Elemental Forums
Any chance of there being non-military victories? Cultural / Religious / Economic / Fear / etc would all be good ways to win a game. Fear is one of those things where the enemy joins you simply because they don't feel they can compete (either you have a large military or are a massive nation).
Yes, Brad has already mentioned within one of his interviews non-military victories will exist.
Here's hoping they won't be treated as second-rate approaches to the game, as GC2 does with its heavy pro-war bias in the scoring algorithms.
Well, if the suffix in Elemental holds any weight you might avoid putting any unreasonably large hopes on a reduced emphasis on military victories.
Nah, it's just a name to make it sound cooler... It wouldn't sound quite as cool if it was "Elemental: Peace and Harmony of Magic." 
Ya, I remember them talking about this in one of the journals or interview or something. They mentioned a few Non-military ways to win. The ones I remember are as follows:
1) Each Soverign in the game has their own personal quests, and you win if you complete yours. More than likely several different of the Soverigns goals will overlap preventing this from being too easy.
2) I think I remember them saying something about being able to win by allying with every remaining faction of your race, though there will probably be certain restrictions, such as your race has to outnumber the other faction by x amount for it to count. This one would be very similar to the alliance victory in GalCiv2 I imagine.
3) This was a method that involved some kind a world spell that does something allowing the player to win. This would be the "Magic" way to victory.
--I'm sure there will be others. You mentioned Cultural, Religious, Economic, Fear. - Possibility of a Cultural type of victory will depend I think on how the game treats culture. I'm thinking it will be quite different than Civ, or GalCiv series. I dought a Religious victory type as I think Magic will take the place of Religion for this game. I'm fairly possitive there will be an Economic victory condition, as "the fallen" have and advantage in Magic and humans have an advantage in economics(as I understand it), it would seem unfair against humans to have a "Magic" path to victory and no Economic path. I'm not sure about a Fear victory condition (or even what you mean by this exactly). It seems that any reason a factions would have to fear another would be highly tied to another victory condition.
*Disclaimer, These are just my guesses, and founded on no real evidence lol
I really really hope that Elemental will make alternate victory conditions just as exciting as military ones. That's what I loved most about GalCiv2. In fact, I have more fun spreading influence and building alliances than I do fighting with other races. That said, however, fantasy settings are typically very warlike, so I would understand if they emphasized war more, but I think it would be nice to break the mold and make peace between humans and "orcs" or whatever a possibility.
Hopefully it will be possible to disable/enable specific victory conditions and some should have adjustable settings.
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