WARNING: MY POSTS ARE LONG. SKIP READING IF YOU HAVE THE ATTENTION SPAN OF A 3rd GRADER!!!

What are the positives??? Very difficult question. Not because there aren't any, but because it depends on how YOU play. For instance, a positive on easy level may not be a positive on hard level. I will answer based on things I love, but think have some (or lots) of room for improvement.

1- Dynasties--. Could have been awesome. The fact that my merchant sovereign may knock up (or get knocked up, depending) a hero that has tech knowledge, or assassin etc.. Then their kids would have one (or two... I wish) traits of the parent, and this matrix would spill down to their offspring etc.   This concept sounded lame to me while the game was in devenlopment but I see tons of potential in the actual implementation of it, now that the game is released.

I think it could be improved by LOWERING the amount of available heroes, and making it to where the children mature faster. On Ridiculous, 8 opponents, I can finish the whole game (well as far as the memory leaks let me take it) and never have one grandchild. It is also too formalized... isn't histroy riddled with kings who killed their wife (wives) because they kept pumping out daughters (the nerve of them. LOL). In Elemental it seems I ALWAYS have 4 kids, either 2/2 boy/girl, or 3/1 boy/girl, girl/boy. In other words, I know I will always have one daughter to marry off, maybe 2-3. I will always have 1 son to marry and thus steal some other sovereigns daughter... maybe 2-3. It would be cool if I could have 4 sons, or 4 daughters, only because of the way the game "takes" dsughters away. I also don't like how a daughter always has mom's talent, and a son always has dad's. So basically, IMO, if you sped up the birth rate/ maturity rate, and mixed up the predictability of my offspring and their talents I think it would go along way.

2- The summons-- I see the devs keep writing posts about "fixing" the magic system, or balancing it, etc.. I don't see the problem. I have no problem with the gloabl mana pool, (until I see how it is implemented) but I don't see, me taking my sovereign, and imbuing 10 heroes as "game breaking" all that means, is my sovereign is now not the "torin" juggernaut that he could be. Where do summons come in to this rant?? Well, in MoM, you could smoke the world in two easy ways (well more than 2, but 2 of the most popular were...) First, you could summon torin, jack him up with enchantments, and/or items, then run around roflstomping everyone. (this is similar to buying massive gear for sovereign but is not nearly as effective... You can still lose a 30 hp Soveriegn in one shot, by many types of units). Second, you could make a massive army of uber summoned units. Great Wyrms, Sky Drakes, demon lords etc... You could then send them around the world ROFLSTOMPING everything. Wee fun.  Well, Elemental changes it up by making it harder to make your sovereign unbeatable, and it does a great job of implementing limited summons. i.e only one fire giant can be summoned per imbued hero or sovereign, etc... So it is much harder for me to make 4 armies, each having 3 fire giants, 3 angels, 3 sky drakes. etc... The thing that needs to be improved is the utility of EACH SUMMONS. Is it just me or does everyone sell that 80gold sand golemn trinket you find early game? Who uses a summoned monster besides Fire Giant? I may not be playing correctly, but I see little to no use for any of the other summons. Some of their skills are broke, and almost all are useless. I would jack up some of their powers to make it more likely to summon them, but for me, I NEVER use any summons ever. It is too easy to smoke the game with heroes, then with summons.

3--Land usage.-- This is a tricky one, I like it, (kinda) and hate it too. First of all, I must be different than everyone on these boards, but I find the current way of building a city the most boring, un-fun, restrictive bunch of crap that totally takes me "out of my immersion" as game developers like to call it. Lemme see, I start a town, I gotta be close enough to such n such resource so my town EVENTUALLY gets it, but no so far away that it is in my zone but "unlinkable". I then gotta try and build buildings, (mostly houses, weeee fun) while getting to the good stuff, oh yeah, I will most likely have about 12% of the room that I need. Not for lack of "space" but because some swamp, forest, hill, or mountain is taking up 80% of the usable world. I love when an Iron, or crystal resource is in an area, where I can only build a city with 1-2 squares of usable area, because it is surrounded by trees. How about them hills, Nothing like spending dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of turns terraforming them, eh????.  Well, the parts I do like about the land, is that when you do get it terraformed/settled, it actually looks like you could live there. Or your game units at least. It looks better than the rest of the world, and now I see what my goal is. Kill next town, terraform it to my preference, rinse repeat. I do wish the "spreading" out of the cities would be done different, and there realy needs to be away to terraforme trees, swamps etc. I have seen numerous saved games people uploaded showing how there are resources in the world that are unattainable, or can only be claimed by a town with 10 people max in it. Due to world restrictions. The AI of course, does not have these restrictions, and you can always take over their towns instead of building your own, which is what I recommend, but if that is what the devs wanted, then why even put in a "city building" element.

