This is the 2nd part to my review of elemental.The first part can be found here
https://forums.elementalgame.com/396148
This review will be composed of 4 parts.
A ) New items I decided to review that were not in the first review.
B ) The replies to the replies of the first review.
C ) A small biography of me since some people did not found me worthy enough to write a review.
D ) Conclusion
This review has been made with version 1.07 so it is possible than some issues are now resolved. This is also the last part of the review, I will not add any more stuff even if there are stuff to say. If it is really important, i'll place it on a thread of it's own. I might reply to replies in this thread.
I have continued to progress in my game which allowed me to experiment and analyse new things. I also teached my girlfriend how to play and she also had made some comment about the game that I will try to include in my review. Of course, we do not have the same priorities for a game. She played without the clothmap and with tactical battles.
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A ) Review part 2
1. --- Magic ---
1.2 Con
1.2.1 Very short range offensive spells: There are some strategic spells that allows you to hinder the growth of your ennemies (For example: freeze settlement). The problem is that the strategic spells all have a very short range limitation which makes offensife spell even harder to use. Some spell requires to be in range of 2 square from the target city. That means entering the ennemy's territory, knocking at their door, saying hello, and then casting your spell on the city. In master of magic, what made offensive enchantment interesting and fun was that you could actually hinder your opponent while living on the other side of the planet.
1.2.2 Cannot cast spells when in cities: If you are in a city and you want to enchant the city you are in, you can't. You must exit the city, cast the spell, hold a turn, and get back in the city.
1.2.3 Hero must be in battle to use magic: This has the problem that your hero will always be on the front which will increase his chance of dying and making that whole kingdom fall. It's like playing chess but where the queen must be captured to win.
2 --- Economy, production, technology ---
2.2 Con
2.2.1 faction special abilities are very weak: Most faction's special abilities are very weak. Most of the time you only get a simple 15% or 25% which is really not that usefull. The "resourceful" ability only gives 10 material and 10 metal, comme on, what are going to do with that. 100 Material and 100 Metal starts to be interesting. Consider that normally, a faction ability should give benefit for the whole game. Ressourceful is only good at the beginning, so if must give you a very good kick to continue to feel it a few hundred turns later.
2.2.2 Combinable empire and kingdom buildings: If you are a kingdom and you conquer an empire city, you benefit all the empire's building and you can build all your kingdom's building in the same city. Since their effects are the same but their names are different, it doubles the bonus you could get from a specific building. For example, you could have 2 study (1 kingdom and 1 empire) which is totally abusive. I strongly suggest that either you make some buildings mutually exclusive ( you can only make fallen buildings on a fallen city), or either kingdom and empire buildings that have the same ability should be the same building.
2.2.3 Hard to get crystals: In order to get the crystal ressource, I needed to research the adventuring field to the maximum before having access to crystals. I don't know if it works like this in all games, but that would mean that taking magical items from the magic tech tree is totally useless until you have maxed ou the adventuring tree.
2.2.4 The warfare tech tree is so huge: You want to have in average the same amount of technology in each field, else each field would not worth the same and will not be comparable the same way. The Warfare tree is too large. There are many things that you could actually fusion together. For example you have "Blunt weapons", "slashing weapons" and "range weapons" that could go into the same technology. It's the level 2 weapon equipment. The previous level was all grouped togeter why not this level too.
2.2.5 Impossible to build on cliff: My girlfriend got stuck in a situation she did not expect. She built a new city trapped betwenn cliff and forest. She could not build a single buildings. On the look, it does not feel like you are blocked. It should be possible to have at least 2 tiles available for buildings on a cliff tile. It should also be possible to chop down trees if you want. Finally, it should be possible to move units on cliff but still not be able to embark a ship from a cliff. It would make movement around the sea less annoying.
