sounds like a cool idea for an expansion/ sequel.

There is a flow switch in the xml that decides how often a lair spawns new units. No expansion needed. You could just turn up the default value and then map size would naturally put factions in the way of neutral monster growth because we would kill the ones next to us. On larger maps, the empty areas would fill up with vast armies of uncoordinated tribes, rip for the conquering. So setting monster density would then determine how quickly they grew in number and how difficult the war would be.

I may just mod this in for my next game and report about it.

 Faction differentiation.I never seen such dull factions in a fantasy game.Look at Illwinter's games and how they make those little sprites and factions come alive.

Ya faction variation. Now in order of importance in my book,

1. Faction Variation

2. City Management

3. AI

4. Tactical Battles

5. More Spells

6. Quests and Random Events

7. Performance and Stability

I voted for city management because, right now, cities are remarkably bland with no real character or sense of life.  They need a lot of work to feel like a fun mechanic.  However, I think everything on the list still needs a lot of work.  Top four for me:

1) City management - see above.

2) Tactical battles - right now, they feel less like battles and more like back alley brawls (or, even worse, a throwaway mini-game).  Where are the tactics?  Where is the art of maneuver?  The clash of steel on steel?  The breaking of morale? 

3) Faction Differentiation:  Nice progress here, but I still would like some starker differences.

4)Random Events:  Haven't seen any?

I voted faction differentiation but City management was my second equal choice.

This would help to have more monsters I guess (and would probably add much variety to the late game, as mid-late game there might actually be large numbers of monsters) ...

But the Neutral Strategic AI is just borked right now. I released Waerloga the Dragon lord, and instead of trying to capture cities and establish his own faction ... he just sort of sat there.

Eventually I could have killed 1 dragon at a time until he was finally dead. (would have probably taken about 6 or 7 armies of full knights, + possibly some extra armies of zombies to soften him before hand) ...

I mean, even if I just sat 1 tile away from him (directly adjacent to him) he would still just sit there.

He spawned next to one of my cities, and could have easily taken it, and perhaps another ... if he tried.

But what the guy was talking about wasn't just more monsters ... it was monsters you could do diplomacy with. It was intrigue between different monster groups (Butchermen vs Trolls vs Spiders vs the Pack Drakes) ... it was having each neutral beast-type of some intelligence act as a mini-faction once it reached a certain 'critical mass'.

It was an idea of a living world (with character), not just a mass of monsters.

(still, a vigorous and growing land filled with monsters might be nice to try out)

-> There is a small level of wildland growth as it is, but currently its too slow to be much of a threat on normal settings ... especially with beasts abandoning their lairs (especially elementals ... Bears and Spiders do a half-way decent job at guarding lairs, but elementals really suck at it for some reason)

I'm sure that somewhere Frogboy said that the real enemies are the opposite factions and that "monsters" are "annoyances". Not that he cannot change his mind.

Its complicated. Ultimately the Factions should be the real danger because of "better strategic AI" the ability to build, maintain, and improve cities, and of course all that juicy MANA!!!

Even a deadly army of pack drakes backed by a few fire breathers would eventually crumble to a united onslaught by a magical empire.

Still, its something that should have the potential for danger at any point in the game I think, not just as early game stepping stones.

Although .... this is probably just a different setting, or a different game/expansion that would cause this.

Its not my primary focus/concern though. Monsters as they are would be fine for Gold/Launch imho (other than LAIR guarding, better LAIRS in general- aka multi levels, and possibly Text Based adventuring ... which has everything to do with the Neutral Faction).

The only thing I REALLY want is for the Shadow Demons (from the Shadow Gate spell) and Waerloga's dragon army to spawn more as factions than as an army that does nothing.

^-those two epic end-game things are the only stuff I'd really want changed (as far as Neutral faction is concerned) for Launch/gold.

However, I'd still rate priority on Waerloga and the Shadow demons as only a 15 or a 20.

