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[Mech#4]

Welcome, I've been thinking about doing another let's play and I'm proud to add to the mass.

Now, while I haven't played Elemental, it's pseudo sequal Elemental: Fallen Enchantress is a ball of fun. I've seen that people have done Let's Play's of Master of Magic in the past and Civilization IV. It's really a combination of both, along with Heroes of Might and Magic style combat. The big feature of Fallen Enchantress is the customisation. Throughout the game you research new items, weapons and armour. These can be used by your heroes and you can also design your own troops and equip them with the same items to a degree as they cannot use items you find in the game world. So no giving them weapons of +10 arse whupping.

From the outset, I'm not that experienced with 4x games. While I have played Civilization IV and V, Galactic Civilizations II as well as Master of Magic (briefly) I tend to not have any definite long term goals aside from win and forget things while playing. Now, my excuses aside...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The main menu, we're going to be playing just a normal, random map so New Game.

Here's the race menu. There are ten races split into two factions to choose from. The two factions are Kingdoms and Empires (Kind of good and evil, but grey areas). The one you see currently is the Kingdom of Altar who specialise in heroes. Other kingdoms speciailisen in magic, blacksmithing, archers, and money.

This is the Empire of Resoln. They're the main empire faction (The main Kingdom faction is magic focused Pariden). They focus on magic as well, they can also train spiders, have superior death magic and also get elementals from mana crystals (aside from life mana crystals that is, but they can convert them to death mana crystals). Big downside is they have no armour.

We, however, shall be playing as the Empire of Umber. Also known as the Beastmasters, they gain access to an early poison equipment, they can traverse forests and difficult terrain with ease, as well as avoid battle with wild creatures. They also get Masterwork Chainmail which isn't as protective as plate armour but is better for high initiative which is what I'll be going for in part. There's also two curved swords (Curved Swords!) available to us as well, the Skath Claw and the bigger Scimitar. Those items are there to equip either our heroes or our troops.

Ah, thank you. This is Erala. The Empire of Umber doesn't come with a pre-made sovereign so I had to create one to play as them. Erala is a bit of a mixed bag of skills that I've found useful in previous plays. She has Urxen Blood (You can't have a different blood from your factions), Earth Apprentice, Fire Apprentice, Tactitian and Hardy as skills. She is also equipped with a spear and a pair of Dragonfly Bracers that give +2 to initiative. The spear is useful because it ignores 50% of an opponants armour and the initiative means she can move more often before the enemy can if there's enough of a difference between their initiative, but that's what haste and slow are for.

For the map settings, we shall make it large for lots of room, ravaged so there's a lot of chasms and other obsticles, wildland frequency (Kind of boss areas) are on many, difficulty is challanging, monster frequency is dense and turn time is epic (don't worry, I'll really only be posting interesting events so you shouldn't notice the longer research times), and random events slightly more frequent. Everything else is on default settings.

Gee... thanks for the vote of confidence...

Opponants will be on nine, that's every other team. The AI is on challenging and if you've played another Stardock game you should know that they're pretty good at making AI's.

I'm sure nothing will go wrong. I've won on normal before you know.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Into the game, here is a brief background of Erala, this is just what the game gave her.

And here's our starting site. Not too bad, we've got areas nice for settling our capital. The site north-east of Erala shall do nicely. The blue bit denotes Essence, which allows enchantments to be cast on a city placed there, this one has two so we can cast two enchantments. There's also a champion to our north, a water mana crystal to the west and a crystal node to the far north-east. There's also some bandits just visible to the east and those two treasure chest icons to the south are places where you can find items.(goodie huts if you will) The main bonus about them is they are unguarded. The river will also be good for the generation of gildar (gold/money).
Along the top of the screen we see the year and season, Prestige (effects diplomatic ties I think), money (150), research points and mana (currently 40).

Here is our spell book. This lists all of the spells our heroes know, as well as letting us cast some of them in the world map. Here we can see the "Meditation" spell highlighted. This will be cast on our first town to increase our mana generation by 2 (one for each essence slot)

Here's the hero we saw earlier and... oooh, look what he's got. "Obsession" is a nice city enchantment that gives your city +3 production for each essence (That's six in total for our city) and 1 extra gildar generation per turn!


Thank you Erala for that text dump. Speaking of which...

