Elemental: It's No Master of Magic
I do not recommend Elemental. I enjoy playing it a great deal, but it's unfinished and unpolished. Stardock fans are vociferous defenders of the company, due to its open communication policy (the CEO is a regular on the message boards) and history of strong support for its games. I have no doubt that Stardock will clean the game up, and by then it will become a solid title. Perhaps it will be too late commercially, but that's not my topic.
No game since Master of Magic came out in 1994 has matched the epic scope of the original title; with hundreds of powerful spells and over a dozen different fantasy races with unique units and different buildings. Heroes of Might and Magic and Age of Wonders were stripped down titles that I always compared unfavourably to Master of Magic, and Elemental is no different. In Elemental, magic is weak and unimaginative, and there are very few special powers, making tactical combat uninteresting. In no game have there been the world-destroying spells of Master of Magic like Zombie Mastery (all units killed in battle throughout both worlds turn into your zombies) or Armageddon (volcanoes rise throughout the world, destroying cities and providing you with mana).
(I've heard good things about the niche Dominions series and the Civilisation IV mod Fall from Heaven; I've played neither but they may be a counterpoint to my hyperbole. In my defence, the former is a non-mainstream title by a small development house, and the latter is a fan-mod where extreme detail is not unexpected.)
These shortcomings are non-technical, it's a lack of content. The trend nowadays is to spend major effort on the game engine and art, but not on the gameplay itself. Elemental demonstrates the consequences of spending development time on the addition rather than the refinement of mechanics. There are substantial innovations such as the Dynasty system, the unit design system, and the adventuring system: you can have children, who can have children of their own, and you can intermarry between nations for political reasons; you also design your units from the ground up by selecting weapons and armour that's available at your technology level; you can perform quests and research to reveal new resources and quest locations and even win the game via quests. The civilisation system is also very nice - cities grow semi-organically around resources, and the tech-tree is substantial. However, the systems have not been sufficiently playtested and refined - some players have complained that the shallowness of tactical combat makes unit design choiceless; others complain that the already-married AIs have a substantial advantage; there are more complaints that starting items are not cost-balanced.
Finally like many 4X strategy games (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate), the gameplay doesn't scale late-game; you are dragged down by a morass of micromanagement. It's stupid/amazing that this is still an issue when developers are concerned arcane graphical effects.
No game since Master of Magic came out in 1994 has matched the epic scope of the original title; with hundreds of powerful spells and over a dozen different fantasy races with unique units and different buildings. Heroes of Might and Magic and Age of Wonders were stripped down titles that I always compared unfavourably to Master of Magic, and Elemental is no different. In Elemental, magic is weak and unimaginative, and there are very few special powers, making tactical combat uninteresting. In no game have there been the world-destroying spells of Master of Magic like Zombie Mastery (all units killed in battle throughout both worlds turn into your zombies) or Armageddon (volcanoes rise throughout the world, destroying cities and providing you with mana).
(I've heard good things about the niche Dominions series and the Civilisation IV mod Fall from Heaven; I've played neither but they may be a counterpoint to my hyperbole. In my defence, the former is a non-mainstream title by a small development house, and the latter is a fan-mod where extreme detail is not unexpected.)
These shortcomings are non-technical, it's a lack of content. The trend nowadays is to spend major effort on the game engine and art, but not on the gameplay itself. Elemental demonstrates the consequences of spending development time on the addition rather than the refinement of mechanics. There are substantial innovations such as the Dynasty system, the unit design system, and the adventuring system: you can have children, who can have children of their own, and you can intermarry between nations for political reasons; you also design your units from the ground up by selecting weapons and armour that's available at your technology level; you can perform quests and research to reveal new resources and quest locations and even win the game via quests. The civilisation system is also very nice - cities grow semi-organically around resources, and the tech-tree is substantial. However, the systems have not been sufficiently playtested and refined - some players have complained that the shallowness of tactical combat makes unit design choiceless; others complain that the already-married AIs have a substantial advantage; there are more complaints that starting items are not cost-balanced.
Finally like many 4X strategy games (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate), the gameplay doesn't scale late-game; you are dragged down by a morass of micromanagement. It's stupid/amazing that this is still an issue when developers are concerned arcane graphical effects.