For me, Faction Differentiation is still a strong 98 or higher, and better AI is a steady 97 or lower.

---> If its true that "pioneer armies' are due to the enemy factions not having enough unit designs, then DESIGN TEAM BETTER GET ON THAT! I'd label that as a 75 importance as its a mix of AI (97) and Tactical Battles (45)

On the topic of monster spawning:

Apparently increasing the world difficulty level will increase the rate at which lairs spawn new monsters. The values just need to be tweaked so that on normal a monster army spawns every 10 turns. On Challenging it should be 5 turns and on ridiculous it should be every turn with very high health levels. I would prefer the Monster Density slider to increase the spawn rate and defense radius of all lairs. On Challenging like minded tribal level neutrals like wildings and ogres should team up if left alone in far away area. The empty space is what I am mostly concerned about. Act II shouldn't mean an end to Monsters. Some places should be kept remote by blocking the way there with mountains or dragons.

RE: Wintersong

Act I is all about scouting the world and carving out a home for your people. The primary enemy is the world. 

Act II is expansion to scouted resources and overcoming the dangers of the wild. The primary enemy is the world. A secondary enemy might be first contact with new factions. 

Act III is the exploitation and utilization of those resources to win the game. The primary enemy is other factions. A secondary enemy might be extremely powerful world elements introduced in the endgame in various ways. 

I was actually about to start a new Poll like I promised i would do back when i did the First poll.

But then Stardock took it on.  ( I voted for city management BTW )

Do you guys think i should still do an Unofficial poll along side?  It did have more options, the possibility to propose new categories and people had 3 votes instead of one so maybe its still worthwhile. If you guys would care about it, I would be happy to start a poll similar to the first one i did back then for 0.77.

Where to focus on? 

Tactical battles!

Tactical battles!!

Tactical battles!!!

That's the area the game lacks the most and on top of it at least fixable by modders. Even as the majority votes on Faction differentiation - modders could do it just as easily. 

But the current state of tactical combat is really not that good (compared to other similar games). 

Quite a few core mechanics aren't well worked out. To name a few: uselessness of dexterity, the extreme nature of dodge and critical strikes (low probability and huge effect in one action - not a good pairing in a strategy game), the over-emphasis of striking first, the horrible oversimplified "Paper-Rock-Scissors" Balance approach (it works in non-tactical games like galciv but not for tactical combat games), most traits and equipment lacking clear tactical purpose and leveling issues (no level-caps..., some stats rise others don't) 

Another problem is: any change on the combat mechanics have to be taught to the AI or otherwise we won't have much fun battling it. And the longer StarDocks postpones the changes to make tactical combat interesting the more difficult it will be to adjust the existing AI code to it.

Compared to that actual faction differentiation can also happen quite late in the development cycle.

Stability and performance shouldn't really be in that poll.  You have to attend to them, even if no one votes for them.  Releasing something that even has a 1% crash rate will likely cause a PR nightmare.  Same thing with performance, with a higher cutoff number.  So, without those in the poll, I'd say city management next.

I agree with your first statement, but are you serious? There is not going to be any "PR nightmare" from a crash rate of 1%.

@ Xadie ... I think that Tactical Battles currently 'feel' weak because of the strategic weaknesses inherent in Beta 2.

Currently I am playing a game with all "Challenging" AIs, and I used one of my Custom combos as a leader.

The custom combo uses default templates + the units I designed for him (I like this! :))

Therefore, I am facing a Magnar IV with VERY high power due to mob spam.

Basically he and I are about double all the other AIs in power ratings ... and its very early in the game (our 40s to 50ish power compared to their power in the 20s)

I didn't take Endless horde for this game, so my units are infinitely more expensive ...

I did however take Lucky and Decalon. Decalon seems to be of some help, although given the circumstances I would have been MUCH better off with Endless horde rather than Lucky.

