Races--because they really matter if you want an epic game

So long as there is a tangible difference between the factions I don't care that some of them aren't super short or pointy eared.

i agree both, but it would be nice to have more than just 2 races. it doesnt need to be as many as MoM but more than just factions of good vs evil. i would add maybe something usually good like elves and something evil like orcs or trolls (along that line of species)

     glad someone brought this up

I side with KellenDunk on this issue.  The initial concept is faction based, not racially based, so why complicate what has already been created.  I'd even go so far as to suggest that good expansion material might be alternate races, and the numerous factions that might exist within them, but that at present the human/fallen template will give more than enough replayability as long as there is a clear difference between each available faction within the two sides.

The game will already have Dragons, and according to dev journals you'll have to work/adventure to be able to recruite one or two members of said race.  It might be possible that these are options for other 'cliche' races such as elves or dwarves or troll or giants or goblins or whatever.  Point being maybe you'll be able to unlock one of these unique racially specific units (likely through adventuring) and once you've unlocked them they can be produced by your faction for the remainder of the game. 

Eg: Quest: Some bandits are burning a forest down, you move in to beat the bandits and help put out the fire.

Resolution: Treants emerge from the forest touched by your kindness and love for wilderness, they offer to join your cause.  You may now produce Treants at "X"

5.  Make sure the player is having fun, not the designer/computer.

It doesn't mean that if suddenly most of the players of this forum want the game to be turned into an FPS, Stardock should do as people here (which is just a small part of the people who will play the game) says.

Stardock offers an idea. And while they are nice enough to let us influence it, only them have the right to finally decide how it must be. And it's their duty to make sure that what they offer us is fun for us. So if they say: "You get 6 human factions and 6 fallen factions, all of the mechanically different.", they must make sure that we have fun playing those races they provided us.

8. Make it Epic

This game (or any other) doesn't need more races to be epic. That's nothing but a totally biased an unfair opinion based on the desire to play different races. Master of Orion III must be epic just for having multiple races. Oh, wait, wasn't it a bad game? And surely Civ IV cannot never be epic because it only has humans that play mostly the same.

But here we are again with a topic of: "This game must have A, B, C or it'll suck." (not literally but the spirit is the same).

If you won't get it commercially, how will you get it? Or maybe you really wanted to say that you won't get it at all?

Aaaaaanyway, sometimes I wish Stardock added different races to the game but made them work exactly as the humans. Seriously. The people only cares about there being different races after all, right? The correct answer would be no. Smart people wants factions that play differently. That's what really matters. Oh yeah, if they can get those differences in different envelopments (races) then the better. But different playstyles will beat number of races any day.

And it's quite tiresome how people fool themselves about how if they are no many races (species actually, unless people talks about having arians, asians...) the game cannot be fun, how it cannot be epic, how it's going to suck and how Stardock don't care. Not everything is the frakking Lords of the Rings, a Dungeons and Dragons book or any other book with lots of "races". The Trilogy of Darwath, Paladin, The Ladies of Mandrigyn, The History of the Runestaff, The Time Master Trilogy, Mirage... there many fantasy books that don't depend of multiple races to be good, interesting and/or epic. In fact, although some of those might have some non human elements (like the dark creatures of The Darwath Trilogy) but they are human focused. And the same can be applied to games.

Stardock has a story they want to develop for this game and it emplies humans and fallens. If they really want to make a good job with it, they need to focus on it and not in what some players define as "fun" and "epic". "Spiritual sucesor of MoM" is not the same as "MoM2 in disguise so Atari doesn't sue us.". Let them work in their vision instead of twisting it to match other different vision. Some time ago it was said that non creatures would be available for sandbox but not campaign, so we might no need so much mods for some "traditional" fantasy races. And expansion packs are assured as long as people are not closed minded zealots. Oh, those would be a minority so at least a expansion pack is mostly assured. And if Gal Civ II's expansion packs are an indication, expansions for Elemental will redefine the word "epic".

I can see both sides, however, I would really want different races and cant wait until they're modded in!

