I saw a post a while ago where frogboy pointed out some potential feature of Elemental AI might not be "fun".  For a moment this morning, I wondered about this statement...   What features are there that make a game fun, and how do you spend time and effort to effectively discover those features?  The answer is probably "your mileage will vary".  Some people instantly love a certain game, which is immediately boring to others.

Many many many many years ago, I was introduced to perversions of chess.  Some people liked to play it where if you took a certain piece, like a pawn, the pawn would blow up, and take out all other pieces in a 1 square radius.  I was too young and conservative to ever try such a game - I was more interested in becoming a good player of the game with the normal rules, than to try this out.

Years later a friend drew me a chess board that was distorted and overlaid on a cylinder, with the board edges "sewn" together to form a continuous board, such that rooks could go infinitely left or infinitely right without encountering any boundary.  We played it a few times - it was novel.  I never quite could get my head around it.

All this to wonder just how "pervert-able" Elemental is, (or is going to be when it's more stable).  

For example, currently there's some discussion over "stacks of doom" whether or not to have them.  Is this moddable?  Can every unit be retooled to occupy a square exclusively, so that some units will stack, while others won't?  [I'm not asking "would that be a good idea", only "is it moddable?"]

Same with unit movement, with regard to the "squares versus hexes" discussion: can unit movement capabilities be modded such that every unit could only move in 6 directions rather than 8 (effectively changing the whole map).