You are the sovereign.
Your people need you. So-called “adventurers” have entered the forbidden dungeon of Ithyrl and unleashed the long banished demon Kroxir, killing them in the process. Lord Ventir menaces your southern border with his army of death knights. The Sorceress Procipinee has claimed your northern cities as being part of her domain and the ancient dragon Smarag has agreed to aid you if you recover her eggs that were stolen by a different party of adventurers.It's all in a day's work in Stardock's new epic strategy game, Elemental: War of Magic.
Customization, Magic, Warfare, Empire Building and more
Design your sovereign in terms of talents, class, even what he (or she) looks like. Learn spells of increasing power to unleash on those who oppose you. Found new cities and build them up by researching new technologies, recruiting specialists or trading knowledge with other Kingdoms. Send your champions on holy quests to recover ancient artifacts, gain allies, or recover the great wealth lost during the Cataclysm.
A strategy game in an RPG world
In Elemental, you design and train your soldiers, archers, knights, magicians and more. With a vast storage of lore developed in collaboration with publishing giant Random House, Elemental ensures that every game is a completely new experience.
Elemental: War of Magic is a turn-based strategy game set in a world of magic, warfare and intrigue. In it, players take on the role of a powerful sorcerer known as a “Channeler”.
Players found new cities, research new technologies, study spells, build a family dynasty, engage in diplomacy, fight wars, go on quests and much more as they strive to overcome all enemies and dominate the world.
There is the standard edition to the game that can be bought here (about 30€/$39.95). And for those who want some extras, there is also a Limited Edition of the game here (about same price as standard).
Limited Edition Extras:
About a 64 bit version of the game, the big advantage for 64-bit for Stardock is that they can address more than 2 gigabytes of memory which allows them to stuff a lot more visual effects, textures, and elements into the game as well as support much larger maps, more units displayed at once, etc. Currently there is no 64 bit version but it was planned to make one some time after release. If it's finally done, there wouldn't be a need to buy an extra version of the game. If you were to install the game through Impulse, it would install the proper version for your system automatically (installing the 64 bit one, once it's out, if you system could handle it).
The game is not available in Europe's retail stores, needing to buy it through Impulse.
(1) Stardock looked for a style that wasn't done before. They took inspiration from the realistic shapes, soft washes and graphical penwork of Alphonse Mucha. (2) Part of the reason they picked the style they did was the contrast between the wide swatches of color with spots of detail where necessary. Which is perfect for a game where you want to immediatly know where the important parts of the map are. You see a huge, spwawlying town and it feels important, opposed to it just being another busy spot on an already busy composition.
(1) Once, legend says, the world of Elemental was filled with magic. All peoples made use of this sorcery; with it, they built great kingdoms – Malaya in the south, Hallas in the west, fabled Al-Ashteroth in the East – raised splendid palaces, magnificent civilizations.
Then came the Titans, immortal beings who sought control of Elemental, and the magic contained within it. They waged war amongst themselves, and in the process turned men into their vassals - and worse. Seeking control of the world’s enchantment, in the end, they all but destroyed it. At the last of the great battles they waged, the land itself was broken. Civilization perished, and the Titans vanished from the world entirely. There were survivors. This is their story.
Although you can choose a Sovereign between one of the ten default Sovereigns, you can also create your own Sovereign. For the creation of your custom Sovereign you have many available options, some of which are purely cosmetic.
You can start by generating a random name for your Sovereign or giving him one of your choice. From there you can continue by selecting which of the Elemental's races your Sovereign belongs to and the sex of the Sovereign. The race is almost a cosmetic choice (affects clothing options, not that you are going to be dressed with just clothing for too long) as some equipment items won't actually appear based on a combo of race and sex (bug and/or minor feature). Sex is also almost a cosmetic choice as the only difference in gameplay terms is that you can only marry with Champions of the opposite sex (women starting with Janusk have an edge).
For game affecting stuff you get some tabs in the Sovereign creation screen that are much like an RPG. You get a pool with some character points and those character points can be spent purchasing ranks into the different stats (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence and Charisma) or any of the exclusive spellbooks available, getting some talents that provide bonuses for different areas (like producing extra food or research), choosing a background for the Sovereign (his past, like if he was a Bard, a member of the Royalty or maybe an adventurer) and selecting weakenesses to get extra characters points in exchange of adding some kind of penalty for your Sovereign (like not being able to have as many children as others or getting penalties on diplomacy). If you have some spare points, you could even buy some basic pieces of gear (some leather armour or maybe a club).