2.3 Suggestion
2.3.1 Bonus Percentage Guideline: Many buildings and abilities gives bonus which are too weak. I suggest the following guide lines. If you have an effect that will influence your whole empire, you must at least give a bonus of 25%. Else, any other city upgrade must give between 50% and 100% bonus. 25% is just not enough. So for example, the market place that incrase income by 25% should be boosted to 50% and the refined arcana that gives a 10% bonus everytime researched should give a 25% bonus. For faction abilities, I suggest at least 50% if that is the only ability they have.
2.3.2 New ressource system: I said before that there were too much ressource to keep track of and it was very complicated to manage. Without changing too much the current design of the game, here is a ressource plan suggestion. You would have 4 ressource:
Gildar: Used to produce and maintain stuff, or only maintain stuff
Material: Used to produce stuff
Mana: Used to produce and maintain magical stuff, or only maintain magical stuff
Crystal: Used to produce magical stuff
That's it, you do not need really more ressources that needs to be accumulated in a reserve. You could have various tiles that produce these resources. For example, gold mine and gem mine could both produce gildar. But it's still the same resource.
3 --- Gui and Appearance ---
3.2 Con
3.2.1 Bad Poses and clothing for characters: According to my girlfriend, most of the character poses are horible and not interesting. It also looks that they were only made for men because when making a girl character there was also many glitch like a spear running through the shoulder or a passing through a skirt. There is also the problem that the robes cannot stack with other clothes, like you cannot have a robe and some arm bands and the same time.
3.2.2 Armor and equipment screw up the look of your character: You start the game by making effort to customize the look of your character, That is cool and interesting. But then you need to equip your character with better equipment. First, you have no way to know how equipment will look on your character before buying it, and second, most of the time, it will look uglier on your character because that would normally mean adding a big ugly armor on your character. I strongly suggest separating the defense value from the esthetics.
3.2.3 You don't know what you buy: The gui does not allow you to see what you have equiped and what is look like. It becomes very hard to know what you could buy and make sure you don't buy something you already have and it's impossible to know how it would look on the character.
3.2.4 Icons are too small for poses and background: It's very hard to select your character's pose and background because you only have 5 icons shown out of many icons and they are very small. You should have instead a button that you push to show a whole screen dialogue with all the pose or all the backgroud with much bigger icons so that the browsing and selection could be done more easily.
3.2.5 Small arrows are very small: In various interface, there are small circular arrows which are either used to move a unit out of a city, or to scroll throught the character's pose or background. The small arrows have the problem of being ... small. They are very hard to click on, even on my 32inch widescreen TV.
3.2.6 Cannot select multiple units in a stack: If for example, you have a stack of units in a city, you cannot select 2 or more units at the same time and give them an order (ex: move to this location), you need to select them one by one.
3.2.7 There are no travel path: When a unit has been assiged a destination, the only thing you see is a small blue X that marks the destination which is not very easy to see. It would be interesting to actually see the complete path the unit is going to take to reach the destination. It is also usefull to make sure the unit does not use a path you do not want to use. In many other 4X strategy game, you have a marker on the path which indicates where they will be at the end of turn 1, 2, 3, etc.
3.2.8 There are no city overlays on the cloth map: It would be interesting if we could see the city overlays when playing in cloth map mode. I consider that the summary of the city displayed could be useful for gameplay.
3.2.9 No detailed description of the spell: I decided to cast once the spell "freeze settlement" but I had actually no idea of what were the consequence of it. Will it block food, growth, income, production? I don't know. May make your spell picture smaller and place a more detailed description of the spell.
3.2.10 Very bad highlight when selecting target of spell: When you cast a spell on the strategic map, the square where your magic wand is located will either change red or green. The first problem is that only 1 square at a time is shown, Instead you should highlight the whole map so that we could actually see in a glance what are the valid locations to cast the spell. Second, the colors are very hard to recognise on the 3D map (cloth map is not so bad). For example, I could not see the green highlight on the map. Use stronger or less translucent colors. You can also use blue instead of green since the whole map is green. I also have an hardtime seeing the marks where I can build a building too while on the cloth map it's not so bad, but thicker lines would help. So
3.2.11 Have a way to exit the game during tactical battle: Maybe time the tactical battle is buggy and there is no way to get out of it. So the only thing left is to kill the process and start the game again. It would be interesting if we could go to the title menu from the tactical battles and reload the game instead.