4--Leveling of my heroes/sovereigns. -- I really think it is wishful thinking, and false advertising to call that a "role playing element" of this game, but it is still kinda cool. I can think of strategy games from YEARS ago that had strategy and much better role playing (Birthright for example)... so I would not call this role playing, I wouldnt call it that in Warcraft 3 either. But, I do like that as my heroes and soevereigns fight (and they must to advance), the get more powerful. I could have 50 heroes all level 1-2 and none with more than 4 essence, if I didn't fight, but if I wanna roflstomp on ridiculous, I gotta risk them so they get more powerful. Now, what to do with that power? More essence (almost always the correct choice), more strength (attack is far more valuable than defense in this game, so also a good choice), more intelligence for more powerful spells (rarely the right choice), or constitution in case I make a mistake and some sucker actually can hit me. Those syons or whatever they are called, that one shot you for 3x their damage using a spell/ability are nice little hero killers, and it is best to have about 20 hp if you think you might ever get hit.... Anyway. I like this part of the game, but I wish it was fleshed out better, and for god's sake, bring back organized. Why is it even out of the game? The game is so so so slow as it is, now I need to move at a max speed of 3??? Yay. Sure organized is OP in the first 50-75 turns of the game, but after that, I teleport so much it isn't a game breaker. I hate having to marry that grizzly adams dude to get some Organized traits in my younguns.

5--Dragons, Demons-- I think these are awesome, most end units are though, right? But why doesn't the AI use them? Or maybe I should ask, DOES the AI use them? I never seen it. The AI can easily have a few hundred grand sitting in the bank by turn 100, 150 for sure. It has massive time requirement boost too, so it takes short time to pump out units at hardest level. If the AI were pumping out dragons and demons to stop me as opposed to another 75 units of dude in a 9 man formation, armed with boar spears I think the game would move from worst AI ever all the way up to very bad AI. a dragon can kill a hero, one shot. so if you have 3 dragons I have to take out ALL three before they get to attack. With our lovely boar spear dudes, I can make a sammich while my army decimates them. Please program the ai to use these end units with all their massive production boosts.

6-- Diplomacy-- I like that I can see why they hate me (and they all do) but I hate that there is little I can do to not have them all declare war on me. Maybe this is only ridiculous, but I dunno. Anyway, every faction I meet, even my own "side" will declare war on me withing 20-40 turns. Sometimes up to 75 but not much more after that. I usually meet someone, figure out where they are (harder than actually killing them sometimes), then start moving an army that direction to plan my new west bank settlements. The longer I let them live, the bigger their cities get, so I never declare, I always wait for them to attack. To Improve Diplo, I would leave in the "chart" that shows their power base, their number of cities, the reasons they hate me etc... but let me be able to influence it a little. Right now all I can do, is build diplomacy producing buildings, or trade gold/units for diplomacy resources from AI. Then when I have like 3000-5000 diplomacy, they say "+2, we are awed by your diplomacy" or something like that. I can never have a bigger army, because they have 200 gazillion units and gold. Mine are smarter and will win, but I am usually "-4, our military is MUCH stronger than yours", this is while I am taking city after city of theirs.

Probably lots more to comment on, but I see the first person shooter people losing interest in this 4 minute post, and are about to go drink some Jolt Cola. So as a courtesy to them, I will stop here.

Peace.

Cooosmetics! All my soldiers look the same, it would be nice to have a second layer of clothing over the first so to speak so you can first outfit them, and then modify their look.

I'd suggest hand weapons and shields are WYSIWYG.

Maybe different shield skins? Armor skins? Stuff like that is sooo cool. Customization is the keyword here.

I like that Kael is now on team Elemental's roster! 

Also, the 1.1 human resource economy sounds exactly what will set this game apart from most others.  Can't wait to start some serious modding with the new system.

I was going to post something earlier, but it's hard to stay on topic when your main "positive" is something like, "The basic skeleton of the game has a lot of potential and I can tell it will be really awesome if we can just get a little tweaking and content and balance and..."

However, I just remembered something a little more specific. In a game not long after release, I was wandering around completing quests with my sovereign. Most of the huts I needed to visit were in my own or neutral territory, but one really important hut popped up deep inside Procipinee's kingdom. I had been ignoring Procipinee, other than to contain her expansion, and she had been doing the same. We were equal in power, on good terms, and she didn't seem to be doing much of anything. I was content to let this state continue for as long as she would allow it, because I had more important problems to deal with than a quiet neighbor. Once that hut popped, however, I was forced to change the status quo: Procipinee had something I wanted.

