So after a good few hours with the sandbox, my needs for this game to better are as follows:
-More content. More spells, more troops types, more abilities, deeper tech trees, more equipment, MORE.
-On gear. The magical equipment is a nice touch. Unfortunately the regular equipment is very limited. That I've seen...4 sword types with little to no trade offs. Two axe types with no trade offs. Two spear types. 4 armor classes. Two bow types. Custom units are a lot of fun and a great aspect to the game, they need to extended how long you can get engrossed doing it.
-On units. Virtually all units are based on your race. The extra races you can recruit, the rock dog things, dark ones, spiders ect.... don't give you that end game feeling like other 4x games. Where are MY golems, my dragons, my demons, ect... Like gear, it's a good start but peters out way too early. And my units can get mana, but I can't produce spell-casting units? Have I just not played enough, or can we not create priests and wizards to at least heal people and throw weak fireballs?
-Spells. Where are you guys finding these mountain moving spells? I took Enchantments and Summoning to start, found ONE book of generic combat spells, and that's it.
There needs to be more strategic spells. Like attack spells that can be cast off the strategic view at units in range, long term effect spells like a storm that slows movement, or an ice storm. There needs to be freaking more, in even area, both strategic and tactical. This is a major failing of the game, I've said until I'm about blue in the face. Half of spells don't have a visual effect (certainly not enchantments) and while graphics are a minor concern to me, it would help me remember and get into the fact I've been enchanting my cities, if they glowed or sparkled or something.
-Quests. I've counted maybe 6 quests so far in my game. My quests are starting to repeat now, although I still have level 4 quests to unlock. So far the quests have been the broken midnight stones quest, multiple alchemist quests to get those stat enhancing potions, the Sliver Flute quest, and one where you get shards from a statue. They talked a lot about their quests and so far, I'm not seeing a lot of depth, variety or interest factor.
-Spawning monsters. They need to dial this back. The non-kingdom areas are CRAWLING with monsters. In my game, my first city was protected by a mountain range, turning the west path into a single tile road hugging the coast. Beyond that is where I built my second city. There's still a gap in the influence sphere between them, that happens to fall right over this natural choke point. And monster are breeding there like it's a fucking orgy. It's gotten so bad I've had to garrison units on the road to protect the caravans. What's annoying me this TINY area of uncontrolled map space produces monsters non-stop. I like that uncontrolled areas become more dangerous. But they need to cap how small of an area that applies to.
-Customization. Again, more. More colors and clothing types. More fair styles. Different colored armor, We need to be able to have a hood and not be forced to be bald. More poses. The only thing they DONT need more of is backgrounds for unit cards. Shockingly, they have plenty there.
-City specialization. Again, like almost all 4x games, cities do not stand out from each other. The only thing that really distinguishes them in Elemental is their size and growth rate. You build all the buildings, except the Civilization achievement ones, and they all turn out the same. As far as specializing them for gildar, resources or mana....why bother? There's no NEED, and the game doesn't force you to make choices, for example, you can build the Temple of the Sion in every city if you want. (Why you would care, I don't know, Sions are mysteriously worthless.)
-Food. I have a real problem with food as a resource. Cities don't produce enough of it on their own, and therefore city building is heavily influenced by available fertile land. You don't get PENALIZED for having less food in a meaningful way, your population doesn't starve. And that's good, because I hate managing food. But city growth is sslllooooowwwww without extra housing, and in your rush to build housing, you overlook some other buildings that require food to build. I don't like the city build menu at all either, it needs to be organized instead of just lining up all the icons next to each other. Population, by extension, also barely impacts your military capability. You would have to work your ass off to really put a dent in your population by recruiting, and the gildar upkeep would crush you long before that. There's just some mechanics floating around that seem like they're there because you expect it of a 4x game, but don't really have any impact on game play strategy.
-Tech trees. I'm both liking and disliking them. On the one hand, it's cool that you don't know exactly what you'll get with each breakthrough. On the other, not knowing if you're DONE with a tech tree is kind of an issue. The tech trees, as far as I can see, are actually really short. What conceals that is the fact you can research some items multiple times, to disguise the fact your tech tree is actually empty. So again, I'll make my call for MORE stuff in the tech tree. For example:
Military:
Basic equipment, armor, weapons, medium armor, medium weapons, ranged, 3-man squads, training 1, 2, 3, 4, advanced equipment heavy weapons, slayer weapons, navies, seiging, heavy armor, mounted warfare....did I miss any? I don't think I did, since magic weapons and armor are in the sorcery tree. That's the whole combat tree, more or less. Adventuring tree is mostly just a gate keeper to the a) strength of monsters and b) the quest level of sites you can start. One or two pieces of research might get you another unit type, slightly better map revealing or one other thing. While I LIKE having control over the monster levels and questing, a whole tree devoted to that seems meh. They really need to punch up all the tech trees. They're all solid starts, and the randomness of the unlocks is a great mechanics, but it's being backed up by not enough content for a day long or more sandbox game. On the normal AI, I maxed out civilization before I'd even seen the boundaries of another sovreign's kingdom.
I will say that the sandbox feels EPIC on a large map. It's taken hundreds of turns just to explore and secure my half of the world, I haven't even looked into the east yet. But the AIs are stupid. One civ that I hadn't met died to another, and when I reloaded my game, it somehow managed to not die. The AI I can see, Kraxis, has been bombarding me for requests for a NAP or trade for 300 turns. He has 8 kids, that I can see. They all run around by themselves. His units are unexperienced and pathetically weak compared to mine. Even his sovreign with his bad ass golem will fall to my armies.
So yeah, epic sense of a world, epic growth and domination of said world, but everything else that backs it up is average to mediocre to terrible.
I haven't yet posted any feedback on their forum, I'm giving myself ample time to look stuff over before I do. And I'm planning on giving feedback as it relates to the next 6 months. I will say that most of the annoying interface and camera stuff that shipped with the game was quickly addressed, which made tactical battles not annoying as fuck. I'm hoping they show the same enthusiasm for adding to the game as they do fixing the easy stuff.
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Topic: Elemental - War of Magic (Read 85595 times)