Some thoughts after a few play-throughs...

from Elemental Forums

Some random thoughts after a few play-throughs:

  • The 1.06 patch has made the game more playable, but there are still many crazy things going on.
  • I was a huge MoM fan, and after playing through a couple extended games, Elemental does have a lot of the same "feel" as MoM, which is pretty good. Some things are better, some are worse.
    • [GOOD] Diplomacy is actually meaningful, and you can win through diplomacy.
      • [GOOD] I like the realism that, in trading, if another faction is flush with some commodity (say materials) they will value it at zero.
      • [BUT] Many times I try to engage in diplomacy and the 'numbers' make it impossible. A comparably-sized faction will value a non-aggression pact from me at 150, and from themselves at 1500.  If they already have materials and metal, then unless I'm willing to fork over 1350G, it's not gonna happen.  And guess what - I'm rarely in a position to fork over 1350G.
      • [BUG?] I saw once where it was 150-140 on one turn, and 150-1500 after loading a game, maybe?
    • [GOOD] The little city icons make it a little easier to figure out what's going on in your empire and which cities need attention, but I still don't fully understand how to read them. MoM, in the late-game, is just endlessly executing your build plan on 150 different cities and micromanaging their growth.
      • [BUT] I still have a lot of city micromanagement to do in the late-game here. If there is a way that the game is alerting me that I've hit the current pop cap on a city and need to go over there and build huts or houses or whatever, I haven't figured out what it is yet. Turns are "expensive" in Elemental, and so if you miss 10 turns where you could have been growing your population, that's a big problem.
    • [GOOD] There's a separate tech tree and magic tree. More choices, more ways to play the game.
    • [GOOD] The AI isn't as lousy or aggressive.
    • [BAD] In MoM, you didn't have an avatar/player character like the Sovereign. You were hidden away up in your tower in your capital city. One effect of this is that you could expend your mana to cast spells to aid in any battle. Weakly-defended city going to get overrun? Not so fast - let's summon up a Phantom Beast and turn the tide of battle. In Elemental, you have to have a magic user physically present to use magic, and magic users are few and far between (you have to weaken one to make another).  That sort of sucks.
    • [BAD] The spells in MoM were really, really diverse. Playing the game with lots of Life books was fundamentally different than playing with Sorcery or Chaos or Nature or Death. Life was about buffing and building, for the turtlers among us. Sorcery was about control of magic. Chaos was about aggression. Nature was about control of the environment. Death was about...well, undead armies. The spells in Elemental just seem bland and repetitive. Each of the elements has some directed attacks (versions of magic missile), some AoE, a couple identical, weak buffs, and maybe some terrain modification spells.
      • [BAD] Mana is extraordinarily precious in Elemental because it takes so damn long to regenerate.  So I am forced to save it for a few magic missle/AoE spells; using a battlefield buff or environmental control is a massive waste and I see no reason to do it.  Ergo: I cast few spells, mostly boring ones, and this is un-fun.
      • [BAD] Even in the late-game when I control 90% of the map and have Arcane things in every city and buffed them considerably with +X% bonuses, spell research is so slow that I am just reaching level 10 and have learned maybe 5-6 spells along the way.
      • [BAD] Regular units of any reasonable power level late in the game (like 8 Dukes or whatever) take a friggin' eternity to grow.  What is it, 30 turns? 24 with a barracks?  As I said above, turns in Elemental are "expensive," especially in the late game where a lot is going on, and 24 turns is an eternity. In MoM, a fully-buffed city with Fighters Guild/War College could produce useful, experienced units in many fewer turns - Halfling Slingers in 3-4, Paladins in 6-8. With a 24-30 turn lead time I have to be thinking so far ahead that I can't really make strategic decisions or bring defenses to an emergent threat.
        • One thing I also liked in MoM was the abiity to spend gold to finish a long build early. Finishing a build that has just gotten started was super-expensive; shaving a few turns off at the end was pretty cheap. This way, if I really wanted that 8-stack RIGHT NOW I could get it, though for a lot of Gold.
    • [BUG] Funnily enough, MoM and Elemental have the same problems in the late game - things get extremely slow and the game gets crashy. Yay for autosaves. I have plenty of horsepower to run this game; something is leaking. I have an nVidia card.  It seems to be related to the size of the land and the number of things going on, because I can play the first many hundred turns without these problems at all.
    • [BAD] Champions are pretty useless except if you imbue them, and then they're only marginally less useless. 
    • [BAD?] I miss Myrror. I get the impression that there is supposed to be something like that in Elemental with the Fallen races/other continent? I haven't encountered it in my games yet. Maybe this one is just me.
  • [BUG?] The nodes don't work right in tactical combat, as many others have pointed out. My spellbook says that my Chain Lightning should do 300+ damage; it misses about half the dudes and hits the rest for 1-10. Fail.
