(1) Its been so long since E:WoM came out and nobody really knows about that game unless they bought it. Just call it Fallen Enchantress since its shorter (I reversed my previous stance).


(3) Looking through the spell list, I think that you have enough really. My only suggestion would be to add some more spells that use 2 different shards. What about a unit enchantment that increases spell damage by 5% for each water and air shard you have, and requires Air 3 and Water 3? Or maybe just spell mastery by 3 + 1 per shard if you think thats too strong.

(4) What sorts of additional quests would you like to see?

If anything put more variety in the Weak and Medium quests since those are encountered the most often. I am thinking like 3x as many. 

How about a sword in the stone quest : P

Rescue a prince or princess from a dragon with 3 options: Bribe with gildar, bribe with influence, or kill the dragon

Help an armorsmith by killing scrap golems and giving him the metal. He rewards you with a masterwork chain chest piece. 

Go harvest some mushrooms in a forest with spiders. Be rewarded with a random potion.

Clear out a library of bandits and get some random books as a reward.

Help a wizard kill the ice elemental he accidentally summoned and he grants you an ice spear as a reward. 

(5) Random events:

- Found a gold mine/apiary/other resource. Creates one in a random city or outpost for you. Should be rare.

- Population Boom: +50% growth for 10 turns.

- Research Breakthrough: +40 research points

- Generous Benefactor: +100 Gildar (maybe +5 per game turn elapsed)

- Noble Gift: 1 Warhorse for your sovereign

- Inheritance from your crazy uncle: A random magic item is given to you (type of item you find on the ground, nothing too strong)

- Wandering Caravan: +1 Pioneer

- Volunteer Army: +1 Militia (perhaps +1 / hundred turns)

- Blessing from a Cleric: Lowers the unrest in your kingdom by 10% for 10 turns.

- Cartographer: Pay 20 gildar for a random 5x5 area of the map to be revealed.

- Champion offers to join your service: A random hero offers to join you if you pay his hiring cost. It should try to give one the player can afford.

- Bandit Raid: Create 3-5 bandit camps in the player's kingdom. This event shouldn't appear until at least turn 50. 

Well thats enough brainstorming for now... hope that helps : D

Also I would strongly recommend you have a look at Heavenfall's Reliquary and use ideas like his for boosting the number and variety of magical items.  After all this is Elemental, we need lots of MAGIC and lots of MAGIC ITEMS.

• Spells. Make them "less bonusy" and "more effecty". Spells that do something unique instead of altering what you're already doing. Again, refer to MoM, you can't go wrong. Also, rework as possible the hero leveling system since right now it only allows to build "multiclasses" - and somewhat randomly, at that. It's not organic nor fun. I want to be able to build a barbarian warrior, or a frail caster with LOTS of spells.
• Epicness. Spells, quests, items and heroes are a lot less epic than they seemed they were going to become a few betas ago.
• Tactical battles. A little boring and repetitive. More effective and colorful spells would help these too. They need some more tactical deepness anyway. Also the famous "Autoplay with no spells" button is essential for the late game, or you are forced to play every single meaningless skirmish going always through the same motions. Game killer, imho. I can't stress this enough.
• Random events. Nice suggestions from the community.

The rest of the game is well structured imho at this point, but without the above it remains bland. After that, balance, bugfixing and performance. Performance right now seems particularly worrying and I'm not even sure it can be fixed: maybe a poll about how many get to actually finish a game would shed some light in this regard: I feel the problem is being underestimated.

I vote for Fallen Enchantress title. Drop the elemental to avoid negative association.

As for spells I think death is at a disadvantage with lack of heals for units so I suggest:

Vampiric touch: Unit recieves 10-20% of damage done back as health (unit spell).

Raise Dead: If a living humanoid stack has been killed it can be raised from dead as skeleton or zombie army to continue the fight (summon).  Can only be used on previously living targets.  Stack remains at end of combat as new unit type with typical undead immunities and weaknesses e.g. poison immunity and reduced initiative.

"Winds of magic": regularly winds of magic blow stronger and in the places where some units died rise undead abominations who proceed to attack nearby settlements to get revenge for their demise.

1 - Call it......Fallen enchantress, mistress of magic.

3 - Magic spells that make various shields against elemental spells, such as fire and ice.

5 - Teach the AI about random events, have it use them, and act more human, more interesting.

I can't help feeling that the Steam community will give FE a right good bashing to start of with, but hopefully settle down later if the game proves worthy.

.

That depend on your logo and plans for followup games. If you plan to do more games in the world, but not ones that has no connection to FE, keep the elemental. If not, there is no actual reason for it (as Elemental: WOM left a bad taste).

I don't quite remember, but about a year or so (or maybe for Elemental?) there was an event for magic spells, and I believe one for quests. I think you should dig these up and use what you find, as it included many fine suggestions.

