well now, you could make some money and buy weapons for your heroes and then hit those spiders. Besides, why do you get the group op peasants if not to ground those early game spiders?

No need to be snarky. I know I could  sit and hit end turn for 30-40 turns for money, but that's not exactly what I would call fun.

You may have played in the beta, but I did not.  So this is my first attempt at playing elemental at all. My point simply was that purchasing equipment, then equipping it isn't exactly intuitive nor the importance of said equipment.  Many new to the game will likely run up to 1 tiny little spider with 4-5 guys thinking they can take him only to get wiped.

This sort of thing is what made Elemental all but unplayable for me during the Beta. It never got very much better during that time and I'm not surprised that it's an issue in Day 0.

But Elemental, not unlike Gal Civ II, isn't a game that holds your hand. I wish it was. It's a game where YOU have to figure out how it works, what you have to do to succeed, etc. -- accessibility and wide appeal will not be its friend.

I agree it would be nice to have a true tutorial that introduces the interface.

Biggest woe I have with the campaign is that by turn 3000 or so it has frozen up.  I can move jerkily around the map, I can view things but it will not allow my soveriegn and his stack to move nor will it let me progress the turn any further.

The massive slowdown on it makes me think there must be a memory leak somewhere as prior to this it was fine and closing the game restarting/reloading makes no difference as far as the camapaign goes.

The Campaign logbook in the Kingdom report screen is a great place to stick stuff like that in.. just need to make it obvious to the user with a popup first on how to get to it

Boogie If I may make another suggestion - please make it more obvious to the user exactly what they should be doing to advance the campaign. At the moment, it's a little more like wandering around until you trigger something. The "Chapter" books are nice, but they mostly tell a story rather than give you a specific objective.

This is especially evident in the very beginning. After you found your city, you're told nothing. If you remember the intro you know you have to go warn someone, but the game just doesn't tell you. Something like "Now that you have a settlement and some weapons, it's time to seek out Procipine (sp) to warn her about the threat. Her Kingdom is to the East.."

Also, speaking of directions - they were written it looks like based on a map positioned upright with corresponding North/South. However, Elemental's default camera is on the side, so the directions do not correspond. Often when the book says something is "east", for the default camera it's actually "north", for example.

I got past the 25 crystal part (did you go east to the Capitar Fortifications?), but I'm also stuck in the campaign.  After being told to split my army, I ended up warning the other kingdoms in the wrong order and now it won't update the campaign log for the last two.  Has anyone else run into this?  

I am stuck on the 25 crystal part.  I've placed a settlement, but getting the crystal is a matter I can't figure out.

Without spoiling anything, i have advanced quite a bit in the campaign, and:

• Little spider and big spider at the start: Buy 2 clubs and equip them. Use the farmers as fodder and youll kill them easily.
• Use your farmers to attack first (to spend the enemies couterattack) before attacking with your companions.
• Bigger enemies: (hint hint big scaled thing with 40+ defense) lure them onto -25% def plots in the tac terrain to kill them while having your units in the +50 def plots.
• Use your summoned familiar as an expendable unit.
• Focus your archers on low def units first. No use wasting 10 shots to score "miss" only.
• Don't rush your melee in. Pepper the enemy with spells/archers whenever you have range/spell superiority.

Wow! Talk about a complete Village Idiot Moment.  I thought all the building was thru the town/village interface. *facepalm* 

Thanks for the help!

EDIT: Deleted my query regarding the 25 crystal shard quest as someone else has posted a thread confirming my problem.