TLDR: C+, moving higher with every patch they release.
From patch 1.01....
Review
Overall: Mechanically and technically, the game shows a lot of promise, and is a solid base on which to build a truly epic game. It doesn't deliver on several key selling points however, or under delivers. Thematically, I don't enjoy Elemental but I guess that's to taste.
Campaign: Since I'm not a fan of the story or the writing per se, the campaign was pretty underwhelming for me. I don't consider it what people should play first if they want an accurate representation of the game's depth. The new tutorial hints and such are helping it feel more fleshed out, but for a game that thrives on choices, randomness and control, the campaign offers none of these. It really only delivers the story, which again, you may or may not care about. It feels like a first-time attempt at an RTS campaign, and coupled with some other problems, results in a pretty bad presentation. That's about all I have to say on it, lest it get too nit picky and negative. I will only say that after playing the campaign for 4 hours, I was pretty disappointed and fearing the worst. Luckily the sandbox is much better.
Sandbox: Overall, the sandbox has delivered an epic game experience because the maps are huge, there is a lot of stuff to do, and the pacing feels about right. There are lots of choices to make, things to explore and the monsters add a lot of dynamism to your turn-by-turn decisions.
On specific featuresAI: I'll start here because I have the least exposure to it. On a normal game, the AI has been passive except for one repeatedly approaching me for treaties. (Shouldn't he take a hint at some point, or like me less because I rebuff him?) The AI has almost managed to kill off one player, who I've not seen because they're on the other side of the world. In comparison to my forces, the one AI I do see isn't intelligently building units or building armies strong enough to stop me. Nothing else much to say, other than it seems semi-random whether the monster AI chooses to attack you or not. They do seem to have a preference for caravans though.
Magic: This is where I'm afraid I'm going to get pretty negative. The magic in Elemental sucks, there's just no two ways about it. What should have been a focus in development feels like an after thought, from how spells are named, to how they're presented, to what they do, to what the core of the system actually is. After 6 hours of a sandbox game, I've yet to see the spells that supposedly make this game awesome. No volcanoes, no storms, no earthquakes, not even especially impressive summons..and I started 1.01 as as summoner.
There are handfuls of exceedingly generic spells, and having spell damage range be almost 100% means you often plink guys for damage one round, then explode them for max damage the next. Neither tactical nor strategy spells really have any oomph. Strategy spells are especially underwhelming. There's no creativity in them, they don't scale in power compared to what you start with, and they don't even have visual effects. How much of this is still in the pipeline, and how much has been completely overlooked, I don't know. Read down if you want constructive criticism on magic. But I had to get this off my chest. Do not release a game with Magic in the title then under deliver on it like this.
City mechanics: Overall I'm pleased here. Elemental still does not get away from "all cities tend to be a like", but the process of building cities and watching them grow is enjoyable, and all the mechanics and strategies that revolve around cities works. What I don't like is the Food Mechanic. Available fertile land dictates city placement way too heavily, as it's hard to grow a city in decent order without it. I like that I don't have to worry about starving populations, and that recruiting for my military seems to have a negligible impact on my population....but since it all ties back to the rate of city growth, and city growth is so important...I feel like Food needs another role than just how many homes you can build, or whether you have the 1 food available to build a trade center or something. Going back to magic, it doesn't provide (at least that I saw) much way to compensate for what you lack in the environment. I've seen the +1 food, +1 materials enchants, but little else...and again, I STARTED as an enchanter.
Tactical battles: They're about standard for 4x fantasy game tactical battles, now that some patches have gone in. I won't comment on the actual combat mechanics, since those seem to be in a great deal of flux. I don't have much to really say about tactical battles, since how fun it is is driven by a lot of other things...but since magic and some units are underwhelming, tactical battles have the tendency to feel that way too. It would be nice if terrain was more important, and more random. Also I have units that sometimes start the battle in the middle of the field, way ahead of my army, for no earthly reason.
