After literally decades of magic-infused strategy gaming, ranging from Master of Magic to Age of Wonders and beyond, I believe that Elemental could be a title that can impress the audience and spawn a long-lasting franchise. That is IF a few things are considered.
First off, balance between magic and technology. Some games eschew technology all together (such as Heroes of Might and Magic, Age of Wonders) but E:WoM seeks to include different styles of empire building along RPG tastes and thus must consider how Magic and Technology can counter-balance each other. As of the 1.2 build, technology has, by far, the longer legs and a deeper impact on conquest and defense.
Magic spells are both lackluster and underpowered, with a few exceptions (such as Arcane Weapon and Spell Blast). To make matters worse, the mana income is, at best, anemic. Sure, a Sovereign can generate 2 extra mana, which is helpful at first - especially in banking mana until the empire/kingdom is fully underway, but aside from the 1 mana per shard (upgradable to 3 mana in late game) there is no real way to boost mana income. Couple this with the sometimes steep casting cost for combat spells (Spell Blast @ 24 mana is pretty typical) and the Sovereign can maybe cast spells in a few instances before his gas tank runs out. Compare this to more robust incomes in the form of money and materials, and a magic-oriented sovereign must think long and hard about where, when, or even if, he can afford to cast spells at all. My suggestion for future Elemental titles is to consider ways that technology can be used to increase the income of a magic-oriented Sovereign beyond the 'Advanced Air Temples' or their counterparts. For example, researching magic 'technology' that increases the mana output of arcane laboratories - or perhaps overflow research becomes extra mana income so that Sovereigns who finish researching spells relatively early can use them to their advantage without fear that the numerous neighbors and unfriendly beasties will overwhelm his defenses. Additionally, summoning is really, really weak. Familiars, demons, imps, and a smattering of elementals does not a supplementary army make. In some of the loading screens, it seems to suggest that a kingdom lacking armies, or needing to make up shortfalls, can use summons to bolster said defenses. This is simply not true; a sovereign summons the creature to his own side, and though the unit can then be sent out on its own, the lack of mana income makes summoning more than a handful (or sometimes less) of these creatures unfeasible. Consider increasing the array of summons available to include specialized summons or short-term summons. Without improvement, a magic-only Sovereign, or one heavily dependent upon magic, makes little sense and can, in the long run, lose out to the warrior type opponent.
Technology is the bread-and-butter of the game, hands down. In fact, the research never really seems to have an end point the way Magic does; after nearly a month of playing I have yet to reach the end of the technology tree before the game ends with my victory (or defeat). This is not necessarily a bad thing, in fact it is quite good and makes the player feel like the society is real - for instance, I'm sure Apple will never say "sorry, no new iProducts, we're at the end of the tech tree for touch-screens" - and keeps the buildings the player laid down (studies, for instance) viable as workplaces for the entire game. But the recent 1.2b update changes that dynamic for the worse; more workers needed for studies + unlimited tech tree = disaster. It seems that tech is being balanced to magic by making tech weaker or harder to obtain rather than making magic richer. In the end, the player must decide whether to research food-harvesting techniques to keep his population - and thus relative power - growing OR researching techs to protect his fledgling empire. A Sophie's Choice that I find rather unsettling and disappointing. While I understand the theory of diminishing returns, this doesn't apply to learning - it would be the equivalent of saying a country with 1 university is a better, more efficient researcher than a country with 100 or 1000 universities. I would recommend NOT limiting research, especially if the game continues to favor Warrior-oriented players.
Unit flexibility needs to be re-thought a bit, especially the inability to upgrade the experienced units into more advanced units. If the units were static and specific to a certain purpose or reflected the degree to which a city had developed (for example in Age of Wonders Shadow Magic, halberdiers can not upgrade to knights because there is no 'new' technology, just a new kind of building) then you might have a case there. But since individual technologies can incrementally improve troops in E:WoM, then it should stand to reason that older troops could pick up new equipment with a small loss in experience as they re-learn their craft. For example, in Civ a Warrior can become a Swordsman, and then a Maceman, and so on up until you get modern infantry. This is because the technology separating the units is incremental and not a reflection of the city's development. In E:WoM, a peasant is the base unit, but discovering patchwork armor spawns the 'observer' and then later the 'forward observer' - shouldn't experienced Peasants be able to don padded armor or leather? Or exchange clubs for staves? Or even learn to ride a horse/warg eventually? I'd suggest a mechanic wherein the difference in cost (money, materials, metals, and/or crystals) can be paid as part of the upgrade process while experienced troops lose a bit of their experience (but not HP) to make up for their adoption of new technology.
