only ONE mission in campaign mode?

I don't know...I havent played the campaign and probably never will.  Never did play the Gal Civ campaign, over three years of off and on play.  The game's focus is on the sandbox mode, and the campaign exists largely to introduce the game concepts.

But Brad did mention another book coming as part of an upcoming free expansion.

more is coming , book 1 was supposed to be a tutorial. 

I never played he campaigns in GC. Elemental however is a fantasy game and Frogboy always said that it should be a platform to tell deep, exciting stories. So my expectations were really high.

As it is, I think the short campaign is still unplayable. I tried to play it when the game come out but there were to many bugs to finish it. I started again after the 1.06 patch, but again I ran into so many errors that I had to stop (quests could not be finished, vanishing armies, groups of soldiers transforming into single soldiers).

But all that will be fixed. The real disappointment for me is the actual story. There just is none. “Book 1” starts with the classic Ulysses theme: a lone hero stranded on a beach. But what does he do? Homer lets him get to his hometown, where only his old dog recognizes him. That’s moving. In Elemental however, the hero founds a city out of nowhere. While he can create a settlement, he is not able to provide even the simplest weapon for himself. So he has to visits the merchant in the city he just created and has to pay a lot of gold for it.

Then he starts creating armies and moves on. Companied by the most uninteresting and uninspired pieces of fantasy writing he talks to foreign monarchs and wins them to his cause by killing some trolls and monsters. That is not a story. If you would write it down, it would be absolutely ridiculous.

The big problem is that good storytelling is much more than just a sequence of genre specific elements. It’s about emotions, inner movements. It’s totally uninteresting to read a long description of a desert. You should tell the readers what is in the mind of the characters. How they are affected by there actions. What it means to them to have to kill for peace. That is what makes The Lord of the Rings or Eragon so great. I think Stardock should start to work with professional fantasy writers and provide some really well written missions. Of course the community modders will do a lot of interesting things, but probably the result will be similar to the official campaign.

Funny, Stardock *is* working with professional writers but somehow this is the campaign we got anyway

It's a shame they bothered to call it a campaign really. Just calling it the tutorial would've been better.

I know more's comeing but lets face it, we were mis-sold an epic story driven campaign.

To have called it a tutorial, would have required them to make another 'campaign', my guess is, that was just too much work considering the shoddy state of the 'mod tools'.

It's true they often mentioned the professional writers and how the triggers had opened up a RPG style adventure.

That said... I still think Sandbox is where the action is and where I hope the development time is spent.

Funny, I think the mod tools are the saving grace of the game at the moment. I can't think of another game that gave modders so much power to change aspects with relative ease. The only short-fall is that you need to do a lot of work to create your own creatures and they can't really make a tool to do this.

The campaign in GC2 was pretty good. It got unreasonably difficult in some scenarios, but that is just part of the charm that teaches you to abuse every rule and detail in the game just to beat the campaign. I like to feel that "cheating" is necessary, currently I just feel using basic elements of the game like "squads" is cheating and unnecessary.

Play the sandbox mode..

Just like other games like Galactic Civ2, Tropico3, Dawn Of Discovery, Simcity,etc... its all about the sandbox/continous modes.

I wish there was no campaign at all.  4X games are all about sandbox mode.  No one ever complains about a lack of a campaign in the Civ games.  

Your telling of the story was actually more interesting than playing it out. Plus, it crashed for me after the "Final Battle".  Your little story has inspired me to do some creative writing.  I'll have to post up the "Story of Relias" this weekend.