Don't mock balance just because you don't understand it's importance.  Even if your not playing "competitive", for the fun of all that play, it's important for each single faction to have mutiple ways to play and win.

An excellent point. Part of this is undoubtably to make games more approachable and easier to learn. Another thing to consider is that most fantasy worlds, at least on paper, are dominated by a massive human population, with only dwindling and reclusive populations of elves, dwarves, etc. Admittedly, orcs and other generic evil cannon fodder are often quite numerous as well, but the 'civilized' world is typically overwhelmingly human. Most video games based on said fantasy worlds do not reflect this at all. This is partly because of player choice, but also stems from the very way the races are presented. (more on this later, I'm at work) Further, most fantasy video games present a single more or less homogenous human society as a playable race, even though humans, being by far the most numerous, would likely include numerous differet cultures and political entities. I'm greatly hoping that Stardock will manage to present the fallen and human subraces as distinct cultures unified against a common enemy rather than slightly different variations on a basic structure.

On the flip-side, this may be hard to implement considering where Stardock seem to be going with tech trees and unit design. It seems like the 'flavor' of your people may be up to you to create. Since technology, culture, and geography are all closely tied it will be interesting to see how the different races and subraces/factions/nations differ initially and how much those differences continue to have effects into the late game. I imagine differences like those b0rsuk mentioned in the quote above will be entirely up to the player to create, since both unit design and tactical style are left up to the player.

.....So the arguement is "it's not as fun since all the races look human regardless of other differentiating factors"?

Seriously??

In HoMM3, you sorta forgot the armies.  Yeah, the magic skills were more involved than the might skills, but the might skills were modifiers of the troops, the might half of the game.  The troops themselves were quite interesting.

I'd like more variety in a game where the command unit is an actual unit and not just a figurehead, but HoMM3 didn't lack for might, you're simply looking at just one aspect.

  Well you might be able to fake orcs if your knowledge of them is limited, but some races cannot be faked when ALL recruitable units are human.  Say you're in the mood for playing the leader of a race of insects.  Now if your town has only military units with weapons such as swords, bows and hammers...  well where are the insects special weapons like a paralyzing stinger, trapping web, poisonous bite, etc., etc.,  .   And why cannot any of your insects fly without some type of spells??  The list goes on and on.

  The reality of having ONLY  human units removes the option from ever being able to fantasize about growing an insect empire and civilization to crush your opponents.  And the same would be true if you wanted to play a race of undead... as it wouldn't make any sense why all your undead need farms and food to survive, why can't your ghosts walk thru walls... and so on and so on.

  Each race has specific strengths and weakness... you just can't say close your eyes and pretend(fake) your civilization is something else.  Based on the examples provided specific abilities, weaknesses, resistances(even 100% immunities), and attacks/defensives need to exist.  

  The channeller has some of the greatest powers in this game and able to imbue essence into the world...  so why should he and his main civilization be limited to being only  human?

I figured this was the reason to stick with two (or twelve) flavors of humans. I think it was a good choice! I just think it is critical that these twelve factions of humans REALLY have some unique back story and also some major gameplay differentiation so that we get all the enjoyment of trying different races and it really makes it a new game. The uniques tech trees and stuff are really going to provide this, I hope.

  I understand this would cause hesistation, but I have a suggestion which might provide a workaround or at the very least provide more options for the upcoming game.  The Orcs, Elves, and Humans are about the same height so the weapons and armors can use the same body types.  The Lizardmen have a tail yet no specific armor should be needed for a tail since many lizards can regrow the tail so the graphic can overlap sticking out from the graphic armor.  Regarding a race of insects, the majority should not use physically forged weapons/armor since they have a natural body armor and natural weapons.

I do see a great concern for a race of dwarves, halflings, and giants... but wouldn't it be possible to use the same graphic armor and weapons already created and include the programming to adjust the sizes of these graphics by a percentage?  Halflings wearing and using the same image with the only change being that it's been shrunk  and  the race of Giants wearing and using the same image with the only change being that it's size has tripled.  Each different size range has a specific size setting... size_1=50% of original image, size_2=original image, size_3=150% of original image, size_4=200% of original image, etc., etc., .   I've used tools which shrink or grow the sizes of images.   

   When exploring the dungeons I would completely understand possibly finding the Ice Sword from a dead giant.  The item would be given a size rating and although my champion could not use the sword I would be more than happy to take it back where it could be sold, traded to another player or possibly given to a Cyclops who has joined my army from a previous quest and is the same size as the dead giant. 

   I hope this suggestion helps introduce finding  small, medium, large and very large  armor/weapons.   Some players would be happy to keep a very large giant club merely as a trophy or possibly with the hope of one day giving the item to something under his control.  This would really help those of us interested in creating our own races and allow for more types of items without generating new images.