3.2.12 Ressource construction in building queue is really not clear: When you build something on a ressource, it takes a number of turn before beign active. Sometimes it goes into your building queue, some times it does not. Sometime it seems that it is being built simultaneously with other building while other times it waits at the end for other building to complete. So it would be interesting to clarify this once and for all.
3.2.13 City zoom too much in construction mode: The city zoom option in construction mode is very interesting. But it zoom too much, especially when your city is becomming bigger. Would it be possible to make sure that the zoom make the city fit in the window so that we don't need to scroll ou every time to place new buildings.
3.2.14 I want he option to auto retreat: I want to have the option to auto-retreat without entering tactical battle. If I get attacked and have no chance to win, I would like to make the decision to retreat my whole army. I don't care if I take a few hits in the process. Else the only way is to enter the battle and retreat manualy.
3.2.15 Impossible to retreat: It's very hard to know if you are allowed to retreat and where you can retreat. The fog around the battle field also makes it hard to identify. You could palce some markings on the tiles that would indicate, that this is the retreat area for your. Also my girlfriend tried many times to retreat from battle and it never worked. Apparently there is some restriction, but's it's really not clear.
4 --- Diplomacy ---
Con
4.2.1 Impossible to make treaties: I never succeed to make any diplomacy because it is actually impossible to do. For the whole game, what ever was the size of my empire (was smaller in the past and it's now bigger than my opponnent), the perceived value, for example a research treaty, was arround these proportions: 17 to 153. Now I need to pay more than 130 points of diplomatic capital (which is going to take 130 turns with an ambassy) in order to compensate the treaty (for a reason I don't understand since we do not have a large difference of strength). At the end, this research treaty would give me approximately 2 extra points of research. Forget it, it's not worth the effort.
4.2.2 My army is larger than yours, so I hate you: What is this? Your relation changes if your opponent has a stronger army than you. I think it should be the opposite, if you have a larger army than your opponent, he will be scared of you and might not be on good terms with him. Else it creates a "run away leader" syndrome. If your opponent is in bad term with you and he is stronger he will attack you. WHile the opposite might not be true since he is weaker, so he will just be intimidated.
5 --- Other ---
5.1 Pro
5.1.1 Minor Factions: The minor factions are really a good idea, but I would like to actually interact with them. My girlfriend suggested that it could be interesting to be able to trade with them or even be able to annex their cities to your kingdom if you have good relations with them. There are things a player will never do that a minor faction could actually do since they cannot win the game.
5.1.2 Modding system seems very nice: I don't understand much to modding right now. The only thing I know is XML editing and the editors that come with the game. I know that there are some DXpack files for the screen interface but I am actually not sure if you can actually add or modify these screens. Else the externalization of the variables into the xml files is awesome. You can even input formulas and use variables in the process which really gives a lot of freedom. I would not even surprised that you could add your own variables. So there is some good work that has been done there and it is now a bit easier to understand that their could be more bug due to the complexity of the data system.
5.2 Con
5.2.1 Flat Earth: I was really not expecting this one. In my head, all 4x strategy games had wrap around map, I was expecting elemental do to the same unless the maps were manually edited. I added the idea in the suggestion forum for supporting at least simple wrap around maps (left to right and top to bottom).
5.2.2 Units get pushed during construction: When you create a city or when you make buildings, all other units which are on the target tile will be pushed into an adjacent hex. That is really annoying because you make a stack of unit that will accompany your pioneer, and when he build his city, the pioneer kick the units out making it vulnerable to attacks afterward.
