I kind of agree with this I'd love to see an enchantment forge where you could design magical properties into armour or weapons at a mana cost to produce (post 1.1 as one of the advantages of 1.1 is that mana becomes a resource).

Magical research could unlock new options e.g. A Displacement enchantment added to armour that gives  10% dodge chance. A Life stealing effect for a sword etc. You should be able to combine these.

After all forging your own magical equipment is in keeping with the ring in lord of the ring obviously very powerful items should also have a mana up keep.

Customisability is a key selling point so lets extend it.

I would also like to see fallen tech that allows them to spend mana to imbue their troops with abilities like (claws, tough skins, extra size and strength, regeneration) Again powerful effects should cost mana up keep as well, after all the fallen themsleves are the result of life altering magical experiments. this would just be implemeted through the unit designer.

In fact give magical forging to Kingdoms and Magical mutation to the Empire to reflect their cultural difference and help deferentiate factions in practical terms.

  Long time Stardock fan.  Just want to say "You can do it".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZ2HcRl4wSk

Stuff I like:

- Ressource grabbing and exploration is fun and feeds my powergamer gene.

- The growing "beautification" of the territory I control - seeing the world go from grey-brownish to lush and green is really amazing

- City evolutiion is fantastic - that is the feature that Elemental does much better than the current Civ games. I love to see all my "wonders" and special buildings, especially when my capital grows really large.

- The RPG aspect in general is nice, although it needs to be heavily retweaked. Some stats, like Charisma, are borderline useless. With a good economy, the recruiting cost benefits are negligé... um neglegible.  Maybe add in a skill tree to further differentiate your heroes. I don't know about other people, but most times my hired heroes just end up wearing the toughest armor and best weapons and work as elite guards for the sov, which is a waste of talents. So why not give, say, a merchant master special abilities that improve upon his 1g/turn bonus? Maybe adding influence when parked in a city or some such? Same with Assassins. What makes an assassin special? Extra movement? Yeeeeeeeaaaaaah. When I think "assassin", I either think "Ezio Auditore da Firenze" and imagine a one man swiss army knife of death, or, being a bit more traditional, a guy who sneakily kills stuff. But in Elemental? No improved crit chance, no "backstab" flanking ability (btw, IS there any benefit in flanking people in Tac Battles?), no poisoning weapons...

- Unit creation. Too bad there's only human(oid) units to create. Apart from the critters, Elemental is rather light on "fantasy" races. Can we get more please? No need for your "typical" elves, but right now it's more or less the Star Trek approach to races, you just don't use the usual face ridges and go for slightly differing skin tones, which is a shame.

- Cloth map. Awesome.

- Music is nice, although more is always better.

Stuff that needs to be fixed:

- Tactical Battles. Boring. Clunky. Not. Fun. The only reason for me to ever enter a tac battle is to keep a wounded champion out of the fray and have my sov nuke everything to death. (Lightning Storm does that, often enough). Where are special terrain features apart from blocked tiles? Unit tactics? Flanking? Zones Of Control? Attacks Of Opportunity? A working morale system? Oh yes, one other thing: DUNGEONS! Or more generally - other battlefields than open-air locations, which again could provide so much more to the tac battle system. An underground cave, bisected by an uncrossable lava stream. Only way across is a narrow bridge, just wide enough for one unit. That's practically the Basic 101 on "how to design a thrilling encounter" from the old D6D Starter box set. And what do I get in Elemental? Boring, not fun tactical battles. Meh.

- More sounds would be awesome. Ambience. The healing of the world could be so much more powerful with cleverly used sounds, going from forlorn wind blowing over the arid wastes to rippling brooks, herd animals and whatnot if the land goes green (or grwoling earthquakes, the moaning of the dead and dying and the bubbling of LAVA when the evil guys take over!). Same goes for pretty much every aspect of the game. Tac battles could get much more impact by using more sounds. Beasts could get much more menacing by actually giving them sounds. Just fire up any Heroes Of Might And Magic game and see what I mean.

I love the open-ended fantasy narrative structure, and the potential to further expand and deepen it.

Everybody has pretty much covered my feelings, so I will just add that I really like the cloth map.  But I would like to have the ability to write on it, such as naming a forest or a range of mountains.  IIRC, this was mentioned in one of the early dev blogs but I guess it never made it into Elemental Vanilla.