In an early post/interview Stardock staff mentioned they wanted something that was similar to MoM in some ways; I don't have the exact quote. My purpose was to express a thought others have shared about what made MoM cool.  I think the races helped, and I think there are enough posts on this site to validate that.  MoM was one of the best ever--follow success.

I agree that if there were tangibly different factions with cool magical differences it would serve the same purpose, if they are both believable and fun.  Can they create a human faction that regenerates health like a Troll might? Yes. Would it seem like they were still human? Maybe--but I'd think the artists would want to draw something different than another human type occasionally to add interest (fun). Another example: if a race has a natural affinity for wind/air magic, over time would they maybe develop wings? Maybe--it sure would be cool!  It's a little harder to believe really cool (read unpredictable, which is important for interest/fun) effects with all human factions.

By 'commercially available' I referred to the modding perspective. Some features are in the original game, others are deemed not important enough but allowed via modding.  How do they determine which must be in the original release? I'm just trying to lobby that if enough gamers want races in the original release they will possibly lose some sales and opportunity. Usually you evaluate this in terms of cost. If it costs an extra 1% to add races but maybe sales would rise by 5%, do it, right? 

If the factions are really different and not just different armor and story, I'll be content. If not, and the modding engines allow for enough flexibility to add races, I guess I'll just have to learn how to mod. Or maybe not.

Oh, and by the way, I never said it would suck without races. I didn't imply that in any way.  I said I want this to be so good that it's considered EPIC and so that all my friends want to BUY it and PLAY it. I think you'll have more sales with races than not. Enough said.

I agree with Tim4fun.  I would also like an epic game(modeled after MoM mostly).  I would go one step further than MoM tho' and have at least a few more races to begin with than MoM had.(If your trying to outdo MoM)  Also it would help give all us players who aren't modders endless replayability race options.  That was one of the highlight of MoM and allowed for its continued play even now all these years later.  Having only a handful or less races in The Ultimate Fantasy strategy game hardly seems epic to me.  Playable races I would like to see are and in no particular order-

Elves-Wood Elves, Evil Underground Elves, Good Elves, Artificer Elves, Aquatic Elves and Elemental Elves(Elves belonging to either Fire, Ice, Earth, Wind, etc.) Of course they would all have their own special abilities, bonuses and detriments as well as looks.

Dwarves-Mountain, Hill, Evil Underground, Armorer and Weaponsmith, Elemental(as Elves) and Good Dwarves

Halflings-Village, Wild, Elemental, and Rogue.  Please no evil halflings.(Save the Kender for Raven X' mod)  I think the Rogue halflings should have various hero type's as leaders.  Luck would be with them again..

Humans-Give us 5 distinct groups here with more to be modded later. Good, Evil, Elemental(guess 4 or more here alone), Chaos, Naturedwelling and Extinct Civ with lone remain city.  Guess that's 9 seperate human races.  Guess I would also be placing MoM's Barbarians in this group.

Legendary Small Folk-Pixies, Sprites, Brownies, Leprechauns, Dryads, Nyads, Nymphs, Mermaids and Satyrs.

The Big Bad Boys-Orcs(personally like the ones in Arduin Grimoire that have the big dripping acid swords), Giants get some special treatment.  There should be the elemental versions that are just tough to fight against but have fewer numbers.  I would also have Stone, Cloud, Storm and Rock Giants.  Gnolls, Ogres, Trolls(add Elemental types for the Trolls also), Gargoyles, Harpies, Troglodytes(water movement) and Manta Lords(also deadly water movement)

We are talking Epic here right...?

Oops, err, and I like complex; not generic for this particular title.  Rather it didn't launch as soon as I wish(yesterdayX10)but fully great in form and play.(even almost bug free, well )

"Make it epic" is an epic example of meaningless game-biz jargon, and I say that despite having great admiration for dev leaders like Sid Meir, Will Wright (pre-Spore?), and Brad Wardell. It's a sloppy way of avoiding both the differences and dependencies between scale and complexity.

But let's take a moment to do some fake intellectual history. The roots of the complaint in the OP go all the way back to the ancient days when AD&D was new and many folks were still defending old-book/box-set rules as a form of revealed truth. If you're going to give some characters bonuses just because of their parentage ('race'), shouldn't they also get penalties to 'keep it balanced?' Thus were born perversions like the level limits for non-human characters and forbidding human multi-class characters. Those perversions prospered alongside obssessions with otherness that left many of us mostly or completely uninterested in role-playing a 'mere human.'

