Ironically, if the game had gotten positive reviews overall, we'd be stuck with the current system (ala GalCiv II's terrible economic system). But now, we're free to make wholesale changes over the long haul. "The pressure" is off"
Its actually really reassuring to hear you say that about the Galciv 2 economic model. Dont get me wrong, I loved Galciv 2 and I just finished a huge map game of it two days ago. My one major problem with Galciv 2 was the way Economics drove everything, including production and research, which made it really hard to have any specific control over individual planets etc. In the end, the way I play is to max spending, put 1% military, 99% social and put focus on research, then forget research buildings and go all out on production buildings (to avoid all the otherwise wasted 'production'). Its my one gripe with the whole game, and I thought I remembered you defending that model a few years ago. The civ style splitting of production, research and economics from each in a nice simple way (Moo 2 dealt with it in a similar way) made it much easier for the player to properly control their empire.
Now back to the thread topic. Ive had several long games of Elemental, but its just not drawing me in (and I dont even mind it still crashing every 30 minutes, the game just isnt fun). I'm holding faith in Stardock to eventually get a fun game out there rather than go for the refund. I think the major things that need "fixing" with Elemental are:
1) Unique factions. Its just simply a lot more fun and adds loads more replayability if each of the factions plays radically differently from each other. I dont want to just play humans v humans, we have Civ and Total War for that. I would be quite happy for the "customise your own units" feature to be dropped, if it meant you could have lots of interesting different racial units with special abilities. Elves, Orcs, Lizardmen, Ogres, etc, etc. Theres hundreds of potential fantastical creatures out there which you could divided between the different factions to make them fun and different to play.
2) Heroes. The current heroes are weak and uninspiring. I want them to be powerful leaders of armies, with a noticable increase in power as they progress through the game. If it becomes too hard to balance them against squads of troops (as well as individuals), then perhaps that unit size feature needs to be dropped as well. Make all army units you train appear as "squads" (which will make the tactical battles look more exciting), and then balance the heroes and powerful monster units (dragons, demons etc) against squads of regular troops.
3) Equipment. It costs far too much and isnt particularly exciting to equip a hero with a set of leather armour and a shortsword. When you are gearing up your heroes, it should be with flaming longswords, glowing plate armour and fun magic items (boots of flying!). The cool gear should be gained from questing/vanquishing monster spawns (or possibly crafted), to make the player earn the good stuff. The mundane stuff should be there to get heroes going, and should be cheap and much less effective compared to magical gear.
4) Magic. When the game is called War of Magic, then the spells should be awesome and exciting to use! I know you are on the case with this already, but the spells from MoM are varied, interesting, and significant when cast. From hearing about the background fluff for this game, with the shattered landscape ruined from abuses of magic and the channelers coming back to heal/destroy the land, I was expecting powerful world changing spells! Rituals taking a few turns to cast that change the nearby terrain in significant ways would be one way to address this.
5) Tactical battles. Im happy enough with turn based tactical battles (rather than RTS), but they need to have some element of tactics to them. Terrain, fortifications, initiative orders for units, larger maps, more units on the battlefields (all squads perhaps? - see point 2), special abilites for units, varied and dramatic spell casting. All these things would contribute to making the tactical battles more epic feeling and fun to play.
6) Towns. The town buildings just arent very exciting. The only really interesting stuff comes in at Tier 4/5, and building anything before that feels like going through the motions. It should be possible to specialise towns, and there should be opportunity/costs for building different buildings. There should also be lots of faction specific buildings.
I have seen these points raised in the past on the forums, and they have sometimes been met with the answer "well you want a different game then, Elemental is not about those things". I am after a more 'high fantasy' game (exotic units, powerful magic, heroes, etc) and to me, it seems like a real waste of the fantasy setting to go for a 'low fantasy' (human units, impotent magic, ineffectual heroes) style of game. If I want to play low fantasy, I might as well just play Civ or the Total war games and forego the magic element entirely. You *need* Elemental to be high fantasy to actually make this fun to play and unique enough to differentiate it from those other 4x types of games.
Good luck, I think theres a lot of hard work ahead, but I have confidence that you guys will make this into the game all future 4x games are compared with!
