I was asking myself why I still play games like Age of Wonders, Lords of Magic, Master of Magic and even Magic the Gathering, despite them being just as buggy, imbalanced and all the rest of it even after all these years. And I realised one thing all of those games have, which Elemental currently lacks, is personality. I'm not playing MoM because it's a fine example of game crafting, I'm playing it because for a few hours I can actually feel like a despotic Necromancer ruling a nation of Halfling slaves.

 In Elemental by comparison, playing Capitar feels no different to playing Tarth. You get slightly different looking people, and a different set of (currently non-working) bonuses, but there's no sense of being the Sovereign of Capitar. For all intents and purposes, you may as well call them Kingdom 1, Kingdom 2, Empire 1, Empire 2 and so forth.

The one thing all my examples have in common that brings this out is the oft underestimated flavour text. It's why Magic the Gathering can build a wonderful world despite only interacting with the player via the medium of baseball cards. It's why Lords of Magic got away with a spell tree that was virtually identical for every race.

 The flavour text, usually a quote from a resident in the world, lets the player 'see through the eyes' if you like of the people in the game. It gives context to a feature that a simple description of the game rules can't. We already saw this in GalCiv II when you clicked on the planet details and got a vox pop from a resident telling you just what he thought of life on the planet.

So my first idea - any time you're explaining something to the player, whether it's an entry in the Herigamon, the pop up for successful spell research or the character sheet of an NPC, there should be a quote from a resident of the gameworld giving a little insight into how they view the subject. So if I research say Flame Dart, there's a small two line quote on the pop up that appears from a Loremaster referencing how the tales mention the Titans were capable of throwing flame from their hands or similar.

And my second is to take it a step further. Lords of Magic got away with a spell list which duplicated spells almost as much as Elemental because for each race's spell, the name and flavour text would be different. So the movement buff for the elves (life) spoke of moving through the hidden paths of the wood, while the barbarians (Chaos) spoke of walking through the spirit world. It was the same for every spell - an attack spell for Life would talk of manipulating the life energy of the target, while Chaos would talk of trying to persuade the spirits to attack on your behalf. This helped build up a theme and sense of diversity despite the otherwise generic spell list - with Chaos you began to understand how their view of the world differed from that of the Life or Water people.

 So maybe these quotes could be changed depending on who you're playing. Let's take Capitar and Tarth for example. You open the house entry in the Heirgamon, and you get the usual description of what the house is and how it works. At the bottom we have our flavour quote, as Capitar you see a quotation from Procipinee talking about building shelter for the desperate. As Tarth however it's a quote from an anonymous source saying something like "A true warrior needs only the stars above his head and his cloak for shelter. The rest of us prefer to sleep dry" (I assume Tarth are the warrior types judging by their description). It's a pretty minor change, but it brings out a sense of who the faction is and how they view the world which will tend to bring them to life far more than any amount of stat changes or bonuses. And we're not actually changing anything about the game (though it might be nice to do so later to bring out the themes of the nations more), just adding a couple of lines of text to a page.

And I know we already have these for NPC's, but what you really need for this to work is a unifying theme that brings out the feel of each and every nation. The NPC's texts tell you about the NPC, but by necessity they need to be generic.