New to Stardock games, I tried Gal Civ way back but found the atmosphere of MOO/2 more to my liking.

I don't fault those who find Stardock games appealing, just as I expect to not be faulted for voicing my preferences <smiley> as one size does not fit all when it comes to games!

Things that I do like are: unit design (although due to balancing issues exposes AI weakness even more); tactical combat (although there are vastly different damage throughput vs letting combat auto-resolve); the dynasty aspect of marriage, progeny;  the ability to quest; equipping your units. I like that Stardock has a track record of supporting games long after they are released.

I don't like that this game was shipped with such a large amount of immediate support needed  I hold any $50 game up to higher standards than I would say a $30 game. I don't expect Eschalon to peg cross-fired GPUs much in the same manner I expect a Blizzard title that is $60 to be polished and ready to play for hours as soon as it is installed, as well as to include subtle nuance programming touches that make me think 'ooh nice touch'!

The thing that puts me off in Elemental to begin with is the races. Call elves 'elf' not mancer, etc. Why do the different races all look like man? They look like them both in portraits and on the zoomed in map. There is not enough coding done to set one race apart from another. So much could have been done here that wasn't to flesh these out: race specific spells; more race specific abilities; race specific tilesets/UI color palettes, music, sound effects etc.

Suggestion: Let players rename races, factions and allegiances in game options.

Suggestion: Add more diversity to races via spells, abilities, units, tiles, etc.

Do away with naming a sandbox game and the opening book cinematic telling me some random backstory with my champion's name pasted in for the protagonist. Instead, do all the subtle nuance programming touches that game companies used to do to give each new sandbox game some feeling of distinction.

Suggestion: For sandbox games have different music, different map tilesets, different creatures that thematically make sense for that tileset, different lists of random names pulled from for cities/heroes, different subsets of random event possibilities etc. for each new game.

 The technology trees are already stale and i've only played a few days. In it's current state, there are 2 or 3 civ techs to grab, a few more in war, then zerg with your best stack, rinse repeat. Diplomacy needs to be fleshed out a lot more than current to be meaningful/worthwhile pursuit tech tree wise). The Adventure tree seems to actually penalize the player in making the roaming monsters grow stronger. Magic tree would probably be a lot more lucrative if shards actually did something of benefit.

Suggestion: Give technology lots of balance and redesign consideration(s)

Tactical combat, in particular, seems to have a completely different set of damage calculations done regarding shards than auto-resolve. This should not be the case.

The multiplicatve nature of modifiers for units, spells, city development and tech advances will make long-term balance tweaking quite challenging for Stardock. Not going to suggest anything as this is one area Stardock has a decent record of eventually getting right.

The game engine is not my cup of tea. I wish it was just the cloth map view constantly and that zooming it would stick with the clothmap tileset as opposed to some clunky 3D rendered mess if red-clay earth and pastel towns. Not going to suggest anything as many man hours were logged on zoomed in view and I have the option to not zoom in!

Suggestion: Add some sound to re-enforcing you selected a unit, city, town, resource, etc.

Suggestion: Add more information to UI. Maybe even simple and detailed views which explain how stats/modifiers are adding up.

Suggestion: Revamp path-finding code

It is difficult to tell when a turn ends, and I often feel I am being cheated of movement if I don't move each and every one of my armies manually every turn.

Suggestion: Units should make a sound on selecting them with mouse and another sound on movement.

Suggestion: End turn should make a sound. There should be the option to have a nag screen pop up if a city, unit, research etc. is idle at end of turn

Too much is left to luck (resource/quest/lost item placement, wandering hero/monster level, auto-resolve where an 80 combat rating hero can be defeated by a 9 combat rating stack of wolves).

Suggestion: Add checks to resource placement on initial map generation to even out some placements.

The stability of the game overall is poor on a wide variety of system configurations. Suggestion: Fix it!

I do not need to speak on the poorness of the campaign, and I cannot speak to multiplayer as feature is not yet implemented.

Nitpick: I also do not see the need to separate factions and allegiances. The amount of benefit this adds to diversifying gameplay options is not worth the cost of initial confusion in my opinion. If sovereign = man then player leads men end;