I'm a huge Elemental fan. I watched this game for months and months before it came out. I was playing the Beta Builds prior to release, but allowing people with much more time on their hands than me to give input.
My initial reaction to the release of Elemental was poor. I really wanted it to be a great game that I would still be playing years after release, like GalCiv2, Heroes of Might and Magic, and Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic.
Obviously, Elemental wasn't. I played about 3 games of the release build, and gave up. I think I had the patience to win one of them. At a fundamental level, the game just wasn't FUN. Whenever I played it, I just got the itch to play a game of Shadow Magic instead!
Since release, I've been keeping an eye on updates, and playing occasionally. I was really looking forward to 1.1. So here's my thoughts on my first 1.1 game, which I'm happy to say I played to conclusion.
The Good!
- The game is FUN! I actually enjoy playing. Improvements to interface, city building, unit design, the economy, population, wondering monsters, and quests have all contributed to making the game a lot more fun to play.
- City building in particular makes a LOT more sense now.
- I had a lot of fun with some of the new quests, and the fact that they get progressively harder.
- I can understand what I'm doing now! I can now more easily tell where I'm getting Guildar from and what resources I need and have. Makes the play experience much better
- Tactical combat is SOOO much better. While the Tactical Combat system is not quite as deep as Shadow Magic, it is enjoyable to play now, and not completely filled with bugs.
- AI has improved immensely. I played my first 1.1 game on "Challenging". Over the course of the game, my cities were attacked by wandering stacks of Monsters, and I actually LOST a city because I was not paying attention and it had no defenders! In my mind, this is great! I want the AI to keep me on my toes! The enemy faction AI wasn't as aggressive towards me, but one of my allies did a good job attacking one of my enemies.
- I love the gradual reveal of additional mines and resources.
The Bad!
- There are still things that are difficult to understand, and needlessly so. It took me forever to figure out what to research to level up my heroes to go claim new quest locations. I'm still not entirely sure what FOOD does, and it's difficult to tell how much the population of my cities are increasing every turn.
- I researched a TON of magic spells over the course of the game. I think I cast maybe 6 or 7 total though. Magic really isn't NECESSARY to the game at all. This is sad, because I think the new Magic system is really good, and the spells look really pretty when you cast them!
- Diplomacy seemed too easy and not deep enough to me. I was playing Empire in my Challenging game. Mid-game I was left with two other Empire races on the map. Once I researched Alliance Treaties, it was an automatic diplomatic win for me. I didn't have ANY treaties with the two other Empire races, but they still loved me enough to ally with my immediately. The only reason I can think that they did was because my military was so vastly higher than theirs.
- I'd love some sort of PATH indicator telling me where my armies are moving and the path they are moving to get there, so I don't have to click on each army everyturn and look for the "X" icon.
- For God's sake get rid of the pop up window informing me that I have a city that has leveled up and is asking me to choose my bonus. I can't look at my city to see what its output of resources is, so how can I make an informed choice? I'm not sure how this survived from the release version of the game.
The Ugly!
- Sometimes when I zoomed out to the clothmap and back into my cities, the faction color of my city would be wrong, and it would be named incorrectly until I clicked on it.
- Still some interface issues. For example, highlighting a horse resource which I couldn't harvest told me I couldn't harvest it until I researched "" "". When highlighting some cities to see how much population I was getting, sometimes the text was cut off.
- When my sovereign casts "Imbue Champion" on a stack of creatures that includes more than one champion unit, I can't for the life of me figure out how I pick WHICH champion I am casting it on! This is the same for any enchantment spell cast on creatures as far as I can see.
Overall!
- Stardock, you've done your job well, because I'm starting up another game of Elemental at a higher difficulty and a larger map size, and I'm not itching to play Shadow Magic instead. I'm looking forward to future improvements. Keep 'em coming!
