Races

You have humans (Man, Amarian, Ironeer, Tarthan, Mancer and Krax*) and fallen (Wraith, Trog, Urxen and Quendar).

Elves, dwarves and similars are in many mods that will be done for the game.

* these humans are in the Empire side instead of the Kingdom one.

Yeah, but the thing is the other races are just nationalities, are they not? I'd just lump that all in the human category. It's just like the subclasses of humans in The elder Scrolls series. They're still human, it's just that they hail from (insert country here) and have upgraded abilities in (insert attribute here). I would kinda like to see more than just human and Fallen outside of modding, but the game looks awesome enough already, so I suppose it doesn't really matter.

Does anyone know what the differences are between the races?  I'm in the beta but I can't tell what the differences are in terms of gameplay.  So far it looks like the differences only come from the faction as far as I can tell.  If there are differences where do you go to see what they are?

i think different races will have slightly different technology tree

They already do for the Empire, at least in a sense of Yithril bows only being available to one faction, demon swords another. Maybe they'll stick with that; Kingdoms get bonuses to things like research and resource income, Empires get special tech or equipment.

There are just a little of info about races... but nothing specifically..

Will be great to see on this cite a history, tech tree, distinguisher etc of all races and what's the main difference among them...

Because it seems than there are only two races, or even only the one: human and fallen human....

"Human" is only a race in a certain type of fantasy fiction. Elsewhere it refers to different phenotypes , or possibly cultures, within human. This is what it means in Elemental. 

I think elemental uses humans only because the fantasy races of dwarf, elf, gnome etc. have been so done to death by other games and media that you can't use them and feel anything other than derivative of Tolkein, Dungeons & Dragons or WoW. So while Elemental could never declare itself entirely original, it will have flavour that isn't instantly recognisable, and therefore (in my opinion) interesting. 

uh on the stickied page dont you see 1 of the "Human" Kingdom factions is elves, and another is dwarf-like?

I think we will have to wait and see if the lore of elemental is captivating.  At first glance I am a bit meh, but hopefully the campaign will have some interesting characters in it.

Personally I have played countless hours of games with the standard Tolkein inspired races and am not close to tired of it.  I am sure that early mods will attempt to emulate more traditional Fantasy staples.

I agree, looking forward to mods that emulate more traditional fantasy settings. I'm not quite tired of treehugging elves or alcoholic dwarves with bad Scottish accents loving homages to Tolkien, at least not yet.

But I'm open-minded regarding Elemental's lore - assuming the book/campaign can differentiate the factions for me (in ways the beta hasn't done yet), and assuming features of the finished game (i.e. tech trees) properly emphasize any such distinctions between factions, I can see Elemental's factions working as well for me as standard fantasy races. But if not, the modding possibilities will definitely make up for it. Time will tell, it's hard to judge from the beta what the finished version will really be like.

The root campaign of elemental is set in a unique fantasy world created by brad... therefore some of the more common races we often see do not exist.. that's not to say we could not add modded races or for that matter that some may show up as minor races..  game has 2 races each with factions with in it.. (except those turn coat Krax ).

I am sure we will have many modded races and worlds full of all kinds of races as we go on.

..ok..As I understood from E.lore the main difference among races of Kingdoms an Imperial is the source of they magic power - life and death... Maybe it brings different abilities to races?! But what?

One thing that really bothers me is the Empire races. Spesifically.. three of them are humans with emo skins. One is humans with red skins. And then there's angry-looking humans who are humans. I don't get this colour coding.. if they're artificially created dragon/men things, why do they have to look like differently coloured men?

I hope they at least got some interesting personalities, other than 'evil'

..I hate Eddings-style races.

I think there should be more racial diversity in the game. Especially the Kingdoms should have more races than just Humans (they don't have to be in the campaign, but the sandbox mode can have more races). I like the standard fantasy races, but some non-standard ones are good too (like Qunari in Dragon Age and the Fallen races in Elemental).

I would imagine Kingdom aligned Fallen make up a small minority. Remember the low population sizes, the cities are attracting families from the countryside, depending on Lore this could cut out quite a lot of Fallen from the population. Hopefully at least Champions or such will be able to represent the Kingdom Fallen

Actually the Kingdom-aligned Fallen would be kinda cool in my opinion.

I'm hoping like hell that we have only been given a small glimpse of the racial diversity of Elemental during the beta.

If it ends up that dwarves are indeed the Ironeers of the beta and to be honest I can't even differentiate which of the races is supposed to represent elves, and that the moddability of the game doesn't allow us to get where we should be as far as races are concerned, then I for one will be extremely disappointed.

During the beta phase of the game the racial aspects added practically zero flavour to the game in terms of diplomacy, mood, surprises, or immersion. All they did was provide two separate building trees and give a few racial bonuses before the game starts. The broad brush approach of only allowing races to fall into categories of Men and Fallen is akin to simply segmenting life on Earth into Land-dwellers and Sea-dwellers. Such a broad-brush approach for the final game will leave the game very flat I think if that is indeed where it will end up.

This has been a real problem for me ever since the beta started but I've latched onto two saving graces:

i. we've been told that the beta is a drastically dumbed down version of the final game.

ii. the mod tools will be powerful enough to allow the changes that will be required to provide strong racial flavour.

Basically, changing hair colour on a model and providing a starting bonus doesn't constitute a new race. It should really have:

• unique models
• unique model attachments (armour, clothing etc)
• unique weaponry
• unique sound
• unique tech tree
• unique buildings
• unique bonuses and penalties
• unique diplomatic approaches
• even unique play-style bonuses (eg, troll race gets a bonus for number of kills etc)

Now if the beta has been drastically dumbed down racially, and the races of Men and Fallen are simply examples of two races with subtle factional diversities, and that there will be a bunch of real races when the game launches, then I'll be very happy.

I'm even OK if the game will allow us to build races fully and mod them into the game properly over time.

But if it ends up that we have to classify any new races into the two beta categories and work them in that way, where we can change the basic look but not the basic functionality, then I'll probably just keep on playing Age of Wonders in the long term.

We haven't really been given any definite feedback on what is likely to be in the final game. I fully understand that this is only a beta but the feedback from the devs to us of, "Yeah, beta sucks, but wait till you see the final game. You'll love it." does require a lot of faith from the we beta-testers that the game will deliver when we've not really seen much of the polish yet.

As I said at the start of my rant, I'm hoping like hell that we get racial diversity...