Cartagia?   Thats a new name on me.   Was that mentioned elsewhere?    Is that the official title of the campaign world?

I completely agree.  The eye candy is important but only one aspect.  What made Galciv 2 TA so fun was the variety of races and their unique abilities.  Now  that could be done with human factions too, but only to some extent. But in a fantasy world it would be possible to include so much more flexibility and strategic options, if you could play an undead empire, an insectoid empire (by the way I love both ideas!) etc.

The problem with the player adapting or modding his own races is that most often it feels like a B-solution where you have to make believe that you are actually not playing the empire you see in front of you on the screen and that you know since earlier games... Now Stardock is the company known for being THE BEST when it comes to game flexibility, both for strategy and for player choice, so limiting Elemental to only human games seems questionable at least ...

When it comes to the problem of adapting equipment to various races: an understandable problem, but I think we need to get our prioroties right.  It is more important for me to be able to play a variety of civilisations than to see each type of weapon I find flap against the armour I just found - that's a detail, that's eye candy. But the basic choice of what you can play is ELEMENTAL!

But in any case: even limiting the game to humanoid-only civilisations with only human-compatible equipment could still include a wide range of fantastic choices, like undead, lizardmen, orcs, elves, rakshasas, mind flayers etc ... There is alaways a solution if you want to find one!

As long as they leave the design of the equipment adaptation open to be modded, a user can create their own race and modify their own armor and weapons for it themselves.  That way, Stardock doesn't need to make a zillion items to cover a bunch of different races, just allow the base to add them in.

Other trivialties like ghosts walking through walls and undead not needing food are also easily surmounted.  The Infernals in FFH2, a badass Civ4 mod, don't use food.  All they have to do is leave the mechanics open for modification, and you can do whatever the hell you want to.  Walking through walls is a simple matter of removing the block that prevents the rest of the units walking through them.

If it's open to be modded, we can do anything we can come up with even to a game that only has humans.

I don't have any concerns and neither should anyone else. Beta 0 is not even out yet.

Boogiebac. Can I make a suggestion? If this game is good, I would happily pay the same again $30-40 for an expansion pack with extra art content and spells.

If you make an 'orc' model, you can just scale the body and equipment for them down to get goblins too

Elves just need to be human bodies with pointy ears. Maybe scaled a little down again.

Need an 'amazon' body type of course please ...

More seriously I do have a few more serious thoughts for the mill ...

(i) Although essence should be limited, does it have to be finite? If it regenerates really slowly, or can be obtained very slowly from some resource or structure (I mean very slowly) it would extend games. Essence based creatures would be rate but not finite. This would help support the vaster 'epic' maps. I don't want there to be too much of a limit on city size.

Also, there might be a pre-game option for amount / rate of essence similar to the options for number of planets / technology research speed in Galciv II?

(ii) Want Paladins. Specifically, I want to be able by some means to build troops with good swords and armour, magic resistance, the power to heal and a leadership bonus.

(iii) Unlimited magic creatures in some circumstances. For example, magic mounts as a resource ... ? Like horses were a tile resource in some versions of the Civilisation and were required to build cavalry. E.g. unicorns, lizards etc?

Yay! That's exactly how I had hoped/assumed the essence system was going to work I'm delighted to have that confirmed as I really think that's the best way to do it to give the player some really meaningful choices about how thin they spread themselves.

One question I would ask is if you've got any idea at this stage as to how (or if at all) this is going to scale with map size. I mean if by the time you've levelled up sufficiently to get a lot of the world beating spells and be nearing the end game phase you have, over the course of your life, accumulated and spent enough essence to put together a 10 city empire and still be pretty strong.. well that might be ideal on a medium map (where that could cover a reasonable portion of it) but on one of the uber huge maps might leave all the empires looking kinda anaemic in comparison to the world as a whole. Now that in itself might conceivably be fun (I guess you'd need to play test it to find out) but it would certainly be a very different game to playing on the lower sizes where you can control a sizeable proportion of all available territory.

Also, now that I think about it, I guess if you are going to change the amount of essence with map size... then the effect that essence has on different aspects of your chaneller would probably have to be tinkered with too. My point being that regardless of map size you probably want the potential essence hording badass end of game channeller to be at the same kinda level ... while you might want cities to be cheaper to produce on bigger maps. Although again I could be making some fatuous uninformed assumption there, I'm just thinking out loud here (so to speak).

Oh, and related to the above points, do you foresee there being any ideal limit you'd be aiming for where a player couldn't have more than a certain amount of cities regardless of map size?.. For instance you might feel that due to UI concerns etc that the micromanagement entailed in trying to run a 100 city empire would mean that it could really never be fun regardless of whether that only covers a tiny portion of one of the mooted giant 64bit maps?