Really.  What I think is important is to avoid looking for flaws in phrasing or taking obscure alternate meanings and interpretations from statements.  No doubt you will find such flaws, especially if you look hard enough, but in so doing you'd be disputing the writer's intent.   And that would seem to be at cross-purposes with what you're looking for.

If you've a question or misunderstanding about anything I wrote, ask me a question.  But please don't pick & choose bits & pieces to shore up your original concern, if in so doing you're changing the meaning and intent of what I wrote.

Example:

I never said - or tried to say - "mods will fix it".  What I said was that I'd assumed Ele will have an official campaign (with it's own 'lore').  And, of course, if you don't want to run the OC, you will need to make your own.  Can you think of any other possibility?  I can't - because at this point I am not aware of any tech that can auto-generate a milieu for you.  Maps, yes.  Lore, no.

Another example:

Why did you latch on to my use of the word "units"?  You wrote, "Brad has expressly said - even in recent dev journals - that the game doesn't ship with units because you create them from equipment during the game."  If you're trashing my whole response because of a pedantic way of describing the unit assets that ship with the game, then replace the word "units" with "stuff".  My meaning remains unchanged, and you can now move on to the gist of the response.  Win-Win.

But I'm pretty sure that your core statement about the game ("doesn't ship with units") makes no sense at all.  But please link me with anything that supports your statement, or your interpretation of Brad's statements, because I definitely want to sort out whatever misunderstanding there may be (even if it's me that is misinterpreting things).

I'll try to rephrase though - the game will ship with bits and bytes that, working together, will form units.  And if you don't like those units you can make new ones.  Is that better?   Again, I'm not aware of any tech that auto-generates lore, so if you don't want or like what ships with the game out-of-box for your sand-box play, you're alternative is to create them with the tools provided.  Perhaps create them without any pre-made official lore at all.

It seems like there's a lot of noise in this thread derived from confused and conflicting vocabulary, and probably also by some assumptions that might be more common to those of us who've played GalCiv2 vs. those who haven't.

When I typed above about plotlines vs. story elements, I had a (possibly erroneous) assumption in mind that the 'normal' game of Elemental will be a sandbox mode at least roughly similar to GalCiv2's 'normal' game. I'm pretty much stumped by the phrase "regular campaign" in your larger discussion because my impression of "campaign" in the TBS context is nothing other than a 'forced' plotline version of a sandbox game.

Aesir Rising - I don't know how to link directly to dev journals (I imagine they're in the forum somewhere but the software really hates Chrome), but the journal dated July 23 (the Elemental FAQ) involves a reiteration of the statements I had in mind regarding units.

Q: Will there be priests?

A:  We do not include pre-built units.  What players choose to call their units is up to them. However, a channeler can choose to imbue a unit with essence that makes him or her able to cast spells.  However, players won’t simply be building armies of priests and clerics.  Those who cast spells are rare and special and lethal.

As they've demonstrateed previously and discussed (especially with regard to combat) it seems that units of troops are defined by equipment selected (hats, swords etc) and level of training (veterancy etc) and not chosen from a list.  Thus the game doesn't ship with units, because it's a toolbox to create more.

I didn't intend to appear to 'focus' on this part of your reply (and indeed also mention buildings) but I had recently skimmed the dev journals and so this quote was fresh in my mind.  Again, I'm not really clear on how the lore is supposed to inform or work with sandbox mode - simpy that that is what it appeared to me that Brad was suggesting.  Others don't see the post the way I do, however, so things will doubtless become more clear as time goes on.

My concern was brought about by an more recent journal, the 'Elemental Story Update' on 6th August which you quoted above.  Brad talks about the story (for campaign mode presumably) and then says that the 'scriptable engine allows each so-called sandbox game to have a truly unique life of its own because there’s just such a massive amount of lore to tap into'.  The scriptable content system is good (it drives the quests, world events, and other things I imagine) because it makes sandbox more interesting and different each time - but this suggested to me that it was somehow based on the story (from campaign and the book, the background lore, etc).  

