas into sandy-unpopulated areas, and happens no matter what temerature it is.  Sand and dust is a natural by-product of loss of plant life.  If all the plants in an area start dying, the land naturally converts to desert (see dust-bowl).   It has nothing to do with temperature.   Cacti don't live in "abandoned places", wich is what the screenshot seems to suggest.  The above pictures of African Cacti exist in "prairies" (savanas) by their standards. 

when explorers were traveling westword they had already named the plains a "prairie" and so when they hit real deserts (or just prairies that appeared to have less life than the midwest) they called it a desert.  So the southwest was blindly labeled "desert" because it looked less life-ful than the "prairies" of the midwest, when in fact most of them were more.  If you compare to African prairies, most american "deserts" are freaking gardens.  And I'm not even talking about the Sonoran desert, much of the great basin (thats Nevada) and...  chibihaun? something like that (Texas and new mexico) are only "deserts" by record of rainfall.  The latin word "abandoned place" does not describe places where cacti grow, so they are misnamed.

Point of case:   "This does not work" refers to the association of cacti to "abandoned place" deserts.  Most hot and dry North America "deserts" are misnamed, and Stardock should not make the mistake of including cacti in unfertile deserts.

If Stardock is going to have places where cacti grow, they should be hot-fertile lands (and if flat, they should be called prairies or savanas, even though that is now what fits common American usage of the term).   And they should most certainly include prickly pear or beaver tail looking cacti.  

Its true...   Mars still has some landforms we are not sure entirely certain how formed.    In the case of my supreme commander rant, my problem is African Unbrella trees evolved the way they did because they don't live where saguaro cactus...   honestly I guess though, its only reasonable to just throw random species from around the world together if you're going to base it on earth life at all.  At the same time, if you're going to have something that LOOKS like earth life, then one can only assume it evolved in a similar way.

Horses?   you mean like pink space ponies?    My theory is that they were earth horses that developed some means of flight.   The pink color is a result of limited breeding pool (only a few escaped earth and were able to find life outside the Sol - solar system).

oh those horses!  (sorry, I don't know where my mind is)

don't forget worves, spiders, and... bears?    how exactly DID all those survive?   I kinda assumed the "world of Elemental" was just something like alternate reality earth considering the life-forms found on it.   The cataclysm would have messed up the plates creating new continents.   New creatures such as the "yeti" or whatever could be explained as a result of the cataclysm as well, the combination of unchanneled magical energies ripping apart a world + the suddenly empty niches in the newly reconstructed ecosystems.  Sudden evolutionary changes are common with major disastors that would create new environmental factors to which creatures must adapt.

Master of Magic had it right... the world of arcanas looked more or less like earth, however the alternate looked alien and held all the truely inhuman races.

To bad this isn't earth game. It's a fantasy game and anything can grow anywhere in abundance in a fantasy world. I can't believe the OP wasted all that time for NOTHING as nobody but a geek moron would even care what castus they put in the game and where.