Tiavals

Have you perhaps played King of Dragonpass? It is remarkably similiar to what you have described. My vision of the game is quite different, though. What I envision is a fantasy world that is already developed, unlike Civilization 4 where you start from the neolithic age, here there already exists a multitude of kingdoms that have existed for as long as a thousand years, for example. The idea of starting from such a small component doesn't really fit the theme, in my mind at least. It

This kind of idea doesn't really work against the AI, I'd imagine. The idea of secrecy is after all a thing that mostly relates to human players. But it would certainly be a nice touch in a multiplayer game.

I disagree. Having a globe is opposed to my Flat Earth Society beliefs, as well as probably meaning the terrain generation will suffer from it. I prefer maps of a more local feeling, such as you see in the maps of almost any fantasy book. A small area by the sea, with an impassable mountainside to the east perhaps.

[quote who="vieuxchat" reply="2" id="1930110"] Or a Sauron kind of ring. When you're strong enough you creates artefact with some of your essence. then you would gain great magic power but lose some of your humanity (and then it should have some drawbacks like having hard time to keep your cities at rest, or you come closer to your dusk - like in Ars Magica - And each spell cast has a slight chance of aging you. When you're too old.. bye bye)[/quote] Not that it has much to do wi

I'm assuming that while each faction has their own tech tree and spellbook, they are mostly constructed from "generic blocks". Like there's a spell called "Enchant roads" that speeds up movement on roads when cast, and 3 human and 1 fallen civilization has it in their spellbook(but you need a specific amount of spheres to cast it even then), and "Siege engines" can be researched by all the human civs but only 2 of the fallen ones. Then perhaps some human civilization, let's imagine a barbaric

[quote who="Ron Lugge" reply="2" id="1929841"] Given that we have two races each broken down into six seperate civilizations (for a total of twelve), I don't know where you're getting you're info [/quote] Really? That's excellent news, I must've missed that. :) I thought there'd be only 2(or three?) races and that's that. Good thing I was wrong then. :)

I feel this is an important thing to the game. Usually in 4X games you just spam cities where-ever you can fit them and reap the benefits. Now, Civ4 and Galciv2 both had some mechanics that tried to hamper this, but they were still a bit insufficient and wouldn't work well in Elemental(or at least my picture of the game). Think about any fantasy setting. Now, in how many of them do cities spring up all the time? In very few. Usually the cities are unique(having some aspects that give

Pretty much agreed. It really is a problem because of the eXpand point in the 4X. You always expand without any limiting factors, growing more and more cities, which affects the terrain(not to mention micro-management and overall atmosphere). What I would like is that cities were much fewer in number(a bit like in the HOMM series, where you can't build more of them) and the wilderness had more of an impact overall. Perhaps instead of full-blown cities you would have small villages tha

[quote who="vieuxchat" reply="1" id="1929360"]In fact I don't understand why spells "could" be random? Wizards work with no idea of what they can achieve? hum ... and why not some "general" kind of spells like attack/defense/global/diplomacy/etc.... and you have the option to ask something mor or less precise to your wizards. If you give just general indication the research is fast. If you give them very precise things it takes longer to achieve. For instance, you ask in

[quote who="GCFL" reply="7" id="1928997"]You know, throughout history, conquering armies always absorbed the tech from the defeated foe. The attempt to assimilate foreign fighters into the conquering army often proved difficult due to difference in language, culture, etc. This meant that you almost never saw a barbaric warrior fight as a native barbaric warrior in the Roman army for example. It was also difficult to train that barbaric warrior into a modern Roman solder.

Keep in mind that in MOM you could always choose all Chaos books and you'd get all the Chaos spells. No randomness there. And that is good. The game should be about choices, and it's definately a choice. Do you want all the Chaos spells, or perhaps you would want to have some nature spells as well? A trade-off is part of your planning. You can always find or exchange the spells with another Wizard. But I vehemently disagree on the "randomness just kills planning" part. It's totally th

Well, something like this was in Master of Magic, and I assumed that's where you got the idea. Every now and then a constellation would go in conjunction or the Moon would be waxing or waning, changing the power-structure of the spellnodes in the game. A simple mechanic that usually affected little in the game, but a nice touch nonetheless.

