The Elemental all-purpose mega thread
I'm putting up this thread as a way for us to just generally talk about the game, brain storm ideas for the future, etc.
So here's my stream of consciousness to get it started:
What I'd like to see happen is for Elemental: War of Magic to continue to be refined with its existing game mechanics largely intact other than the change to the mana system and UI update scheduled for v1.1.
Beyond that, the evolution of the Elemental TBS would be delivered via expansions, sequels, etc. like every other traditional game. This way, we can introduce pretty substantial gameplay changes without people feeling like the War of Magic version is some sort of test tube of game design experimentation.
For brevity, call these A, B, C where A is Elemental: War of Magic and B and C are some sort of future expansions. B would be free to everyone and C would be free to those who own the game by September 30th.
So with A, the game mechanics revolve around exploring the world, exploiting world resources, expanding your control, and exterminating enemies. A will evolve as we go to 1.1 with more techs and improvements that let players convert 1 resource that they have a lot in to one they are lacking in. Spells will draw from a global mana pool and the UI will be cleaned up and content across the board expanded on. For good or bad, minus bugs, A is what we originally conceived of for War of Magic and it should rise or fall based on that.
B will be a new Elemental title (an expansion pack ala GalCiv II: Dark Avatar). It is important that B come out sooner rather than later. Users who like/enjoy A can stick with A but users who find the combat in Elemental too simplistic or are unsatsified with some other core game element will hopefully have much of this addressed in B.
C will also be a new Elemental title (ala GalCiv II: Twilight of the Arnor). C involves more wholesale gameplay changes and would take quite a bit longer to come out. A and B would continue to be supported (just like we did with GalCiv and Sins) but I would picture C adding a great deal more depth to the overall game across the board.
So as we move forward, when people say "I think something should be like this" we will think about those requests and put them either in the A, B, or C buckets.
So for example, a user commented today that the combat should support flanking and there should be taxes and that there should be easy ways to convert resources and such. If we concluded that this is a direction we'd want to take the game into, it would go into the C bucket. It's way too radical for A, not doable for B but would be doable for C.
On the other hand, having the tactical battles eliminate "action points" but instead go with initiative on a per unit basis is too much for A (that's not the system we had in mind for War of Magic) but is something we would do for B.
And so on.
So feel free to use this thread to talk about pretty much anything you want. It's just a back and forth with us.