I like a lot of the proposed changes I have been hearing about, but the specialist things still kind of bothers me if they are a global resource. I understand the idea is kind of like a modern community labor force, where all the specialists can easily move from one city to another where they are needed. Yet, that kind of labor force requires a large quantity of highly developed social structures to function, and as any one who has to commute to work knows, it doesn't necessarily function well. Now, since this is a fantasy world and ultimately just a video game, I understand that some realities are non-issues, but I am wondering if a global pool could actually further promote city spam.

Consider for a moment the following, if a city with 1 house at size 1 produces x specialists for 1 food, then y of these cities will produce x*y specialist for y food. now if a size 2 city produces 2x specialists and costs 2 food ( guessing), then there is still an incentive to city spam, as y food will still only produce x*y specialists but you also the time penalty of developing cities to that level. Since it stands to reason that the growth of specialists in a city is actually based upon size, we can assume that a lvl 2 city produces more than 2x specialists, and therefore the food specialist ratio would be better with a lot of large cities. Yet, if we assume the specialist to be global, it stands to reason that a city improvement would cost both specialist and population, or else, we would find that a single lvl 5 city producing something like 10x specialists would be able to fuel a massive production movement in many lvl 2 cities. This would then again give incentives to city spam around a central huge city.

From my perspective, adding a specialist as a global resource would almost create a strategic incentive to specialize a few key cities while still spamming meaningless outposts. Yet, I have faith that this mechanic will be moddable and we will be able to tune this resource to a balance that suits us. Additionally, I think that yall at Stardock will also continue to tune these changes to make the best experience for the players.

the changes sound promising, thanks for the update.  I am particularly happy to see the elemental spell books get moved to research options, I've been hoping for that change.

weapons and amour re-balancing would be excellent, really hope that makes it in too.

The more I have thought about specialists as a global resource, the more worried I have gotten.

If I understand this correctly:

- 'specialists' is really just a name for your population.

- Specialists can be assigned to buildings to work in them

- Specialists are a global resource and can assigned to any city, ie: commuters.

So....

1) How will this impact housing? If specialists are global, I can assign them to any city, even one where there is no housing for them to live in? So they really are 'commuting.' This seems really silly to me and very counter-intuitive.

2) Since they are global, how will this impact the loss of population? Lets say I have 100 specialists assigned to various buildings around my Empire. An enemy comes and sacks my biggest city which has 80 specialists / people. I thus lose the population / specialists within that city. So...they are gone, and thus can't 'commute' to my other cities to work...but I still have some population in my other smaller cities, so I can still cover some buildings...will the game just randomly pull some specialists out of my buildings to represent the ones that were lost when I lost the big city? This seems really confusing, and again counter-intuitive.

I love the idea of needing population to run buildings, but I hate the idea of that population not being tied to a city. It just seems silly to me that we are looking at treating population as this abstract resource that can be magically moved around our entire empire at will. A big city should be able to run more buildings because it is a big city with a big population. A small city should be limited in what it can do because it is small.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, but the whole 'commuter' thing has really thrown me. I feel like this is an overly complicated (or perhaps overly simplistic depending on how you look at it) way of doing things. I think each city should have its own population, and these 'specialists' can be used to work in buildings in that city. This seems far more natural and intuitive.

EDIT: Also, I recommend that we ditch the 'Specialists' title and just call them 'Citizens' or 'Population' or whatever. Specialists implies that they are, y'know, special, when in fact this is the title for every single citizen in the game. Might keep things from getting confusing.

IIRC it was changed to BETA start in the first November week to give Kael some insight into how Stardock works.

These changes sounds like a very good start to reinventing Elemental I havent played for a while now as the game is pretty slow on my comp and it is not very fun to play yet. 1.1 gives me faith. A few more updates like this and we leave CIV V in the dust (I want CIV V to succeed as well ofcourse)

Nice post Goontrooper.

I see things a little differently with regards the population changes.

Imagine a feudal society where each fief/holding/village/town/city etc has to give over 1 in every 10 workers to the feudal lord. Some will become soldiers and expand or protect the frontiers. Some will become bureaucrats and help manage the various towns. It will be up to the lord to allocate the roles to these people under his/her direct control.

They wouldn't live in one city and then commute. They would merely report to and then be assigned from the palace. 90% of the working population would still be toiling away in their towns and villages.

If a town was conquered it would just mean that the pool of available people would be less - or even in the negative. But the assigned people would still exist except the bureaucrats that were used in the building of the conquered town.