Unit customization and gear: This is an especially good part of the game. Building units and equipping them and champions adds a lot of depth. Equipment however feels overemphasized in terms of effectiivess. Levels don't mean squat without the gear to back it up, for both heroes and regular troops. I have suggestions below. Overall, this is a great start, but equipment DOES lack quite a bit of content once you've played a single game. With only 4 sets of armor, a handful of weapon types with 1 to 2 levels of quality, and only a few trade offs between them, it's more of a sliding power scale than a real tactical choice.It's cool that I can have shirtless berzerkers with axes and Stones of Rage...but they'll never be "good."
Items: As I said above, it's a good start. I love that I can make troops with magic items. But like a lot of this game, there needs to be more, and more thoughtfully designed items. Suggestions below.
Champions: As people have mentioned around the forum, heroes have a lot of short comings. Even if I have them in every single battle I fight, without the right equipment, they're no better than high HP peasants. If I give them equipment, they're all "Fighters" of a generic sort. If they're not spellcasters, they aren't army leaders, in my book, since a 3x3 nuke in tactical battles is pretty much a winner. And those without combat special abilities at least seem especially worthless, the true baseline, uninteresting fighter. I have suggestions below
UI: I have to hate again a little. I'm not a fan of Elemental's windows or UI. The color scheme is god awful in my eyes, I don't find pastels to be an engaging or evocative set of colors. So much has been packed into that bottom tool bar as well that it's overloaded. More suggestions below, but is it possible to get away from the peaches, the mauves, the baby blues and the limes? When I see pastel, I think bland, inoffensive, somewhat childish. When half your game is that color, half your game gives that impression. The font in quest windows seems thrown in there, as well.
Bottomline
A good start. I feel you guys jumped the gun on release though, and I say that as an avid gamer who can't wait to get their hands on stuff. I avoided participating in beta because I wanted to experience Elemental as a polished product...and I feel like I'm getting the beta experience none the less. In the future, I suggest Stardock reigns in their own excitement with their title, and seeks non-fan, non-beta tester feedback before they launch. As an indie developer, I thought the benefit was control over the release process, but Elemental's initial offering really seems like someone was breathing down your necks for a release. And for the truly hardcore Stardock fans, answering that modding will solve all of this, that's not a response that works for anyone but die-hard fans.
Having played GalCiv 2, I feel like I know what to expect from the future of Elemental, and I hope continued support from Stardock takes the game up the several notches it's capable of, from average, troubled 4x game with great concepts to great 4x game with fully realized concepts. Given the amount of thread nuking of late around here, I hope these criticisms are ones you'll leave stand.
Suggestions for the next 6 months of development:
Magic: I don't propose a total rewrite or anything like that. I find the Fire/Water/Air/Earth dynamic to be totally overplayed in this day and age, but that's probably not going to change. So what I want to see is:
1) More spells, and more meaningful spells
2) Easier access to spells earlier on in the game.
3) More truly epic spells, and more spells with a lasting impact on the game and/or the world.
More spells and more meaningful ones. A new spell which only does more damage, or has a different mana/damage ratio is not a spell worth making. Yes, it satisfies a balance requirement, but that's ALL it does. More meaningful means: different patterns of attack, additional effects, different casting times, additional costs or risk to the player.
Easier access to spells earlier in game. For a player that is half magic, half combat, spell acquisition is slow and boring. You stare at the same 9 spells you don't want to waste time researching because they're not interesting, wait 50 turns to raise a spell level, to maybe get one or two spells that excite you. A single book can add a handful of spells to your repertoire, but books are infrequent and late game, making magic boring all the way up until then. Rewarding players with single spells for quests or random events would be a nice perk.
3) More truly epic spells. I shouldn't have to wait until the very pinnacle of magic to make a volcano, like was demonstrated in the videos. And that's the ONLY magic I know that's truly epic. Are there more? Probably. But I've put 15 hours already into Elemental, I've done my dues, now where's the cheese? Strategic spells are boring by and large, and many lack visual effects. I want stuff like:
-A massive thunderstorm that hangs in the map view, slowing down everyone within it and dealing some elemental damage. Can be maintained a significant power cost, with accompanying kick ass visual effect.