Resources need to be streamlined a bit. Some are rather obvious; food, metal, and crystals for example. But some are sketchy at best. There needs to be a better job of documenting what each resource does for the player. In a real-world style simulation, such as Age of Empires, wood, stone, and gold are familiar to the players and logical inferences can be made as to how these materials are employed. Not so with E:WoM. For example, what is the use of Elementium? Can I find more instances of it or do I 'luck' into it? Is it like plutonium where I can make an ultimate weapon from it? or is it like amber with a bug in it; cool but useless? I'd suggest a better tutorial and a better encyclopedia to boot. A little bit of time documenting the game will save lots of frustration and confusion in the long run. While its good that players CAN compile a stupendous compendium of the terms, items, concepts, units, etc. of your game, they shouldn't HAVE to. This I will take you to task for; lack of good documentation is inexcusable, especially given the grand designs of the game. It points to either a) a lazy production and supervision of the game development or b ) a rush to publish, neither of which are a good sign and both of which will lose potential players who opt for better-documented games.
The map is both good and bad. The cloth map is nice and makes the game feel like a story book. But, when the empire gets relatively large, and the drain on the memory gets increasingly tough, and more critters pop up in or near your territory, it becomes necessary to play only from the cloth map, which quickly looses its charm - what's the point of high system demands if I'm playing a pastel-colored cloth map game? At first, I resisted trying to play from that map from a want to experience all the cool graphics from spider-webbed trees to dragon-face-cliff pools to ruined cities of a bygone era. But as the empire grew and grew, the details that you worked hard on melted away as the cloth map both a) seemed to tax the system much less and b ) seemed to offer a more efficient way to move around. My system has quite a bit of power - I play mass Effect 2 on it, for example - and even it seemed overwhelmed at times, taking time to render objects over and over again as I scrolled, locking the game down with memory lags. A balance between memory drain and graphics should be reached; perhaps by limiting the level the camera can zoom out/zoom in a bit more or by more efficient use of memory by the program. Either way, the potentially fun graphics are wasted in my games when I have to play from the cloth map.
The Main screen gets cluttered fast and becomes an unusable, uninformative mess. On the left side, the 10 hot buttons for units/cities is quickly overwhelmed during a war or after swallowing an enemy's cities. No ability to scroll essentially makes this list a de facto army roster. "Next idle city" button makes up some of the slack, but is small, unobtrusive and not evident when trying to administer a kingdom of 10+ cities and its armies. Along the top, the 'resources' tabulations quickly force their way under the date/season tab: gold, population, materials, metal, food, mana, elementium, crystals, wargs/horses, types of shards owned, etc. crowd each other from right to left on the screen. Eventually, the gold and population of an empire are lost under the year panel and the whole bar becomes useless. Finally, the minimap/faction strength/terrain description/etc. buttons can crowd out the messages given at each turn. It is not unusual to have messages obscured by these items, forcing the user to close these information panes in order to read of finished production, invasions, or other important news. I'd suggest a few tweaks; remove the army/city buttons and replace it with a more obvious 'next unit' and 'next city' button in the control panel at the bottom. Resources can then be listed on the left side with an eye on quick-reference information. Year/season will then no longer interfere and need not be changed. Consider keeping the minimap 'frame' permanent with small buttons to change to different functions; one for a power graph, one for the terrain description, and so on. Then the messages which appear on the right side can never be lost under this minimap (barring a coding problem).
Bugs! And you know you have lots of them. One particularly frustrating bug happens in technology research; at around level 11 Civic technology locks the computer up. Sometimes, the game crashes inexplicably during enemy moves. Sometimes tactical battles lock up and can only be resolved through 'auto calculation.' Sometimes you have to rotate constantly to target creatures too close to your units in tactical and strategic maps. Sometimes, sometimes, sometimes....Too many bugs to count, even as of June 2011 a year after the game's release! This is probably indicative of a rush to publish which eliminated some of the play testing necessary to make a fully-functioning game. Of course every game, regardless of publisher or platform, has bugs, exploits, etc but there are so many in E:WoM that, as of your release, the game got very low scores and universally 'meh' reviews. As a developer, you should be very thankful to the people who keep this game installed long enough for you to update it even as you struggle to make it better a year later. Don't focus so much on Fallen Enchantress so much that you abandon these good and loyal players, or you'll have a game with no market and bad word of mouth - ask 2K about Duke Nukem Forever. I'd recommend a focus on playtesting and for heavens' sake, release a beta/demo version to the community. Not only will it increase the hype around your game, but they'll find bugs and suggest fixes better than anyone in your dev team. And a Demo will keep people from feeling like they got ripped off by Stardock - a demo will let them know EXACTLY what your game is like and what it is NOT and an informed buyer is a loyal buyer.
That's all I have for now, though I do reserve the right to come back later and add to (or hopefully take away) some of my critiques. if anyone would care to add their two bits, I'd welcome it as long as it is well informed, reasoned, and geared toward improving the product line.
Game Grade: C-/C
Overview/Feedback: Potentially excellent, deep, innovative 21st century fantasy 4x marred by some implementation problems, lack of balance, and uncoordinated components contributing to a good rough draft, but in need of revision before achieving excellence or exceeding expectations.