I was in the no-mere-human-for-me crowd back then, so I have a strong empathy for the let-me-play-as-Lizard-Queen crowd here on the Elemental boards. But I remain convinced that the whole question is best postponed until we see roughly-finished versions of the canon factions. The real underlying concerns here are about variety and replayability. PC games are highly plastic and back stories have an infinite potential for variety. Can't we at least wait until we see fairly mature Capitar, Kraxis, et al, before we condemn the base game for being too limiting?

Sure. You fund Stardock now, right? All the extra art assests so different from each other that doesn't allow reutilization, the coding to differenticate all of them properly, all the whole testing to try to balance minimally all of them, release date pushed back (this one isn't necessarily bad)...

Yeah. Epic.

Well I was going along with the op's view and assuming(and I was assuming epic as in Illiad by Homer epic.  Meaning "epic " in a good way.  As far as art, resources, etc I am sure Stardock will decide what they can and can't afford.  I have also been spending a little time reading here and I saw that Stardock for the moment would not be including Elves and some other fantasy races which I just assume should be standard in most fantasy gaming.  However the game turns out, whether strongly influenced by one game or other, if its fun I'll be playing.  It also sounds like several mods are being created that will be fun also.

Yeah same here, but imho modding in new races won't be easy...just don't forget...those new races must have new 3D models. Not only that, but those models must have animations as well. [Death, swinging with a weapon etc. etc.] Oh and let's don't forget about armors and weapons. The existing armor "models" for example won't work with the new creature models.

It's very expensive. It's also harder to code in some parts (the unit designer).

Probably you will never get it because everyone has a different idea of what's a "worthy spiritual successor" of MoM.

It has different races with different abilities, it's simply that visually they are all humans.

Thanks for the update Boogie! Could you tell us a few words about the "difficulty" of modding in new races? We will have to create new armor models for the new races I suppose? IE: The armors won't be "dynamic", so they won't fit properly visually on a very different creature body compared to the original humanoid models. Am I correct? Also what about the creature animations? How many different animation sequences do we have to create / new creature model? [Dying, Attacking with a 1H/2H weapon, Shooting with a ranged weapon, etc. etc.]

I agree for the most part with the original poster, but I too would be satisfied if the Human and Fallen factions were both mechanically, and asthetically, very different.  If all we end up seeing is a set of monarchies with "you get +5 to your food and you get +5 to your weapons" I'll be very disappointed.  I love stardock, but I didn't get much of the right feel when it came to Galactic Civilizations--- until the last expansion, which did it quite brilliantly. 

I'd like the races not only to have differences in their productivity, but also their lifestyle: some rely on large cities, others perhaps on large seafaring "flotilla colonies" or desert "sledges."  Some civilizations might have tight knit city states where the sovereign and nobles are directly involved in public life, and others composed of detached, enigmatic wizards who live holed up in their towers, pulling strings from behind the scenes.  I want to see this flavor translate into real gameplay features. 

I started out thinking no orcs, trolls, etc ala MoM would really hamper this game. But I am seeing if there is not just bonuses but unique research and significant differences then the factions could cover everything important.

I agree with the original post. The reasons for why a lot of people would prefer several races have been spelled out elsewhere on the forum already (e.g. unique abilities like flying, playing more D&D-like campaigns, i.a.  ...).

To my knowledge SD has not yet really given any one reason why it's all human based. Without any inside info, I would guess it could be linked to the graphics in the battle screen: much more difficult to include a wide variety of races ... How do you do with cavalry, equipment etc when races look completely different ... So, in that case it would just be a developer challenge holdingback a very basic part of the game (too bad in that case, I'm sure the brilliant team could solve the race issue on the graphics). But by now I guess it's also a problem of the background material and story (most of it already written I guess, including only humans and fallen ...) But also here it would be possible to widen the scope if SD really wanted.