-A massive zone of corruption that reduces food output, morale in combat and leeches life from people within it. Visual effect please.
I'm not going to rattle off dozens of examples, but you get the drift. Apply that to tactical combat spells as well. You should be able to summon every creature in the game with the right combinations of books. You should be able to cause earthquakes that make some of the battlefield unavailable.
There should also be offensive spells castable from the tactical map. Sovreigns should be able to drop meteors or fireballs or lightning bolts at great distances, not just in combat. Make a new spell for it if you have to, but again, give us the feeling of magic's epicness both in and out of battle.They should be able to cast offensive spells in friendly terrain at 100% (or more) and have spells decrease in effectiveness the farther out of their terrain it is, or the deeper in enemy territory it is.
Make every spell count if you can...and honestly, put the leg work into good magic. The current offering really feels like a side project, or something that only got a few weeks spent on it.
Unit customization and items: We should be able to customize all the appearance aspects of troops we make. If I want to make blue skinned berzerkers, I should be able to go into the editor, within a sandbox game, and make them.
More poses for unit cards.
Unit cards should update to reflect a hero's current appearance.
We should be able to customize a hero's appearance and unit card quote once we hire them.
We should not have to be bald to wear a hood.
Layering clothes and armor would be amazing. Not a requirement but it would still be amazing.
Units poses on unit cards should not have weapons clipping through shields or body parts. If just looks tacky.
Stuff at the item vendor should be organized by item type and/or quality. A big list of stuff, if you guys plan to do more items, looks messy.
More items with a variety of trade offs and advantages, of all types. There only reason now to use light armor is for avoiding the combat speed penalty or because you're broke. There should be better light armor with a higher defense value available later on. There needs to be more basic weapons available at the start of the game, everyone running around with clubs looks ridiculous. Rusty daggers, rusty swords and reasons for why you'd want a club versus a rusty sword. You've got tons of combat relevant stats, make the gear play off those stats, both UP and DOWN the item advancement scheme.
We should be able to customize units for races we get access to in game, where reasonable. Darklings, for example. It makes no sense we can produce a race of troops with different gear and arrive at different kinds of troops, but not do that with the other races. There needs to be more magic items in general, even if they just are better versions of older ones. But there also needs to be items with a higher variety of effects. Resistance items, invisibility, shape changing...you get the idea.
Again, what's there is a great start. Don't stop now or it will never be more than that.
Heros: Heroes need some more love, or they need more roles to fulfill. As it is they just follow my sovereign around, who in turn hides behind my strongest units, to get levels. Coupled with the fact they're so fragile, you never want to get them into trouble, even though they don't really DO anything for you, other than allow you to branch out into the world and hit multiple quest spots at once. Which is a bad idea unless you have two or more good armies to back them up, since they can't do anything on their own.
I feel like heroes shouldget Attack and Defense increases as part of their leveling. Make the % of increase relevant to their current stats, but all of them should be getting at least somewhat more effective in combat as time goes on, without pouring all their points into the strength.
The heroes that you haven't made into spell casters, or have no relevant special abilities, are completely boring. Who cares if they produce 1 gildar late game? At the risk of suggesting some new overarching system....let us put those non-combat, non-exploring, non-spellcasting heroes to work. What if they could be put in charge of managing cities, like a Lord? An extra slot in each city that only a hero can be put into, where their stats increase (or decrease?) a city's output or defense values? They may not be gaining experience, but it would feel like they're doing something useful at least.
UI and Visuals: Seriously, revisit the color scheme in the whole game and look for uses of boring, mild colors. I'm thinking the Kingdom/Research/Spell pane for one.
