In 2008, right after we released Galactic Civilizations II and Sins of a Solar Empire, we at Stardock felt pretty good about ourselves. We had assembled an amazing team of people that could make amazing games and we thought there was nothing we couldn’t do. Hubris attracts Nemesis.
With space conquered, we set our eyes on making Fantasy Civilizations. It would be half Master of Magic and half what we had learned from making Sins and GalCiv. The game would be called Elemental and it would be the ultimate 4X fantasy strategy game.
We dreamed big, envisioning a game packed with depth and nuance, an expansive fantasy world filled with intriguing characters, a rich lore, and quests weaving through every corner of the map. It would combine civilization-building with deep RPG elements, unique units each carrying their own backstories and stats, and a world players could truly shape through terraforming, magical dynasties, crafting, and more.
We wanted it all, from dynasty systems where heroes could marry, have children, and pass down traits visually and statistically, to intricate city building, powerful spells, extensive tactical combat, and robust modding tools backed by a built-in social platform for sharing creations. Heck, we even had a companion book from Random House exploring the lore. The vision was ambitious and we were excited.
But there was one hitch. We designed Elemental to fit within the constraints of a 32-bit engine that had access to only 2GB of memory. As it turns out, trying to stuff a universe of possibilities into just 2GB is, well... challenging. We built, what we thought, was a sophisticated memory manager to deal with it, but we would still get random crashes even though we were keeping the total memory allocation well below 2GB.
We trimmed, cut, streamlined, and reshaped, trying desperately to fit this vast universe into a smaller memory footprint. When Elemental: War of Magic was released in 2010, it was chaos. It was heartbreaking. It simply didn’t deliver on our dream. It very unstable and we had spent so much time trying to work around the memory issues that the game we released lacked the refinement that our players expected.
Undaunted, we learned, iterated, and adapted. Two years later, Elemental: Fallen Enchantress emerged—a refined, streamlined take that kept much of the strategic depth and advanced AI, delivering on many of our original promises. We gave it away, free, to everyone who bought War of Magic.
Fallen Enchantress became highly regarded among strategy fans, praised for its intelligent gameplay, engaging mechanics, and innovative features, like the ability to zoom from a richly detailed living world to an elegant, strategic cloth map — an innovation widely adopted across the genre since.
A few years later, we delved into other aspects of our original vision with Elemental: Sorcerer King. This iteration emphasized a robust crafting system and compelling quest mechanics, finding its own niche audience despite stepping away from heavy strategic depth. This wasn’t a 4X strategy game, but instead was a crafting/adventure game. Player vs. World. It was fun, but not what players expected.
Yet, Elemental remained fragmented. We had 3 different games that emphasized different aspects of the original design.
War of Magic focused on the player using magic to shape a world.
Fallen Enchantress focused on leading a fantasy civilization.
Sorcerer King focused on questing and crafting.
But none of them fully realized what Elemental was supposed to be.
…Time
Passed…
Stardock grew. We eent on to make and publish other games. We started other studios with our friends like Mohawk Games (Offworld Trading Company, Old World) and Oxide (Ashes of the Singularity, Ara: History Untold), but the team didn’t forget about Elemental. We thought about it every day, even 15 years later.
Remarkably, most of the people who worked on Elemental are still at Stardock and scheduling has worked out so that we have the opportunity to bring them all back onto a single project.
In a normal company, what we’re doing is insane. Every person who was on Elemental back in 2008 is in a lead role now. You would have one of them on a given project, not all of them on one game, but we want to do Elemental justice.
And so here we are. We have remastered the original engine to be natively 64-bit. We’ve updated the graphics engine to DirectX 11.
We’re rewriting a lot of code to bring all the pieces into a single game. The terraforming and Royal Dynasties from War of Magic, the deep unit design and Civ building from Fallen Enchantress and the crafting and quest system from Sorcerer King.
And to be sure, this will be a fantasy 4X strategy game. Elemental was never intended “everything to everyone”. It’s a fantasy civilization game in an RPG world.
So here we are, 15 years later. We’ve been working on this for a long time and we’re excited to share with you the progress we’ve made.
This is what Elemental is:
A vast, procedurally generated fantasy world where every game feels fresh and distinct.
RPG-level depth where every unit has a unique story, stats, and place in your kingdom.
A sophisticated dynasty system originally dreamed up for War of Magic, allowing your characters to marry, produce heirs, and inherit traits dynamically.
Rich terraforming mechanics to shape the land itself according to your strategic vision.
Enhanced crafting and quests inspired by Sorcerer King, ensuring deep immersion and story-driven gameplay.
Tactical combat that's engaging, strategic, and now powered by an advanced AI that makes auto-resolve battles both practical and satisfying.
A beautifully redesigned UI optimized for modern displays, razor-sharp at any resolution, fully leveraging today’s PCs.
Integrated modding tools more robust and user-friendly than ever, empowering our incredible community to expand and personalize the world.
An immersive story-driven campaign rich with lore and meaningful decisions that shape your civilization’s destiny.
Now, we can’t fully hide the fact that this was a game originally made 15 years ago. The art assets were made with tools made by companies that don’t even exist anymore. But the gameplay is quite unlike anything else out there.
Elemental: Reforged is our love letter to you—our fans who've kept the dream alive. We can’t wait for you to finally experience Elemental as it was always meant to be.
Thank you for joining us on this incredible journey. It’s going to be epic.
