Update!
Elemental: Text Assetshttp://forums.elementalgame.com/338042"Well today I have to start putting together all the assets that are going to need translation so that we can get that going.
For Elemental, the plan is to have a much much higher level of writing quality than we had in previous games by bringing on professional authors and editors to help.
So what sorts of things do we have in mind?
The Factions
There are 12 named factions (races) in Elemental. In addition, players will be able to create and submit their own factions to be shared by other users.
Each of the 12 named factions will have its own history and back story. Those factions are:
Kingdom of Altar
Kingdom of Yoren
Kingdom of Gildren
Kingdom of Tarth
Kingdom of Capitar
Kingdom of Ithul
Empire of Uthugul
Empire of Calax
Empire of Turzog
Empire of Izen
Empire of Dol-Sirion
Empire of Korin
The Kingdoms are of men, the Empires are made up of the Fallen.
Technology Trees
The technology in Elemental is largely the same for each faction with a handful of distinctive early game features that enable special buildings and units per faction.
There are roughly 20 different technologies. This seems low because of the way (far more fun IMO) technologies are implemented. Instead of there being "Advanced Swordsmanship" or something players instead choose a more generalized tech and the more they research into it, the better that stat gets. Spell books are where the more literary interesting stuff comes in.
Spell Books
Men and Fallen get completely unique spell books. The spells are broken into the 5 different schools of magic:
Earth. Air. Fire. Water. Life/Death.
Each of the 5 schools will have around 20 different spells in them.
Quests
Unlike previous strategy games Stardock has developed, Elemental will have optional quests. How in-depth these get will really depend on how much time we have. But ideally, we would like players to be able to see their sovereign as a quasi-RPG unit that can go out and deal with a particular quest.
There would be a huge, and ever growing, quest pool for the game to make use of.
We are budgeting for an initial quest pool of around 500 quests.
The Campaign
Like the GalCiv series, Elemental will thrive the most in its sandbox mode. Unlike GalCiv, our intention is for the campaign in Elemental to have a lot more to it. We'll have a firmer idea of this later once we figure out how powerful the engine can be made in the time we have with it."
The Fallenhttp://forums.elementalgame.com/338162The Titans of old long used men as pawns in their proxy wars on Elemental. But men were often unpredictable.
It came to pass that some of the Titans with the darkest of motives began to take the strongest, most ruthless, most consistently evil of men and used them as the basis to create a new race of mortal - The Fallen.
The architecture of the Fallen is very alien from that of men. More savage. More violent. But also more practical.