Foundation

AoW - SM is the best fantasy TBS right now, but EWoM's potential is much bigger.

 1. The development team [Stardock] is awesome. They will keep enhancing the gameplay elements, and they are listening to their fans. These are very important things.

2. Modding. It will be very powerful in EWoM. You can create whatever you want. [You can even modify the core elements in the game via Python coding.]

I have similar doubts as the OP's author. Elemental seems to be "founded" on GalCiv2 more than on the great fantasy TBS games of the past. Listening to fans is good, but if the dev team doesn't have strong beliefs in which direction the game should go, the result can be chaotic and "shapeless". I'm sure that there will be some good mods out there, but the unmodded game seems to be rather "bland" from what I've seen so far.

I didn't do the GalCiv2 original beta, but I played it from early versions and put in some beta effort on expansion pack(s?). Stardock are definitely addicted to constant fiddling and occasionally putting out major free updates, and the GC2 expansions seemed almost more substantial than some standalone games that I've accidentally wasted money on.

But I'm with PawlS in finding the last public beta to have few signs of a distinctive game world that's integrated with the mechanics.

I'd love to be happily surprised by an RTM version that has a magic system that's based in a fictional cosmology instead of feeling like a simple product of combat playtesting by hardcore gamers (I'm both/and about that, not either/or). I'd like to see something similar with mundane knowledge so that both the UI progess paths and the flavor text reflect the mature crafts (and sciences?) of the pre-Cataclysm world. Thankfully, this modern economy has been driving home life lessons re modifying my expectations, and I've had an unseemly amount of fun with these fever-inducing, bamboo-under-fingernails betas...

They have stated that the main cammpaign has been worked on outside of what we played on the beta...so...whats with all the sky is falling threads lately?

I'm not exactly a sky-is-falling customer, just one of those folks who had never done a primary beta before and someone who still has no clear idea what Brad means when he's talking about the difference between 'engine' and 'content.' (Or maybe I do get him on the distinction and just disagree about what share each 'side' should get of dev time & money.)

The two things that made me chime in here were Tormy invoking the Modding Will Save It All thing and Pawels reminding me that Brad's swell old thread on Integrated Physics never did get its followup for Integrated Metaphysics.

You guys realize that nearly everything (content wise) in the beta is placeholder right?

Brad has said over and over that the Betas aren't demos, they are for testing the engine and the various systems.  Content is being intentionally held back so that it feels new come release.

I have no idea what you're talking about 

In December 2008, Brad posted a journal note called Integrated physics that spawned a great deal of discussion about how physical combat would work in the game. I forget when & where I started using the term "integrated metaphysics," but for a long time that thread has stayed in my head because we have never seen anything remotely analogous for the magical side of the game. I'm pretty sure that the lack of dev interest in that general notion is part of why I find the current magic system, as you put it, "bland." Not offensive, not pathetic, but also not distinctively interesting.

One of the things I've been toiling away on is a heavily inspired by AOW:SM system of magic. Shards, and combinations of Shards will open up spells for research similar to the way assigning domains worked. Some of the region affecting spells will require access to all the modifiable files I can get my hands on though to even see if that's possible. I'm also looking at different ways enchantments could possibly work with each other.

I agree with _PawelS_. There are a lot of things that were talked about that we've seen tossed aside due to forum whining; a simple but living economy where trade routes meant something, and resources that affected production times got replaced with global piles. We no longer have to choose between small farming towns or bustling cities because people whined about too much clicking, and now every single city I've built is 95% identical to the one before it. Listening to the fans has really sucked a lot out of the game, even before it was released.

What I've learned from this beta is: Ignore everything Brad ever says about anything until the game actually ships. But damn it I love his enthusiasm and admire Stardock as a company.

That being said, the reason you should buy it Sheenjee is: Elemental will be a fun engrossing game it wouldn't be shipped out otherwise, and modders far more talented and skilled than I am will expound upon that 20 times over.

So what do you think would have been a better way of doing things?  A more limited beta process do you think?

Best regards,
Steven. 

A development team that knows what to do from the start* and uses good ideas from games that were made before, as well as some original ideas. The beta feedback should be used only to fix bugs and polish the details, like adding a new feature that won't change the general game mechanics but it's a nice addition that makes the game more enjoyable.

* In case of Elemental the tactical combat is a good example, they changed its concepts quite a lot. The result (turn-based and tile-based) is good for me, but I think they lost a lot of time developing the realtime/continuous turns/tileless versions. So they didn't have much time to work on the turn-based version, which makes it feel a bit unpolished now.

Yet another situation where things seem either-or to (many, most?) folks but I want to have my cake and eat it too.

More than a few apparently forum-driven changes have disappointed me, especially the big 'win' for the simplified economy. But on the whole, I find the devs' interest in ideas from the peanut gallery to be oddly fascinating and admirable.

Whether or not they had a fairly settled set of mechanics in mind when they began the public beta is not important to me because I'm not a very competitive player. I mostly play to play and 'winning' a game just happens eventually if I don't manage to 'lose' or get frustrated or bored with a map and start a new one.

I'm just pretty confident that the stuff Brad calls content would be stronger overall, in a way that makes the gameplay more distinctive, if the basics of the game world had been fairly settled, particularly the cosmology and the general social dynamics for the Kingdoms, the Empires, and their canon factions. Decisions about how to shape the mechanics and maybe the UI would have yielded richer results if they had been made against a relatively stable, modestly detailed background world. Maybe that's exactly what's happening now as the, ahem, Random House inputs are being included.

@Sushikawa: Re the current state of city-building (which I believe is slated to change significantly for RTM), I don't quite follow you. I've complained about 'boring' clicks for stuff like housing, and for a very long time I've typed here and there about how swell it would be to see Elemental be the first TBS game where cities were not tacks in eventual wall-to-wall carpeting and had distinctive identities shaped by their location and some player actions. I'd trade the entire 'housing' thing for a two-tier settlement system that meant rural villages would stay rural villages and a town could eventually become a metropolis, with the help of a surrounding network of villages.

@GW One of my ideas to eliminate the clickity click was to simply have open land tiles be used for food automagicaly as the encampment grew. Not unlike the farm creep from AOW:SM. The catch being that the more buildings you constructed the less food you would produce in that city. 

But enough with derailing the thread

Fall of heaven is too buggy in multiplayer for me to take that prize.

I like FFH a lot, but it has the same disadvantage as normal Civ4 - the "stack of doom". That's why I'm waiting for Civ5 and a possible fantasy mod for it, as well as the standalone FFH and Elemental.

So far, AoWSM is the best.

Nah. FFH2 is an awesome mod, but it has been created for a bad game engine. [...bad for a fantasy TBS.] 

[[PS. While we are at it -> The Third Age mod for M2: TW is the best amongst the TC mods made for strategy games imo.]]

I have to say the potential for me to mod this engine makes me wish I had never read this thread.

Maybe I don't get it because I never played GalCiv2 - but I'm not disappointed at all in this game and don't find it bland.

Based on the Beta, it might have rough edges, but what game doesn't especially at release or during the Beta stage?

And I know people down the Modding Will Save It stuff, but for me, modding is one huge part of it. After dealing with games that make you jump through hoops to let you mod everything about it, Elemental seems like it will have none of that and yes, that's a big draw to me. Not only for whatever I might scrape together, but with the creative minds in the community and the open arms attitude of the game engine and developers to modding, I can only imagine what mods I'll eventually get to experience from the community.