  • [BUG/FEATURE?] The ability to equip as many rings/amulets as you want allows my Sovereign to be actually useful in the late game.  I paired him up with some fairly decent stacks and we went on a Torin-the-Chosen-like tour of the map last night.  That was particularly fun, although I feel bad that I had to basically exploit the game to do it.
  • [UI] I can't talk to even level 1 champions early in the game; I think it's because I haven't researched enough adventure tech (but nothing in the game explains that to me). Since I was trying to avoid the wilderness being full of gigantic creatures I can't defeat, I saved researching adventure until late in the game.
    • [BAD] As such, I couldn't recruit a wife, and I didn't really have anybody to imbue. I might rethink this in later plays - imbuing others seems to be the only way to realistically overcome the nasty mana shortage in the game (since all casters regen mana at the same rate, you can get N mana per turn (where N is the number of casters you have) instead of 1 for just your Sovereign.
  • [BUG?] I researched 'teleport friends' late in the game because I wanted to be able to move stacks of armies that were not co-located with my sovereign. I then realized that it doesn't do that - instead, it does exactly the same thing as Teleport, only it took me 8 zillion turns to research and costs 15 mana instead of 5. Fail.
  • [BUG] In the late-game slowdown, everything goes back to full speed if I zoom out to the cloth map.  The cloth map comes in very handy in late game, by the way.  One side effect of the slowness is that I will put a unit into auto (not tactical) combat and it will take like a minute to actually do the combat if I'm zoomed in; this prevents me from clicking "next-turn." If I zoom out to the cloth map, the combat happens instantly.
  • [BUG?] Auto-combat and tactical combat have wildly different results, and not just because the shards work in auto-combat and don't work in tactical combat. Even in contests against non-magical users, battles I never would have had a ghost's chance in hell of winning in tactical combat I win about 75% of the time in auto-combat.
    • [BAD] Since I do so much better in auto-combat, I find myself doing auto-combat a lot. If I have my Sovereign in auto-combat, it will use his mana. Judiciously, but still - after several battles I've gone from 75 mana to 2, and it's going to take me 73 turns (read: the rest of the game) not doing any auto-combat with him to get it back.
  • [BUG] City HUDs/banners get randomized often, showing the wrong city banner/HUD on both my and enemy cities. Others have reported this.
  • [BAD] The stuff available at the store (weapons, armor for champions) has a way-too-low bang:buck ratio. Given the choice between giving Janusk some padded greaves and building an 8-stack of Royal Guards for the same money, guess what I'm going to pick.
  • [UI/BAD] As I research military technology, the game offers me some new standard units I can build. The problem is that it eventually offers me 6 different units that, as far as I can tell, are identical except for their names and pictures. Their stats and costs are identical. There seems to be no difference whatsoever between Royal Guards and Wardens, for example, and there are four other unit types that are the same.
  • [UI] If I'm trying to get a bunch of units to walk to a faraway city and I want to give them a target that's two or three screens away, I generally just click the units, click-and-drag my way to the destination, and then right-click. However, about 80% of the time I inadvertently click something else that results in me deselecting the units I want to move, and when I right-click the only indication that I did not actually give the order to those units is that no [X] appears on the ground.  Then I have to go back three screens, find the unit, and try again.
  • [UI] In the trading window in diplomacy, if I offer 50 gold and then don't explicitly hit the OK button (and instead click on what I want the other guy to offer), it cancels my offer. It took me like an hour to figure out why I could never get something to show up in both columns.
  • [BAD] Bummer that you can only put the really good advancements (e.g., Palace) in one city, even though the requirements are so high for them (level 4-5 city that takes you all game to grow).
  • [BUG?] My Torin-the-Chosen-like Sovereign, plus army, went around doing all the quests after we maximally researched Adventure. The one where you get the giant dragon was pretty awesome. There was another high-level quest where there was some painting on the ceiling of a Level 4 Ancient Temple that led to another square on the board.  I went there, and the destination just disappeared and nothing else happened.
    • [BUG/UI?] Inns that give quests don't disappear after their quests are over; I think they're useless after that, though. They mostly get in the way of my city-building.
    • [UI] I know the UI sort of shows you the general area where your quest destinations are, but if you miss it or you can't see it right away, you have to play grope-the-cloth-map to try to find them.
  • [BUG] When multi-figure units enter cities, or exist when you save and load the game, or they go to the bathroom, or whatever, they randomly get messed up badly. Figures disappear, at least. I don't know if their HP changes. Others have mentioned this.