— Brad Wardell, Lead Designer and CEO, Stardock Entertainment
Wow, it has been quite some time since I last posted here. Glad to see you're bringing Elemental back. I've still got the Collector's Edition (with that little dragon that I've been trying to make a mold of so I can make resin miniatures of various colors for potential RPG encounters) sitting on my shelf, probably the biggest box I've got. Hoping the re-release takes off, and people can do even crazier things with it with mods. I remember being able to marry your daughter off to a dragon, in the 1.0 version, and them having dragon kids that would then be able to ride horses. I think that was a bug, but that image is seared into my head and it'd be wild to have it added back in.
Good luck with the game, Brad and everyone else at Stardock, it's been a long while since I've played Elemental glad to have it back in my life. I wish I could do the same with my hair and my youthful enthusiasm.
Next month is the 15th anniversary of the release our fantasy strategy game, Elemental: War of Magic. It was... a bit of a disaster for us.
Elemental: Reforged
To me it feels like calling a remaster "Reforged" is now a bad omen. The last team that did this, started working under the wing of a similarly "old blood" manager, who valued the game he had worked on back in the day. Once that manager has gone out of the picture, the team lost managerial backing. Previously grand plans and bottom-up approach to polishing the 20-year-old code base had to come to a halt, to rush a rapid release. What was supposed to be a filigree reconstruction was turned into a bull run. With budgets cut, deadline shortened, the team (who still loved the project they were hired for) worked overtime to make the best out of their situation. Despite a couple months release delay, the game almost released without the Night Elves. They were unfinished to that extent!
This then turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy in my opinion: promised too much (initial plans) and delivered too little (management changed plans). Of course said management probably thinks in hindsight "huh I am such a good boy, that would've been a harder flop, had we not cut it short". When in reality, the most true fan base that's been around for nearly all of the 10-15-20 years through the ups and downs (in the 2010s) were the loudest minority for practical reasons. The campaign didn't receive the overhaul that marketing had promised based on old plans. The art didn't have a direction to make it a faithful upgrade of the original. The missing features and new critical bugs (despite having had PTR test branches before the big release) had angered the other half of the community (modding and custom maps) that, essentially, were the only source of fresh content for the game for at least a total of 10 years.
I hope you'll avoid such mistakes and therefore wish you all the best. This is the "game of love" category for the Steam nominations. Where devs aren't distanced too far away from their creation and players behind thick corporate walls. It's heartwarming to know there are still old school collectives out there. Like you, who managed to come back together for a project.
Oh gosh! Wow, that is dedication. I had forgotten that game . Glad to see it coming back. Hope you succeed!
Very excited to have the team together!
Aloha!It will be interesting to see what comes out. The last industry attempt in this vein was the Master of Magic remake, which had issues. Hopefully this one works out well.
Take my money please! FE is one of my all time favs, I used to go back to it often. This is awesome. Thanks!
Well damn. I'm in.
I still, after all this time, take extra effort to get Fallen Enchantress running on my Steam Deck. I'm a sucker for custom control layouts with those sweet sweet touchpads and even though it took awhile, I sussed out that I had to run a second game, quit, and go back to FE to successfully get a focused window to make the game work. And I had to do it every single time I ran the game. Eventually the problem disappeared, maybe in an update. But *that* is for important the game was to me. I stretched my knowledge and put in ProtonDB entries to make sure people knew how to get the game running. And I couldn't be happier to see the trilogy get care and attention. Thank you.
And if you make physical collector edition like old days with Ultima like grabbies, you will have my wallet.
You forgot to mention Impulse. FYI, for those who don't know, Impulse was an online game store that was competing with Steam at the time. As I recall, it was said that Impulse was quite distracting. Both Elemental and Impulse demanded resources and man power; so it left Elemental stretched thin.
Yeaaah,
maybe this time you dont have to listen to enigma... fingers crossed...
Thank you for doing this!!! Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes is my favourite so far.
I was there at the beginning with War of Magic and when I received FE free, you earned my eternal trust and respect. Looking forward to following you on this path, dreaming and hoping for this magical game to come to reality.
Who needs sleep....Can't wait.
After all that time, Elemental has a special place in my heart. So happy to see you willing to revive it, and I hope this time you get it right.
Brad, I'm excited to hear this. It's been a few years since I've logged into the forums to post anything, it's a bit nostalgic.
I've added this to my wishlist, and I'm looking forward to something different in both the 4x and the fantasy genre. With the AI you've always had on the bleeding edge it should be a lot of fun and a challange.
Good luck!
Every few months, almost quarterly I come by and peak at the forums hoping to hear something about elemental, but rarely do I and happen to see this in the dreaded launcher of all places. I enjoyed the first two titles, hated Sorcerer King, Let's see how this goes. I await with bated breath.
I've still got the little dragon on my desk right now. Any benefits in buying the new Reforged version if you were a loyal stardock user and bought the Elemental deluxe edition as well as various iterations of Galciv, desktop tools etc?
Great to hear about the reboot! I really enjoyed Fallen Enchantress.
...
This then turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy in my opinion: promised too much (initial plans) and delivered too little (management changed plans). Of course said management probably thinks in hindsight "huh I am such a good boy, that would've been a harder flop, had we not cut it short". ...
I wouldn't worry too much about managerial commitment on this one. As per the above, Brad is the CEO of Stardock and I think also the (majority? sole?) owner of the company. And it's clearly a passion project for him whose first shortcoming has been occupying him for a long time now. So, that one will get the time and resources it needs. Even with that, things still sometimes doesn't turn out quite as well as you hope, but given all that commitment and the lessons from "three predecessors" on what has and hasn't worked and that there were (very) fun games in them, I'm optimistic.
Outside of this reply, glad to hear about this project. I think FE was a great game that brought me much joy and it seems like the team is doing a curated approach on what to take from where to build something new. I hope they will also be strict on what value each feature adds and be judicious in whether the game gets better from adding things or taking things away.
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