I would like to see some World Enchantments, such as Zombie Mastery (raises killed units at now cost with a high upkeep), and other ones that are strong, but cost large amount of mana. Currently we are stuck with the mana dumps (500 mana for -5% unrest?)

I would like to see MoM's merchant coming back. If I have gilder, a merchant has a chance to attempt to sell me some mercenary well trained army, or an artifact.

Another is a new bunch of heroes (one-2 per game) who will go to a random faction. They do not still other champions exp (like henchmen), but after some time they defect to a different random faction.

I am usually playing on a much too high conditions for my own good (2nd from end). I will go to that difficulty and try to post some extra info on ideas.

This is probably the most important:

1) Fix the population! In 0.95 Population has no place in FE. It costs (Game wise) about 1/3 of your resources/buildings, and give little in return. A city with 2/3/1 (G/M/E) is better than a 5/3/0 or 5/2/1, due to amount of people is not Important.

Reason: people are used for money and city level. City levels are not as important as production, and you can reach level 2 with either 3 grain (2 grain+1 essence) or with a building or two of extra pop.

Besides levels, people can pay taxes at a cost. The cost is production and research, which is most-always more important than taxes, especially when you get most of your needs from the buildings.

Either make gilder a much bigger issue so that a high population to tax is important, give them the old 0.1 production&research bonuses, or scrap the idea (easier game for new players, easier for the AI, less room for bugs).

2) Remove the production cap on cities (3 turns minimum for production).

This issue annoys nearly all of the players, since there is no reason for it. Nearly every reason for it can be easily solved, and remove it.

3) Better show of races uniqueness in-game. Currently when making a custom race it's impossible to know what is unique to each one without memorizing it. Also, make another pass on them, as I suspect some races do not have a unique ability, while others such as Yithril (Juggernaut) does. They got certain options the other once didn't take, but a custom race has no reason to pick them.

4) Upgrading all resources from cities, instead of going to a resource hunting. This includes all resources the city controls, and can upgrade (can build multiple times if have the same effect on different resources). Players will still be able to manually upgrade.

5) A look at Governor heroes exp progression. They need to fight (and do so badly) in order to improve, and need to be in the city in order to use their abilities. Maybe allow them to "lock" in a city, turning them into a defending unit, but granting them exp or some other idea to keep them progressing?

6) Alchemy gilder--->mana. I believe we'd like to see such an optional research in the magic tree.

One more thing: after you believe you implemented all of the features (at least the ones you plan to, release a 4B for the community to give feedback, so nothing will go into beta 5 half baked.

This next beta will be extremely important. First impressions and how the word spread across Steam, Gamespot, Gamespy, ign.com +++ does matter. Therefore the beta next week needs to rid us of the most blatant bugs. 

Corrupted save games, disappearing action bar in combat, arrows coming inn from strange angles and these main things that has been with us since day 1.

Good luck

Its an amazing game in need of some polish and love before release.

And one more question, cant we stard with group of 5 soldiers instead of 3? It would help the immersion a bit and maybe it would also hel AI in the early game, as it relies more on mundane.

Just a small suggestion...

I would stick with Elemental: Fallen Enchantress. Like Bingjack said above, Elemental is a good name for a TBS franchise. Just FE doesn't give the same feeling. As for avoiding the negative associations, as if that is even possible. Taking 1 minute to google the game before buying it will reveal WoM. Every review will start with a reminder about how bad WoM was. Speaking of which;

Maybe you intend to fix all the balancing, pacing, immersion, AI, UI, and performance issues in the polishing phase, but in my honest opinion the game is not ready to be released. There is a good basis and, like WoM, it has a lot of potential, but it's not giving me the 'TBS classic' feel yet. Also, Frogboy talking about 'lots of stuff we haven't seen yet' is giving me a bad sense of deja vu. There was a lot of talk like that in the months before WoM's release, and it never came through. That being said, the hint at more/better content and mechanics does excite me a bit

The game is a lot of fun now.    However, it could be a real classic.

Suggestions for FE:

1. Reduce city spam.     Currently the game has too much "rush out and stake your claim" in the early phases.      The AI is entirely focused on this.    We go from a a 4X game to a 1X game.    It reduces the fun a lot.    This is the biggest current issue.

2. We need more late game content.     Once a player has cleaned out the monster dens in an area its safe until the AI shows up.   Once the direction of the AI threat is known there is very little reason for troops anywhere but at the front.  

I suggest monsters and some quests re-spawn later in the game and at higher levels.

3. Allow road building by some type of an "engineer" type unit in addition to the automatic city roads.     The new manual roads would have to have a cost of course.

4. Please fix the loot distribution.    Despite what the change notes for beta 4 said, you still quite often get low level gear for defeating a dragon.

5. Please fix the combat "slow down" problem that occurs sometimes in tactical.    

I agree with this. Keep the name as it is.

Also, "Fallen Enchantress" only makes sense as long as you are playing the campaign. If you're in sandbox the game is more about the world of Elemental.