Elemental seems promising if you have some time to allow SD team to fix majors issues.

I am sure that at the end it will be more enjoyable.

Just my thoughts so.

   Both are pretty awesome games.  I never did like the fact though, that in fall from heaven two, your stacks square off, and randomly chooses which unit of yours fights which of theirs, and you lose your nursed heroes and powerful units without having much say so.  Fun though, and really well done.

I haven't tried it, but I've only heard very good things about FfH2.

Elemental I have tried, and I'm sorry to say I can't recommend it. The game looks nice, and it has an outstanding tech tree. But pretty much everything else about it is... bad. The problem everyone talks about is how buggy the game is, and while that's all too true, it's not the reason to avoid the game. Based on past & current behaviour there's no reason at all to doubt Stardock will have squashed the bugs very soon. No, the reason to avoid Elemental, is that a great, big chunk of the core mechanics are incredibly ill-conceived. Check out the thread on the combat mechanics & why such mechanics lead to spiralling brokenness, for an example of what I mean. Pretty much everything in Elemental works in a similar fashion, unfortunately.

Elemental has better empire building/management mechanics.

FfH has better combat, both on the grunt troops and the magic ends of things, and more differentiation between civs and such.

I think Elemental is good, FfH is better.

Go Fall from Heaven all the way. The AI is just as bad. Everything else is better.

Ive enjoyed FfH2 a lot, except for the fact that every time I get really late into the game where the end-game battles are beginning, usually me and my vassals vs some other civ and HIS vassals, the game degrades into unplayability and the game file gets corrupted somehow and Im never able to actually finish the damn game. Grr!

Elemental I can at least finish a game, even if its always super easy to beat the AI. Hopefully they'll fix that soon!

Elemental is still in the bug fix stage, it's pretty stable as of the 1.06 patch but, the game still needs balance & polish (things like magic, tech, units, quests, need to be fleshed more, random maps and a much better AI). The AI can't really play on a map of islands yet. The game is a collections of good ideas, that right now only work at a very basic level, the question of how these areas will be expanded (mods, lots of patches, expansion packs) is yet unknown.

There is no real difference in units other than other hit points and picture, very few units have any special abilities and those that do are so over powered (dragons, fire elements) are game breakers.

The quest system is very limited (find goodies, go here, go there), the game really needs dungeons!

The RPG elements need to be expanded.

Combat Magic is just willy, nilly, miss, miss, hit for 1 point of damage or sometimes hit for 20 points with no rhyme or reason.

Tactical Combat seems to be little more than random numbers (hit, miss), no real tactics.

Documentation is very poor, sometimes you can't build something and have no idea why.

If only FFH2 had tactical combat and some CRPG elements!

I agree that Elemental needs some serious work, but I can't see anything that is so fundamentally broken that it can't be fixed or modded.

The biggest reason I'd suggest waiting on Elemental is, if you want to stay current, every daily new patch breaks your save game.

The AI isn't very intelligent yet. GalCiv2's is the second best (AI Wars is even better, but that's a very different kind of strategy game) I've seen in a strategy game, though, and I'm confident Brad will keep working on it until it's even better than GalCiv2's.

@ Phazonfreak: I'm unaware to what extent the core mechanics are modable, but I wouldn't expect Stardock to fix them. Why? Because since the earliest days of the beta lots of people have written at length and in great detail on why the current mechanics can't produce balanced & interesting gameplay, and Stardock has at no point shown any interest in or receptiveness to that kind of criticism. So why would they now, when the game has reached a point where it is a hundred times as complicated to redesign them?

Just right now IMO: AoW SM + BNWv3.2 > FFH2 > EWom

Civ IV, IMO, is one of the best strategy games of all time, one of my favorites for sure, and the best of the civ series (til 5 hits and blows it away).

That said, due to my love of fantasy, there are times when I've considered FfH to be better than civ itself.  It's truly an amazing thing how the FfH team transformed civ for fantasy purposes.  Everything about it feels right even with it being built on civ.  The races are all incredibly diverse and well done, the magic system works out great, the violence of the world is great.  Monster lairs and dungeons/goodie huts are all well represented and make sense.  It's just a wickedly good thing (and there's little wonder that it got scooped up to become a stand-alone game that's in production).  It also has some MoM-like feel with how the magic nodes work (and other stuff).  And you still have fantasy themed wonders.  In a lot of ways it's like the best of many things combined - civ and DnD with some MoM influence - sexy.  (FfH is based on the lead designer's old pnp DnD campaign).

So, ouch, really tough call.

I love FfH and still play it (and regular Civ IV:BTS, just as I still love to play GC2).

Elemental is kind of in a rough state and it'll probably be a few weeks/months before it's truly in a state it should've been in for release.  Elemental definitely has good parts about it now, and a lot of potential, and it's playable/enjoyable now.  A lot of Elemental's mechanics are different and cool (like city expansion, for ex).

My biggest problem with Elemental now is all the lockups and crashes - it's really, really irritating and pretty much unaccpetable in a modern game.  How many times has Civ IV:BTS or FfH crashed on me?  I'm sure it's happened but not enough that I actually remember.  Elemental crashes or locks up so much that I set autosave to every turn because I know I'll be restarting the game and loading a lot.  Arg!

I can't realy recommend one vs the other, but I will say that if you own Civ IV, like fantasy (you're here aren't you), and have not checked out FfH, that you have failed.  FfH is amazing and absolutely worth experiencing.

I generally don't screw with mods for games like this or civ, but FfH isn't a mod - it's a total conversion of the game - it's like a seperate game - and it is incredibly well done.