WARNING: MY POSTS ARE LONG. SKIP READING IF YOU HAVE THE ATTENTION SPAN OF A 3rd GRADER!!!
What are the positives??? Very difficult question. Not because there aren't any, but because it depends on how YOU play. For instance, a positive on easy level may not be a positive on hard level. I will answer based on things I love, but think have some (or lots) of room for improvement.
1- Dynasties--. Could have been awesome. The fact that my merchant sovereign may knock up (or get knocked up, depending) a hero that has tech knowledge, or assassin etc.. Then their kids would have one (or two... I wish) traits of the parent, and this matrix would spill down to their offspring etc. This concept sounded lame to me while the game was in devenlopment but I see tons of potential in the actual implementation of it, now that the game is released.
I think it could be improved by LOWERING the amount of available heroes, and making it to where the children mature faster. On Ridiculous, 8 opponents, I can finish the whole game (well as far as the memory leaks let me take it) and never have one grandchild. It is also too formalized... isn't histroy riddled with kings who killed their wife (wives) because they kept pumping out daughters (the nerve of them. LOL). In Elemental it seems I ALWAYS have 4 kids, either 2/2 boy/girl, or 3/1 boy/girl, girl/boy. In other words, I know I will always have one daughter to marry off, maybe 2-3. I will always have 1 son to marry and thus steal some other sovereigns daughter... maybe 2-3. It would be cool if I could have 4 sons, or 4 daughters, only because of the way the game "takes" dsughters away. I also don't like how a daughter always has mom's talent, and a son always has dad's. So basically, IMO, if you sped up the birth rate/ maturity rate, and mixed up the predictability of my offspring and their talents I think it would go along way.
2- The summons-- I see the devs keep writing posts about "fixing" the magic system, or balancing it, etc.. I don't see the problem. I have no problem with the gloabl mana pool, (until I see how it is implemented) but I don't see, me taking my sovereign, and imbuing 10 heroes as "game breaking" all that means, is my sovereign is now not the "torin" juggernaut that he could be. Where do summons come in to this rant?? Well, in MoM, you could smoke the world in two easy ways (well more than 2, but 2 of the most popular were...) First, you could summon torin, jack him up with enchantments, and/or items, then run around roflstomping everyone. (this is similar to buying massive gear for sovereign but is not nearly as effective... You can still lose a 30 hp Soveriegn in one shot, by many types of units). Second, you could make a massive army of uber summoned units. Great Wyrms, Sky Drakes, demon lords etc... You could then send them around the world ROFLSTOMPING everything. Wee fun. Well, Elemental changes it up by making it harder to make your sovereign unbeatable, and it does a great job of implementing limited summons. i.e only one fire giant can be summoned per imbued hero or sovereign, etc... So it is much harder for me to make 4 armies, each having 3 fire giants, 3 angels, 3 sky drakes. etc... The thing that needs to be improved is the utility of EACH SUMMONS. Is it just me or does everyone sell that 80gold sand golemn trinket you find early game? Who uses a summoned monster besides Fire Giant? I may not be playing correctly, but I see little to no use for any of the other summons. Some of their skills are broke, and almost all are useless. I would jack up some of their powers to make it more likely to summon them, but for me, I NEVER use any summons ever. It is too easy to smoke the game with heroes, then with summons.
3--Land usage.-- This is a tricky one, I like it, (kinda) and hate it too. First of all, I must be different than everyone on these boards, but I find the current way of building a city the most boring, un-fun, restrictive bunch of crap that totally takes me "out of my immersion" as game developers like to call it. Lemme see, I start a town, I gotta be close enough to such n such resource so my town EVENTUALLY gets it, but no so far away that it is in my zone but "unlinkable". I then gotta try and build buildings, (mostly houses, weeee fun) while getting to the good stuff, oh yeah, I will most likely have about 12% of the room that I need. Not for lack of "space" but because some swamp, forest, hill, or mountain is taking up 80% of the usable world. I love when an Iron, or crystal resource is in an area, where I can only build a city with 1-2 squares of usable area, because it is surrounded by trees. How about them hills, Nothing like spending dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of turns terraforming them, eh????. Well, the parts I do like about the land, is that when you do get it terraformed/settled, it actually looks like you could live there. Or your game units at least. It looks better than the rest of the world, and now I see what my goal is. Kill next town, terraform it to my preference, rinse repeat. I do wish the "spreading" out of the cities would be done different, and there realy needs to be away to terraforme trees, swamps etc. I have seen numerous saved games people uploaded showing how there are resources in the world that are unattainable, or can only be claimed by a town with 10 people max in it. Due to world restrictions. The AI of course, does not have these restrictions, and you can always take over their towns instead of building your own, which is what I recommend, but if that is what the devs wanted, then why even put in a "city building" element.
