Love Stardock, Like Elemental (Almost)

First off, thank you, for creating Elemental.  It's a beautiful mix of RTS, Civilization, RPG, etc.  Love the "create your own hero" option and I'm a particular fan of the "create your own goth/undead/dare I say it 'vampire' hero" that you've added in there.  Very nice touch.  I don't really care for your games, personally, but I absolutely advocate Stardock as a developer and support what your doing and the message your bringing.  I mean, let's be fair, SoSE was an ok game, it was actually a game, not some piece of doo someone boxed up and asked me to pay $50 for.  It was an honest, earnest attempt, and the delivery was on solid ground.  Let's also be fair, I didn't buy the plethora of expansion packs for it, personally I kind of felt like that would be me buying the game I thought I was purchasing to begin with.  I mean, you don't want every gamer on the planet not buying your game for the first six months, right?  That's the kind of behavior expansion packs enable, and I know a lot of gamers who don't buy new games for that specific reason, the first expansion pack is just their cue to give it a try for the first time.

Elemental, as I've read elsewhere, isn't taking that route though, those who jumped on the bandwagon at the beginning get the first Xpac for free as part of their initial purchase price.  Right on, man!  That's the way to do it, I mean, if you want ravenous hordes clambering after your newest games.  It's edgy, it's innovative, most producers would get heart palpatations, but it's a real solid "thank you for supporting us" move that gives us first-comers a little something for hanging in there, for being beta-testers who paid to beta test.  It's these sort of moves that Stardock makes that makes me actually buy your games, not because I'm in love with the game, but because I want to enable honest behavior in a software developer.  And, let's be honest.  There have been about 20 games that have come and gone from my hard drive, SoSE is still hanging out there....twice.  I'll probably end up buying Elemental twice too.So, anyways, back to Elemental.  I would like to try and influence it's future a little if I may:

So anyways, back to Elemental.  I'd like to provide my input, if I may.

1:  Hero customization.  The default "channelers" have either life or death spellbooks listed but in hero creation, I don't see either of these spellbooks.  I know it probably means that the races of men get "life spells" as part of their other spellbooks and the fallen get "death spells" but I hate feelling like I'm missing options.  I want to make a hero with the "death spell book", or have better indications of what spellbooks the default channelers start with. 

2:  Summon demon this, summon demon that, where is my "summon undead horror of the night" spell?  I want vampires, skeletons, zombies.  How come the death spell book summons demons. 

3:  Units exiting town:  I was actually working out my feedback in my head for a few days and was going to suggest ctrl or shift to select multiple heroes/units and I decided that maybe I should actually *try* that before suggesting it, and lo and behold, it does indeed work.  LOL  However, the UI design behind that is a little unfortunate, still.  It wasn't real clear how to do what I wanted to do.  Maybe a drag/drop interface instead of an arrow?  I know, it's a ton of zots for a simple UI change, but the UI experience is a huge part of any game.

4:  Formations and unit placement.  Back to drag and drop heroes.  I need a way to arrange how my units will show up into battle.  My melee heroes end up safely nestled in the back of the line, my magic heroes stand guard over my well armored melee heroes, and my archer units are thrust into corners where they can't shoot.  I need a way to remediate that.

5:  Turn based;  Unit movement either needs to be more tied into turns, or less tied into turns.  The way it is now, I'm trying to move one unit to one location and I'm constantly clicking around trying to figure out which of my heroes is gumming up the works, before I give up and hit the "end turn" button.  I right click hero #1 and he meanders a bit, I right click hero #2, he meanders a bit, I click hero #3, he meanders a lot, because a turn happened, presumably, and I have to go back to #1 and #2 again to make them meander, but they won't, because I forgot about archer #4 who I really just want to stand there.  We either need to unlock the "turn button" and just set everything to a "clock" with rates of speed, etc, or we need to make everything more "turn centric" with pathing indicators, distance indicators, the reticle needs to change color if you're trying to move more than is possible for one turn, with some feedback on how many turns it will take, and then have them "auto move" at either the beginning or the end of the next turn.  I know there is some automovement now, but it's not real clear if it's designated at the beginning or at the end.  It almost feels like it's in the middle of the turn.  I know there were some last-minute design changes to shift the game towards turn-based but we do need to revisit this and flesh it out with a turn-based intent, or revisit the clocked method.

