My main concern: there's a ton of research to be made, right from the beginning. I'm fine with having different layers of complexity getting branched out as I continue to play and understand a game. But I find it a bit overwhelming having to decide on a bunch of research items (being some of them very similar to each other), right when I'm starting to build my civilization.
For example, why separate Farming, Orchards and Beekeping? These are all food bonuses for my cities. If I have one city with an apiary, another with orchards and another with fertile land, I need to do every bit of research for these food bonuses, while research requirements increase every time. In the meantime, there's military to consider, and education, administration, taxing, housing, mining, advanced mining, etc, as well as magic and adventuring research, etc, etc... This is more of a hassle and less of a fun factor in my opinion.
Better, intuitive research is needed. New players who are oblivious to the game mechanics will find this a frustrating learning experience, with the AI most likely beating them to a pulp... for the wrong reasons...
Suggestion 1: add a recommended research feature.
Suggestion 2: add a 'food production' research to encompass all the different food bonuses. A city with a certain food resource will be able to harvest it immediately. However, only the pioneer unit can upgrade that food resource to its fullest potential (as in the civilization adapting to that resource and learning how to increase its output) taking a greater amount of turns for the first upgraded resource, but less for the subsequent ones of the same kind (message on first upgraded resource: 'Your civilization learned how to fully develop Apiaries! Next upgrades of the same resource will be much faster now!').
Sareln did that for us. Here
Elemental is already going for a lot of different things. I really like how the RPG elements are being added into play. Families are a nice, intuitive addition. As for building my cities and the different structures, this requires a good deal of thinking in a good way; there is a noticeable pattern which will most likely become clearer as the game gets polished. With the critters that spam all over the map, most of them need to get nerfed 'cause it really sucks for my Sovereign and quests getting botched due to frequent critter encounters at the early stages.
Research is what really got my spider sense tingling. Mind you that I haven't been that immersed into the BETA tests and don't particularly like to dig deep into stats and number crunching. Being more of a casual gamer, I am more or less in the role of a noob that buys the game and gets to play it for the first time.
Research as it is doesn't feel 'right' to me. I don't mind different but I do mind about being confusing, counter-intuitive, frustrating... I've been reading a lot of talk and a lot of effort from testers into this area of the game. I like the ideas of a clearer tech tree, allowing multiple research, and simplify research for similar resources. But maybe this is simply something that could use a more conventional approach.
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