Elemental: War of Magic Q&A -- Kingdom Building, Diplomacy, and Dragons

From our early look at Elemental, it's clear that the game draws inspiration from several sources revered throughout both the fantasy and strategy universes: The Lord of the Rings, Master of Magic, Sid Meier's Civilization, and the Total War franchise. As a leader of a civilization, or a channeler, you'll grow your kingdom, establish new cities, recruit heroes to your banner, and do battle against evil. Unless you prefer to be evil, in which case you can smack the forces of good in the mouth. The game has more than a year remaining in development, but we sat down with Brad Wardell, lead designer of Elemental and president and CEO of Stardock Entertainment, to get the latest. Here's what he had to say.

GameSpot: Elemental looks to be an ambitious project, to say the least, with elements drawn from Master of Magic, Civilization, and Total War. How would you describe Elemental? What is it closest to?

Brad Wardell: It really does draw from a lot of different games. I'm more of a game player than a developer--I develop games so that I can play them (and hope others want to play them too!). I would say that Elemental will be a lot like Master of Magic and Civilization in terms of the strategic elements and a bit like the Total War series for the tactical battles.

In essence, you're building a civilization in a fantasy universe. You're founding that society that you may have played D&D or some other role-playing game in.

GS: We understand that, like in some of the other fantasy strategy games that came before it, in Elemental, you also control a character in the game that can fight in battles and aid in city management. What powers does your character have, and what are some interesting ways you can utilize him in the game?

BW: Your character has immense power that grows over time as he levels up. At the beginning of the game, you're absolutely indispensible. The world of Elemental begins with an absolutely devastated landscape, and only through life magic (or death magic, depending on how you play) can the barren world be brought back. That magic, at the start of the game, flows from you. You can only found cities in places that are no longer desolate wastelands, and you can only do that by imbuing the land with some of your essence--which, once used, is gone forever.

Over time, you can imbue some of your champions with your essence so that they can cast spells and access your global mana pool, but at the start it's just you, and if your character dies it's game over.

As the game progresses, you gain levels as your champions and you gain experience (anything that has some of your essence in it will also transfer some of its experience back to you), [so] you can become increasingly powerful. Depending on one's strategy, their character may be a titan a la Sauron at the beginning of Lord of the Rings (the movie), or if they've distributed out their essence a lot, they may not be much more than a Sorcerer King who mostly stays in the capital city.

GS: Take us through the basics of city management. What resources are at your disposal, how do you grow your kingdom and increase in military/magical might?

BW: Every city founded has a keep. The keep provides a number of basic resources for that city such as food, stone, and wood. When enough excess food is collected, the city grows. When the city grows, the player is able to add a tile to their city which can be placed in any adjacent space on the existing city. Inside of these tiles, players can build numerous buildings (a tile can hold multiple buildings) such as farms, housing, barracks, forges, temples, academies, etc.). These various buildings produce different things for the player such as military units, spell research, tech research, resource enhancement, etc.

GS: Along the same lines, while you're developing your domain, how big of a role, for instance, does economy play against military or magical development? Are you going to have to strike a balance between these areas of development for your kingdom? If so, how easily will it be to shift gears from one track to another?

BW: The economy is one of the many things a player will have to balance. In the traditional 4X strategy game, players divide resources between researching tech, building infrastructure, or building units. In Elemental, you have the added dimension of researching magic and improving your sovereign and champions.

One of the key distinctions between Elemental and what we've done before is that we want there to be multiple paths to victory that really involve exciting gameplay in them [and] are very unique from one another.

GS: We understand that hero characters can be found throughout the world of Elemental. Tell us about the different types of heroes, their roles in the game, and how you can recruit them to your cause.

BW: Around the world of Elemental are various heroes. When players find these heroes, they have all kinds of different stats that make them good at different kinds of things. So when players start to recruit heroes, they will need to look at their stats and get an idea of how they want to use them.

GS: We also understand that there will be only two factions in the base game of Elemental, despite the fact that the game is following in the footsteps of fantasy strategy games that typically offer many different types of colorful fantasy armies full of all sorts of different critters. Will we be able to see more of this sort of variety in the standard, out-of-the-box game? How will the in-game tools we've heard about let players build the armies they might be used to?

BW: There are lots of different types of creatures in the world but from a storytelling perspective, we are focusing on the Kingdom and its factions and the Empire and its factions, which are all derived from humans. The world has all kinds of creatures, ranging from dragons to goblinlike creatures and such. We wanted to avoid the temptation of having orcs, elves, and dwarves be crutches for the game's story.

Now, as you allude to, players will be able to create their own races and submit them for themselves or submit them into the game's metaverse in which all players will then potentially have access to them. Stardock itself will probably provide "non-canon" races to play as. But officially, there's only two races in the game.

GS: Victory in Elemental can be achieved in more ways than simply wiping out your enemies. Tell us about the different victory conditions in the game.

BW: The victory conditions are one of the things we've focused the most on. As a gamer, one of my pet peeves in strategy games is that nearly every path to victory involves, directly or indirectly, having the best economy/military. So when designing Elemental, we wanted to make sure there are other paths to victory that involve other distinctive resources than just that.