Like indicated in the post, if we want Elemental to be successful (really successful) it shouldn't be made to please just this Forum audience, which is hardly populated only by the average players. Best would be if the fans (on the Forum) would be happy, while the game is still reaching out to a wide audience of other gamers too (less interested). Including a lot of options, like several races, seems to be a very good step in that direction. The average player won't spend weeks on modding.

If we end up with only humans anyway, I think the game could still be really good but would then plead for maximum variety among the factions, maximum flexibility, lot of optional stuff etc, to let you, as far as possible, pretend that you can actually play different races. The factions will be key for this!

I think races that are functionally different are very important to character customization and replayability.

MoM had:

A race the flies (goes over water, moves faster)

A race that water walks (try lizard men with small continents, very different)

A race where everyone gets a magic ranged attack (dark elves)

Klackons (don't get along but the best builders)

high elves (the one normal race with magic production from population)

Gnolls (a non-myrror race with a lot more hps, making them great fighters, but limited in tech trees)

halflings (best food production expansion and the amazing slingers)

Trolls (your entire team can get wiped out except your hero and they all regen at the end of the fight)

This is just a few examples of how different the races could be. I would often build my character and strategies around these racial differences. If this new game doesn't include stuff like this I will be very dissapointed.

Mike 'Krazy' Donais

Let's do not forget about the races in AoW 2. - SM. That game was awesome because of the very different races/units -> tactics & strategies + the amazing tactical combat.

A Song of Ice and Fire has no Elves or Dwarves or blah blah blah and is more epic than just about every other fantasy series ever made. Believe me, you can do a lot with just humans. 

I don't expect race design in Elemental to be like creature design in Spore (which was actually good) but it would be nice to have some way to alter already existing models: take the ears of the human model and make them pointy, make themodel more slim and you have your elves; then change skin colour to #333333 and hair colour to #fafafa and you get drows. But as mentioned before, even if we were to have be able to do things like that, what happens with armours? Would those race design screens include options to check the armours in the models? And shape change them to fit the new models? So if I create a dwarf with their "usual beer belly", I need to change the armours they are suppose to use to prevent clipping an dall that (not even sure of the Havoc effects on it).

So... would be possible to get a sneak peek (in worst case scenario) of what are the plans on that part of the game? Some rough sketches as "screens" are more than enough.

If I remember correctly, Brad said somewhere that the story was one major part in why they only have two races, but he also said that every faction will play very differently compared to the others

To be honest, I don't understand this complaining about 'Only two races' when we have 12 different factions. The important part is that every faction plays differently, who cares if they look the same? If we have a faction which is very close to nature and another faction that lives mostly underground and is good at mining, don't we have elves and dwarves (more or less...)?

Thank you for the update BoogieBac.  By the way most fantasy books including George R. R. Martins have "fantastical" creatures in them.  The Corum series was just 1 in a group of books that were Michael Moorcock's "Eternal Champion" series and guess what?  They too had fantasy creatures.  And since were talking fantasy books I better not forget to mention J. R. R. Tolkiens books(probably the best fantasy literature ever written with the possible exceptions being the Illiad or Odyssey or some other civilizations seminal writings) and they all had fantasy creatures in them.  So I am happy to hear that we can create our own creatures at start of game or as a mod tool.  It also great that we will have statistical controls as well.  As most in this forum have pointed out the exceptional strategy elements by have different races(flying creature civ's, water based creature civ's) besides just the factional differences(humans).

I've only finished the first book, and I am in complete agreement with you. I loves me my Tolkien elves, perhaps more than the average nerd. But Mr. Martin's work proves that you don't need to fart around with 'races' to get a great fantasy story.

There are already "fantastical" creatures in the beta builds (trolls and giant spiders), just not as playable factions. The main frustration that Tim4fun and others have is that they want to play as trolls or whatever, not just encounter them on the map. I'm fully ready to join that griping camp if it turns out that the canon factions vary only in a minor cosmetic details and simple bonuses for things like combat or building improvements. But I played through the progress from base GC2 to Twilight of the Arnor and saw the Starodock devs do seriously good work on what, to me, was one of the biggest weaknesses of the GalCiv series--the lack of real diversity in playable factions.