The thing I love the most is the concept of resources.

They are rare enough to make a single resource a good reason to open war.

It fits the story of the game, it's interesting, it's original, and most of all - it adds to the re-playability since every game I can get different resources around me and change my game style and strategy accordingly.

Despite the fact it can and should be improved, I like the ability to design units.

Combined with the lack of resources, I can reach completely different designs each game, depending on what resources I have around me.

One other thing is the "human only" concept. This is something that relates to my "pen and paper" RPG gaming style.

Emphasizing cultural differences between the current factions is good enough and just because it's a fantasy world, it doesn't mean you have to stick elf and dwarf cliches in there.

I think it's a minor advantage, but it's worth mentioning considering how many requests I saw for  LOTR races in the core game.

I also think there are many things in the game with great potential, but I can't really add them as advantages until their potential is tapped.

The long list includes the dynasty, quests and the city that is more than just a list of buildings.

* City building on global map. I'd love to have some 'wall' buildings or other cheap defensive stuff to fill gaps tho.

* Unit designer. Well, it sucks right now, but its good that its there as feature. Being able to 'design' minor races from diplomacy tree would be great. Plus it should consider local population composition. It does not make much sense to be able recruit humans from fallen city and vise versa.

* Terrain modification spells. They are buggy, but still good to have.

* Tree-based techs with categories as goals instead of actual techs.

* Dynasties. Needs succession and ability to marry children with champions. And bugfixes.

* Cloth map. Needs some sprites fixes to distinguish beaches and some other tiles like resources, huts and locations, tho. Usefulness should be above realism and style, IMHO.

Other than that, most of aspects are 'could be good, but not too good right now'.

I think these are interesting ideas, but I would consolidate them to simply say, that tactical units need Roles. As it is currently, the various summons actually fulfill roles in battle. Some like the VM are good at counterattacking, while others like the fire giant have a range of different attack spells, which have various tactical roles. It is why these units tend to be far more useful than the standard tactical unit. In general, the normal unit have two roles, which we will refer to as "Fighter" and "Ranger". These are fairly generic fighting roles which do not even begin to express the spectrum of possibilities of either role. I think it would be interesting if a player had to balance his dps fighters with his heavy armored tanks. While the current system does allow units to either put resources into creating some approximation of these roles, it does nothing to prevent players from simply making the third role of super awesome combination guy. Ultimately, it simply comes down to the more tactical roles the greater the tactical possibilities for different strategic approaches.

I like that I can point to Elemental's "everything and the kitchen sink" design strategy as a big no-no.

I dig unit degisn, but the options are too limited. You can't really add special moves to a unit, and the weapons and mounts are too basic. Ideas (some are from MoM, but hey, they did that very well):

* Mount + Shortbow = mounted archer, give +1 to hit because of extra high

* Mount + Spear = cavalry, +2 damage if they moved a square before attacking (i.e. charge)

* Spear = first strike against mounted units

*Sword and large shield = -1 to hit penalty for missiles (should be small and large shield)

Stuff like that will make it a lot more tactical already.

I dig being able to customize my heroes, but again, the options are too limited. Equipping them is very costfull and a pain. I want to be able to enchant items like good old MoM. Yes. But maybe I should try and get a hang of building an economy. Hehehe.

I like the color scheme stuff but I dont really have a clue as to how some colors work. Would be nice if you would have some basic models when using the faction creator to see what kinda colors you get when assigning color schemes, like in GalCiv.

I like the cloth map, especially on my laptop. My gaming rig... not bothered

Champions need more and more varied abilities.

I'll start a game with just one opponent now, large map, to check out some stuff. Wish I had more time to play! But man, as far as timesinks go this is a good game

I like that Elemental can be won from multiple angles. The tech-trees in Elemental are probably the most distinct of any 4X, allowing each to work in very different manners from each-other. At the moment though, diplomacy doesn't really work (largely because getting the ai to declare war on each-other is worthless since the ai won't attack.) and the adventure tree is too strong. Simple balance and ai issues will improve that facet vastly.

In the same manner sovereign customization was well done, and each sovereign plays differently. Once more, at the moment some sovereign builds are godlike while others don't even work.

