100 spells are much more than I would expect. It doesn't need more than it, after all the spells need to be balanced and quality is preferable over quantity especially in this where spells are so important in the game. Better less that are cool (nicely animated) and usefull than tons of useless skills. I hope a big part of them will stand has ultimate ones (or usefull till late game), instead of only a few. I mean, that allow for different late game strategy instead of just a few ultimate ones, because then it would be progressive.

By the names model of each faction, if there is any, It looks like Izen should a Kingdom while Ithul an Empire. 500 quests also looks very fine, much than I would think especially because they are optional. Those numbers impressed me. The Technology system seem to be as free or open as the system that will be used to make units, in which you choose the names and the itens you want, so might be also nice and probably to be a combination of gameplay style. Looks like you can go for as many points as you want at your own risk of not improving the other ones or the player point distribution to be very tweakable. Just guessing tough.

I'm interested in custom spells also, but I suspect Aesir's "Mechanics" list is too small. GalCiv2 finally got a Custom Tech Tree Editor, and it covers about 40 categories of technology. Admittedly many of them are not likely to have analogs in an Elemental spell category list, but the items Aesir lists so far seem to be just basic combat spells. If we get to build our own spells, I surely hope that we can customize global ('world wrecking') spells as well as our own magics to affect commerce, diplomacy, citizen loyalty, farmland productivity, etc.

The basic distinction between special effects (UI) and mechanics seems important to keep in mind, though. I'd very much support a fairly simple set of options on the in-game presentation side if it meant we had a pretty wide range of underlying functionality to play with.

If the plan is to have custom spell design possible within an active game, I think this kind of stuff would be a good candidate for a third major parameter. In the tabletop RPG Champions, basic superpowers like an energy blast or telekinesis can be modified with Advantages (raising the cost) or Disadvantages (lowering the cost). For example, to make a fireball, you add an Area of Effect advantage to a basic energy blast. To make that fireball design cheaper, you could make it harder to cast (costs more mana), or give it an activation roll (you can't always be sure it will work).

only if they have a spellbook maker or something like that so I can save "silly spellbook" and "tournement spellbook" as different.

Frogboy, if you see this and have the time to answer, I'd like to ask if the names of the nations are work-names or their actual names. I don't want to intrude on your creational process but if Humans and Fallen are both divided into adamant Kingdoms and Empires it feels a bit.. dichotomic.

Modular Spellbooks! Every time you research a spell, you can put it in one or several custom spellbooks that you define yourself. There'd be one big spellbook with all your spells. Going into it, you could define which other spellbooks it'd show up in.

Most people would likely only have two or three main spellbooks - World Spells, Battlefield Spells (if any), Buffs, etc. But with modular spellbooks, everyone could sort them however the hell they want! You could download that "800 Silly Spells, including Luckmann's Dancing Ferrets, Landisaurus' Thesaurus, Swicord's Archaic Stopsign, and Pigeonpigeon's Exploding Pigeons (not to mention Vandenburg's Flying Deathtraps)" without it completely cluttering every single spellbook, no matter how the game itself categorizes those spells (battlefield, etc).

It would be funny to see a Scandinavian Localized version. Mixed Norwegian, Swedish and Danish. Take whatever words are the most archaic in every language when deciding what to translate to, and bam. I'd lol.

Man, don't forget the Finnish!

In terms of quests, I've often wondered if there's not an opportunity to weave gradually developing, multi-episodic quests into a game like this.

This would be similar to the "Good / Neutral / Bad" episodes that came up in GalCiv 2, but with a thread running between them.  So, if something comes up, and I send a character out on a small quest early in the game to rid the countryside of a marauding band of Orcs, maybe I see a reference to an Orc chieftain named "Thugrak". 

Depending on the outcome of that first quest (do I find and slay the warband, do I hire them as mercenaries to serve in my own army, do I pay them money to leave me alone?), there's a branching storyline.  Wouldn't take more than 3 or 4 "episodes" to create an engaging narrative thread, and I'm assuming you could build the scripting language so that you don't get the exact same result every time.

This is also the kind of thing that modders could go crazy with.  Let them craft their own quests, with their own outcomes, and provide their own writing.  There would be a lot of duds out there, but there would be a lot of gems that would rise to the top, and be easily included in our ongoing games.

Something along the lines of those pop-up text passages you used to get in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, if that rings any bell?  Otherwise, it feels to me like we're left with the simple, engaging but somewhat tedious "Go here / bring me this / kill that" experience where every quest begins to feel exactly like every other quest.

Ron, that was the game I was thinking of, I just couldn't remember the title!  The storylines were the most fun part of that game, and definitely added some flavor "on the cheap", from a development standpoint.