The Wraith race color is baby blue, and it makes it hard to see on the cloth map. It's also just not very intimidating. All race colors should pop brightly, because that's info you want to know immediately when looking at stuff.
Spheres of influence should be visible on the cloth map, or MORE visible.
Roads should be MORE visible on the cloth map.
We should be able to expand the minimap to get a single pane view of the whole world, rather than just a zoomed out in-game view.
Vendors should list items in some sort of order, possibly under headings like "Mounts" and "Swords"
There should be multiple tabs on the spell book to view spells according to level, sphere, strategic or tactical. The spell book should be larger too, only being able to display 12 or so spells on that one page will get tedious as time goes on and more spells are added. Do we really need to see those icons so big? The titles are right there and the art isn't so amazing it's worth having that big. Sort of like the spell art on the right page, where half of them just show the crystal image associated with the spell.
The size of each entry in the design unit screen does not need to be that big. It seems like a general them of Elementals screens that EVERYTHING is oversized/uses huge fonts.
Other stuff: Timing on many spell animations, versus the damage floater and the sound effects, are off.
Battle sounds still cut out regularly. This may be associated with the memory leak.
Friendly units should be able to move through other friendly units (but not stop on the same tile) as long as one of the units isn't a super huge monster. It looks awkward that a single unit is occupying one corner of a tile, and another single unit has to walk all the way around them.
Monster spawning is a little out of hand. Not only is it the frequent "adventureres have done something stupid!" but monsters spawn in the tiniest corners of unclaimed space, meaning very small pockets between your cities produce an inordinate amount of critters, which them go straight for your caravans, since your roads usually go right through those pockets. Don't get me wrong, it's a cool mechanic. But monsters should need at least some room to spawn and move around.
Monsters also spawning RIGHT next to units is really, really annoying. I've recruited heroes before, ended turn so we could blink back to a city to buy some gear, and had a monster spawn and kill them immediately. Very annoying. Monsters should not spawn within 4 or so tiles of a unit, so you at least have some warning, and they aren't ninja ganking caravans.
We need a "retreat" button. We at least need a chance to escape a battle without having to fight it out to the end. We should take some losses for doing so, but auto-battling implies we're too stupid to run away when it's warranted.
Autobattles should not pick out the weakest hero to kill as often. What should be any easy way to get a hero leveled turns into an easy way to get them killed, because by the numbers, they're the first to die. If my combat rating is 10x the amount of the enemies, that should tell the AI that, at the very least, weak champions shouldn't be getting killed.
We should get a notification when a champion has died, especially because of how auto battle resolves at the moment. There were a couple times I went looking for one and found they had died long ago in a random autobattle.
There should be a "select all" button for cities. It's tedious to Shift + Click 12 units, especially when it causes your cursor in game to freak out.
Rethink horses and mounts. It's very cool we can have them. There's just no reason NOT to have them. Seriously, is there a reason? Who doesn't want more moves per turn and a higher combat speed? No one, that's who. For troops, it makes sense, mounts are based on resources and in macro bump up the cost of troops a lot. For heroes though, mounts are relatively cheap and never a bad idea.
Well city building in 4x games is hardly cutting edge stuff.. saying it's "okay" is hardly high praise (MOM had it too).
If Magic in MOM is not high standard, the fact that EWOM fails to fit it is even more disturbing
IMHO the magic system of MOM (including unique abilities) is the gold standard that has yet to be bettered.. Maybe dominions, but the lack of TC makes it hard to compare.
As it stands, I would say the spells in HOMM, AOW are more interesting than EWOM.
Indeed. I really wished they would have worked on the mechanics of gameplay.. That would not be very hard actually to do, but I suspect they were thinking .. let's make it super-moddable (looks like the bulk of development time was done on this).. then later we can fix it.. But I'm not quite sure if the game is moddable enough to fix some of the problems..
The problems with too randomised rolls, need for more different types of spells and effects, these weren't things that only surfaced now. If you look at the forum, it has being discussed , pointed out over and over again.. SD just didn't care, even though in dev journals it was mentioned and we were asked to suggest ideas for spells but.....