  • [BAD] Later in the game, multi-figure units (4-pack/8-pack/12-pack) dominate, especially in auto-combat. I still have yet to figure out how they do this, though. Or how they work at all, really. In tactical combat they are especially useless: they will attack some decently-leveled 1-figure unit with 30HP and miss, or do 3 damage. The 1 figure unit will then strike back for 15HP damage on my 8-pack of soldiers(?) Multi-packs have 60-120HP, and if they lose half of that I just chalk it up to them being disposable, because the odds of them lasting another 60 turns to heal are pretty low. Combined with the fact that they get royally screwed up by the above bug, I just try to keep a few 8-packs in reserve.  In MoM, if you gave them a few turns, they would regenerate their HP and all their figures, which was kind of nice.
  • [BALANCE?] The tech trees differ substantially in depth. Diplomacy and Magic are pretty shallow; adventure is medium, civilization is deep, and military (or whatever it's called) is super-deep, to the point that even in a 1000+ turn game I still haven't hit the bottom.
    • Is there a substantial difference between blunt weapons and bladed weapons and such?  I haven't used the Unit Creator, so I research these things and am offered (as noted above) a number of identical-statted units that may in fact use different weapons. If they do, I'm not sure why I would pick one or the other, or research both, except for cosmetics.
  • [UI] I have read the post on how adventure technologies work, but honestly it's just confusing for me. I understand that researching various ones 1) creates new goodie huts and resources around the map; 2) allows me to enter higher-level goodie huts; 3) allows me to talk to higher-level champions and recruit them; and 4) causes the creation of higher-level wild monsters.  I am not sure which technologies do what; I can be on like Level 7 Adventuring but still not be able to enter a Level 3 goodie hut. Also, I think the other factions researching Adventure can also affect my game, because I played a game where I deliberately did not level adventure until later, and I kept seeing higher-level champions, plus more resources and higher-level goodie huts randomly appearing.  I believe Janusk also informed me that there were higher level monsters roaming around. I couldn't use any of these except the new resources, but they existed.  It was very confusing for me at first that researching tech would cause new resources to spawn; in MoM the resources and huts are there at the beginning of the game, although some will be too high level for you to make use of right away. That made more sense to me.
  • [UI] When some rampaging monster walks over one of your resources, like a farm, and destroys it, you get a message that this has happened ("Our Northwest such-and-such was just destroyed.") It's a big map; I have no idea which one that was.  I like the red (!); those are helpful, but you don't seem to get those if you have a resource improvement that got destroyed. Additionally, the wandering monsters seem pretty fickle about whether to stomp your resources or not; it's relatively rare and pretty annoying when it happens. Units are also way too expensive to station on every resource, so I end up just rebuilding things and occasionally sending out a stack to kill the marauders.
  • [UI/??] Love roads, not so much how they are inextricably linked with caravans. Also, what is with the defenseless micro-caravans running on the road all the time after I set up a trade route? The enemy factions seem to mostly ignore them but rampaging marauders will kill them from time to time. Do I have to re-build them? I don't know.
  • [BALANCE?] Food is awfully precious for a market (which does +25% Gold) to use 1 of.  Also, what is up with this +20%, +25% stuff? Most of my cities, unless they are sitting on two gold mines, put out like 1-2G per turn. Do I actually get 1.25 or 2.50G? Not worth it for permanently consuming 1 food.  Irrigation systems also give you +25% food, when most cities are only putting out 1-2 food. Do I get 1.25 food?
  • [GOOD/UI?] My reading of how the huts & houses behave is that huts provide room for 25 people and houses for 50.  But they seem to actually provide room for a lot more people than that.  I think about 4-5 huts will get your city to level 4?  That seems about right and the city status display is pretty clear about how much housing you have vs. how much population it can hold, but that plus the descriptions are a little confusing.
  • [UI/BALANCE?] I didn't understand about the "minor factions" thing.  Those are kind of interesting, actually, but I could not understand until I read the forums why some of my captured cities I could level up substantially and some I could only level up to 1.
  • [AI] I captured a city once and my food supply went straight to pot.  It took me a while to figure out why: the AI had built like 20 huts there!  I demoed most of them and it was all good.   This was pre-1.06.
  • [UI/BALANCE?] When I take over an enemy city, it is often full of cool-looking buildings that seem to do cool stuff, but they don't have basic buildings like Study and Arcane Lab, which I then build. Are these Fallen buildings? Do I get their benefit even though I didn't/can't build them? I've only played Capitar so far.
  • [RFE] I liked the ability in MoM to trade spells; it might be even more important here since spells are too expensive to research many of them on your own.
  • [GOOD] The Dynasty system seems pretty interesting.
    • [BUT] I have yet to be able to make use of it. It seems that the best way to do it is to research enough adventure early in the game to talk to low-level girls, and then marry one right away.  I have had a number of children with them, but they are young for so long that I've only had one game where they got old enough to actually marry off. And unfortunately I had 5 boys in a row, and my remaining opponents were either childless or had all boys also. They seem to have passed Proposition 8 in Elementia, so that was pretty useless for me.