4--Leveling of my heroes/sovereigns. -- I really think it is wishful thinking, and false advertising to call that a "role playing element" of this game, but it is still kinda cool. I can think of strategy games from YEARS ago that had strategy and much better role playing (Birthright for example)... so I would not call this role playing, I wouldnt call it that in Warcraft 3 either. But, I do like that as my heroes and soevereigns fight (and they must to advance), the get more powerful. I could have 50 heroes all level 1-2 and none with more than 4 essence, if I didn't fight, but if I wanna roflstomp on ridiculous, I gotta risk them so they get more powerful. Now, what to do with that power? More essence (almost always the correct choice), more strength (attack is far more valuable than defense in this game, so also a good choice), more intelligence for more powerful spells (rarely the right choice), or constitution in case I make a mistake and some sucker actually can hit me. Those syons or whatever they are called, that one shot you for 3x their damage using a spell/ability are nice little hero killers, and it is best to have about 20 hp if you think you might ever get hit.... Anyway. I like this part of the game, but I wish it was fleshed out better, and for god's sake, bring back organized. Why is it even out of the game? The game is so so so slow as it is, now I need to move at a max speed of 3??? Yay. Sure organized is OP in the first 50-75 turns of the game, but after that, I teleport so much it isn't a game breaker. I hate having to marry that grizzly adams dude to get some Organized traits in my younguns.
5--Dragons, Demons-- I think these are awesome, most end units are though, right? But why doesn't the AI use them? Or maybe I should ask, DOES the AI use them? I never seen it. The AI can easily have a few hundred grand sitting in the bank by turn 100, 150 for sure. It has massive time requirement boost too, so it takes short time to pump out units at hardest level. If the AI were pumping out dragons and demons to stop me as opposed to another 75 units of dude in a 9 man formation, armed with boar spears I think the game would move from worst AI ever all the way up to very bad AI. a dragon can kill a hero, one shot. so if you have 3 dragons I have to take out ALL three before they get to attack. With our lovely boar spear dudes, I can make a sammich while my army decimates them. Please program the ai to use these end units with all their massive production boosts.
6-- Diplomacy-- I like that I can see why they hate me (and they all do) but I hate that there is little I can do to not have them all declare war on me. Maybe this is only ridiculous, but I dunno. Anyway, every faction I meet, even my own "side" will declare war on me withing 20-40 turns. Sometimes up to 75 but not much more after that. I usually meet someone, figure out where they are (harder than actually killing them sometimes), then start moving an army that direction to plan my new west bank settlements. The longer I let them live, the bigger their cities get, so I never declare, I always wait for them to attack. To Improve Diplo, I would leave in the "chart" that shows their power base, their number of cities, the reasons they hate me etc... but let me be able to influence it a little. Right now all I can do, is build diplomacy producing buildings, or trade gold/units for diplomacy resources from AI. Then when I have like 3000-5000 diplomacy, they say "+2, we are awed by your diplomacy" or something like that. I can never have a bigger army, because they have 200 gazillion units and gold. Mine are smarter and will win, but I am usually "-4, our military is MUCH stronger than yours", this is while I am taking city after city of theirs.
Probably lots more to comment on, but I see the first person shooter people losing interest in this 4 minute post, and are about to go drink some Jolt Cola. So as a courtesy to them, I will stop here.
Peace.