Questing is quite fun, better than say AOW1's quests, but is it good enough to make up for a bland magic system? I don't think so.
This review is spot-on. I was really hoping for a true MOM successor given my experience with GalCiv2 and Sins. I know SD can crank out a high quality and fun game. I'm truly underwhelmed at the current game. So much potential lost behind a bizarre UI and unbalanced/un-fun mechanics. Not to mention the thing running so slow/jerky as if I was using a 5 year old laptop rather than my modern quad core with a GPU that draws 200 watts.
@ Owl208
Even sweeter, we could summon arguably the most powerful Champion in the game, good old Torin the Chosen. Heck, he even had his own spell and every player in the game could possibly get him because he wasn't attached to a particular spellbook flavor.
Torin the chosen came forth from the incarnation spell. You have to dedicate yourself to life books in MOM to get the spell so not every player got to have him. You probably confuse this with the summon champion spell.
Anyway, I agree with the dismal feeling spells in this game, especially compared to MOM.
Another areas where MOM is superior to EWOM.. Better manual Though I suppose EWOM plans to change tons so they probably thought why borther with a comprehensive manual as 90% or more is going to be changed within 6 months!
The whole thing about defense providing max defense against right attack type seems to be lifted 100% from galciv no?
well imo questing is ok, every game has few bugs and imperfection at release
the ones in questing arent really game breaking
but most of all questing in general is fun
OP: You've summed up my thoughts (and more) far better than i could. This game IS fun - but it needs polish. And I agree with others above - the magic systems needs work, and it's been said many many many times.
The reason we are having these discussions after release is because the beta was basically unusable throughout the process and had almost no content. In the beginning of beta there was no game at all, or even a concept of a game. At the end of beta it was only possible to muddle through a few turns before a crash, and there were very few spells and quests and items for designing units.
The result is that beta testers went on and on about the pie in the sky that they wanted, yet nobody was in any position to discuss what we had. If we criticised anything, we were reminded that this was just the beta and the real thing would be different. We were told to trust that SD would pull off some miracle in the month between beta 4 and release. Nothing whatsoever was accomplished in the beta process in terms of finding the fun.
In the end there is a little bit of fun, I stayed up late to finish the campaign, but the game is so far from the vision presented in three years of dev journals, it's very dissapointing indeed. I think it's unfortunate that the real beta starts now, and that unwitting customers are forced into that position. You can't just will a game into readiness. It's ready when it's ready.
I find it amusing that someone could write such a lengthy review based on two-days of play time. Yeah, right.
To add to that, screw Civ 5 and its release slot. If you are financially able to take more time, TAKE MORE TIME. That's the golden rule of any deadline work. I thought this was a given since this is Stardock's release and presumably no one elses.
Those those that might have worried Civ 5 would overshadow Elemental's release, had Stardock taken the time to make content and polish it all, people would have played both for being two different, interesting games. As it is, when Civ 5 releases, people aren't going to play Elemental because it's still trying to get up to its own standards.
So what, I made this up? Or maybe I was just paying attention as I played.
More like you saw the length and went straight to your "make a mocking post" button.
Some of my mechanics beefs:
Very limited equipment lists, and as others have mentioned, that limited equipment is ridiculously overpowered. Give a random schmo a dagger and he's 4x better than my sovereign all of the sudden?
The tactical combat implementation is poor.
-How do I get an advantage from terrain again? Maybe it works and I don't understand it, but it's mystery to me.
-The random damage model is very dated.
Auto-complete combat is also poor. Guys die VERY needlessly and randomly.
The quests are VERY generic.
The heroes/champions just don't do much. They are bland, and not much differentiates them.
Magic/spells are obviously sketchy at best.
The random creature spawning is poorly implemented with little/no supporting logic.
AI is not very good (this is hard, I know, but was supposed to be a selling point for the game).
