[delacroix]

I'll probably write some impressions once Elemental comes out and I've had a few days to see how it plays. I'm a bit hesitant with the game from what I've seen in the beta, but it's still the beta so it's not fair to judge quite yet. I liked a couple of the attributes of the game, but there's some notable glaring shortfalls that need to be addressed too before I'd recommend it to anyone. (eg. combat has been bare-bones so far, so no one other than the devs has seen how it'll play out with unit special abilities or all the graphical effects). Stability has been poor for me as of beta 4 as well, so hopefully they do end up ironing out the crashes by release.

I agree with poster above about the factions; they all look bland and kind of the same.. just tan-skinned humanoids, gothic humanoids, some red-skinned humanoid and a blue-skinned humanoid. The concept art looked a lot more stylistic and seemed to accentuate differences in the appearance of the races, but the in-game units just don't have an appealing look so far.

Also, the faction capabilities are poorly documented. For example this is the strength and weaknesses of one of the factions, Umber, in beta 4:
Strength- caravans build roads faster
Weakness- -20% tech knowledge

That's all. I don't know about anyone else, but I can't say I'm excited about building roads faster as a racial/faction ability. I'd hope the factions will be a lot more unique than that. I'd prefer to see factions to be as varied as the races of Master of Magic, or Dominions, or Heroes of Might & Magic town types versus difference among Civilization games. At least Civilization had the excuse that it isn't a fanstay-era game and all Civs are human so they couldn't have factions that regenerate, or fly, so I can be a bit more lenient with a game like Civ having similar faction capabilities.