This is both a walkthru and my critique of where we are on the game.
This is going to get updated a lot as I go through this so keep refreshing.
The New Economy
We definitely listened to your feedback. After considering the reports and lots of prototyping we came up with a significantly better, more original, more interesting way to run your Kingdom/Empire.
The world of Elemental is populated with many resources. Admittedly, the screenshot above represents one of those really lucky moments where there’s a lot of resources together but it does illustrate the way things work now very well.
Cities no longer produce resources on their own beyond the absolute most basic research, materials, and arcane knowledge.
The action comes from the very finite number of resources scattered about the world that you can now make use of if they are within your territory. If a resource is in your territory, just click on it and choose build. You don’t have to create any special units to make use of it.
The most common resources are:
- Fertile Land. Produces Food
- Old Growth Forests. Produces Materials.
- Lost Libraries. Produces Knowledge
- Ancient Temples. Produces Arcane Lore
- Gold. Produces (well gold)
Your settlements don’t produce these things anymore in any real amount. Instead, the improvements improve upon these resources.
So a market doesn’t produce gildars anymore. It provides a bonus % to the existing production of any resources associated with that settlement.
Magical Speed Up
A Dangerous World
There are other things in the world trying to ruin you besides other factions. And they will if you’re not careful.
Tactical Battles
These need more polish (for instance, the movement tiles are far too opaque), the sound is highly iffy, and the overall play tuning still needs work.
Combat & Conquest
The conquest technology tree continues to be an issue in the beta. Too long to get boring stuff. This is something that is high on our list to do something about. It just takes way too long to get the conquest stuff going.
I’m 37 turns into my game and I have no armor items and my only decent weapon is a boar spear.
Diplomacy
Diplomacy is coming along nicely. Of all the aspects of Elemental that still need work, this is the area that seems to be potentially the most interesting. Unlike GalCiv which was goblygook, Elemental’s diplomacy system is much more straight forward and provides a lot more potential opportunities for trading.