The UI is not horrible IMO, but certainly not great. I encountered several situations where I could not selected what I needed to, or could not interact with an NPC, etc.
Among many others...
Then the complete lack of decent documentation and/or tutorial is frustrating for a release.
As are the huge bugs and crashes of course (to be honest, mine has been FAIRLY stable, just going by other reports on this).
But in the "not exactly bug, but broken nonetheless" category, I loved the sandbox game I started on average difficulty and ran into a "1st level" king who was a dragon and had like 50 hp with huge attack and defense scores within 8 rounds (my immediate neighbor). That's the kind of stuff that makes people say the game is "broken" and/or unplayable. If I had not just been messing around and experimenting, that would have been HUGELY irritating, because you can basically just throw that game out the window. That dude could have crushed the whole world immediately (but of course, he was just sitting there doing nothing).
The city building is somewhat interesting, but if I just want to build interesting cities and empires, I can play CIV 1 or 2.
Ack, enough. I could go on, but my point is that I'm really not sure patches are going to fix all of this, and I'd rather just have my money back at this point.
Yeah, instead they'll be complaining about how broken, unbalanced, and poorly tested Civ 5 is. Trust me, it's going to happen.
More like I'm justifiably suspicious of lengthy "in-depth" reviews based on such limited experience with game as deep and complex as Elemental.
I stand corrected, thank you. And it was the champion spell I was referring to as the non-spellbook spell which allowed everyone access to all heroes. Torin does require the life spell Incarnation. The old memory seems to be failing me, I need to go back and play MOM again, lol. Still, even though it was years ago, MOM's magic system left a very positive impression that stays with me even today.
It goes to show you though just how well thought out MOM's magic system was and I expected more of this kind of thing from Elemental, so its disappointing to see such a bland and noninfluential magic system.
So you didn't even read my review, and yet you're saying I haven't played the game enough to have an opinion?
Now that's funny.
The length of time since the release of the game doesn't impact the validity of Nenjin's observations. It doesn't take much playing time to figure out what is working and what isn't within Elemental. The length of Nenjin's review is due to the fact that he is going into depth on what he sees is wrong and unfun and most importantly, what can be done to correct these problems in the future. He also states what he likes. The constructive criticism is being delivered in a straightforward, non flaming, trolling way, so why isn't this acceptable or valid? How many hours or days does he have to play before its acceptable to make a judgement?
Good review, but I do have confidence in Stardock to work very hard and get the game where it should be. It is not a terrible game now by any means, but it could be SO much better if they are able to polish and focus existing features as well as implement new ones. Give this game 2 or 3 months and I bet it will be a hell of a lot better.
No, I read it, and it's all stuff I noticed my first hour of playing while I was still barely scratching the surface. For all its length, your "review" is actually quite shallow.
I own CalCiv 2 and soase and love both, but wtf is this? i can't even call it a game. i wish i hadn't preordered! anyway, i learned a lesson by this.
I appreciate the review. It's clear, concise, and makes excellent points without all of the flaming and raging that runs rampant. Well done.
Elemental is more than just a game. It is a foundation. WoM makes use of that foundation to present to us a very enjoyable game that merely touches upon what Elemental will be in the coming months and years. This does NOT mean that it is unfinished. Merely that we have yet to scratch the surface of what Elemental truly is. If you are simply going to judge the game based upon WoM, then you deserve to be as dissatisfied as you allow yourself to be. You will put the game on your shelf and you will not be part of its evolution, and you will miss out on what it truly has to offer.
The game that Elemental should be drawing comparisons to is Neverwinter Nights 1. NWN1, out of the box, was fun. But it was not polished and flushed out to its full potential until a couple of years after its release. The community still goes strong to this day, some 9 years after release. Elemental wears this same mantle for the turn based strategy game. If you don't understand that, then you really have not been paying attention over the last year or so.
