So I've finally had time to seriously play Elemental thanks to the weekend, and I thought I should post my thoughts since it seems encouraged.
First off, let me say that I'm one of those 64bit Win7, ATI setup, and I've noticed a lot of improvements with 1.07 (although 1.05 was playable for me). I'm also glad to see certain exploits have been fixed in this version (double build improvement, and unlimited rings/amulets, etc). The pace at which these problems along with the technical ones have been addressed is very impressive, so I want to thank the team for their hard work. There are still some odd OoM errors and a few CtDs (around 150+ turns in, map size doesn't matter) that I think has something to do with the dynasty system and the children growing up because I have noticed some oddities there as well. In general though, the game is playable, especially since I have a pretty good rig and the load times are barely noticeable. I'm sure these problems are being addressed, so let's move on to game changes.
I'll get straight to the point: the number one thing that should be addressed is the faction destruction when a sovereign dies. Simply put, it just HAVE TO GO.
If you don't believe me, go ahead and start a new game on a small map (just to make things faster), choose a Kingdom faction (only because I'm more familiar with the Kingdom techtree) on ANY DIFFICULTY (easy to ridiculous, doesn't matter) and build your first city near a tech library. Research Production for the Great Mills if you don't have up a Material resource near your city, then up the resource discovery path in the Adventure tree until the Ventri mines. Then focus all research into warfare for catapult and build a couple. Most importantly, DON'T DO ANYTHING ELSE. Don't marry, don't explore, don't expand, don't do any spell research (don't build anything that produces arcane research, and don't bother picking any spell books either). You don't even need to build up your city beyond level 2 (to build the Great Mills and have enough influence for your resources), yep, that one hut city with 75 guys is all you'll need. All the resources that you need for your catapults will be available from the discovery techs except for materials. Now hit end turn a ton of times. Depending on your game setup (number of AI, their difficulty, world size, etc), this might take a bit, however it always ends up the same, the AI will expand and gets powerful enough, then declares war on you because you are weak. Finally, the fun begins... right?
Just sit there and continue to hit end turn until the AI marches his sovereign and his army of doom up to your city to wipe you out. Right before he gets to your city (since they only have 2 movement, they will either be right outside your city, or one tile away), pull out 1 catapult next to his army and attack. In battle, shoot his sovereign in the face with a boulder (twice, if needed). If he survives the first round, end turn and shoot again. Repeat until he's dead (then autoresolve). If he somehow managed to survive (got REALLY lucky with his armor rolls), pull out another catapult and repeat. Congrats, you just completely destroyed one of the stronger player in the game. Hit end turn a bunch of times until the next one steps up to the plate to be smacked in the face with a boulder. The only real question at this point is whether you have the patience to wait until you win.
Just to be clear, this isn't a problem with catapults, they can be destroyed fairly easily with a massive melee stack. In fact, if you don't want to use catapults, you can do this with archers very easily (especially if you pick the archery stat for your faction) or spells (but will take more work to imbue/level champions), anything that can do range damage will do, even the earth golem. The problem is that your sovereign is the weakest link in your empire, and thus prone to assassination techniques like these. Even if the AI was told keep its sovereign inside it's territory, all you would need to do is take the nearest city, then hit the sovereign with an assassination squad on the same turn. It's just way too easy to kill someone by going after their sovereign. This is the main reason why even the ridiculous AI with all its bonuses are a joke atm.
To fix this, you have to either:
1) Remove all range attack from the game (melee, skills, magic). This will let the sovereign run away like the coward that he should be, and will also fix the problem with autoresolve's inability to emulate movement and the advantages of range combat. Although having said that, I hope that you don't choose this option, as it would make tactical combat completely meaningless.
2) Use the dynasty system to your advantage. Namely, if the sovereign dies, the control of the empire should be switched to the next channeler in your family tree. So if you imbued your spouse, they would take over. If not, the first child that is a channeler (some children is born with 0 essense, and thus doesn't qualify). If you pursue this path, you could do creative things like have the empire split up if there are several qualified heirs, and if one of those is married to another family, that split portion would join the other faction, etc. There are a lot of things you can do with this. You'll probably have to tweak the dynasty system a bit to make heirs available earlier in the game to prevent early game assassination (but you should probably do that anyways to make them more of a factor), but this is probably the most realistic approach to the problem.
3) If the above is just too complicated (or perhaps it'll take too long to implement and you want a quicker fix), you can always just have the sovereign respawn but give them some harsh penalties (reduced max essence and health, lose all equips, etc). Only when the sovereign ends up with 0 max health or essence do the empire actually gets destroyed (no health or no channeler to lead them). This will at least give more leeway to the system, and the AI can be told to be more and more protective of its sovereign as he gets weaker and weaker though multiple deaths.
Now I'm sure there are other options available as well, but you really have to do something about this. If left alone, no matter how great the game runs or how much time you spend on AI tweaking, all it takes is a single range assassin to destroy an empire. With this system in place, I've won countless wars that I have absolutely no business of winning. IMO, this is the main problem with the game at the moment. Are there other problems? Sure, the magic system is a bit stale, equipment balance, faction uniqueness, etc... but none of those have as big an impact as this, so I'm going to hold off on talking about any of those because it seems like talking about certain topic raises its priority on the the master list.
