So the logical answer for a fun game would be... Go 2D?

(goes back to play some roguelike)

After playing MOM for the past few hours to remember what it is I liked about that game and to hopefully add something to this thread, I'd like to add these couple things:

1. Please give me a prompt after things are completed at my towns. Either that, or please allow me to queue up buildings before I can actually build them. MOM lets me know when each of my buildings are complete, so I never go any turns without making progress. It feels less micromanage-y that way. 

2. Heroes feel pretty bad-ass in MOM. I'm always happy to see that a new one is ready to join me because I know that they're powerful on the battlefield. As of now, my heroes in Elemental die really, really, really easily. No fun!

3. Give me at least ONE (possibly more?) "race-specific" unit per race/faction. The Lizardmen's Dragon Turtle (or whatever it is) feels pretty awesome on the battlefield and it's unlike other races "uber" units, like the Gnoll Wolf Rider or the Dwarven Steam Cannon. 

4. Speaking of race-specific, give me more race-specific qualities and maybe race-specific structures?

5. Make quests more challenging and give us better items. It's a real sense of accomplishment when I actually beat the millions of skeletons and mummies in a crypt and get something pretty awesome out of it. Stuff like this would be awesome. 

6. Swimming units, flying units, mountaineer units, etc. would all be an awesome addition to add some variety. 

7. For me, the real gap between Elemental and what I'd like to see from it, would be its variety. I wish each faction felt more SPECIAL and UNIQUE. I felt that way when I played different races in Twilight of the Arnor - each race had a different tree and a distinct look of their ships. With Elemental, I would really like to look at the basic units of an army and immediately know which faction it is. A LOT like I do with Master of Magic. 

Meh, just some ideas. I'm sure they've all been suggested ad nauseum, but I wanted to put my 1/2 a cent in. 

I don't think that we need more races, what we need is for the factions to be more different from each other.

It wouldn't matter that most of the factions is humans if they hat more game defining bonuses than +10 starting metal/materials or +10% to whatever.

maybe factions could have some unique high level technologies or some unique backpacks so we can have faction specific unit that work within the lego-style build your own unit system that elemental uses.

You just gained a TON of respect in my eyes for admitting that one, Chief. Well done.

Could you expand a little on "we're just going to have to bite the bullet on this" ? What do you mean by having to bite the bullet? Having to bite it and spend the money to make more different races? Or having to bite the bullet and just not make them?

Thanks

Gonna have to disagree on this one. If you've played any of the good TW games you'll realize that you can click all you want on whatever you want, and if you don't Plan your troop movements with a decent Strategy you won't win, period. TW isn't Starcraft and it doesn't play even remotely the same. Clicking doesn't do anything.

No, the game NEEDS more races, and Definitely more FANTASY races. There are a lot of cool monster races in Elemental. These need to be expanded and made into factions if they can, with the ability to add, use, and equip in game items, armors, and weapons. Like Draconians and Minotaurs and Elves and Orcs and the like.

I agree though those races and factions NEED to play differently and have different strategies work for each of them. Like how Klakons had higher production rates, and how Trolls had great regeneration abilities, and how Elves got better resources for making cities and towns in forests. Of course in Elemental we don't have "Elves", but one of the human factions could be made to get bonuses from living in woods, and one for living in deserts.

Look at the faction of Tarth in game. According to the Lore, Tarth is a sea going nation that should have bonuses from sea trade and fishing and other things like that. Having Tarth specialize in ocean going techs and having them be able to get resources from the seas that other factions could not would Definitely set them apart and make them play differently from the other "human" factions. This is the kind of diversity and differences between the Factions that Elemental Needs.

