More like this please folks. The idea is they get the drift of your wishes from your bullet points and can read down for the rest. Keep 'em coming.

1. Tactical combat enhancements with an increased emphasis on unit special abilities
2. Magic system improvements both in variety and impact.
3. Stronger champions/sovereigns compared to other units.  Hopefully closer to what MoM had.

1. Tactical Combat is pointless.

2. Champions get slaughtered by city-made units.

3. City-made units are dull and have no uniqueness.

4. Tactical Combat Animations are Slooooooow.

EDIT: Had to add #4, or else I could never enjoy fixes to #1/#2/#3.

1: Performance

2: AI

3: Magic Overhaul

1. Tactical Combat!

2. Tactical Combat!!

3. Tactical Combat!!!

1. Make the process of climbing the tech tree more fun and intuitive

2. Remove units and mechanics that don't have a well defined purpose or role (observers vs. forward observers)

3. Re-do the UI to make important text and icons stand out

Just one request, please fix the diplo. It's too difficult to play a peaceful game

1. magic system and more meaningful spells

2. battle system

Probably for me

1. Unit combat changes for the ai (needs more tactics instead of just rush in)

2. Less resources scattered around the map in the beginning.

3. AI Sovereigns having more guardians.

1. AI

2. Tactical combat balanced and fun

3. Magic balanced and fun

1. Fix shard & shrinking unit bug

2. Finish the documentation

3. Learn from MOM magic & unit designs

(4. Fix all the typos in the XML files so I don't have to do it for you)

Srsly, for a game that's the spiritual successor to MOM, the only things EWOM cribs properly are the ones common to every 4x game.  Give me a decent variety of properly balanced spells across all spell books, with a magical research tree that's interesting and meaningful to explore, influenced by meaningful choices in sovereign creation.  Give me choices in unit design that are more than 3/5/0 vs. 6/10/5.  Give me treasure chests in monster haunted wilderness that give me something better than the same ratty leather armor and sharp stick I hand my peasants.  And honestly, proofread the bloody xml files at least once before pushing them.  If my untrained eye can spot glaring errors there, surely someone paid to do the job with the proper tools can spot them and fix them?

Ex: CoreSpells_AIR_Strategic.xml, SpellDef InternalName="Quicken", SpellType = Spell_Haste_01.  There's 2 valid values for SpellType: Strategic or Tactical.  Shouldn't be that hard to spot, but results in a WTF spell that's 2 levels higher and twice the cost for 1/2 or less effect than Haste.  I suspect about half the WTF moments in the game are due to things like this.

1) Make tactical combat deep/interesting

2) Overhaul dynastic politics (children need to inherit the throne for ALL players)

3) Make city building/management more interesting

   1.  Be able to change map parameters

   2.  more Unique Magic

   3.  Fix the negative money cheat the AI use

   What I mean for #1 is be able to have choices, as in is the map an Island map, a map with one large continent, many mountains, mostly a flat plain, deserts, forests etc. Then the choice of little resources to very resource heavy maps etc. Then maybe the rate of spawning monsters, choice of having swarms of monsters constantly on your borders to a peaceful map to where your biggest enemy are the AI with a few monsters here and there.

Little game experience, but so far:

• Tactical combat needs a MASSIVE overhaul. Its so bland. Also, some points:

• The differing terrain granting various bonuses to defense are difficult to differentiate from each other.

• Little to no reason for troop variety. Just equip them with the best stuff available and churn them out like theres no tomorrow.

• I've notice that the ATK stat for units is not consistent in the way it is calculated. For example, the starting peasant design has an attack of 3, which is from a base of 1 plus 2 for its weapon (gnarled club). However, other units that are designed and equiped do not always have a base atk of 1, so their ATK stat is simply the value of the weapon equiped. I don't care how its meant to be, but the inconsistencies need some serious sorting out!
  • Edit1: I've notice that this is also the case for the HP of different unit designs. Some have a base of 1, others do not.
  • Edit2: Okay, so I've realised its not the same case with the HP. Rather some of my units were leveled up, so they gained some base hitpoints (which I think should be called something else to explain were it came from). However, I did notice that units with no experience (so level 1, or is it level 0?) do not get the x1.5 modifier from the "experienced training".

