Factions

Well, I'm not sure if each and every faction has been accounted for, but I have a couple of simple ideas. I personally would like to see different races besides men and "evil men" in Elemental, maybe in an expansion if they don't see the light of day right off the bat. They don't have to be orcs and elves or anything like that, I'm cool with angels, demons, werewolves, whatever, but let's have some sentient races besides humans.

In any case I thought that this faction system could be actually very sound at doing this (that is, supporting sub-races within the two major ones). Here's what I was thinking os far:

Men:

Necromancers

This faction's ruling class is composed of necromancers, channelers who employ a perverse form of life magic to animate the dead. This faction does have access to standard troops and technologies, although not to the extent of most factions. They can also raise hordes of living dead of various varieties and this is where their strength lies. In the late game they have access to several basic tank units like flesh golems and bone dragons that can be trained, upgraded or otherwise altered like any other unit in the game.

I thought it might be interesting to have at least 1 evil human civilization because, as we all know, not all humans are nice. That and it'll break up the steretypes a bit given that you'd expect the Fallen to practice necromancy and that you'd expect necromancy to be a form death magic (even though it's really bringing the dead back to "life").

So, as for strategic bias these guys can produce units similar to those that other human factions get, but as the game goes on the undead troops should definitely be the focus, as they are fearless and frighten enemy units lowering their statistics or perhaps decreasing morale if a morale mechanic is included. Generally speaking though basic undead troops are very average at best (with a few exceptions) and rely on numerical superiority to win battles.

Another interesting mechanic might be to ressurect your enemy's fallen troops as your own, with all of their characteristics. So for example say your opponent sends an army of heavily armoured cavalry your way and you kill them, you can now animate a portion of those "knights", using a bit of your channeler's magical energy, complete with heavy armour and whatever training, upgrades and abilities they had.

Lastly I would hope that there might be a few different "species" of undead you can turn into units. That would be pretty cool. Of course there would be the basic zombies and skeletons, but there would also be vampires and wraiths and maybe a few advanced types (liches if there are wizards in the game besides your channeler). This could add some interesting customisation options and could give rise to a wide variety of units.

So, for example vampires. You can equip them with long swords and light armour and buy them some sort of "teleport" ability. Now you have a potent and very fast support unit that can drain life (a basic vampire ability I would imagine) and zip around the battle field, attacking vulnerable archers or skillfully slaughtering wherever your army needs them most. You'd have to be careful though, because speed comes at a price and these vampire duelists aren't going to be able to endure drawn out combat.

Then you could have vampire knights, heavily armoured, riding on skeletal horses. Not only are these guys awesome on the charge and utterly fearless but they can also survive long combats and take a lot of damage because of their life drain.

Or what about berserk vampires, that tear enemies apart with maces, axes or maybe even their claws or teeth? These guys get a huge bonus to their life drain, but don't have much health to start out with and don't have access to other nifty vampiric abilities like shape changing or teleportation.

Of course the faction would have to be balanced so that players can't just pile all of the best abilities on their units to create a one-size-fits-all super unit, but won't that pretty well be the case for the other factions too?

The only other problem that I can see is that some of the human heroes may not fit with the faction, but I suppose it's possible that the faction could be allowed to hire fallen heroes instead, if it's really an issue, maybe as an upgrade (you can hire fallen heroes in exchange for the ability to hire human heroes). Although at this point it's a bit hard to say given that we haven't been told the ins and outs of how Stardock will be handling heroes here.

Well, I have a couple of other ideas, but that ended up being longer than I intended, so I'll post the other factions later.

What do you guys think? Please feel free to post your faction ideas here if you'd like to, the more the merrier!