This will be long. You have been warned.
First, I want to heartily thank Brad Wardell, Derek Paxton, and all at Stardock for sticking to their guns and producing this game. The first Elemental was not worth the money I paid for it in preorder. This edition, while it has its flaws, has provided entertainment value for me and may yet evolve into something very good indeed. It has been a hard road for the development team, I'm sure, but you kept your reputation intact. Hopefully the economic payoff will follow.
Now, having played E:FE for a while, this is how I see what you've produced:
FE's best quality, by a country mile, is its commitment to overcoming some of the worst pathologies of 4x TBS. FE makes some important mechanical changes that really improve the genre.
Almost all grand-strategic 4x games suffer from a key flaw, in that the most basic game mechanics (how far units can move in a turn, how many units can be built, distance between starting capitals, etc.) are not designed for a particular map scale. Instead, the designers more-or-less invariably allow the end user to select map size, resource density, and so forth, and do not bother to tailor the game mechanics to any particular setting. The result is conflicts between the mechanics and whatever settings the user actually chooses. Civ is typical: the smaller the map, the greater likelihood of factions dying to zerg-rushes, and the larger the map, the more the game gets bogged down in micromanagement. There is no sweet spot.
While FE allows you to freely choose world gen settings like any other 4x, it definitely has certain settings in mind (and the backstory encourages you to go in those directions). This game wants you to play with (to use the Civ terminology) barbarians maxed and research speed at normal. Unit movement and city spacing are set up so that zerg rushing is minimized.
As a consequence, the pacing of the game is much more consistent, and the design guards against zerging, tech snowballing, and micromanagement hell. You can lose in the early game, but it is very hard for anyone to win in the early game (assuming competent AI... more on that later). There are a number of design decisions working in concert here.
- Large numbers of barbarians slowing down exploration.
- Limited settlement sites, which when combined with all the barbs more-or-less eliminates the need to city spam.
- A relatively short tech tree with individual techs defined quite broadly, which fits the post-apocalyptic theme (recovering lost knowledge, rather than researching new ideas), but which also makes the tech tree a rate limiter instead of a self-reinforcing dominance engine.
- Automatic road building at certain techs, which keeps your empire knitted together as it grows with no effort on the player's part.
- Tech trading cleverly redefined so that the research you have already done defines how much you have to offer, but the resource you get back in the exchange does not automatically vault you up the tree.
- Low unit density, which keeps the economics simpler and reduces the bookkeeping for the player.
I read the review at Rock Paper Shotgun, where the guy talked about how he was confused by the way the game had him clearing out territory, eliminating map icons by completing quests, and thereby leading him to feel like he wasn't accomplishing anything. I read that and thought, "He's stuck in the Civ mindset." Anyone who has played a lot of 4x has been conditioned to think in terms of building, improving, altering, researching, constantly doing, doing, doing every turn. FE turns that all on its head. You start in a wilderness you have to fight to control, and as you gain control over it, distractions drop away and it becomes progressively easier to manage your empire and fight wars against other factions. In most any incarnation of Civilization, a declaration of war against a sizeable opposing faction was always a massive headache, what with all those units to build and coordinate across large distances to fight a meatgrinder conflict that could span hundreds of turns. In FE, by the time you're gearing up for a significant fight like that, you have established control over your territory, you know what units will be available to you (and that they won't be made obsolescent in the middle of the fight by tech advances), and you can put your armies on the border in a few turns, ready to engage in decisive battles.
As far as I'm concerned, this is a major achievement. So many 4x games have been produced in the last 20 years, and so few lessons learned. Mechanically, this game is such a breath of fresh air.
Now, the rest of the game's features vary widely in quality. I'm guessing this is true simply because getting the above-listed mechanics working is hard enough in its own right. The good news is, the fundamental engine is solid. The bad news is, that engine can get hidden under a lot of ineffective, or even bad, chrome.
In no particular order:
- While the backstory is helpful in encouraging the user to play with the settings that maximize the game's mechanical synergies, it otherwise remains bland and uncompelling. Some of this can be marked down to the way that the factions are (by design) built with lego blocks, but most of it is just poor writing.
- The quests, equipment, and monsters are all very clearly taken out of a basic toolbox, and will be reliant on further development and/or modding if they are to succeed in the role they need to play, namely of providing a sense of emergent narrative. I think this is crucial to the success of the series, because emergent narrative is by far the biggest benefit to be had from incorporating "RPG" elements into a 4x structure.
- The tactical combat module is so basic as to be vestigial. No tactial unit placement, no delaying a unit's move in the turn order, no modifiers for terrain, no range penalties... it might as well be the system from Warlords. Needs work to be considered an asset.
- The lack of a tactical exploration mode for dungeons, while no doubt helpful from a coding standpoint, does rather severely limit the "story" aspect of the quest system.
- The AI has a ways to go. On the strategic map, AI sovs/champs ignore goodie huts, fail to clear weak barbs from their territory, leave easily-reached settlement sites untouched, etc., etc. The tactical AI is better, but then it would have to be, since the tactical module is so simple... and yet the game's core tactical combat experience is watching a darkling shaman cast "shrink" on the same unit several times in succession while other units advance on it and pound it into dust.
- Magic doesn't suffer from the lego-block assembly problem as much as some other areas, but it is nonetheless somewhat bland.
If Stardock follows through on its earlier stated intention to make a trilogy of this, I have high hopes that this game could become something very special by version 3. The tacitcal combat needs a lot of work, and both the developers and modders will have to put a huge amount of effort into breathing life into the narrative elements, but the basic design has a lot of merit. I'll close by thanking the developers again, for trying to take the 4x game in a different and better direction. There's good stuff going on here. Keep at it.