5.2.3 Unit design is not that interesting: Thematically, it is interesting, it feels like when my friend and me were running a kingdom in a D&D campaign. But in elemental, it's pretty straight forward because the detail of the equipment does not matter that much since in the end, it is reduced to att and def stat. So most of the time, you will place the best equipment you can, and if you don't do it, it's because you want to keep the production price low.
5.2.4 Easy and hard death of the sovereign: In some situation, the sovereign dies too easily, in other situations, it's too hard. For example, my girlfriend got attacked by the ennemy sovereign, she won the battle and win the game because she could kill the sovereign. On my game, the sovereign stay outside the city, but If I attack him, he always retreat and teleport to the next city. Which prevent me from winning unless I kill all his cities.
5.2.5 Aging is way too slow: You wan us to manage a dynasty, the problem is that sometimes, the game ends before we have a chance to make our first baby. The aging of the character is too slow, it would take around 1000 turns before beign old enough to transfer our kingdom to our children. How many generations were you expecting people to have 2-3 or a dozen. If it's a dozen, the game will end way before that.
5.2.6 Is there some girls in there?: It might be due to some bad random number generations, but is there an equal chance to find a female hero than a male hero. Because it took me 230 turn before finding my first female heroine. I married her right away, knowing that I might not have a second chance.
5.2.7 Spidernest are useless: I developped the "unlikely friends" technology and I had a spider nest near my capital, so I was happy to realise that I could train new units that would make a nice addition to my army. It took a lot of time to build the nest because it cost 200 gold to harvest. I was completely deceived at the end, because not only the units were expensive, but they were weaker than the units I could normally produce. So the price was very too high for what it gave.
5.2.8 Playing robin hood really worth it: It seems that the unit of my opponents army have more gold in their pocket than in the whole treasury of their empire. When you kill their armies, you gain like 500-1000 gold but the sovereign has less than 100 gold in his treasury. So f you need gold, loot your own army. I also find it stupid that creatures like spiders and wolves actually carry gold on themselves.
5.2.9 Power rating of kingdoms and combat seems not fair: I think there needs to be a better caculation of power rating for kingdoms and combat. In my game, My ennemy was on the brink of death and had a power rating as high as my friendly neighbor who had at least twice more cities. I had a lower rating than both of them even if I was better. For combat, my girlfiend also had this problem, she had a huge army of peasants, very high combat rating, but the ennemy had a defense so high than all the attacked missed and she end up beign anhilated.
5.2.10 The music is not very catchy: The music is OK, but it's 100% ambiance music. It's so much ambiance music that you don't realize that it's there. Personnaly, the best music is the one that is going to get stuck in my head and that I am going to whistle all the time. In elemental, there is currently only 1 music that does that ... the title screen. Besides that music, I don't remember any other music from the game even after playing it.
5.3 Sugestions
5.3.1 Units upgrade: As I suggested in other thread, it could be interesting to recycle your old units by re-training them with new equipment. I suggest using the moo2 system when you select the unit to retrain and then choose the unit design you want to refit to. Calculate the price difference between both units and this is what you have to pay to re-train your unit.
5.3.2 Leaving a city neutral or destroying cities: Late in the game, most of the time, you want to destroy a kingdom without necessarily control all his cities because you have enought. If you cannot destroy cities you capture, you get the problem when you must leave your army in your new conquested city to defend it before capturing other cities. If you leave it empty and other units would be able ot capture it, you get penalized. This is something I have from civ rev because if you leaved cities undefended, the ennemy would capture your gold reserve.
So either give te option to raze a city, or leave the city neutral on it's own. This way, the city will be put in the hand of the AI which will try to improve it and defend it. Maybe you could have the city spawn a few defense unit to get a minimal protection. With a system like that, I will be able to move my army forward without having to manage new cities and defending them.
5.3.3 Capital city: Each player should have a capital city. Losing your capital would destabilise greatly your empire. You might even lose control of some cities (rebellions). It creates a weak point on each opponent and it prevent the need to capture or destroy every city in an empire to win.