 

elemental
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Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

[GOOD] The little city icons make it a little easier to figure out what's going on in your empire and which cities need attention, but I still don't fully understand how to read them.

 

Blue dots next to it = buildings

Red dots next to it = units inside

Yellow border = empty build queue

Two progress bars below the icon - upper for buildings, lower for units being built by the city

 

That's it i think :)

 

[BAD] Even in the late-game when I control 90% of the map and have Arcane things in every city and buffed them considerably with +X% bonuses, spell research is so slow that I am just reaching level 10 and have learned maybe 5-6 spells along the way.

 

Make sure you build the arcane things in a city that has a temple resource near it. Those temples are so damn rare i played several games before finally finding one. They are the equivalent of lost libraries for arcane research, but if you find one temple for 10 libraries you can count yourself lucky.

 

[BAD] Champions are pretty useless except if you imbue them, and then they're only marginally less useless.

There was a thread about it. After reading it, just for the heck of it i made a sovereign with no spellbooks with pumped melee stats (called him conan :p)

He ended up with like 160 attack and 120-ish defense, with just under 40 hitpoints. Then i parked him in a city because his son matured and funny enough, has 'inherited' almost 30 essence stat, and +6 per round mana/health regen. So i bought him top equipment, and went on a solo monster killing spree, putting every level-up into intelligence. He wa pretty unstoppable, until he finally died on second step of the Quest of Mastery(a bug i believe, spider cast web on him and he never un-webbed till he was dead). Funny story that :p

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

k1

Great summary of any number of minor annoyances that add up to a big headache.  Some design/UI clarity would go a long way to alleviating these issues.

Fences - Organize your desktop icons today!
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting stax77, reply 1

Blue dots next to it = buildings

Red dots next to it = units inside

Yellow border = empty build queue

Two progress bars below the icon - upper for buildings, lower for units being built by the city

Thanks for this. I realize I could look it up, but 1) I'm lazy and 2) the fact that I would have to go look it up means the game UI isn't educating me itself.

This is better situational awareness than MoM, but it's a far cry from as good as it could be. A game like this is ALL ABOUT situational awareness of various sorts, and I'm betting that different players want different kinds. Maybe the UI modding community will come up with some good solutions, much like the WoW UI modding community has.

In MoM, you got situational awareness through constant modal notifications (i.e., you were notified of everything and it stopped gameplay when you were).  You then responded through micromanagement.  By the time you had 50+ cities in the endgame, every single turn was 5-10 notifications: "Such-and-such city has built a Granary! What now?" (A marketplace, duh!) That's too much info and too much decisionmaking. The only alternative was to enable the Grand Vizier, which had a stupid and non-customizable build plan and was either managing all your building or none of it.

In Elemental, the HUD tells me more: how many units, whether the build queue is empty, and so on. I also get non-modal notifications in the form of the little tags in the upper-right (which I have to click on like 40 times to see, and then I have to click on the empty parent tag to dismiss that too). That's a little better, but now I often get too little information. If I forget to click on all the little tags and events, I might miss important ones. The HUD tells me that the build queue for a city is empty, but maybe that city is built out and no, I don't really need a watchtower there.

