Book 2 is the next chapter coming out soon, its only available if you buy the Book Elemental: Destiny's Embers though. There is a registration code in the books.

The tutorial, erm campaign is really mainly just an entertaining way to teach you the basics of the game.

Yea, I don't think so either, the Campaign of the Book, is specifically related with what the book is telling, at least that is my understanding.

The book's bonus campaign is not related to the War of Magic.

Elemental: War of Magic - book 2 is in the future.  The meat of Elemental is the sand box game. The campaign (book 1) is basically a glorified tutorial.

It's simple, stardock doesn't place much faith in campaigns.  So they don't care about them.  Honestly, that's what I personally buy games for, and a game set as an TBS-in an RPG world should have a fairly STRONG campaign mode.

but that's my two cents.

Sandbox is the important part.

I agree. I like Campaigns over sandbox why can't we have both like GalCiv2 did? 

If Stardock dislikes Campaigns so much why not just call it a Tutorial then? I mean lotsa games don't have Campaigns and that is fine. But don't advertise one if there ain't one. I think they just wanted the word Campaign on the press releases and Box because it sounds better then "Oh yeah, it's also got half a Tutorial which we might add to later if we feel like it."

 Like most things, Campaigns need to be looked at again. But, unlike oh, say TC or Magic it won't, they've already said as much. Pity, but, I do understand that in order to make the overall game better some things need to be trimmed.

Beakie

Sandbox is fine by me.  I haven't played on line before - since Internet hookup is new to me.  Sandbox playing is also story-writing for me.  Perhaps role playing might be a better descriptor?  I'm all for a quality campaign.  But if its a choice of one over the other, please work on making the sandbox better.

Besides, i think the enchantress is going to be like a big campaign, At least I hope so.

@Stuie_:

Ok, so, as I understand it, you like to have a frame that fills the game with meaning.
I can relate to that. Almost every game at some point made me think "What am I doing here, what am I wasting my time on?", and that was when that meaning diminished.

I guess I was baffled because for me the meaning of games such as EWOM or Master of Magic or Civilization or Master of Orion is to play the "sandbox" game.
I always write "sandbox" in quotation marks because the word gives me the association of exactly this - ambiguity, absence of meaning.
As I said, this isn´t true to me, this "sandbox mode" for me IS the game.
And I wonder how anyone would buy a (4X) game like that when he only wanted to play the campaign.
For me this would seldomly be worth the money, and when it comes to the developer, wouldn´t be worth the effort of building an extremely complex game.

PS: And it´s even more than that.
For me such a game is about making my own story, not playing the story that some other has made for me.
I recall an 18-hours hotseat session of Master of Orion 2 with a good friend of mine.
All the time administrator Kimbuzzi came and wanted to work for me, so in the end I hired him.
This session was extremely much fun, because we imagined how the actions would look like in our game-universe and how they would appear in the historybooks of our game-universe. There really was immersion in the gameworld for us and we made our own story.
A campaign doesn´t give me that.

hummm did anyone notice this "campaign" was inspired by the book Chronicles of Dragonlance I: The Return of the Dragons??

anyways, I was ok with the first book, but I imagine stardock will give space to ppl to develop ideas for the other books, if they ever come out...

nonetheless it was cool, loved the feel of Dragonlance that this game has

Sandbox game play in these types of game are different each time. You can't say that about a liner campaign. I aften find campaigns to be boring and very limiting in the choices a player can make due to the fact that have to Adhear to the story. And personally I don't like that.

I would like to see a series of campaigns.  I go to play online and there is no one there.  I have struggled to learn this game and now there is no outlet to play other than competing against the AI.

People actually play the campaign? Thought it was more of a tutorial?
Isnt the meat and potatoes of the game in the sandbox mode? Like Dawn Of Discovery and Tropico3

I think when you're having such a deep strategy game, it wouldn't hurt if the lore would be represented much better. especially, when it is claimed that there's loads of written material about the world. I like that Elemental does not have elves, dwarves and orcs and uses its own original racial classification, but It would add so much flavor to the gaming process, if more was known about the differences between the trogs, urxen, wraiths, quendar and the nations of humans. hope it will be explored somehow. and I don't think its the most difficult part of making the game.