There is also more to that, being able to select things like the face of the Sovereign, his hair, the shape of the eyes, the colour of the skin and hair, different types of clothes and their colours (main and secondary ones, some pieces don't use them).
The game comes with ten default factions. These are the "civilizations" or "nations" you can play with. You can even create your own in the Workshop using the Faction Creator tool.
All these nations belong to one of the alliegances of the game: Kingdom or Empire. These alliegances are like a way of life, a way to see the world and intereact with it. Kingdoms and Empires have different points of view about how to organize their nations, deal with the neighbours,... and when talking about magic, Kingdoms follow life magic while Empires follow death magic.
In Elemental, each faction is lead by a Sovereign, has an allegiance (Kingdom or Empire) and a race (Men or Fallen). For example, Pariden is a faction that has Procipinee as their Sovereign, has a Kingdom allegiance and men as a race.
Elemental's canon factions are:
Custom factions get a tool in the Workshop of the game. In it we can give name to our faction, a crest, an alliegance, the race it will use, advantages and disadvantages for them and even the colours that the faction will use.
Selectable races are:
(2) Food isn't stockpiled presently. It's based on your production because it's perishable. (3) They very much want to stay away from the micro management of food. It isn't fun. The reason other resources can be stockpiled is because you use them when you build something. People, by contrast, continue to consume food.
You can build on resources tiles that are inside of the area of influence of any of your cities. Whenever one of those resource tiles can be built by you, it will get a big red exclamation mark to let you know of such event. If the resource tile is close to the city, it will be sorrounded by the city walls and get it's protection. If it's not, you will control it but it won't be protected by the city walls and could be destroyed by monster or enemy armies. You could prevent that by leaving some troops protecting the tile.
This is a list of resources that can be found or used in the game:
After the Cataclysm, much of the old knowledge was lost. One of your priorities is to rediscover that knowledge using scholars that can recover it. In Elemental there is a technology tree with five categories and altough you can select in which category do your research, you cannot select what will be researched.
When you select one of the categories, you can see a list of possible techs that could be the result of your research. That list of possible techs is colour coded by their rarity (gree = common, yellow = uncommon, red = rare). When the research is finished, some techs of that list will be offered to you so you can select one as the researched tech. The techs offered will be randomly selected and influenced by their rarity.
Each new level of each category requires more time than the previous to be researched. This can be quite important when deciding if to pursuit the research of some rare tech. To increase your research capacity you need to build infraestructure that allows the reseach, like Studies or Schools. You can also hire scholar champions that will give bonuses to your research.
Kingdoms and Empires have the same number of categories. Those categories have different names though and offer different technologies to research.
Magic in Elemental can only be used by those able to channel it from the Shards scattered over the world. It doesn't require to control any Shard, just that ability to channel it. That ability is known as Essence. All the Sovereigns are Channelers because they have Essence. Champions can be imbued with Essence by a Sovereign and become Channelers themselves.
There are many different spellbooks in the game. Sovereigns get by default one spellbook based on their alliegance (Kingodms get Life Spellbook and Empires get Death Spellbook). In the Sovereign creation screen, you are offered four spellbooks that cannot be obtained later but that the player can buy for some points in this phase. The rest of spellbooks are unlocked through research in the Magic/Sorcery categories and there is one unlocked through quests.
Spells are divided in two groups: Strategic and Tactical. Strategic spells are the ones used in the main map of the game. From a glyph that gives extra life to the enchanted character to teleporting anywhere in your realm. Tactical spells are those used in Tactical Battles and include not just damage spells but also spells that allow healing, lower defenses or avoid counterattacks.
Spells can have requirements to be able to be cast by your Channelers. One possible requirement is to control one or more Shards of a type, like a Fireball requiring you to control 1 Fire Shard to be able to cast it (you can research it any case). The other requirement, and that Sovereigns ignore, is Intelligence score. If the Channeler doesn't meet the intelligence requirement of the spell, he won't be able to cast it.
To cast spells you need Mana. Your Sovereign generates a small amount of mana each turn. You can get more by getting a special talent during Sovereign creation if you use a custom Sovereign. Shards you control and in which you have built a temple will provide you with more Mana too. With some research, it's possible to unlock more buildings that provide Mana in cities that control a Shard.
Altough the Sovereign starts with a few spells, to get more spells it's needed to research them. For this reseach, you can build laboratories and other types of buildings that give spell research points. In your general spellbook you select the spells you want to research (queing them in the order you want them to be researched). There are five spell levels and you start at the first one, so if you want to research spells of higher level, you must research first those new spell levels selecting them like if it was one spell. One a new spell level is researched, all the new available spells will be added to your general spellbook for you to research.
