I absolutely cannot wait for this game. At first I thought to myself, "Aw come on, where's GalCiv3!?" but scratch that, Elemental looks amazing. This game will show that Stardock is definitely not a one-trick pony, not that they ever were in the first place. I only see success for this game, I don't see how anything could fail in regards to it. I already preordered the game and am trusting in Stardocks ability to deliver a great game backed by great customer service and longetivity. I know that Demigod was not entirely Stardocks fault, as they didn't even develop game, and the whole fiasco surrounding Demigod doesn't faze me because I know how it was GalCiv2. Which was absolutely an amazing experience both in the game and on on the forums.

On dungeons/planes/underground/etc, do we have any confirmed information that there will actually be more than one map in a game?  As in MoM's Myrror or HoMM's underground?  Dungeons are confirmed, but do we have any info about how they are actually represented spatially or how a "dungeon crawl" is represented temporally (i.e. one turn or more than that)?

The map editor looks really nice, Brad, thanks for sharing that.  I'll get a good bit of fun out of just making cool maps; my office is notoriously non-decorated execpt for sql db diagrams but these just might make it onto the walls.

Thanks,

Keith

If there is a map editor, I am assuming that there is some sort of a dungeon editor as well? Or will we get to pick from a set of pre-created dungeons (hopefully that can be modded in some other way)? What I certainly don't want is for them to be sprinkled arouind the map like GalCiv anomalies!

Also, I want to be able to create some really wacked-out maps, so I don't think it would be wise to have rules like in the GC2 editor where you couldn't put planets outside of three tiles of a star, and so on. Screw you, geology: I want my icey lake in the middle of a burning Mordor plain!

How big will we be able to make maps?  (based on how big the example map in the picture is, of course)

Here's hoping that we can indeed extract the baseline map from a game to re-use with other settings and/or tweak with the editor. I've also had that experience of wishing I could try again at a map that beat the crap out of me long before I learned this, that, or the other thing.

If there's an internal debate on planes/moons/whatever, I'd love to see a companion thread to the one on the econ mechanics. Or at least a semi-firm dev reply to this question that's been around pretty much since the boards opened.

Just a thought, if you want everything to be the same when you started previously on the map why not just save at the start, I have a simple system I use for that: saving as "### - GAMESTART" then any notes a jot down in the college rule notebook using the numerical reference and skipping a page or two before I start on the next one like 001, blank page 002 blank page... 121 blank page..... etc

I mean sure having the game do that is nice and all, but just a thought

@ Palverz, reply #36

Though I appreciate the suggestion, I already have a few methods for keeping track of my own games. However, I might add your suggestion of a notebook to track things to the list (or maybe a text file from notepad).

The problem I have faced in the past is that sometimes new patches renders the old saves non-functional. For GalCiv 2, this has happened many times. I would give an exact example, but I seem to have a bad habit of missplacing my backup game data.

My reasoning behind wanting the game to remember start settings is, in the event a major change in a patch that somehow renders the old saves non-functional, the game should be able to generate a new game from the original settings. Its more of a redundency than anything else, one that I hope will work when Elemental reaches its own ver 2.0 milestone.

I think a world generator like that of Dwarf Fortress would be nice here. Especially the more involved of the two ingame options. There are litterally hundreds of parameters in there which can be tweaked, everything from the desired percentage of megabeasts left alive to how volcanic the map is. It really fills the big void in world generating between the two extremes of "Completely random with no or very little say about the end result" and "The player decides where to place each and every last little rock on the map."

And a suggestion for a tool in the map editor:
An 'environment edge' tool which detects the environments in its circle and automatically creates an 'edge' for them. By that I mean the gradual/random looking transition between environments which are seen in nature, but often require painstaking effort to create in a map editor.

I think the key to get a Dwarf Fortress-like editor might be to just provide a command line function for every function available in the GUI-based editor.  If we had that flexibility, it's possible someone it the modding community could come up with a good, parameterized algorithm set to call the Map Editor functions to build a world.

Enabling custom map scripts such as those CIV has would allow the community to do this sort of thing and more.