Yeah i agree with raven x it would be nice to have those, but i think that there should be ships. You could upgrade them to have catapults,ballitae,etc but ships are nescary. and fish/sea monsters which should be in the game.

i also think that every so often when you get a ctiy or a metroplis or something momentous you should be able to get a specila bonus

Ex: Option 1-Get extra powerful weapons and armor that can only be made at place X

      Option 2-Because of specila thing X you can create your own creatures that can come to there city

and so on

i am one of these people that believe that the factions we have now is fine, and that we don't need more races.  but like others have said there needs to be more distinction.  think in multiplayer, why does a player choose a faction?  either A: they really like the style or B: their unique abilities most allow for the strategy they want to employ.

there should be some factions that are good turtlers and have special stuff for that.  there should be some that have special things for offense.  see guys, you made galCiv2, look...  do you think that the Drengin have the same mentality as say the Torians?  if i were a player who chose to be an offensive war prone faction would i choose the Torians for that?  no i would def choose the Drengin.  everything about them oozes fighting.  looks, bonuses, tech(talking TOA here).

i personally think that you really don't need crazy fantasy races(although i would enjoy that) in order to improve the faction portion of the game.

Right now there is alot of micro-managing and not enough fantasy empire stuff. Every turn I have to click on cities to make sure they are doing something and then pick what to build and where to place it. Nothing is automated except for the caravans and only they can make roads which is terrible. Can't make new roads unless the caravan dies and you get to send it elsewhere.

I really don't like all the focus on the city building. The whole problem with cities not growing in population unless you build houses is bad and having to place them in a undefined area is terrible. The only things we should build in the cities is buildings that give bonuses or improvements that we would not get otherwise. Housing should be automated (building all the time until there isn't enough food) and we can pick to build extra housing which increases our cities growth rate. I have said this before in numerous other posts but "cities grow not only outwards but also upwards".

The tile limit needs to go as well as the pop cap.

The magic nodes need to be give bonuses and mana. All nodes give 10% more power but a fire node will give a fire spell 20% more. Different nodes have different strengths and power and should be guarded by magical creatures (think MOM). This makes it harder to have these all important nodes but gives you something to strive for besides doing the questing and fighting random monsters and nieghbours. Goodie huts that are ruins or monster lairs should spawn monsters until they are found and conquered (same goes for magic nodes). Lost libraries and temples are essentially ruins and they to should have to be conquered before they can be used and it would be neat instead of giving only a % bonus to research, that the more you own the more likely you are to discover something completely (no need to research it).

Would be nice that when you kill enemy spell casters you can capture there equipment and plunder their spell books and the ability to ransom them back to there countries.

Many, many more ideas but please change the city building please.

That's what I thought as well. Still, it could have meant they were going to break down and do both. I'm not one of those people thinking Elemental needs Elves and Orcs either, but, I do think it could do with at least a "few" more non-standard fantasy races. With Elemental, they should use Elemental Races. Like Skath or Droda or the Sand People monsters (don't remember what they're called off the top of my head). There's lots of good options here, they just need to expand on them some.

Brad,

I would like to see more fleshed out Sovereign Creation. Right now It feels like they are just slight varations.  See here: [Customization] - Sovereing - Faction - Items - and a few Random things I have been thinking about that I would like to see added to the game.. (Kinda long)

For Tacatical combat units need abilitys that make them diffrent,

Trowen/Special - Strikes before Melee combat 

First Strike, First strike in melee range - Units with long weapons, Spears, Pikes, Ect...  Need to stike first when the unit attacks or is attacked. Your Sword welding guards have to close through my pikes strike range before they can attack.   2- units with first strike cancel out- 

Some abilitys  should have a random chance of happening,  others with a cool down after use..  

Archers - Aimed Shot -  Lowers enemys Defense by 75% and increasses attack by 75%- but takes one full combat turn to aim- 

So Your fast archers - You tell them to take an aimed shot at the Lord Hammer Squad on the other side.   Your Archers Draw and aime-   End there turn -- they come up agian and fire -Your airrows fly ture and scathe throug there Lord Hammer Squad killing almost all.  There turn ends.    You lose the chance for your archers to attack for 1 turn- but you in creass there damage, and chance to hit by a large amount..  