My vote:

- Faction differentiation:

1. buildings: all factions have to have a unique buildingstyle - with this engine it's childplay to make new building modells, i don't understand why have missed this opportunity this game so far

2. units: the armors could represent the ethnic differetiation as well - it would be cool if you could distinguish between nations by looking at the armors what the units are wearing.

So I would like to see nations with their own artstyle. The world of Elemental is nice, but I feel the nations plain. The culture needs some flavour.

At EWoM I didn't want to play with Capitar after Gilden (e.g.). There was minimal difference between them and I hade to manage cities and unites with the same looks. And some initial differentiation between nations will fade in the middle and late gameplay, but the differentiation of artstyle remains.

I love the game so far, but if you play on a big map with a lot of opponents I start to get the dreaded "out of memory" crash.  Like with the first version of Elemental, it happens all the time.  Loading saves, saving.   Triggers also include fighting monsters in the wilds (for some reason bears are a problem) sometimes just turn to turn crashes. 

Think about what 1% crash rate means, Progress.  One time out of every hundred someone who owns the software tries to use it, it crashes.  Let's say there's 100,000 units of a piece of software sold.  Let's say each of those users tries to use the software 3 times a week (a really low number).  At a one percent crash rate, that means there's 3000 crashes a week.  If even one percent of those users get on a message board and complain about the stability of the product, that means 30 posts a week in the first few weeks of the software release of some very unhappy customer talking trash about your product.  Think about what that would look like on a webstie on your product, and how many posts it takes to make your product look bad, and start to affect sales.  I'm not talking about trolls and flame posters, these are legitimate complaints about real problems with your product showing up in the first weeks of its release.  Yes, I think 1% is a PR problem.  But, this isn't my industry and sales and PR isn't my world, so if I'm way off base here, maybe you could explain where my error is?

Crashes are not evenly distributed. I haven't gotten a crash in the last 1000 turns. Some of you are getting them on every play session. So if 1% is all crashy, the devs can fix the configuration problems for those comps after release with little to nothing heard about it. I am sure there are devs working on your crashes until release though. Still, this is why I say gamers need to buy the most purchased hardware and software over the cheapest or highest performing options. XP 64 is kind of a bad choice for a gaming orientated computer. 

I am planning on building a new windows 7 64bit with an 8 layer CPU for the release. I want to be able to have immense maps.

First of all, thanks for letting me in on the Beta. My first taste of Elemental.

I usually get a crash every couple hours. My system is pretty blazing though so it doesn't even bother me (default map size). Ive got win 7 intel i5-2500k oc'd to 3.5ghz Load times and game start-up takes seconds, just like loading an Excel worksheet (just a small exaggeration)

Not sure if this has been mentioned already, but... I feel that the implementations of vassals is a must for this game and there should be an incentive to make someone a vassal. My games seem to always end up with me getting whooped or rolling through everybody else (only dependent on difficulty setting). And just as there is an incentive to make vassals, the vassals should have the potential/ power to overthrow over time.

Also, I feel the attacking of capitals should spawn more units, and not just militia.

Didn't vote because I want to see more work on the core mechanics such as the discrepancy between city income and item prices, lack of options for focusing on economy/growth early game, sparsity of early game buildings, general pointless-ness of food techs/buildings early game, etc. That didn't seem to be an option in the poll.

I build cities in a direction to reach a patch of forest so I can build a lumber mill.

I build cities to block off the ability to walk around it, limiting access to part of the map.

I build cities to touch resources in the immediate vicinity, this will extend the city wall around them. They then can't be separately destroyed.

I extend cities along transportation routes to make travel faster. Crossing a city takes no time.

I'm not sure we are playing the same game.

Except in those cases where the army stubbornly refuses to go through the city and goes around instead.

alright it's better than a hat customization program.

I would like to see the maps more refined and more resources distributed.

I would also like to see the option to make more then 1 - 2 cities per Large map. It seems after the first city I can get another one if I am lucky about 15 tiles away and usually only 2-3 tiles allow for the new city.