It's not a huge problem if it's like GalCiv2, where the 'story' was limited to flavour text for technologies and particular popups given per race - however this sounded to me like the sandbox mode was going to be generating lore-based stuff with the scripting engine.

Thankfully it will have an interface, unlike DF, so this possible detail will be usable by mortals.

That is the kind of dynamic scripted stuff I certainly thought of earlier in development; I'm concerned that it'll be -too- specific to whatever story the campaign has, while I'd prefer sandbox to be totally divorced.

I actually really hope the scripted stuff works as you describe, since Brad has been eager to get that kind of dynamic story event thing going for a while.  Dynamic, changing and connected?  Good, excellent even.  Restricted by story? Bad.  Infodumps about story?  Bad.

As an extreme example, it'll suck if you see a forest called 'Dreadwood' and thus, by experience, know what is likely to be in there, because of 'the lore'.

It's a lot easier to strip out lore that someone doesn't want then it is to add lore that other people do want. Especially if the modding system allows for custom events.

I don't think there's a lot of fear of the game turning into an interactive story book, the whole point of a game like this is that it's a big sandbox. Adding in events, landmarks, and elements based on a coherent story rather then random stuff the developer thought up (like Civ 4's "build 8 colisieums in your 6 city empire" type quests) is an improvement.

The issue with your statement is twofold however.

1: "We will mod it out" is such a bad fallback. I'm paying for a game that I like from the get-go, not the "privelege" of fixing it.

2: The problem with a coherent story focus is that each game now has far fewer ways to be unique. I'd just rather they worked on an awesome content generation system then wrote a book. I must be a bad person.

Ok, thats fine. My issue is with anyone who thinks it will be fun to play using the exast same lore everytime. Ill give you an example:

Game A: Bill the paladin raids a cave. The treasure in said cave is Giovanni's Sword, a +2 sword of healing or something. The player sighs privately to himself... out of the last 5 games hes seen this sword 3 times. Nothing changes about it, and he's starting to feel deja-vu... afterall, hes just a player in a story thats always the same, maybe the locations and map has changed, but theres that sword... again.

Game B: Bill the paladin raids a cave. The treasure in said cave is Giovanni's healing Sword, a +2 sword of healing. The player is intrigued, even though he has seen healing swords before this one looks new and has a new name. The reality is that in the last 5 games, hes gotten 3 +2 healing swords, but he doesn't realize this because hes so involved in his own lore. The "giovanni" tag was pulled at random from a list of 1000+ names, attached to the healing adjective due to its properties, and presto! instant original lore.

You could argue that since there isn't any backing lore that it takes away, but hardly a handfull of people care about the reasoning behind thier gameing. Most people just want to game.

That's an interesting sentiment - adding a toggle would be hard.  You'd think making certain game elements optional would be pretty easy (aside from critical mechanics, anyway).  I've often thought that in many cases - particularly 'realism' - many features should always be optional, to prevent driving away certain players. 

For instance, I wanted a really complex econ model, because I've hated simplistic crap for twenty years of Civilization.  Obviously this isn't for everyone.

The biggest flaw of Sins of the Solar Empire is that there is no story.

It's not so hard, just look at Dawn of War 2 and SW: Empire at War, all it takes is some very reusable character animation windows and voice acting, and story of course.

But I get the feeling that Starcraft 2 will greatly upgrade the standards of how the story is done in strategy games, in terms of scope, replayability and non-linearity.

It's a tricky balance. On the one hand, if the Tower of Time is always the same, then it gains a certain legitimacy. It's The Tower of Time, officially and canonically. That would be really awesome, but it does lead to the problem of knowing what to expect because you've seen it before. Randomizing everything would solve that, but then the "Tower of Time" is just another tower. It doesn't mean anything.

Is there a way to have the best of both worlds?

One thing that just occurred to me is that we don't know when the names pop up on the map. What if you didn't learn the name of a map object until you explored it? You could find a tower, but you wouldn't know which tower until you get to the top. That prevents you from knowing what to expect by memory, but still allows for fun moments like, "That was the Tower of Time? Oh. Oh my."