Gaining the right to travel through her territory was a simple matter, but it wasn't something I had been planning to do. The quest system, which by itself was just a fun but slightly annoying treasure-acquisition method, had combined with the territory and diplomacy systems to provide an incentive for me to interact with another kingdom I had been ignoring. I can see interesting things arising from this, as reluctant allegiences form not from loyalty or for defense, but because one side wants something the other doesn't know it has.

So perhaps revisit the spawning of objects so that some low % show up in foreign territory, just fingertips away from your grasp....perhaps even have an advisor popup to make a note of the situation.

Anyways, just rambling. thanks again for everyones continuing feedback!

I like the fact that a clueless dude like me can get into the XML files and make changes. Everyone was bitchin' about crashes, but I did all kinds of things and haven't crashed the game yet.

I like the layout of the tactical battles as a starting point. Check out Guardians of Graxia. Yes, a $9 game at GamersGate has me completely absorbed in the intricacy of its strategy and tactics. Even half the depth would put Elemental way over the top.

Best to you!

I like the extent of the tech trees I love how I still haven't researched every tech yet in a game. I would love to see this expanded a bit and see the tech trees intertwine so that some of the best techs have prerequisites from multiple trees. For instance having some rare Adventuring techs giving learnable abilities to champions requiring the univeristy in the civics tree.

I really like the RPG elements for the champions and the ability to level them. The only thing missing is the customisation as they level up other than just stat points. eg AoW type abilities.

Here are some things I liked in past versions but now gone:

I loved the really high monsters in the wilds right from the start, not so much right next to your starting city, but it's so vanilla now.

I really miss the monster lairs and really hope stardock goes back to them. The idea of cleaning lairs out is exciting. Also as the controlled territory expands You could rarely have lairs spawning to keep things from getting too boring.

I really like the world visuals and the cloth map.  I think the rate of land conversion within your ZOC would be nice if it slowed down a little.  

Its nice clicking on a resource to build it, but all resources should be linkable to a town, just give a little penalty if you think its needed if the resource is 5 or more tiles away.

I enjoy building my forces.  Damage types and resistances would add a good bit of fun if they are incorporated, that would give more thought to creating our armies.

I really like being able to group various hero's and unit types together.  My one wish is that we could appoint a leader of our choice, somehow flag a certain hero to be the leader of given group regardless of its level.

I like leveling up hero's.  I wouldn't mind if you had the option of buying traits.  something akin to feats or leadership abilities, etc..

I like the variety of options in technology tree!  keep adding!

doubt it. there was a chinese version though. gemfire is royal blood 1 i think, not 2

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quite like raise land. getting bottled up in a peninsula by the ai? no problem. out flank them by raising land from water. you'll probably end up surrounding them! downside is that it's not always clear that some lands are not raised properly. a tile might look flat and can be built upon, but in fact not the case.

I like the art direction and style a lot.

I like the quest system.

I like the dynasty concept.

I like the unit designer.

I like the tech research system.

I have to applaud this idea, but all to often in the beta program the baby did get thrown out with the bathwater.

I love the idea. I love the dream. Not the reality. If we could only change the clock back. A poor decision to release a game that was half done.

Its in the past. Let it go. I`m trying my best to move on. Looking forward to Dereks involvement in the project. The cure has been found.

Freebird out.

huh???

you changed xml files, and the game hasn't crashed?

My PC must be older than I Thought. Laptop, 3.something ghz. 4 meg ram, 1.5 meg video card.... My game crashes all the time. What are you running that the game doesn't crash. Let alone changing an xml file and it doesn't burn your house down.

I love that Elemental is an RPG/Fantasy game.

I love that Elemental is a 4x/Strategy/TBS game.  RTS would have been fun too, but, RTS often turns into a "rush war" so TBS was probably a good choice.

I love that you can customize your faction, your champion, and all of your units.  We can put a unique flair on how we play.

I love that the game runs on my laptop!  

I love that you can zoom out for a cloth map overview and zoom in for detail.

I love that the fallen race almost looks undead!

I love that you can shape the world with spells to make it better suit your needs/designs.

I love that there is this one all-powerful sovereign who can share his power with others, or keep it all for himself.

But most of all, I love Brad, the big lummox.

Except it is not new I agree it is genius and it started in MoM and was expanded upon in the AOW trilogy.  Elemental changed the terrain w/o a spell and has a few limited spells which can further alter the terrain.  What would be further genius would be coming up with new and unique ways to use these ideas and how the terrain would affect things like cities and battles.

The game seems to be on the verge of better utilizing water in the terrain and landscape.  Most cities today are founded upon a water source, Las Vegas being one notable exception.  Most all other cities were founded upon a river, lake, springs, or coastline.  Food for thought...

Oh For that matter I like how I can manipulate the Influence of my towns which changes slightly the border and this has allowed me to take control of a resource node on more than one occasion when it was right near the border.  I think the border influence thingy is done very nicely, in fact it is one of the diamonds of this game.