The visual customization of the sovereign was ingenious and really adds to the ability to connect with your sovereign.

In the same vein, the ability to customize your troops is just awesome. It would be nice if you could make more decisions effecting the mechanics of your troops. Of course, it's also important to get the ai to a level where it can put up a decent fight in tactical against a human, so...

Champions are cool. They always are. They need to be more customizable and more capable of fighting it out with normal troops, especially if you invest heavily in them. Not exactly a balance issue, but more of an issue that there aren't many viable ways to use champions despite all the options your given to customize their mechanical nature.

The sprawling cities are cool. Finding ways to put whatever resources your handed to good use in your plans is fun. Would be better if some resources weren't just plain worse than others (more balance issues.)

Hmm, I'm sure I could think up more things, but the game is in a state wherein you can easily customize the nature and appearance of your empire, and there are a lot of cool things to do. Note- doing cool stuff is fun. In this way, the game is well designed, in that it has a lot of fun stuff to do. The barrier holding it back, is thus, that it lacks end game depth, mostly due to balance issues, but also due to a lack of mechanical choices.

I will list the things that I like which are somewhat unique to Elemental. Which means what are the good elements that makes elemental, on my point of view, stand out from the crowd. I will not list what I don't like (already done and too big).

- 2 different production track for unit and buildings

- Wilderness get stronger as civilization expand (It might still not yet be at it's full potential)

- Fixed production time for Unit and building production.

- Unit design is an interesting idea, reminds me of D&D, but the current implementation makes unit design boring.

- Mountains not crossable by land units makes the map more strategic and interesting.

- The 2D graphics are interesting (but they lack of vivid color)

- The cloth map is a very interesting. I would like a full colored cloth map. It also easier to play and recognize terrain on the cloth map than the real world.

- The modding system seems well designed, but there is still a lot of work to do before it becomes easy to mod. (By modding, I mean creating new games, not simply adding maps and stuff. I call that game editing)

Everything else, either it's not new (found in other games like MOM and CIV), either I don't like it or either I hate it.

the 2nd is a bit like elemental insofar as it's basically the same engine as genghis khan 4.. but it's fantasy based and there are dungeon explorations, etc.. again, can't remember details. don't think they came out in english though.

http://www.gamecity.ne.jp/products/products/ee/Rlroyal2.htm

Is there an english version of royal blood 2 (Aka Gem Fire). I always wanted to play but could never do it because of the language.

Biggest boons for me, I think, are the fast turn processing (which I guess will get even faster).  Not sure how useful it would be to list that, as I don't imagine that's in danger of getting ditche! lol.

Another is the unit customization.  I wish there were a bit more to it, though, instead of simply newer tech = better.  Maybe weapons, armor, equipment, etc. should have a weight that affects combat speed.

I really like what people have been writing.

Things i can think off -

I like the faction editor a lot - I think it needs more loving though, many more options for faction bonuses and penalties, and a preview would be nice when choosing your faction colours. I have made odd colour choices and had to restart my game after some really nice starts because the colours i picked were hideous (make stone bright green or something and have a look lol)

I would like to see neutral factions have more of a presence in the wilderness. They could be some kind of trading oasis. Make it impossible for anyone to take over some of these neutral cities - they can sell items and mercenaries for anyone who can afford it.

The neutral wilderness needs some loving. A "neutral zone" diplomatic option could force it so there is always some wilderness. The ai needs to take more advantage of the adventuring techs

If there is not going to be an equivalent to the spell of return than the ai should stop attacking with its sovereigns. Ai sovereign strategy needs some loving.

I would like to see information unlocked by the pub/inn branch of the civ tech combined with the diplomacy negotiations tech that gives you a better understanding of the faction standings than you get from the graphs. You should get some warning flags when certain benchmarks are passed on the way to the various victory methods - weaker factions should have the opportunity to gang up against stronger factions to prevent them from winning the game.

I kind of did like the awesomeness of Salrog (The Dragon). Sure his stats weren't that great, but his spell was amazing.

while he may have been the only way to kill the early-drake Snathi ... at least wielding that level of power (even if a new rendition isn't until late-late game) was really fun.

Also, I kind of liked that you could (in some way) determine where your new citizens were "born."