I followed it as well very dilligently, but enough of that. MOO3 is a game of hellish bureacracy, it's more of a simulation than a game anyway. A very well designed way of handling it can be found from Armageddon Empires, a turn-based hex game where you control an empire in a post-apocalyptic wasteland and try to squash others. That's really where I got the idea from. The choice of how to invest your points is quite well handled in it, and I think anyone interested in t

Agreed. The artstyle is somehow.... enchanting. I like it quite a bit. But I fear many others don't like it.

The modifiers to morale is a nice thing, as it makes you build thematic armies as well. That's a nice touch as such.

In most games castles and fortresses and such are totally worthless, because the enemy has rarely any reason to attack them. And even if he does, he can usually siege them out instead of attacking full on. Will there be such constructions in the game(seperate of cities) and if so, what kinds of bonuses they give? My suggestion would be actually pretty similiar to that of Galciv2 Starbases. A castle would offer bonuses to troops in it's radius, in addition to bei

Oh, reading this springs a question to my mind, specifically "Elemental puts you directly into the game as the powerful sovereign of a fledgling kingdom who has the relatively unique ability to channel magic from the shards of magic. " Does this mean there are "neutral" kingdoms as well, ones that cannot use magic at all? Ones you can make an alliance with or subjugate, or trade with? Like minor civs in Galciv2 perhaps? Some barbarian tribes, or a merchant republic or something?

There's one very important thing that comes to my mind out of random maps: They are rarely, well, personal. Take Civ for example. Most of the areas are just small plots of random terrain with little feeling to them. There is rarely a large desert or mountain range or something like that. There's a mod to Civ4 called Fall from Heaven, which has a very good random map generator, since the map is a local one, instead of the whole world. This allows things like valleys and jungles and suc

As I don't know how spells work yet, here's an idea: It would be interesting if you could mix different types of magic. Mix fire and earth and you can shoot magma bolts or comets, mix water and fire and you have acid. Water and earth and you can cast mud, and so on. Mud elementals, flaming undead, all kinds of crazy and great things could be spawned. Dominions had this kind of system, and it was incredibly nice.

The way Galciv2 used the alignments was great. Being good should be hard and cause you grief and being evil should be easy and beneficial. After all, why would someone be evil otherwise? Anyway, as I understood it, you must choose either Life or Death magic, you can't have both? This was a rather disappointing part of MOM to me, why couldn't you have both?

[quote who="vieuxchat" reply="7" id="1926596"] It shouldn't be too hard to just change the portrait of your unit with another one took in an "elite-portrait-pool", and a message that would ask you the new name of the unit.[/quote] Sure, but that would create these faceless heroes. They're not unique, but generic, so I really wouldn't have a similiar "attachment" to them as the "real" heroes, I suspect. It's not the lack of a portrait, but the lack of a distinct feeling of being a

It's a fault that plagues almost all grand-scale strategy games. Because you always expand and expand and expand, you'll come to a point where you have 20 cities and can't really be bothered to check most of them out. This was mostly dealt with in Galciv2 with the specialization of planets, just have your planet full of some building and you don't need to manage it much at all after that. Now, I don't know the scale of the game, whether you really do expand uncontrollably and end with

A very good idea, I think. Though I would limit access to them greatly. It should take great magical power or portals to get there, and even then they would be dangerous places. Also, you shouldn't be able to colonize them, but instead there should be ample amounts of magical energies, perhaps magical items/ingredients that ease casting spells of the sphere you could harvest there. Or maybe rarely recruit native creatures. Or perhaps even the ability to manipulate the envirome

1. Ample customization of your channeler/empire. More akin to MOM than Galciv2. Perhaps you could customize both your wizard and your empire. Let's say you choose the humans as your race, you could then decide on different govermental/societal options that would affect the production of stuff and perhaps even the units they get. A tribal human-nation would certainly get different units than a kingdom-one. 2. Spells that affect terrain. You could use a firespell at a forest, causing it

A great idea, I think. Variance within an army is always a good thing. You could have forester units that move fast in forests and can hide in them, like you said, that would have an advantage against knights, but on an open field they would be decimated and so on.