Some more random thoughts about this:

  • There are some things I want to be interrupted about and I want right in front of my face:
    • A new resource is available for building (the red (!) has gone a long way in helping here).
    • A city has reached its pop cap, or is about to (since it will take ~3 turns to build more housing).
    • You just finished researching a new technology that grants you a new building (School, maybe) and now all your old, built-out cities need one.
    • There is some idle city missing a basic improvement (+1 research, +1 gold, +1 arcane) that I want in every city.
    • A city just finished building something important and you need to decide what to do now, including let it idle.
  • Maybe other people want to be notified about different things, so more customizability would be very helpful here.
  • I like the ability to queue up several buildings so I don't have to micromanage. The problem is that queuing stuff up is on the buy-now-benefit-later plan. If I want to queue up a building that will not start construction for 20 turns, I have to fully pay for it in resources now. I understand why that is, but I'd like it if I could queue stuff without having to pay for it until it's actually going to start construction. Alternatively, customizable build plans would be nice.
    • One way to manage this would be to create a separate pool for "committed resources." Let's say I've committed to build stuff that will cost 100 gold, but I have only 80 now.  So my 80 goes into committed, and any gold I earn over the next turns also goes into committed until I hit 100 to pay for those enhancements so I don't forget and inadvertently use it for something else, like buying a useless cudgel for my sovereign.
  • One neat thing in MoM was that different cities could be built out for different purposes. This little hamlet next to the Adamantium node with the Fighter's Guild is the Slinger Factory. That epic city next to the Mithril node with the War College is the Paladin Factory. In Elemental, any city can build any kind of troops at any experience level; the only difference is that some improvements will reduce the build time from way-too-many turns to almost-way-too-many-turns.  It's a little bland.
    • One thing I found most interesting about MoM was that if you took over a city of a different race, it continued to be operated by that race, with that race's tech. If you were playing Halflings and you took over a High Men city, that was rad because they had Paladins and Engineers and all sorts of cool stuff Halflings could not build. On the other hand, if you took over a Gnoll city, that sucked because Gnolls are useless, and unfortunately your only alternative was to raze the city and lose fame. Something in between would have been nice.
Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top


  Many times I try to engage in diplomacy and the 'numbers' make it impossible. A comparably-sized faction will value a non-aggression pact from me at 150, and from themselves at 1500.  If they already have materials and metal, then unless I'm willing to fork over 1350G, it's not gonna happen.  And guess what - I'm rarely in a position to fork over 1350G.

You can gather diplomatic capital from scenic outlooks or the embassy building. It can be used instead of Gildar, and is always a 1:1 valuation (at least that I've seen).

In Elemental, you have to have a magic user physically present to use magic, and magic users are few and far between (you have to weaken one to make another).  That sort of sucks.

Your dynastic offspring will be natural spellcasters though. To be honest the problem here isn't so much the lack of magicians, but that magic is a damp squib. Limited spell casters is good in theory, it makes knowing where to deploy your limited casters an important decision. It only works however if magic is a potential tide turner in battle, at present you can get better results by equipping your sovereign with a bow than you can chucking lightning bolts around, which is silly.

[BAD] Champions are pretty useless except if you imbue them, and then they're only marginally less useless. 

They're not that bad, just don't expect them to solo an army right off the bat. Given a lord hammer and legendary plate however and you'll hit an attack and defence in the 40's before anything else is taken into account, which is enough to take on the lower level group units. I like the idea of having champions more in a supporting role than as mincing machines, it lends an epic feel to using them to hunt down enemy champions for single combat.

[UI] I can't talk to even level 1 champions early in the game; I think it's because I haven't researched enough adventure tech (but nothing in the game explains that to me). Since I was trying to avoid the wilderness being full of gigantic creatures I can't defeat, I saved researching adventure until late in the game.

You can only talk to them if you have the Gildar on hand to recruit them. If you select the NPC and then the action tab and hover over the greyed out diplomacy icon it'll tell you why they won't listen.

 That said there are some champions who are always hostile. I'm not sure if this is intentional or a bug - they have "creature" on their card so I wonder if they're supposed to be evil champions or someone just forgot to set their faction alignment properly.


I researched 'teleport friends' late in the game because I wanted to be able to move stacks of armies that were not co-located with my sovereign. I then realized that it doesn't do that - instead, it does exactly the same thing as Teleport, only it took me 8 zillion turns to research and costs 15 mana instead of 5. Fail.

There's a couple like this. I'm not sure if it's a bug or intentional - Fallen sovereigns don't start with teleport so it is necessary to research it for them.


