I agree with most of these posts. My personal problem with sitting down and playing Elemental is simply that I find the game to be kind of boring. This is what originally start me to mod the game. I made my updated weapons mod simply to try and make combat more interesting when I only had normal units. Yet, to really understand why Elemental is boring, one does not discuss exploration of new continents or even get past the first 100 turns. Consider for a moment starting a game of Elemental. Here you are in the middle of the waste lands, surrounded by some resources, and you as the sovereign decide to start your new Empire. A fairly standard beginning for a 4x game. Now, for the first 10-20 turns, you build a hut, a workshop, and a unit or two. Again, some standard fair. As you start to expand your first city and maybe build an expansion, it dawns on you that you are basically building the same 3 or 4 buildings. You start researching hoping to find more improvements to build, but most are only really useful in cities with one resource or another. This leads you back to the same 3 or 4 buildings. After a while, you now have 4 or 5 cities and they have a bunch of the 4 or 5 basic buildings. Yet, in between these cities is a whole bunch of nothing. Sure, you have some goodie huts, some quest locations, and maybe a couple of resources, but your people are unable to do anything with most of the empty space. You can't build forts or watch towers. You can't directly build roads or cultivate the land. All you can do is wait for the game to spawn some stuff which has only 1 particular purpose. So maybe, you are ok with doing the same stuff in your cities, and you are ok with the big empty that is your surrounding territories. Then, you start to fight the roaming monster, which is basically a big game of roshambo, where each side trades simple attacks until the other just falls over. This might be ok, if it didn't take 80,000 turns to get your units to a single battle. So, here you are about a hundred turns in. You have a 10 or more cities, all which filled with citizen we call the happy folk ( since they never get upset, or sick, or have any needs of any kind). You have armies, which slowly move around the map unable to even check out something as simple as an abandoned caravan, or learn to do anything better than swing a club in one specific way. You have caravans running between your cities magically producing gold and roads out of thin air. You have tons of empty space which you can't do anything with since your people apparently hate to live too close to a neighboring city. You might have a wife/husband and some kids, which are basically clones of your sov and his spouse. You might have some champions, which are glorified normal units with the ability to level up a couple of stats but still can't really compete with multiple troop units. And it is here that you finally get a new improvement for your big city, and you realize that you can only build one in your entire empire. Awesome...

edit: After re-reading this post, I think it came across harsher than I originally intended. Please note that this post is not intended to be insulting to SD or any of the hardworking devs. This is simply intended to point out my personal desire to see some more depth added to certain parts of the game.

I agree with the original post, and I agree with kenata. And I also believe Bradley, Derek (especially), Jon, David, Toby and the rest (Paul Cari Jesse Charles Sarah Jeff Akil Jue Dan Key and Scott) understand these issues as well. I'll give them plenty of time to get this stuff right, because the game wasn't close to being ready to be played by the common public last year. I just feel sorry for everyone playing the game a lot now, as the game might be difficult to accept as exciting after playing the boring version for so long. I hope I'm wrong.

There's one thing that kenata's post made me think. What if the game would only allow you to build one city, ever. After that you could only build outposts that could contain defenses, fields of vision etc and magical portals that allowed travel between any two of your portals, including your city. The city would be the only place where people would gather in, so you would have a much more centralized feeling and a feeling that most of the world is still a dangerous land, with some shady inns scattered around and such. Just a few outposts that are really only maintained so that the people who have joined your cause can thrive, expand and grow more powerful. Only soldiers and champions dare to exit the confines of a city.

Did that idea just blow your mind? It blew mine. I instantly fell in love with the idea in my head. Could someone come drop me back on earth and tell me the faults in this concept? Otherwise I will feel sad that the game doesn't play out this way.

I'd love to see that too. Truly unique factions with interesting quirks.

I loved all the different factions in Fall from heaven II.

Also, maybe I'm an old fuddy duddy but I'd like to see Halflings, Elves, Dwarves, Frostlings, Orcs, Goblins etc. like in Age of Wonders.