This seems like a contradictory statement. You noticed the same things Nenjin did in your first hour of playing, then knock him for saying them because it is too soon after the release to be saying them. So my question to you is will waiting to say them change things?
its absolutely possible
but here we are NOT saying stardock is a bad company
in fact stardock is good
too many games are shit at release these days
and since we are customers we HAVE THE RIGHT to compain
videogames are the only economy sector in which this happens
what would you say if you buy a car that has 3 wheels "we will put the 4th on a later patch" ? or a car that has a performance similar to a computer program, hanging for no reason sometimes ?
No, what I'm saying is that it's all surface stuff that's maybe worth a mention in a review but can hardly be the entire basis for it. It's like reviewing a movie after having only watched the first ten-minutes.
I think this review is spot on.
The way champions and magic are implemented is quite frankly, piss poor. There's no point to leveling your sovereign or anything like that. The later level spells don't do anything particularly interesting other than 'summon unit' or 'deal damage in mildly creative way X'
I will give credit to the game where it is due, the empire building part of the game is pretty neat. I like the way the tech tree works and building empires and stuff. My current strategy revolves around using an Organized sovereign to basically zoom a huge army around the map. Seems to work well. The real test will be in fighting against the AI and seeing how that works.
--
Alot of this could be fixed by simply tweaking champions. My suggestion is to make it so that creating a champion and buying equipment is closer to parties/squads of units in cost.
Think about it:
A level 1 champion has maybe 9 HP, and crappy stats and weapons. They cost as much as a squad of well equipped warriors who would likely have high attack and 30 HP. I might pay 50 gold and 50 materials for that squad, and they will all be armed with light armor and axes. I can churn these guys out at every city I have with little consequence.
For an equivalent champion I'm, going to be forking over something like 200-300 gold for something with much less attack and HP.
Honestly, champions/soveriegns SHOULD be as cost effective in plain old combat as the highest 'group' of equivalently armed soldiers. If my champion has 12 str and a broadsword/armor set that I spent 600 GP on, then he should be worth 15-25 equivalent guys and take/deliver a real beating. I recommend raising champion's stats by a factor of 5 or maybe even 10. 25 HP/5 attack/5 def for a level 1 character you paid 50 GP for sounds reasonable to me.
Champions would be naturally limited by the fact you can't churn them out 5-10 at once at super-experienced level.
Magic itself I'm much less enthused about getting better. I don''t really see new spell effects being added until the next expansion, which is really what this game needs. There's just an overall lack of interesting units/abilities to get. This game really needs a shot in the arm in terms of creativity, and relying on modders is really not going to work. That's just lazy.
A modder can extend the life of a game for years, but the majority of people playing the game largely depends on official content. At most 5% of the community will use any given mod, resulting in fracturing.
It would be GREAT if Stardock simply dumped a bunch of artwork and stat archetypes into the tech/design engine. Let's say you research "Build dragons" , well now you can call up a portrait of a dragon, and then grab some stats for it (basic/HP/attack/defense/move values) and then equip it with certain items (Rings/amulets/packs/etc).
THAT would be sweet. But do I see that coming in a PATCH? Not a chance in hell.
But honestly? I see this game going down the way of Demigod if Stardock doesn't do something DRASTIC to improve the basic gameplay within the next few weeks. Drastic like sticking artwork and programming assets into a patch. I really doubt stat tweaks and balance mods will be enough to fix the game's initial....underwhelmingness.
The sheer fact is there aren't many strategic options other than booming a lot of cities and pumping out troops. You need troops to keep peace and fight monsters, so pretty much no matter what 'objective' you choose, master spell, master quest, diplo-vic or conquest, you'll be playing the game the same way.
As of now the Elemental platform has a lot of potential as a TOOLKIT, but really the core game is weak.
be realistic, surely stardock will work on it but you cant expect in 2 weeks to have every concern you express solved
it takes times
Yes. Also I'm really wondering how much modding can do if the base game has few spell effects. If the base material is so limited, how much can modding do beyond tweaking a few variables?
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