Champions are characters that you can recruit to serve you. They roam the world, have different skills and attributes, and can be hired by different amounts of money depending on their power.
All the Champions start with some equipment, which ranges from very basic to medium (if they are powerful). Some have combat skills (ignoring defense for example) that can be used during combat with a cooldown period that determines how often it can be used. Others have skills that provide Prestige to your cities, gold each turn or a bonus to food in the city he stays.
Champions can gain experience in battle and level up the same as Sovereigns. Then you get 3 points to increase ny of their stats as you wish.
Champions of the opposite sex to the Sovereign can be proposed for marriage by the player. Depeding on the reputation score of your realm, the Champion may accept or not. The Sovereign can marry only once and once married, and while both are alive, will eventually start founding the new dynasty with some babies. The number of babies is four (less if you picked Ugly for the Sovereign).
As the Sovereign of your realm you will have the opportunity to get married with one Champion of the opposite sex and have some children. Once married, and randomly, each turn you may get a newborn child as part of your bloodline. The new babies won't be on the map but you can check them out in the Dynasty screen. After some dozens of turns, the babies will reach maturity and be available as Champions in your Capital. They will have some random stats and talents based on their parents (boys from their father and girls from their mother).
The children of a Sovereign can be used as regular Champions: leveling up as they gain experience, buying equipment for them in shops or casting spells if they are Channelers. But you can also marry them to other Sovereigns' children, girls being sent with their new families upon marriage. Sharing these kind of bonds with other factions means some bonuses to the relationships with them. The children of the Sovereign can have children of their own, following the same game mechanics than themselves, including giving some extra bonuses to the relationship with the the factions of origin. There is a chance that the newborns will defect to the mother's family once they grow old enough to become Champions.
The Sovereign can only marry once so it's very important to make sure that the spouse survives long enough to have as much off-spring as possible, as once dead the Sovereign won't be able to marry again and continue to grow his family.
If the Sovereign dies, it's game over for his faction as there is no succession system in place.
Quests are adventures that your Sovereign and Champions can take. They are found on the map, maybe in some Inns or other special places, and to trigger them you must send your Sovereign or one or your Champions to that place. Although the initial (low level) quests appears on map as the game starts, more advanced quests require to unlock them through research in the Adventure/Domination category.
There a few types of quests. All the basic quests involve doing some kind of task in exchange of some money and/or experience. You may also get a special item depending of the quest, like some book for scorting a young nobleman to his home. More complex quests may involve visting different places and defeating some enemies.
One of the victory conditions is completing the Master Quest, that involves visiting different places and deafeating increasingly difficult enemies that may require your Sovereign to use a powerful army to complete.
Peasant unit aside, there are no predefined unit classes in Elemental. There are no swordmen, bowmen, Knights or any other unit class like that. It's the player who picks an individual and gives him the equipment he wants, creating in this way the unit class that he wants. If a player wants to create a Knight, he can pick one man in the Unit Design screen, give him a sword, a shield, heavy armour and a horse and then call it Knight. If the player then wants a Rogue, he can take a new man and give him a dagger and some leather armour and then call it Rogue.
The equipment you can give your people depends on what you have researched and sometimes on resources. Once you research a new type of weapon or armour, it'll be available in the Unit Design screen but you won't be able to recruit units of that type unless you can pay the recruitment cost, which may include resources in the cost in addition to Gildars.You cannot give your troops heavy metal armour unless you have researched that kind of armour first. And once you can design units with that armour, you won't be able to recruit units using them unless you have also metal to create the armours they wear.
Units can be equipped with only one weapon (and a shield if not a two handed weapon), different pieces of armour, special equipments like boots that give more movement, magic items like rings (one of each type though) and a mount (horse for Kindgoms and wargs for Empires). They can also wear cosmtic elements like clothes or hair. But martial equipment in the same body areas will override them.
Designs (blueprints) can be upgraded in the Unit Design screen but units that have been already recruited cannot be upgraded and will keep their original equipment. That means that your peasant with a club won't upgrade to heavy armour and a claymore when you upgrade the Peasant blueprint to use those items. Designs can also be retired if they are obsolete. The game can create new designs for you automatically each time you research a new type of equipment for your troops. This option can be disabled in the Options menu.
For those who believe that the feather is stronger than the sword or that simply want more options to deal with the opposition, Diplomacy offers the chance of trading, creating treaties or even marry the Sovereign's offspring.