5.3.4 Using the rule of 1/10th: On my point of view, I think you should reduce many values to 1/10th of the current value to make some parts of the game more balanced or actually run faster. Here are some examples of before-after.
If cost 100 gold to buy a horse for your character
NO it cost 10 gold to buy a horse for your character
Our perceived value of a technology treaty are 20 versur 150
NO our perceived value of a technology treaty are 2 versus 15
It takes 100 turns to build a level 3 city
NO it takes 10 turns to build a level 3 city.
End of review
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B ) Replies to the Replies of part 1
Who are you, and why should we give a hoot about your review?
Read my mini Biography at the end of this post.
I also dislike what Civilization 5 is doing. If Civ 5 is abstracting that each square represents hundreds of miles of land, it makes absolutely no sense that you could block the entire section with a single "unit". In all of the preview videos I've seen, it is utterly ridiculous that you can march an army of, say, 10 units and span it vertically across the entire world map. Sure, it may make combat more "fun", but loses complete credibility when you are trying simulate a world the size of Earth, for example.
It seems they have sacrificed realism for gameplay. It's good that some parts of the game diverge from reality, but it must not diverge too much like seen in many euro board games. After seeing some civ 5 review, the strategy looks interesting for a game that had no tactical battle system. The only reason why it would work in elemental is because the city is not contained in a single square.
This one is solved by attacking creatures which gives you cash. Essentially when you start you need to scout for gold. If you find none you should use the resources you do have to either tech up to palace and other civic economy techs, or start killing for money. It is one of the best strategic aspects of the game.
So I need to play robin hood to get the fundings I need to maintain my cities. This means that my cities will never be self-sufficient. Very weird and funny concept. I can hardly see today city mayors starting to hunt criminals to get the extra funds they need to finance their public services.
Too large an area of influence? Many people dislike having tens of identical cities. Hopefully the devs will take this as just one person's opinion, albeit a thoughtful and well written one.
I understand that if city management is very long and complex, you want to have the fewest cities possible to cover the most space possible. Personally I would do the opposite, I would make city very easy to manage and grow very fast but have more of them on the map. But with the current ressource system, it seems impossible because there are too much dead locations.
More so in a strategy game which rides on the idea that decisions count, if a single action can completely erase the last 100 turns... that's not fun (at least, not in this context). Strategy gamers (at least in the 4X style) all want actions to mean something as well as build an empire. That the plan they created 200 turns ago finally works out. Being able to derail that on a whim does not work.
I understand the problem. But it your city took 10 turns to build instead of 100 turns, players would be less deceived to lose something they have built.
In the end, all valid statements. However, we need to take into consideration the difference between "It's X and that's just not how I like my games" and "It's X as a result of poor game design" and even "It's X but it's X to avoid being Y (which may or may not be bad just not appropiate)". Surprisingly, those aren't usually the same thing. You sound like you want very specific things your games - that's great! But just recognize that what you want is not the only right way of doing things. Recognize that just because you didn't find a part of it fun or good does not mean that the game itself (whatever game it may be) is itself bad. I may not have liked Bayonetta but I recognize the value that people who do enjoy beat 'em up games find in it.
True, there is a bit of everything in my review: Personal preference and bad design. It's not always easy to point out each of them. Some times I could use an expression like "Personally I prefer ..." which means that it's more a personal preference than a bug.
If you're particularly passionate about the game system, why not make a mod for Elemental? Certainly it sounds like you have a strong vision of what to do, and I'm sure people will enjoy it along side the main game.
Well I am currently design a board game of master of magic ( under another name of course). Look at my mini biography for more information. It could be possible to adapt my board game design to elemental, but I think my changes would require too much reprogramming to actually be a mod. So I might keep it as a board game.
