I'm a bit of a Stardock (Galactic Civilizations II and Sins of a Solar Empire fame) 4x strategy whore, so I immediately pre-ordered Elemental when it was announced. Elemental is a 4x strategy game that is a very obvious spiritual successor to the 1995 game
Masters of Magic. It's kind of a mix of Civilization and Fantasy RPG. You start with a hero who can build your first city, you then have to build pioneers/settlers to make more. You can build on resources to get extra materials, you get to lead armies with these heroes (who can also equip new loots) to go and hunt monsters and steal their treasures through either auto combat or changing to a turn based tactical combat grid. You can win a game win in one of 4 different ways, the usual 4x fare in that sense.
Some of the fun stuff involves making your own troops in the game. As you unlock equipment and powers you unlock new units, but you the real meat is unlocking new weapons, powers and customizing your own troops. You can save these customizations to include them in the list of trainable units. Not entirely surprising considering Stardock's obsession with giving these kinds of options in earlier games, but still a nice addition. The magic spells are satisfying, the summon creatures are great and so many things about it are great but goddamn when the game has a problem it has goddamn problems.
The interface is kind of shit terrible, it has no tutorial to speak of, it has one hell of a learning curve, it has quite a few bugs and tons of options in the settings menu that aren't explained in the menus at all.
Another one of the problems I'm having is with the graphics. Now, I am not one to need a good graphics engine for a 4x strategy game (Civilization V is perhaps going to spoil me) but this game has the problem of have some gorgeous terrain on the map but with character models straight out of 2003. It ends up having a rather ridiculous contrast that bothers me a bit.
Overall I'm quite enjoying the game, and they are working quite hard to fix it's problems (they've released 3 patches in the last 2 days) but I don't know if I could seriously make any real judgement until the game is actually spit shined and polished. It's definitely worth a shot if you enjoyed Masters of Magic in any way though.
Anyone else bought or considering trying the game out?