• Stacking units is screwed up and doesn't work gameplay wise (in my opinion). If you have a squad of 4 units, each with an ATK of 6, the total unit ATK is 24. It remains at this value regardless of unit losses in the squad. It gets more ridiculous with the stacks of 12 units, each with very high attacks. Also, the way it works (at least how I think it does) means that armour of individual units can be completely irrelevant. As I said, I believe this whole area of combat needs looking into.

• Magic. This has been discussed many times, and I believe it is being overhauled, which is nice to know.

• Performance. I realise that the game is just out the door, so there is likely to be much optimization to be had in the future, but I just thought I would point out that its quite an important point.

I would like to point out that I do love the game and really do look forward to the continued effort and timethat I know Stardock will put into it, as they did with Galciv 2. Its just a matter of time before this game is brilliant, its just not there yet.

Working AI both strategic and tactical.

Revamped equipment, spells, UI.

All bugs and imbalanced fixed.

AGREED!!!!

1. Magic Resistance

2. Magic Resistance

3. Magic Resistance

1) Performance

2) AI

3) make city building/management more interesting (i also never run out of resources... materials for example, always got thousands and thousands of it, it is impossible to run out of it)

1. Make magic effective

2. Make champions effective

3. Make diplomacy effective

1. unique magical resistances for different eneimies

2. An actual manual so new players can read how to play the game (sorry, but that deserves a bit DUH).

3. MP with Tactical

1. AI

2. Magic system (make diverse and overland spells like MoM) make casting take turns for huge spells. 

3. Hero abilities (make diverse units like MoM)

Just scratching the surface of the game so far but:

1. Keyboard remapping. 

2. More information in the UI - a lot more

3. Still thinking, probably a lot more detail in the campaign

re: #1 -  I'm playing on an m11x laptop, and half the camera controls are unavailable because I'm not playing with a mouse, and there's no apparent substitute for the mousewheel controls.  The tactical combat screen is particularly atrocious, as the '+/-' zoom keys don't even work there.  At least let us remap the camera controls and/or anything that relies on a mouse (eg using the arrow keys to control the camera and not units).  Even if there isn't an interface for this, at least slap them into and expose the xml file.  FWIW, I think this was a problem (no keyboard remapping) in Demigod, but for a turn-based game it really should be possible to play without a mouse, Demigod was more twitchy and it would be less expected.  Most of today's laptops may not be able to play it, but if this has sins' legs then it will be more probable.

re: #2 - the UI *really* needs to give the player enough information to figure things out.  Right now the game pretty much comes with the cliffs notes version - the game needs to provide the Elemental encyclopedia  Yes, we're talking exponentially more documentation here.

re: #3: the campaign lacks polish.  It should pull the player in, and probably do a little. more handholding early.  For 'the recommended place for newcomers' it does leave a lot to be desired, and it needs to feel more epic.  There are some epic elements, but they seem kind of disjointed and they really need to be dialed up to 11.  Campaign quests/tasks really need map flags/markers too.  eg: Where the heck is the 3rd farm under threat in the swamps (unless this is a bug, and there's only 2?).

1. 64 bit version release. Shouldn't be anymore out of memory messages?

2. Able to see my hit and evade % in a tactical combat log. Ex. Enemy hits you for 10 damage, chance to hit was 50% etc

3. Better and faster performance. Right now I'm getting 10-15 FPS with a six core and an ATI 5850 around turn 95.

I noticed the only difference between Elemental and MoM tactical battles(other then graphics) was that MoM had a lot more special abailities for units and more spells, other then that they are pretty much the same.

1. Hero system reworked.

2. Magic system reworked.

3. Tactical system reworked.

Assuming bug fixes are coming, so I can play the game without it going to a crawl. Also yeah it would be a ton of work, probably way too much but it's a wish list so I'm wishing here. There's been some great write-ups on the issues with all 3 all over the boards so I won't take the time to rehash them here.