The Diplomacy/Cooperation category of the research tree allows you to unlock technologies to improve their diplomatic skills and to get new diplomatic options with the AI. You may unlock new types of treaties that allow you to trade resources, to create alliances or to unlock Embassies that once built in a city will allow you to accumulate Diplomatic Capital. This Diplomatic Capital will make the enemy factions to like you more (or hate you less!) and can also be used in trading.
In the Diplomacy screen you can see the different encountered factions and the relations with them. Selecting one of the factions will also give a more detailed inform of that faction (earnings, relations with others and what does that faction like and dislike from yours). You can select which opponent to talk to and then you can select a topic to talk with the other Soveriegn. Depending on the situation, some topics may be disabled like declaring war to the opponent if you have a peacy treaty with him.In the trade screen, you can try to trade gildars/resources from the other Sovereign by making an offer. That can be a good way to get access to horses or any other uncommon(rare) resource if you werenn't lucky enough to find some and you don't want to declare war on the other faction (maybe because you are too weak and/or too busy with other factions).In the treaties screen the player can try to get some treaties with the AI if the player (or the AI, or both depending of the type of treaty) have researched the proper treaty. The player may try to get some open borders to be able to explore lands controlled by the enemy, propose research treaties or to ask the other Sovereign to declare war on someone.
The Diplomacy/Cooperation category also allows to research how to get special allies in the form of special creatures. Once the player researchs their proper tech, a resource point for that kind of creature will be spawned and once he builds on it, he will be able to recruit units of that type in the city that controls the resource. The basic special creature that Kingdoms can unlock are spiders while the more rare and powerful one are dragons.
At the start of the game, we could imagine the sovereign walking around alone or maybe with 10 foot soldiers armed with pikes. Those early battles will be pretty straight forward. Later on, however, you could have battles with hundreds of soldiers with a few recruited magical creatures involved along with your hero.
(1) Stardock wants to make sure that the AI handling is about as good as a human player at the auto-resolve stuff. With the details dialog, we can see what actually happened after the battle.
(2) Originally, Elemental was going to have continuous turn combat. That effectively meant real-time. Ultimately, after playing around with it, Stardock decided to implement turn based (simultaneous turns based on combat speed) with tiles.
Elements of Tactical Combat
In no particular order these are the things that matter:
*crickets chirping*
(1) There are built in modding tools for assest, item or resource creation. Also scripting for gameplay and AI. The plan is that players will be able to save these creations and post them to share with other players. When these creations are saved, they can choose what “mod” they go with. Players would continue to use the bestiary to choose which mods they want to make available for themselves.
(2) The mod tools in Elemental are designed to let players design their own worlds in great detail.
The mod tool implemented can be found in the Workshop option of the main menu. The tools currently implemented are:
(3)Excerpt from a F.A.Q. about modding (see link for some more details):
Obviously, how much is done here depends on how successful Elemental is commercially so these aren’t promises as much as what they are planning to do.
(4) Modding isn’t something that they plan to work X weeks on and then finish. Rather, the modding budget involves full time Stardock developers assigned to it for the next 18 months. Their current strategy for modding will be to work with active modders to see what sorts of things they need Stardock to expose to modding that they haven’t thought of.
(5) A modding guide for Beta 4 with some of the things that users can do The formats used are:
Ways to distribute your custom content are:
I prefer to update once a week, during the weekend. More time for devs to post things, more time for me to search what to update... It should be updated for the Sunday. I'm going to need a sharp scalpel as I'm still unhappy about the format. Need to improve it somehow while keeping it useful.
*ponders*
Given the primitive forum context, it seems fairly decent as-is. It does make me wish for bookmark-links within a single post (clickable index) and text blocks able to collapse/expand, but I have no idea what trying that sort of manual HTML would do here.
If you want a 'fixable quibble,' I'd suggest adding the date to your New & Updated tags in the index. My favorite thing about your project here is that it helps me catch up if I'm offline for a fair while, and I imagine that's even more helpful to folks who only check in occasionally (lurkers, waiting on the full-graphics beta folks, etc.)
Partially updated. Will finishing updating during the week if possible (before the 1G Thursday update would be nice).
There are a few things out. I blame different browsers and the time consuming efforts they require to have something that can be properly seen in all of them (Firefox zealots and similars: I don't discard browsers that still have a good proportion of users; live with that). So I have finally chosen a limied improvement in the design. THe radical changes will appear next week or later, depending on how I can test things.
If you haven't checked the main page, they have updated the Lore part and it's wonderful. Whoever is in charge, good job! I wish could do something like that for the OP.
Anyway, from now on, the index elements will have the date of the last time they were updated. Could include extra information as: deleted this one, moved that one...