6:  City upgrades.  I know it delivers the city stats at the bottom, but it's kind of the small print at the bottom of the screen, and I'm not one to memorize what resources my town generates, and once the screen pops up, I can't move it, reduce it, close it, delay it, or otherwise postpone it to check out which city leveled and what resources it has (yes, I know, it's on the bottom, but I can't interact with the city!).  Maybe some way to close the window and just put one of those red exclamation points over my city so I can go on with my turn and assign a bonus later.  Of course, then we have to plan for that one person who lets their bonuses stack up for 5 levels and assigns them all at once...  Furthermore, provide some verification of our choice, there have been multiple times I've tried to click on a choice to select it, see what it does, get some feed back, or I just hit my mouse button by accident, and it immediately selects +50% gildar in a town that doesn't produce gildar!

7:  Random City Guardian:  Well, first, my random guardian has been a spider three times.  Second, is it really your intention that we pick random city guardian?  It seems like a silly thing to click on to me, but with the bandit raids and the CPU heroes, etc....it seems like you would expect us to pick this on pain of losing our town to a random passer-by.

8:  Lore building/Arcane building:  I haven't seen the pip-mark anywhere that says that these buildings take one gildar per turn.  It's not real clear at all.  My first 20 games or so I ended up with -2 gildar per turn and I didn't know why!  If these buildings are going to suck gildar, it needs to be apparent that they suck gildar.  Also, the game makes the blind assumption that I will always want to research something, which strategically, is probably the case, it just wasn't clear how I was selecting the research I wanted, it just magically happened, and that whole -2 gildar per turn could have been avoided if I could just not research something.  Some UI improvements could be done here.  You could move to a % scale so that kingdoms could research multple projects at once.  100% Colonial, or 50% domination and 50% sorcery, or 20% everything, or 0% everything, etc.  Then you get into varying gildar costs per turn, etc, but...hey, it's options.  Players like options.

9:  Unit design:  I just won't be happy until I can forge a nearly endless army of female elven slaves armed with their skivvies and a club.  No way I'm paying a whole resource point for their clothes.  I can take their pants from the dead.

10:  Game slowdowns/memory leaks:  Yea, I know, it's on the list.  It's on mine too.

11:  Archery:  I think archery is over powered.  I know, I'm jumping on that bandwagon of the "cool thing" and people will whine when you change it, but...archery is a bit over powered.  My solution?  Make it so an archer can only fire once per turn, regardless of his combat speed.  I mean, I can reason why a warg would make a melee fighter "faster" IE:  you get there faster, the warg bites the guy, etc.  I can't fathom for the life of me why sitting still on a warg would make me shoot faster.  Just sayin'.

12:  Imbue Hero:  When I cast imbue hero, and click my party with multiple heroes, it should pop up an interface asking me which party member to imbue, and indicate which ones are already so imbued.  I imbued the earth guy like 3 times in the campaign trying to imbue my bard.

13:  World size:  Five words, "Decrease the scale of everything."  The maps strike me as a little small, so I end up bumbling into bad guys pretty quickly, even on a medium map.  The map itself doesn't have to actually change size, if you decrease the scale of everything else in comparison the map will seem "larger."  Saves on resources.  I just don't want to stumble into a kingdom at turn 5, or at my second city.

14:  Hero customization (again): I can use the faction edtior to make my own faction, but I can't assign my created hero to that faction?  Huh?  Also, if I'm part of a faction that starts with knowledge of archery, it'd be nice if my hero could start with a bow.  Actually, it'd be nice if our heroes could start with more gear period.  This, "clothes and a stick" approach is a little painful.

What I want to see:  Ok, we're all gamers here, we've all played outside our relationship with Stardock, we can reference other games.  I'd like to see the unit management and turn based aspects of the game more closely paired with Heroes of Might and Magic, and a map scale/UI closer to Civ III.