So first, you have the traditional military conquest mode. You also have the diplomatic victory that works much like what's in Galactic Civilizations, where if you ally with the other factions of your order (men or fallen), you win. You also have the spell of making, a powerful spell that you have to (a) research at great expense and (b) capture and hold enough shards of magic to get the mana to cast it. And lastly, you can win by completing the quest of dominion, which we'll talk a lot more about in the future.

But these four victory conditions are deceptively simple, because there's a lot more to them than what you'd normally expect. Without going into too much detail, let me give you an example:

Because so much of the game's key choices are made by the player character deciding how much of their essence to impart into their minions, you can't easily tell how powerful another player is. It's not like in GalCiv or Sins of a Solar Empire, where you see a big, honking fleet and know a particular player is going to wipe everyone out. That's because the power of armies is not obvious. One player may focus on making their player character ridiculously powerful, with relatively few champions leading armies. Another player may have tons and tons of armies. Who would win? It's not obvious.

But that's one of the parts we expect to be the most enjoyable about the game. It's not about players knowing they've got the game wrapped up in the first half hour and spending the next four hours mopping up. There are many different and subtle paths to achieving victory. The guy who cranks out eight cities in the first 20 moves will have a very weak player character for a long time (since those cities will involve taking a lot of their essence to revive the land they're on). There's just a ton of different choices for the player that are fun and interesting.

GS: Victory certainly won't be achieved without some level of bloodshed. When two forces collide on the campaign map, they will enter a three-dimensional battle map. How will tactics and strategy play into a battle, and what magical elements have you added to spice up combat? Will there be aquatic combat? Sieging?

BW: Well it probably involves bloodshed, but we're committed to making sure victory can be achieved through clever manipulation and scheming as well, without ever having to go to war at all.

But, that said, when two armies meet on the strategic map, the game will zoom in on them to display the tactical map. I should clarify that there are a lot of options on how to handle battles, from having instant resolve where two armies meet [and] one is destroyed a la GalCiv, or auto-resolve where tactical battle occurs but the AI controls both sides, to player resolved where the tactical battle shows up and the players give orders to the various companies on the map and they battle it out.

There will be naval battles, but we don't plan on them [being] tactical in nature like the land battles, as most of the action will take place on land.

With regards to taking cities, here's where things get really interesting. In Elemental, as mentioned earlier, cities don't just take up one strategic tile. They take up many, and the shape of the city is determined by where the player places new tiles. A city is only captured when the keep is taken.

Moreover, the game resources--food, stone, wood, and iron--aren't beholden to the city that has the tile on the particular resource. Rather, players can build caravans to transfer a unit of food, stone, etc. to other cities (and you see these caravans go back and forth on the map). So players can literally lay siege to a city and simply block these caravans from reaching the city and without these resources, a city could starve or be unable to grow or be unable to create weapons and so forth.

And as if that wasn't crazy enough, players can build city walls around a city or build their city in such a way that makes it easier or harder to defend (since the invader has to make it through other city tiles to the keep in order to conquer the city but can do serious harm to the city by destroying other buildings on their way).

GS: It wouldn't be a fantasy strategy game without dragons. How will these magical creatures and other sentient beasts aid you in Elemental? And should a malevolent dragon threaten your kingdom, how can you hope to defeat it?

BW: Well first, let's talk about dragons. Dragons in Elemental are a big deal. If you see a player who has two or three dragons in their army, it's over, you've lost. Dragons are not just rare, but supremely powerful. One dragon could wipe out a thousand men (and in Elemental, you'll be able to watch a dragon wipe out these men in some detail).

Dragons are neutral. They're not on your side unless you can recruit them. And they're not easy to recruit; your sovereign (your player character) might have to negotiate with them in person which, as you can imagine, is very risky, but the reward is very high.

There are a few other sentient beasts in the game, but not many. There are other beasts that can be found and trained for use in your army, but players who are expecting to build armies of unicorns in their city or whatever will be disappointed. There aren't any gryphon aviaries and such for you. It's 99 percent men versus men (or fallen). Getting a magical creature in your army is a rare but big deal.

GS: The art in Elemental is highly stylized with a cel-shaded, comic book-style appearance. Why opt for this art style?

BW: The engine is still relatively early so the lighting isn't quite done. The look we're going for isn't cel-shaded per se, but highly stylized watercolor.There's a number of different reasons for doing this. First, it's a fantasy game. We want it to have an otherworldly look. Secondly, by doing this, we can easily scale the hardware requirements. We want very old hardware to be able to not just play the game but be able to enjoy it--but we also want the game to look phenomenal on the latest ATI and Nvidia cards, and this style lends itself to lots of different subtle and interesting effects.

GS: Finally, it's no secret that you were pursuing the Master of Magic license for a fantasy strategy game, and you've obviously gone forward without it. What do you think this license would have added to what has become Elemental: War of Magic? Do you think the game would be different?

BW: Indeed, the game would have been quite different because we're really big about staying true to the spirit of the title. If we ever made, for instance, a Master of Orion 4, it would be Master of Orion and not, say, Galactic Civilizations.

In hindsight, it's probably best it worked out the way it did. Stardock wasn't nearly as well known back in 2005 or so, when we were pursuing that, so I think Elemental will be able to stand on its own. I hope/think strategy gamers trust us enough to know that we're going to take a lot of care of the game we're making. We're in this for the long haul.

GS: Thanks for your time.