Is there a substantial difference between blunt weapons and bladed weapons and such?  I haven't used the Unit Creator, so I research these things and am offered (as noted above) a number of identical-statted units that may in fact use different weapons. If they do, I'm not sure why I would pick one or the other, or research both, except for cosmetics.

Generally, blunt type weapons have higher damage but a combat speed penalty. Sword type weapons do lower damage but either no penalty or sometimes even a bonus to combat speed. Combat speed determines how many actions a unit gets in tactical combat. Note that most of the heavier mundane armours also penalise combat speed.

I think the other factions researching Adventure can also affect my game, because I played a game where I deliberately did not level adventure until later, and I kept seeing higher-level champions, plus more resources and higher-level goodie huts randomly appearing.  I believe Janusk also informed me that there were higher level monsters roaming around.

Yup, I think the message occurs every time an AI levels adventure - I saw references to Morrigan's dungeon at some point so I suspect it meant one of the Fallen factions had researched Morrigan's notes.

 For the effect you need to read the tech description in the window. There's basically three trees though and they're obvious for the Kingdoms - Recruit spawns and allows you to recruit higher level champions, the explore (Lost Maps) reveals new resources, and the final (whose initial tech I can't remember - it's the dungeon delving one) increases your quest and notable level. Both the resources and the quest level techs spawn more powerful creatures. Not sure if the recruit tree does.

[UI/??] Love roads, not so much how they are inextricably linked with caravans. Also, what is with the defenseless micro-caravans running on the road all the time after I set up a trade route? The enemy factions seem to mostly ignore them but rampaging marauders will kill them from time to time. Do I have to re-build them? I don't know.

Yup, as it tells you in the pop up, if they're wiped out the caravan is destroyed. The road remains, but you won't be trading along it. You need to build a caravan and send it along the road to restart the trade route.

 Also if you click on those caravans it tells you what you're trading and the bonus it gives.

[BALANCE?] Food is awfully precious for a market (which does +25% Gold) to use 1 of.  Also, what is up with this +20%, +25% stuff? Most of my cities, unless they are sitting on two gold mines, put out like 1-2G per turn. Do I actually get 1.25 or 2.50G? Not worth it for permanently consuming 1 food.  Irrigation systems also give you +25% food, when most cities are only putting out 1-2 food. Do I get 1.25 food?

As I understand it, it adds all the resources generated together, then applies the multiplier. So if you have a mine which gives 5 gold, and a merchant which gives 1 gold, you'll put out 6 gold. If you build a market it will add 25% of that, or an extra 2 gold. It's useful because anything which creates additional gold output increases the bonus. With a single gold mine, merchant, palace and building the gold generators like the market you can be hitting 40 Gildar from a single city once you add the +% buildings.

[UI/BALANCE?] When I take over an enemy city, it is often full of cool-looking buildings that seem to do cool stuff, but they don't have basic buildings like Study and Arcane Lab, which I then build. Are these Fallen buildings? Do I get their benefit even though I didn't/can't build them? I've only played Capitar so far.

Fallen have similar buildings, for example they get a money changer rather than a merchant. Not sure if you still benefit as a Kingdom though.

[BUT] I have yet to be able to make use of it. It seems that the best way to do it is to research enough adventure early in the game to talk to low-level girls, and then marry one right away.  I have had a number of children with them, but they are young for so long that I've only had one game where they got old enough to actually marry off. And unfortunately I had 5 boys in a row, and my remaining opponents were either childless or had all boys also. They seem to have passed Proposition 8 in Elementia, so that was pretty useless for me.

Heh, I got three daughters and a single son, so ... The only thing to remember is that the children will tend to inherit the traits of your spouse, so if you marry a farmer all your kids will also grant +20% food production to a city too. So you can tailor your dynasty to boosting an economic area, or look for one of the adventurers with a useful special ability and try for that.

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Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

[UI] I can't talk to even level 1 champions early in the game; I think it's because I haven't researched enough adventure tech (but nothing in the game explains that to me). Since I was trying to avoid the wilderness being full of gigantic creatures I can't defeat, I saved researching adventure until late in the game.

The only time I haven't been able to talk to champions is because I don't have enough money to hire them.  You can select the champion, then select "actions" then click on the grayed out handshake icon.  That will tell you how much money you need.  I usually start with 5 charisma, so a level 1 will be expensive for me - maybe 50 g. 

[BAD] Champions are pretty useless except if you imbue them, and then they're only marginally less useless.

I find the ones that buff particularly useful.  Farmers are great.  Merchants pay for themselves after awhile then add to the treasury every turn.