And complaining about needing to click your spellbook? Really? That's standard fantasy game stuff and not effort intensive at all
What I mean is that nothing is centralized. In MOM, if I want to cast a spell, I click 1 button and have access to the spell book. Now I must determine which hero is going to cast the spell. So I need to search the heroes, compare their mana an take a decision. Then I need to select the unit and cast the spell. I would prefer something centralised for the whole empire.
Huts are basically how you determine where all that excess food goes. We agree that the global pooling of resources is good but you need a system like huts to divvy them up. Leaving it all up to the random map generator would be.... bleh.
Moo2 had a transport system which allowed to distribute surplus to other colonies. The only decision you had to make was "do you want more transports or not", else the game took care of food distribution by it self. Personally, I consider that all cities should be self sufficient, only the surplus of food should change according to city location. That would be the situation where food is used to maintain armies. Else, there is no need to keep track of food surplus if every city is self sufficient.
For my mod, I intend to make each unit cost 1 food, food would only represent surplus in a city and it will only maintain units.
<Ressources>Is it really that tedious to just glance up at the resource display at the top of the screen?
Seeing what you have is not the problem, calculating and planning ahead is complicated because instead of planning your spending of 1 ressource among different things you can purchase, you need to calculate the spending of many ressources among many different things to purchase.
<scrolling screen with keyboard>Numpad keys 8, 6, 4, 2
Well according to the rule book, the numpad does the same thing as the arrows which moves your unit in the direction you pressed. Personnaly, I would place unit movement on the numpad so that you could easily move units in diagonal and place screen movement on the arrows.
I spend less time microing cities in this game than I do in most 4x titles, I think. I do notice games dragging, but I think that's more of a function of maps being shockingly big. There's just so damn much to explore and fight through and you need so many groups to do it. And if you pick really small maps, well, I already discussed the problem there: Too high a chance to get fucked by the resource system.
I agree that the city management is much easier than civilization. City management was the thing that turn me off in all civ games, even civ rev had worker placement. THis is why I prefered MOM, the only thing on map that you could do where roads and there were no worker placement on the map.
<limit in number of buildings>There is a limit, but if people aren't noticing it's there it's probably too high.
A suggestion to make the city level useful. WHen you raise your city level, you increase the maximum number of buildings you can build.
And splitting armor up into multiple equip slots is pretty vital to the whole slash/pierce/bludgeon dynamic elemental has.
Splitting up the armor is only useful if you have hit locations and I don't think elemental has hit locations. At least I hope so. Grouping the armor under 1 item works pretty well with different attack types.
(Which lead to a game like "fall from heaven" which was not very good).
You should have put this part at the beginning, that way I wouldn't have been so surprised at how much Wrong your review has in it.
"fall from heaven" was the best they could make out of civ for a MOM mod. It end up with little magic and the same city management overcomplexity problem the regular civ game have. I think they even complexified a few things ( I remember that it took me 3 tech upgrade, 2 city upgrade and 1 special ressource to finally get my +1 hapiness in 1 city. If I need that much work to get a +1, imagine building a whole empire). The only thing I liked is the card game, a few thematic ideas ... and the music (this is when I discovered "Nox Arcana" and "Midnight Syndicates" music group)
End of replies
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------C ) My mini biographyWho are you, and why should we give a hoot about your review?
Here is my mini biography, I hope it will convince you that I am worthy enough to write a review. I'll try to make it quick and simple. I will also try to focus on my gaming experience rather than my personal life. If you don't care, just skip to the conclusion.
1) School and work: I studied as a computer technician and a library technician. I have done different library jobs so far and I am currently working in a psychiatric hospital documentation center. I prefer school libraries, and that might be where I want to work in the future.
2) Video Game Programming: One of the first reason I studied as a computer technician was to make some video games. First, I found a book and started to make my own library. I tried making a space strategy game called "star empire". It was full of bug and it did not worked. Then I discovered Allegro and started the "Wizardry Legacy project". I worked on this project for 2 years and I end up changing the design many times and not having a fun and playable game. The engine works, but there is a lot of game features to implement. THere were also a few side projects like a megaman dueling game.
