There are some updated "big" mods available @ AoW Heaven. The 3in1 pack, which combines 3 big mods is also updated [10.3.2010]

Here is the link: http://aow2.heavengames.com/downloads/showfile.php?fileid=828

I am so happy you are the same PawelS,  your contribution to the AOWSM modding scene is invaluable.   

... a 3rd idea below.

When you capture a new town, you can utilize the population if the town is of same race as yours.   But if they are foreign to your race, the population is 0.    It does not mean they are all killed, it is just that you cannot use them at all.   That also implies you cannot produce units of a foreign race.

(To recap Frogboy,  there are a few races.  For each race, there are a few fractions belongs to it).

I'd like to be able to make a race of Flying Squirrels.

Rocky and Bowinkle meet the Dynasty system in Elemental... A race of flying squirrels?!?!?!

The most important thing about the factions is that they look and play differently.

It does feel like there are only two factions or playable choices right now, Men and Fallen. Capitar, Pariden etc. are not different enough, they are just a sub-faction of Men with some minor modifiers that might affect gameplay but not significantly so - they feel the same.

So indeed instead of focusing on Capitar and Tarth, I would focus on the race of Men and the race of Fallen (altough I would call it something else). An evil Sovereign who wants to build an empire could attract followers from either race. The game is all about the Sovereigns reshaping the destroyed world the way they want to. So let them corrupt the race of Men if that's what they want. All the more epic story. Rebuilding Tarth does not sound quite so exciting.

I'd like to see more Races than two, but certainly not any generic fantasy races. For example, I would rather have Sand People and Northmen, who would also be Men but look, feel and play completely different. And with the engine capable of dynamically altering the world, I could see the desert or snow covering the lands more as they gain influence.

The post apocalyptic setting also makes it possible for lots of "new" races to rise, so I would not miss on that opportunity. How about a race of mutated Ratmen who are now breeding faster than Men? They could be the result of a magical experiment to create a slave race and one of the evil Sovereigns could be responsible for that. We don't know much about the Fallen, perhaps something like this is to be expected?

 I can barely keep up with the threads at a minimal level and play the beta!

1) I also vote for more variety in the races.

2) Personally, I believe there should be more of a good/neutral/evil characteristic as well as style. One of the things of making an alliance of factions to fight "evil" is that unlike evil, all sides have a say. It wasn't hard for Nazi Germany to have "allies" as they just made them do it at gunpoint. England almost attacked Russia because of Russia attacking Finland in WWII. It took Pearl Harbor to get the U.S. involved in sending troops and not just material.

3) Occupying another city should be a lot tougher, recruiting them should be tougher still. Troops forced to fight for the occupiers of their homes tend to not be very enthusiastic about it. Those units should suffer penalties. There are plenty of historical examples of the problems of occupying territories and the problems were increased by different cultures, religions, and yes, skin color. Examples are plentiful even today still.

4) Refugees - a bliessing and a curse. Let's say we stick with men and the fallen. Cities of men falling to the fallen should spawn refugee units that leave to either form new cities to start over, or join another faction of men. Somehow I doubt if this were a real world and the undead took over a human city, the folks we be ok with living there. "Well Becky, they one fair and square. Not much we can do but toil for them and let them eat the children."

It's been mentioned before, but that poll is of pretty shakey value. I didn't even respond to it because I couldn't find enough information on the different factions to offer an intelligent response. Dwarves are "merchants of iron and blood', whatever that means. Not much of a basis for chooseing a favorite team. So with that grounding in ignorance I move on...

As I understand it you've basically got "Team life" and "Team death" which are supposedly not the same as good and evil, but who are you trying to kid anyway? At any rate each side has 5 sub-factions which are cultural differences for the good guys but mostly different races for the bad guys. Pretty stock stuff.

We already have a fair amount of control over our Sovereign in the same way we could build our own Wizard in MoM. If I understand this post it's suggesting that we should also be able to not merely select a starting race as in MoM but to build our own race from a palette of racial (eats rock, breathes fire) and cultural (efficient miners, fast breeders) traits. Yes, that's a cool option and I like it.

So there are three levels of playstyle customization right off that bat. Team Evil or team Good. Wizard. Race. I like it.

This is a terrible idea. Every 4x game that has different races maintains racial identities after conquests. MoM did it, AoW did it. Heck Moo2 did it. For that matter the civ games do it even when the difference is only cultural and not racial.

So I think it would be a jarring lack of an expected feature if Elemental is missing such a long standing part of the genre. It would also be completely immersion breaking in the basic setting. This is supposed to be a ravaged and half-dead world, so if I take over a city of demons, even if butchering them all is SOP where do I suddenly get 200,000 humans to repopulate the city when my own kingdom only had 35,000 people in it? Cultural conflict between conquering troops and occupied cities is a long standing part of the genre complete with racial and faction modifiers based on cultural hatreds. Why would you throw out such a rich tool for weaving your worlds backstory right into the mechanics of the game? If you want then using something like AoW racial migration option where the conquereing army has to sit on a revolting populace for a few years while you slowly to do to New Mordor what China is doing to Tibet then that makes more sense. Having magical options to ease tensions or even mass convert all the occupants of a city to a new race would also be cool.