I've been playing Age of Wonders again lately (thanks Impulse ^^) and I really love the classic fantasy races.

I find myself torn with respect to this post. On one side, I think that too much of the community has ragged on the magic system, which I find to be one of the highlights of the game. There are a multitude of different spell effects, and while there are some features I would like to see added (like effect chaining), I think that one can make a great many different and interesting spells. In fact, I personally have made something on the order of 50+ spells of all different kinds. If one takes a really critical look at the magic system and compares with the current magic criticism, you find that much of the hubbub does not really concern what the system is capable of but simply that one spell or another does not exist when someone believes it should. Now, on the other side, I also think that the global mana pool and global spell books are in some ways a missed opportunity to add some interesting RPG qualities to the game. A good way to look at this would be to understand global mana and global spell books as they are intended. These are the sov's spell books and mana pool based on the efforts of his faction. Thus, the sov is slowly gaining power as he pushes his faction to grab shards and research new spell books. Yet, a champion does not have to work for these things at all. The Sovereign simply imbues his followers with his essence and they can now channel his power without limitation. If we look at the most general case, a player can simply hire a new NPC, cast the imbue champion spell, and now this new NPC instantly becomes adept spellcaster without any work on his own part. Honestly, I don't think the solution is to revert to an old system which was in many ways even wackier and less satisfying. A better change would be something closer to what one finds in AoW. The Sov would always have access to his base of power for obvious reasons, but champions would have a maximum channel limit, which one could choose to level. Then when a champion casts a spell, he takes mana from the global pool, but can only do so up to his channel limit before he can no longer cast spells.  After casting, the champion would then have to wait a turn or two on the strategic map for his channeling to charge back up. This would give players more choice about how to customize their champions, it would make champion spell casting more of a trade off, and it would balance the power potential of newly imbued champions as players would need to work with their champions to get them past the kid gloves stage of spell casting.

Everyone seems to be harping on the bland world, and it's true, it's bland and boring the way things are now. You have to delve into the Adventuring tree just to unlock hidden resources that might or might not be worth it. I totally agree, and was hoping more for a Master of Magic style, where most tiles offer some bonus, albeit maybe not as significant. Because a lot of people are talking about this, I'll post one idea I had.

IDEA:

If you're not going to go the MoM way, then one other idea I thought of was this: how about get rid of the adventuring tree's resource research (it's worthless; as the OP mentions, it only uncovers resources where you've already seen on the map, not on the whole map). Then, make every resource in the game hidden. Get rid of that starting food tile near your starting location (just have your first city provide that food for you to save time and effort of building on it, but only your first city should give that to you). Then as you expand your borders, new resources are then uncovered, instead of you having to research it. See, the idea in the game already is that the world is devastated and destroyed, so why not have it seem that way? As your area of influence around your cities spreads, you are "cleaning up" the devastation and therefore you uncover new resources. So you will find a hidden shrine or new food resource as you expand and create new cities around the map. This will make the game more interesting because the world will still be barren, but the resources are still there; you have to control that area and fix it up (not literally) to know what's there. And it will provide a bit of a meta-game where in between the rest of the game, you can expand into an "empty" area of the map, only to find tons of stuff hidden there after creating an outpost.

This way you will not load up a game and see that there's only a food tile and 1 shard near your home base, see that there's NOTHING else on the rest of the map, and just quit or reload because it looks boring. Of course, this would require that they put more resources on the map, especially food, because no one will own the entirety of the map, and you can only find resources by having your cities' area of influence uncover them. Then this would encourage more cities, but you will have to defend them, so this will encourage more units trained, etc. 

Anyone think this idea is good? If so, maybe I'll throw it up on the suggestions page (maybe it's cause I'm tired, but that sounded funny).

"Adventure tech" is the reason why I despair of SD getting this game to be even remotely near MOM or AOW levels..

I hope you are right, but is this certainty based on reason or do you have a confirmation somewhere?

THIS!!!!