Some thoughts after playing for two weeks

   Some thoughts about the game after playing 10 games or so the last two weeks. I'll try not to mention things that have already been mentioned alot on these forums (lack of diversity in spells/factions/units, AI to easy ect.)

- Would like to be able to re-marry if my spouse dies and we haven't had children yet. In one game my wife was killed when some mob I didn't notice attacked the city she was parked in. After that the whole dynasty thing was useless to me. I understand no re-marriage if you have a kid already but if there are no children yet I would like the option to marry again.

- I don't like the fact that you can't walk through other people's territory cause I find it limits diplomacy and makes that aspect of the game boring. For an example, my last game was on a large map with 10 opponents because I wanted a longer game with alot of opponents to deal with. The map turned out to have alot of "choke points", meaning narrow strips of land that could be blocked off by a cities influence. After spending  some time bilding up, I wasn't able to pass these "choke points" becuase of other empires influence so I only ended up seeing three other races the entire game. I suppose I could hire a champion early and just send him around the map but money is at a premium early on and I found that champions without a movement rating of 3 or more can have a hard time getting around forests and obstacles with mobs in em without getting ambushed. And non-aggression pacts can be so over-valued by the AI.

   Perhaps if you allowed single units (sov. or champions) to cross borders. I mean it would be hard to notice an individual traveling through a large kingdom wouldn't it. Or create some sort of stealth unit or ability that allowed you to send a unit across borders. I would like to be able to deal diplomatically with all or most of the other races during the game and the current system makes that difficult.

- Any chance of getting a cloth map version of tactical battles? I play the regular game with cloth map only since there are some screwy video issues when I try the 3-d style but the tactical battles are only 3-d and i get wierd issues there as well. I actually don't care about playing the cloth map only, I actually like that view better. In the tactical battles screen however I experience an issue where the units are sometimes "sunk into the ground". Sometimes I see half thier bodies, sometimes I don't see them at all and sometimes they show up just fine. This issue, plus the fact that tactical battle animations are sooooooooo sloooooooooow have pretty much ruined the tactical balltle part of th is game for me and I just auto-resolve (unfortunately). Having a cloth map version of tac battles where there are no fancy graphics and animations would be nice for guys like me who don't care about fancy visuals and just want quality game play. (I must have played over 500 games of GalCiv2 and never once did I see the game in anything other them zoomed out strategic view hehe)

- Don't know if it's possible but it would be nice to have a slider at the beginning of the game for resource density (and maybe goodie hut density as well), like you had in GalCiv2 for planets/anomalies ect. Some of my games on big maps had practically no resources while others were quite rich in resources.

- This is a purely cosmetic thing but I would love to be able to re-name heroes like you can re-name units. I don't mean to insult but the names of current heroes don't grab me and I would like to name my guys anything I want (Drizzt, Aragorn, Bret Farve, Barrack Obama, whatever). It would help personalise the game and get me attached to the heros. Groups of units as well. I can re-name individual units and not groups. I want to call my mounted archers the 3rd cavarly division or something like that.

- I would like a few more editing tools for guys like me who aren't super computer literate like you had in GalCiv TOA. In TOA you had a component editor, Tech-tree editor and an improvement editor. The equivalent for Elemental would be an nice. As it stands now, two of the four editors provided are completely cosmetic (Particle and tile) and one of the others (faction) is not very usefull since there aren`t alot of gameplay customization options. You just have one list of strengths and a list of only four possible weaknesses and all with only one grade of severity. The rest of the customizatoin options are purely cosmetic (appearance, name, backstory ect.). The map editor is probably the only one that I would use. People will point out that I could do that stuff by altering the XML files and I did a little of that with GalCiv2 but it seems a bit more complex with this game so editors for those things would be great.

- Unloading from ships really needs to be improved. As it stands, you have to click on each individual unit in a boat and then right click on the piece of land that you want to unload in. If you have a full boat this gets very tedious especially since the view shifts to the unit after it disembarks so you have to keep going back and selecting the boat to off-load the next unit. Annoying as heck. How about giving the boat an unload button where a cursor will appear and when you pass it over an acceptable off-load square, it will turn green and you can unload all units in a ship at once.   

   Well these are just a few thoughts I thought I`d share. As it stands now, after having played for two weeks, I find the game to be on the verge of being interesting to play but there are a few issues that are killing it for me. The woefull lack of diversity between races, units, spellbooks, underdeveloped tech-trees, weak heroes with no special skills or just lack of special skills in general is big. I`ve also read alot of people complaining about tactical battles but since I rarely play them due to graphics issues and the fact they are so slow (animations), I can`t give a valid opinion on that.

   Hopefully future patches-changes will address these issues and make this the great game I would like it to be. I wish the developers luck in thier efforts. Have a good day all.