But to chuck out all those cool gameplay and world reinforcing options even though they have been a core part of the genre since the beginning and were a core part of the game that directly inspired this one? Terrible idea.

i think there should be more different starting races...

it is true that most people probably want to create their own race BUT

- i also want to be able to acquire different races within my game

- i want to have different races as enemies

for me it would be tedious if i had to create several races in the beginning just to get some variety

i also think the current fractions are (at least from what i know so far) not distinctive enough... therefore i'd also prefer less but mor distinct races that serve the purpose of future customization better

for example use only maybe 2 different human races (warroirs / mages) and add a dwarf race (the smaller size units can serve as default model for other races like gnomes, halflings, goblins etc.)

and also make the fallen races more distinct - a human, a dark elf/undead like race with a dark/pale look, and a beastmen/orc like bulky race that serves as default for the more bulky and barbaric races

I'm wondering if anything's happening on this front. Choosing between the kingdoms still feels like a choice between Men, Men, Men, Men and Men. 

They just look and feel so identical and the kingdom names also sound like they all are of the same european culture.

It really wouldn't hurt to have some scandinavian, celtic, arabian, african or oriental or whatever influence in there to give more flavour. (And different kind of unit setups.)

I think custom races only benefited GalCiv2, so I'd expect the same for Elemental. 

Reading between the lines of the OP, then if you keep racial bonuses quite light in game effect, then I can only see it being light "chrome" to the rules that won't upset game balance.  So in other words, sounds like an appropriate feature that will improve the replayability of the game.

Please, yes.

This would be great. Reminds me of Warlords 3 where the AI would customize it's side if the player took points to customize his.

i think it's a great idea to allow greater customization of races and factions, but i'd just to say this:

if it will be so easy for players to create their own races to play as and against, why can't that functionality also be used to put more races in the game from the get go?

I believe these problems could be overcome by a "point and hook" system.  Each trait would be assigned points relevant to its potential and the strength of the trait.  For example, Horse familiarity could be worth 10 points, while Horse Lords would be worth 50 points.  This point system is utilized by Warhammer to create enhanced moddability while maintaining balance for multi-player.  With regards to the AI utilization of these traits, hooks can be implemented which would tell the AI how to use these traits. Horse related traits would be associated with speed, distance, and plains preference. The AI would use these hooks, and the relevant strengths of the traits to determine an appropriate strategy. With associated hooks placed in the environment, the AI would be able to adapt a strategy suitable to its environment. AI level would determine the ability of the AI to manage these hooks. This could result in a plethora of effective strategies that would increase diversity and replayability. This would also force the player to adapt his own strategies, so that he is not repeating the same pattern over and over again.

I fully support focusing upon the two basic races and customization to enhance stability and potential. It would take an inordinate amount of time to create 10 factions and all the possible permutations of mixed races. If you instead focus on two races and the "genetics" of race/trait mixing, you will end up with a stable platform with endless possibilities. Given the "point and hook" system, you could easily generate several viable opponent races to satisfy the time-pressed or uninspired.

any system but spores way which is just cosmetic would be fine, spore might have limitless creation but they all have pretty much the same crappy stats...

Differentiate! Differentiate! Differentiate! Please!!!

Gal Civ was sold on the fact that there were diverse races to choose from that were truly unique. And it delivered. I just assumed Elemental would take this aspect even further.

I would like to see definite racial choices that go beyond just affecting stats. It would be awesome for some of the races to have different base units. Eg. An Orc race would have goblin, orc and troll base units before you started to add equipment. And the equipment would be limited to each unit base. Eg. Troll base cannot use bows but can hurl boulders. Goblin units can only use light equipment. etc etc.

I don't like the idea of being able to morph too much with conquered cities unless there is some sort of cultural alignment, for example a barbarian city captured by orcs. The game Warlords had no real character because you just collected non-cohesive armies which killed any RPG element the game should have had.

Are we going to get the faction customization option back in the game by release?

IGN’s Feature on Elemental Modding : This article from the news section said that faction creation would not be part of the game ui but would go into the xml modding areas.

I think that's probably a bad idea, considering the poll in the journal section, and that most gamers will not want to mess around with the xml. We're not all modders out here.

One thing that makes me very sad is the lack of playable "monster" races...

One of my favorite things about MoM was the sheer variety of race options, and since regrettably I have zero experience in modding I worry it will be too difficult to recreate races like "Trolls", or "Gnolls", or "Beastmen"...

I suppose my question is this: How difficult will it be for a novice player to grab ahold of your modding tools and make races? Will it be like pulling teeth, or will it be a very easy "point and click" kind of experience?

Well, XML is basically a text file - so if the key names are easy to make sense of, it would be like changing an .ini file - and you could use notepad to edit it if you had to (I'd suggest notepad++ though).

Making more races might be as simple as making lots of copies of the base .xml file, renaming them (say trolls.xml, gnolls.xml) and then doing what you want inside each file.

Just a guess, but I'd imagine they'd not make it overly complex since they are going this route with it and I'm sure they want "regular" players (as opposed to experienced modders only) to be able to make their own races/factions and such.

a good question ?

Well, my original choice was "custom" but ....

now my Favorite is Tarth, followed by Resolyn.

Custom all the way!...but Tarth is decent because of the various military related bonuses.

But can this be done in a user friendly editor?

If you mean in the game/mod workshop/a gui interface, I don't think anyone knows. I don't think using a text editor is terribly unfriendly, though. Folks use text editors all the time. Heck, posting to the forum uses a text editor.

Oh no! You revealed Procipinee's secret!

I wonder what she looks like before she transforms into Super Sovereign X Procipinee?