While we're at it, here's Erala's stat page, and we can see here special ability of "Tame".

Well, let me fill in a few gaps. Nature's cloak is a sustained boost to a given hero. It increases their defences ( I think resistances) based on how many earth mana crystals we control, steal spirit takes a spell skill from another hero and gives it to Erala but kills the hero in the process (I think permanently). Burning hands will be familiar to DnD players, it does about 8 fire damage in melee.

Anyway, let's settle right here.


And begin to bring the world back to norm... wait, why is the earth bluish?

Could we try for a little less evil please?

::Ahem:: Moving on...

Here is our research options. We can choose from Civil, Military or Magic. I shall be focusing on Civics now as it allows us to rush production and I plan to start generating dosh.

So I start construction of a merchant. +2 money per turn sounds nice.

And here I have hired the hero we saw earlier. We can see his equipment (a dagger, whoo...) and Erala's. If she was feeling generous she could trade hers to him but he's destined for magehood.



We don't have much else to spend money on right now, and numbers are important because the world of Elemental is very dangerous.

A few turns later and I look at one of the goodie huts. Ooo, this is a nice find.

And it looks quite nice on you.

A bit further and we uncover our first beast. A Black Widow spider.

Stats for your viewing pleasure.

Thank you, I would also be happier with a slightly more powerful beast, maybe we'll find one soon.

And that's where we stand right now. I have cast both meditation and obsession on Cyndrum improving mana and production, this means we don't have enough mana to cast tame on the spider (it needs 40 mana) but that can wait while we explore.

I shall continue playing and have another update soonish. I have to order notes, files and folders as well as remember to resize images after I've added text. Any opinions so far on the format?

See you next time!

[a1s]

I've seen that people have done Let's Play's of Master of Magic in the past and Civilization IV. It's really a combination of both, along with Heroes of Might and Magic style combat.

But isn't the combat in MoM already HoMM style? In fact I'm pretty sure it (and AoW) is actually closer to what Elemental has then HoMM is.

[Mech#4]

You are right, but I've played more Heroes of Might and Magic than Master of Magic (I haven't played Age of Wonders) so that was the connection that jumped to my mind first.

[Stworca]

I actually preferred Ele : WoM to Ele : FE. They have made the game annoying with new camera controls and weird map layout 

Good luck, nonetheless.

[Mech#4]

There wasn't much substance to the first update what with it being all introductionary and all, so here's another lot.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

::Ahem:: Repartee, I thought I had corrected that...













If you can see the tool tip underneath, Assassin Demons are nasty. Whenever they kill an opponant they gain back lots of life. They're actually amongst the weaker of demons.

I apologise for all spelling mistakes, I'm a stickler for proper spelling but things just slip through.

I actually preferred Ele : WoM to Ele : FE. They have made the game annoying with new camera controls and weird map layout 

Good luck, nonetheless.

Thanks! Do you mean how the camera can't be moved by mouse scrolling sometimes, and how do you mean the map layout?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Oh, and stop outdoing me in Dark Souls. Though would you consider dodging easier or harder than blocking?

[Frumple]

Hey, neat. Just chiming in to say looking forward to more. I've heard FE's better off than its preceding game, but still kinda' iffy in an objective sense. Be good to get a better idea of what it's like before I decide upon acquisition or not

[Neonivek]

This game vexes me, it is one of the few games that sits right on the edge of "Should I buy it?"

Yet I cannot really get much info on it oddly enough.

[Un67]

Your character drawings are really cool, keep up this LP please 

[Stworca]

"Should I buy it?"

No. At least not yet. Wait for 19 patches to come out.

[Sheb]

Yeah, the character drawing add a lot. We want more!

[Neonivek]

"Should I buy it?"

No. At least not yet. Wait for 19 patches to come out.

Dang it!

[Mech#4]

I'm still having a few issues with image screenshotting and editing. It's been a while since I did my Sims 3 one so I've forgotten the process I used. Blah blah blah excuses.

Onto the game!

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Sheb]

This sucks. How long until you start having some real units to defend your cities?

[Neonivek]

Well I can definately tell what your favorite object is...

The Spyglass because you found it twice.

[Stworca]

Ahh yes, random, wandering monsters in this game are classified as : "Bloody Ridiculous" most of the time.

Really like this form of let's playing, keep up the good work.