I agree with Heavenfall.  I've enjoyed the game quite a bit.  It handles what it does well, and is different enough from FE that I don't see it taking anyone away from it.

I'm loving Warlock. Different to FE and is much simpler to get your head around. I've just started doing a Let's Play series on it on YouTube if anyone wants to get a feel for it before buying - but as Heavenfall mentioned, for $20 it is a must-buy.

I love the game.

This game has a much more potential for a MOM MOD especially considering tha:

- There are multiple planes.

- There are no sovereign.

- There are ships.

- There is no tech tree.

Still, there are not

- Heroes and equipment ( But in the original MOM, it was only for artifacts, in elemental it's the complete equipment). But that is something I do not mind losing.

By thinking about it, I would be much more excited to make a MOM mod for Warlock, rather than elemental. The amount of work will be much lower with warlock and I like the new CIV V like features of the game. There is probably something that could be edited right now. Maybe some data files are actually SQLITE database like it was the case in Civilization IV+. Only changing the data will allow me to do a lot of stuff even if no scripting is available.

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Personally, I like features like

- limited number of buildings per city

- fixed time construction

- no worker placement

- on map tactical battles gives a different flavor. It's better in a way that you do not have to pause the game to resolve battle and it is easier to manage 1 unit per hex rahter than 1 stack of unit per hex. So it makes the game much more multiplayer-able while adding a light dose of tactical battle.

"It's also 50% off on Steam right now, so for $10-$12 it's a great buy."

Oh! Really!

then I am seriously considering it.

When you buy a game on steam, it's only valid for 1 computer right?

I'll have to try if the demo works on my netbook, but I really doubt it. Else I'll have to buy it on my girl friend's PC.

You can put it on as many computers as you want and redownload it as often as you need with Steam.  Those kind of restrictions are not Steam related.  So if you buy a Ubisoft game from Steam, it probably won't allow you to do that...cause Ubi are kind harsh about that shit.

The DLC is also half off.

I finally bought the game, but still considering the expansion pack. Races looks similar, so buying another race did not seem very interesting, and I did not understand the other pack. I rather pay for additional functionality rather than paying for additional data.

I played rapidly yesterday. I like the core of the game, but I doubt some things would require balancing. This is why modding would be important. For example I summoned imps and ghost wolf. They both have similar attack powers with no outstanding ability and the wolf has a -6 upkeep while the imp has -2. Why a so huge difference?

Another thing, sometimes the interface lack of info, but that could probably be patched. For example, the summon upkeep does not appear anywhere before casting the spell. So you need to summon, then say "Oh! my god, that is expensive!" and then un-summon it.

But my most surprising discovery was the fact that ALL UNITS CAN MOVE ON THE SEA. This is very ingenious, it avoid many problems including AI problems. I think elemental could do the same.

Of course, else only walking on water naturally would be very too powerful. But the fact that you must not build a ship and bring it to destination makes it awesome. It's also less annoying to design the interface to load and unload units.

Another idea would be to have a certain number of "Transport" in reserve that does not appaer on the map but that gets automatically used when moving at sea. So if you want to move more units at the same time on the sea, you would need to build more of them. It's a similar concept to the freighter fleets in master of orion 2 when moving population.

My girl friend played a quick game. Her biggest complains was the poor tutorial because there are some things she could not figure out by her self. Like for example: What are the Victory conditions!? Is there other victory conditions than kill all wizards? There was a few other things like how population growth works, etc.

But again, that can be easily fixed.

By the way, is there a rulebook/website/wiki, etc.

I don't know why people would give bad rating to Warlock. The only thing that I can see is that it's a simple game, a bit like CIV REV. And that might scare people away.

On my point of view, simplicity is perfect because it would allow to develop other aspects of the game like diplomacy, magic, espionage, etc. The problem with most CIV games is that the city management is so heavy that the players do not have enough energy to manage other things. Now with a much more simple city management, you can allow players to manage other stuff.

The only problem with warlock is that this other stuff is either weak or missing. For example, the diplomacy system is very limited. I would have added much more options with the possibility to have a council of wizard with laws, contracts and political powers.

We will see how it evolves, if they will add features or if it will be possible to mod our own features. But one thing for sure is that the core is very good and it seems quite playable. You don't feel like if you are playing an incomplete game.

There was a bug in the demo where desenchanting a unit spell removed the effect, but not he upkeep cost. I did not test it in the real game.

I have to try installing the game on my netbook but it has windows XP and according to steam, it only run on vista and 7. Did any body tried windows XP for this game.

Second, is there a ways to transfer the installation of a game from a computer to another, or do I really have to re-download the game again to my second computer directly from steam. I just want to save some bandwidth by simply transfering the files from a computer to another.