I agree that the term 'Specialists' is a little 'Europa Universalis' and should be called something different. It is not the population as such because it is just a small portion of the total number of citizens so 'population' is also wrong. Maybe 'Vassals' would be more appropriate because in medieval times it was the vassals who were drafted into the lords service.

Every citizen that joins your Kingdom/Empire will be added to your specialist count on the top resource bar.

Buildings will now require a number of specialists to get up and running, now instead of robots you need people to operate that Blacksmith  

OK, that's it, I will not play the basic game anymore. Too much details. I'll stick to modding.

Yeah, I agree with this, but let's wait and see. Maybe it will work.

Much to the contrary. It was already been said that INT will determine which spells the caster will have access to so the high-int casters get the big guns.

The only change (and that's a good one) is that you can't just stop researching spells when you have the one damage spell you'll ever want to use. You will want bigger ones...

Except that magic base damage is higher than weapon base damage, and magic largely (entirely?) ignores armor. So while your weapons are scaling up, so are your opponents' armors resulting in a curve that is less steep for weapon damage than it might at fist seem. Also magic damage will scale up as you unlock higher level spells. Lower level spells will still be used because they have lower mana costs and sometimes you don't need to do a ton of damage. In 1.09 I use magic heavily and flame dart is by far my most used spell because it only costs 2 mana and I frequently find myself only needing to do 5-10 damage to finish off a unit.

 Hey Toby, wonderful news you have going there. I bought elemental even after reading the reviews because I love Stardock as a game developer and wish for them to continue producing wonderful games!

I do have a question though, I was wondering when the faction creator would get some love, customizability is my favourite part of any game... With Elemental I currently feel that you guys skimmed over it, the colors dont display anywhere, have nondescript names, and you can have problems trying to construct certain units if you didn't pick a race!

Hope to see more updates for this kickass game soon-Later!

Hi Toby, thanks for introducing yourself. I hope you don't mind being grilled in your introduction thread, but there is a lot of important stuff in your post.

I'm happy to see that two out of three features that need a lot of improvement are being addressed in v1.1 (Magic and city building, third being combat), but to be honest I'm not very enthused by the proposed changes.

I like that population is becoming more important, but I don't see how the specialist system will improve the game. As far as I can see it's main benefits are:
1) You can instantly see how much 'free' (unoccupied) population you have left.
2) By becoming a global resource, your population is more mobile (possibly speeding up the game by not having to wait on people moving into your city before you can build something).

The first part is a non-issue for me. If you want to build something, you can just look at a city to see how much free population it has left, or you can go to the city list to check all your cities at once. The second part, IMO, just dumbs the game down. All your other resources are already global, making population global as well is not only silly and completely unrealistic ('commutes' between cities used to be days, not the few hours it takes now), it also removes any restrictions on what you can build where. There is nothing stopping you from building a lot of buildings in a brand new outpost on the other side of the map, unless some (arbitrary) building limits are reintroduced. Sure, some of the more interesting buildings can only be build in higher level towns that have large populations. But (with the number of specialists being equal to the number of citizens), what is the point of separating your population from a building location if you're then going to require a certain number of people living in the city before you can build certain things? How is that better than just requiring a number of unoccupied people in a town before you can build something? If relatively few people are required for 'simple' resource producing structures, and a larger amount for the 'high level' buildings that give a % increase, you'll end up with pretty much the same end result, small towns that produces small amounts of resources and large cities that produce large amounts, without the silly intermediate step of global specialists.

As for the changes in the magic system, I'm with Annatar on the character stats influence on spell effects. Having certain requirements for casting a spell is fine, but having them always do the same amount of damage will probably result in the same spells being cast every time.

What I am more concerned about however, if I understand it correctly, is that your population will now also be able to produce mana through buildings. Not only does this not fit the lore, but it will also make it more difficult for a player with a small kingdom who focuses on magic to keep up with bigger kingdoms. No matter how much he specialises a city for magic production, he'll lose on the magic front to a player that builds two cities focused on magic, and eventually to a player that builds lots of cities with a few magic structures in it. I'm not saying everything should be completely balanced, but it will make the 'small kingdom' strategy even more difficult or impossible.

If this is implemented, magic will just become another global resource. I don't mind that mana is stored globally, it is the only resource it makes sense for lore-wise in fact. But if it's produced like any other resource it won't feel special anymore. What I'm afraid of is that the game will turn into focussing your population to produce 1 global resource to win the game, doesn't really matter if it is gildar, weapons, diplomatic clout, or magic. What I'm trying to say is that different systems interacting in different ways make a game interesting, not a single system that is used over and over again. To quote JSJ101;