Its actually really reassuring to hear you say that about the Galciv 2 economic model. Dont get me wrong, I loved Galciv 2 and I just finished a huge map game of it two days ago. My one major problem with Galciv 2 was the way Economics drove everything, including production and research, which made it really hard to have any specific control over individual planets etc. In the end, the way I play is to max spending, put 1% military, 99% social and put focus on research, then forget research buildings and go all out on production buildings (to avoid all the otherwise wasted 'production'). Its my one gripe with the whole game, and I thought I remembered you defending that model a few years ago. The civ style splitting of production, research and economics from each in a nice simple way (Moo 2 dealt with it in a similar way) made it much easier for the player to properly control their empire.

Now back to the thread topic. Ive had several long games of Elemental, but its just not drawing me in (and I dont even mind it still crashing every 30 minutes, the game just isnt fun). I'm holding faith in Stardock to eventually get a fun game out there rather than go for the refund. I think the major things that need "fixing" with Elemental are:

1) Unique factions. Its just simply a lot more fun and adds loads more replayability if each of the factions plays radically differently from each other. I dont want to just play humans v humans, we have Civ and Total War for that. I would be quite happy for the "customise your own units" feature to be dropped, if it meant you could have lots of interesting different racial units with special abilities. Elves, Orcs, Lizardmen, Ogres, etc, etc. Theres hundreds of potential fantastical creatures out there which you could divided between the different factions to make them fun and different to play.

2) Heroes. The current heroes are weak and uninspiring. I want them to be powerful leaders of armies, with a noticable increase in power as they progress through the game. If it becomes too hard to balance them against squads of troops (as well as individuals), then perhaps that unit size feature needs to be dropped as well. Make all army units you train appear as "squads" (which will make the tactical battles look more exciting), and then balance the heroes and powerful monster units (dragons, demons etc) against squads of regular troops.

3) Equipment. It costs far too much and isnt particularly exciting to equip a hero with a set of leather armour and a shortsword. When you are gearing up your heroes, it should be with flaming longswords, glowing plate armour and fun magic items (boots of flying!). The cool gear should be gained from questing/vanquishing monster spawns (or possibly crafted), to make the player earn the good stuff. The mundane stuff should be there to get heroes going, and should be cheap and much less effective compared to magical gear.

4) Magic. When the game is called War of Magic, then the spells should be awesome and exciting to use! I know you are on the case with this already, but the spells from MoM are varied, interesting, and significant when cast. From hearing about the background fluff for this game, with the shattered landscape ruined from abuses of magic and the channelers coming back to heal/destroy the land, I was expecting powerful world changing spells! Rituals taking a few turns to cast that change the nearby terrain in significant ways would be one way to address this.

5) Tactical battles. Im happy enough with turn based tactical battles (rather than RTS), but they need to have some element of tactics to them. Terrain, fortifications, initiative orders for units, larger maps, more units on the battlefields (all squads perhaps? - see point 2), special abilites for units, varied and dramatic spell casting. All these things would contribute to making the tactical battles more epic feeling and fun to play.

6) Towns. The town buildings just arent very exciting. The only really interesting stuff comes in at Tier 4/5, and building anything before that feels like going through the motions. It should be possible to specialise towns, and there should be opportunity/costs for building different buildings. There should also be lots of faction specific buildings.

I have seen these points raised in the past on the forums, and they have sometimes been met with the answer "well you want a different game then, Elemental is not about those things". I am after a more 'high fantasy' game (exotic units, powerful magic, heroes, etc) and to me, it seems like a real waste of the fantasy setting to go for a 'low fantasy' (human units, impotent magic, ineffectual heroes) style of game. If I want to play low fantasy, I might as well just play Civ or the Total war games and forego the magic element entirely. You *need* Elemental to be high fantasy to actually make this fun to play and unique enough to differentiate it from those other 4x types of games.

Good luck, I think theres a lot of hard work ahead, but I have confidence that you guys will make this into the game all future 4x games are compared with!

One thing that definately needs to be added to the tactical battles is the control of the placement of the units at the start of the battle. Right now you start a tactical battle and it's a pure crap shoot as to where units will start. The only constant that I have seen is that the soverign usually starts in the second row.

