I love the aesthetic of the game.
I like the map, the feel, the "look" - I like the tech/spell descriptions etc. The game is immersive in this regard and draws me in - I like it much better than a bright real-world looking land.... I feel like I'm in a fantasy realm with this game.
I am having fun so far - I enjoy the city development and how you can manipulate units with equipment etc. to such a large degree - that is excellent in my opinion!
The pace in my first game (I never play the campaign, always enjoy maps against AI) is with 2 other AI players on large and I have yet to meet anyone yet.... although I'm playing this more as a mess around and learn rules make a lot of mistakes than anything else.
A few minor annoyances: the map view seems to get stuck on the zoom into city mode and then you can't see except from a top down view - it isn't easy to know how to change this (learned here on the forums that it is the middle mouse button).
Also the lack of a "next unit" button is a bigger problem for me - especially in an empire building game where unit numbers gets bigger and bigger and bigger.... having arrows at the top with the cities would also be nice (maybe I'm missing how to scroll through them?) once you are in city mode so you could go through each city and routinely tweak them.
I also dislike that out of my 4 heroes - 3 of them have the exact same portrait - bleh. Minor, but disappointing.
BUT overall I am very pleased, especially knowing what GalCiv2 turned into ... so I look forward to seeing what Elemental becomes. This doesn't mean I don't expect a playable game today if I've shelled out the money - but I have been having as much fun with Elemental today as I have with almost all of what I consider my "A" list PC game titles.
Well done, team. I think you have the right feel, the right immersion, the right idea behind the overall style and expansion of this game. For those who are comparing to Age of Wonders:Shadow Magic (which I play heavily still and mod for) please remember that the game didn't even have settlers that knew how to expand! The games are similar and yet different - I would put Elemental as a much more complex game so far with AoW:SM as more of a 'beer and pretzels' style (which isn't a bad thing at all).
My current .02 cents.
J