Links with anchors finally included. It's overdue but they work. To go back to the index, just hit... er... Start? Beginning? The key to the right of Insert (I don't have keyboard in English so...).
Yay for some new (copycat) styles! Next, in Elemental for dummies, some extra information by the developers (and maybe some extra adjustments to styles) and other hot topics based on Beta. Really!
*psst* BoogieBac. Give us more art related news.
Winter, I had no idea that a forum post could be that nicely tricked out. You've taken a handy thing and made it handier, with lots of pretty on top. The art devs should mail you a souveneir sketch or something.
In any case, now that the visuals are improved a bit (instead of Wall of Text, now it's a Pretty Wall of Text... eye of the beholder aside), only need to keep the info in it useful. So if someone thinks that something is missing or it's outdated, let me know. I plan to add more stuff of the Beta itself as complementary to some of the info in it, and there are still some topics I need to gather some extra info and/or decide how to weave them to put them here (extra planes, sovereign death...).
Looks really nice, good job. I have been directing friends to this thread when I start talking Elemental to them for the first time, so keep it up
Don't be so modest, Wintersong! That's awesome what you've done.
Keep up the good work.
The page has improved again. Very nice.
Something for you to add when you get a chance:
http://www.impulsedriven.com/products/SSD-SDE-W002
Aye captain.
But the Collector's Edition remains as... a possibility? Only Normal and Limited editions for the game? I suppose I better ask in the proper thread.
Something new to add
https://forums.elementalgame.com/378072
I have updated a bit. Not much time lately (damn deadlines, work supposedly for two that ends being for one* without altering the deadlines, and taking work from the office to home for the holidays**) so probably missing pieces here and there depending of the devs' activities on the forum (especially out of Developers journals area) as I have only being able to read some threads.
So if there is something missing/outdated, post it here. No promises that I'll be able to update it before April 1st though.
* guess who is that "one" ¬.¬
** which that "one" usually uses to unplug the brain and sleep
Actually i believe You can control battle in battlemode 2 as it's been said in the features list on impulse.
Partially updated. Better late than never and I don't want to risk to wait more and start next week and find myself like these last weeks (swamped in work).
Need to find the reference to Dinasty system being more egalitarian in sending children off in marriage, add somehow all the stuff about city building and pioneers, some bits about general combat, Impulse Reactor...
This post just keeps getting better and better, Winter. Well done.
Very good post indeed. Allow me to virtually pat your shoulder.
Haha. Thanks. Alhtough still lacks some information (yeah, global resources are coming, I promise) and I feel like some kind of new format (for the information, no eye candy related) may be needed. Still trying to figure one though. Being distracted doesn't help. I wonder why I have been distracted...
This is really great. And very usefull for me...
You should be on the credits of the game.
'nuff said.
Awesome work Wintersong. A great way to show everything we know about Elemental. I found quite a few interesting tidbits of info reading through!
Also good to link to for those one may want to tempt a new game for. (or buy as a birthday present - which I am doing)
Thank you for making this Wintersong! Most helpful! [e digicons]:karma:[/e]
Once that finally Beta 2 has hit us all like Thor's Hammer (not that from SG-1 but the one from Marvel), I can finally "morph" the thread. There is no so much need anymore to depend on what devs say that they want to do with the game (dependecy still present tough) and we can finally see what they have been doing in secrecy.
That means that the thread can be heavily update with Beta content while keeping some parts, like game overview or Elemental Editions, that are also interesting to have here (for a supposed easy to find routine). And it also means that I'm hacking and slashing lots of texts and stuff (still need more Beta 2 time though), which would benefit greatly from some redesign in the thread (visually and in content).
So, taking a look to the index book at the top of the thread, would you mind to make some suggestions about what you think that should be there? It doesn't need to be a complete list but it'd help me to see if I forget something or determine how important some elements really are (i.e. does city tetris deserve a whole section?).
With some luck, I'd be able to have the thread updated for this week. Next at most. (now I need a thread that makes "previews" about this thread and includes possible "release" dates )
I have a question about maps for anyone that can answer. I want to apologize in advance if this has been answered before. I see there is a "static" map in place for the beta and there is mention of a map creator for the release version, but my question is will there be a auto map generate function within the game when setting up a single player game or will you have to choose from a selection of premade maps?
I don't know if it fits your objectives but I would appreciate an annex about "How to do..."
Less informative but more practical, it would explain some useful (but not obvious) mechanisms for beta-testers. Ex:
- how to transfer an item between Sovereign and NPC?
- how to band together heroes/units?
and other useful tips about the different domains.
Anyway, thanks for your efforts!
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