I think fleshing out tactical combat is a must...not every creature should be moving two spaces(I want my mount to matter), I want defensive units, I want more abilities for those units:)

I would also like ships and navies in general. 

I would like magic fleshed out with more over land spells.

I would also like to see elemental resistances and magic resistances.

just a few things I want:)

Unfortunately I don't agree here.

The only sensible way to play the magic game is to recruit level 1 heroes, give them some essence somehow (imbuing is most obvious but one game I had a Ring of +1 Essence which was brokenly powerful), join them into a tough stack and then kill some monsters. They level up to L3-4 almost instantly. Since they already have some essence they can then buff their Essence by +3 for each level they gain.

Combine that with as many as possible of the Temples of Essence (or whatever they are called, they give a multiplicatively stacking +50% essence) and each of these heroes ends up with 20-40 (or more) essence. Rinse, repeat until you run out of heroes to hire.

Very easy to have at least a dozen heroes with 20+ essence each (or even 100+ with enough Temples).

Perhaps the most ironic thing is that if you need to get your sovereign to do the imbuing (ie no magic ring) then your poor sovereign ends up on practically no essence while these formally L1 heroes all become gods of magic.

There is no reason to let your sovereign keep any essence when through the power of levelling it is so much more efficient to give it to a low level champion and watch them multiply it as they level up.

I have never played MoM and my excitement for elemental came from a paragraph game informer had on it like 2 years ago.  That one paragraph got me psyched as all hell for this game.  Now obviously there wasn't much information in that paragraph, just enough to let my imagination go wild.  The main draw for me that the paragraph talked about was manipulating the world and your troops with your extraordinary magic in a strategy game.  Once everything is up to par thats what I would like to see improved upon.  I may be in the minority hear, but being able to manipulate the world or at least my own land more with my sovereigns magic would be awesome.   You can already do a lot of things currently, in this vein.  No water for a farm?  My sovereign summons water from the earth and creates a lake.  Or on the flip side twisting the land to reflect my evil sovereign.  I could go off for awhile on this just ranting into oblivion, but needless to say if an expansion took the game in this direction I would be a giddy school girl.

Any chance we could get the files to make that happen and decide for ourselves?

A HUGE thing I'd like to see come out of the Elemental launch is the showcasing of Stardock::Reactor.  As far as I am concerned, the way that Stardock goes about Reactor is FAR superior to the way which Valve goes about Steamworks.  Reactors method is friendly and unobtrusive.  Steamworks method... not so much.  There is much to say about the differences between the two.  But I don't debate them here (theres other threads for that).  Just saying that I would VERY much like to see Reactor emerge as a viable alternativeto steamworks.

+1 to above.  Reactor is awesome, and needs to be showcased.  It's quite possibly the best thing about Impulse next to not having to use Impulse to play your games.

Same feeling here. I don't have the game rigth now BUT, what I would like to see is some powerful, earthshattering magic. Our sovereign begin with little to no magic and build up his magic strengh with training and researching. Mid game, the caster (sovereign, not hero) can restore the land (add water, level land) and can cast powerful attack spell. Late game, I see the caster like in Black and white 2 game: you can create Volcano, make ressource (like B&W1) and food. Burn your ennemi or protect your settlement. Your sovereign should be next to a god in the late game and be able to "create" magical building like arcane forge (build magical item) Tower of wind to deflect ennemy arrow and enhance your range/speed in your city or area of influence, open the hell gateway to recruit demon or the "Staiway to heaven" to unlock angel/arkangel. If you choose the "death" spellbook, you can create monster (like frankenstein monster: take the head of a wolf, body of a troll and leg of dragon) turn land to ash, destroy all life form (land) with a area of effect spell on the map. That would be awesome . Also, what I would wish for is, like many other, specialise unit. Some good for offense but some good for defense (like CIV 4 have some unit that can only defend). Add some magic defense to it (magic "machine fire crossbow", force wall, magic fortress with undead legion) and that would wrap up thing. Well, it's war of magic so I would like to see the magic impacting more the game. By the way, sorry for my english .