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Does The Elemental 1.1 Patch Fix It?
Stardock's fantasy 4X crashed and burned when it launched in August despite seemingly being full of promise. The first major update is now available for download. How far along the road to respectability has Elemental come? The answer, sadly, is "not as far as I had hoped."
I don't mean to belittle the effort that has gone into straightening Elemental out so far, because the 1.1 version of the game does address a lot of issues. Much of the change is under the hood, though. For instance, spells now do (much more balanced) damage according to a transparent calculation. In 1.0, lightning bolts were supposed to do "more" damage as the caster's Intelligence increased, and yet inexplicably hit for zero a lot of the time. The relationships between food, prestige, population, production buildings, and city growth make way more sense now. The entire design around mana generation and spellcasting has been redone as well, and is no longer horrifically stupid.
Many of Elemental's stupidities remain, though. The difference between a good starting location and a bad one is still completely game-breaking, as founding your capital near a special resource like a lost library can triple or better your research rate for the first fifty turns or so. Defense is badly overpowered in the early game – a sand golem is all but invulnerable to early units – and nearly worthless later on as attack values continue to inflate. Tactical combat has almost no depth, as your choices are too often limited to "attack" and "attack".
If you think of Elemental as a house, it was rotten from the inside out at release with a UI that barely functioned, damage calculations that made no sense, and utterly broken balance at the high end. This 1.1 release deals primarily with the structural integrity of the beams and rafters, creating a solid framework that Stardock can hopefully build a good game around. The interior of the Elemental house, however, has yet to become anywhere you want to spend much time.
Maybe I'm too much of an optimist, but I haven't yet given up all hope for Elemental. Though version 1.1 isn't a magic bullet that fixes the game, you can catch flashes of a vision behind the design now. I look forward to downloading the next release in the hopes that it comes closer to the game it should be, even if the game doesn’t deserve a slot in my strategy rotation yet.
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