Then after one day, I decided to leave video game programming once and for all. I was very tempted many years later by the XNA library for developing Xbox arcade indie games, but I said to my self that I will only design video games If I lead a development team that is going to do the coding for me. Because video games are 80% programming and 20% game design. The only thing that interest me is the 20% game design.
3) Gamer's history: I started to play video games on the intellivision, the first console I owned was the NES which holds on my point of view the best games in video game history. I stopped playing video games after the silent revolution near 1995 with the arrival of windows and 3D games. This is were the video game industry started to change their target audiance. A few years ago, there were approximately 1 game out of 1000 that was actually interesting for me. It has increased a bit since my girl friend has an Xbox 360 because they are releasing old school arcade video games (ex: bionic commando and mega man 9) so there has been a light increase of interest to video games lately.
Meanwhile near 2006, I joined a board game player group and now I have discovered the large world of board games which are very different from video games. Still, being a video game player, and being used to play strategy games made by Koei, there is a lot of board games that I actually don't like because they actually makes no sense. But making sense seems not to be a priority for board gamers, only the strategy behind a game count. So I end up being in the middle of of video games and board games. I like ideas from both sides but I don't completely like how each side makes games right now. So this is why the board game I make should fall in between both styles.
4) Board game design: In 2005, I decided to join the board game designer's forum. This has be done a few years after abandonning video games and trying to make board game instead. What pushed me in that direction was the fact that I could freelance my game design and I could now publish my game electronically though PDF distribution. So I would be able to design commercial games and actually compete with other games on the market which was impossible for video games. I released my first board game in summer 2010, It's called "Fallen Kingdoms". It's a semi euro-war game where you play viking factions which constantly re-invade the land to change the balance of power.
5) The Spellcraft project: Now the biggest board game project I have is to make a board game out of Master of Magic. This has started many years ago when I realised that all the open source MOM remakes where dead. So I have been working many years on this project, while working on other games, and it's still not a playable fun game.
The design is very complex because board games can keep track of much less information than video games. So I needed to massively simplify and abstract the game. But what makes MOM a very rich game is the amount of details it contains (many race, spells and abilites). So on the other hand, I need to complexify the game in some situation, like in combat, to make sure the game does not lose details while still beign playable.
Which means that I have analysed the design of Master of Magic inside out. I have made various breakthought in the design of my game, to make it playable as a board game in less than 5 hours. So it's normal that I probably do not see the game the same way that everybody else. I see it more on an abstract high level point of view rather than a detailed point of view.
For example, it's a waste of time, in my view, to build a pioneer, send it to destination and then build a city. In my board game, I jump directly at the goal: Build a city. So player choose an adjacent hex and place a city. No pioneer, no travel, no construction time.
Every turn, players must do something meaningful and the game make abstration of a lot of things because I consider that the players should have people under their command to manage these things. So the player only manage the high level decisions: Do I declare war?, Do I want cavalry in my army?, etc. The game take care of the details, or should I say, the game hide the details.
I have many game ideas, but I could say that this is the biggest project I have and I want to do it right. So I might even make multiple editions of the game until it becomes perfect. I hope I will able to complete a good game out if it. You can now understand why I might argue on some things or suggest new stuff when I look at Elemental.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------D ) ConclusionSo this is it, I'll think I will wait for a few months until stardock makes more update, until the community does some modding and some documentation on how to mod games. Then I could give a second try to the main game or make some mods.
I first thought of joining the MOM modding team, but on the other hand, there might be too much changes I want to make which could make the game feel less like MOM (for example, I would change the white magic sphere to yellow to remove the good-evil opposition). So I might instead wait for the MOM mod to get finished and then mod the MOM mod to my tastes.
Else I could make an "Elemental revolution" that would make the game simplier like in civ rev, or make "elemental exponent 2" where the time of the game pass much faster than in the original game.
Meanwhile I'll work on my board games.
Thank You for reading
