The fun I was missing in the original Elemental release was diversity in what you could play.  You could play humans, bald humans, green-tinted humans, or greyish humans, and you could build a shiny city for them to live in or a crappy city for them to live in with the exact same bonuses.  There was nothing fundamentally game-changing like a race of immortal crystal golem people who live underground and don't need food but have to harvest the babies of living races for their souls.  Or nomadic undead who only increase their own populations through raising the dead from battles.  It would be pretty sweet to play a zombie race who goes around infecting whole cities of their opponents for their own use!

It's a fantasy game.  It needs to be weirder and more fantastic.

There were 3 things that I found fun in MoM (and MoO 2) that I'm waiting on for Elemental.

Diverse playing options. Each race offering a unique experience, plus each spell type (fire, air, etc) also changing that experience in a unique way. Unfortunately, the difference between each seems rather shallow right now, I am sure this will improve over time and with mods.

Fun tactical battles. This is a combination of mechanics and AI... interesting spells and non-spell abilities are crucial. Having a good balance between early units and end game units is also important. Right now this is the #1 reason I haven't bought EWoM.

Something to do besides win. Having cool units to unlock, artifacts that you can find or create, and powerful monsters that guard them. I think that the questing and adventuring system in Elemental has potential, but you need to crank it up a notch. For example, you can have each map start with a handful of really powerful items, a sword that ignores defense, a shield that makes you immune to ranged attacks, etc, and guard them with dragons, elementals, powerful champions, etc. You can even tie these into high level quests... just make there be something exciting to do before deciding to pull the trigger and wipe out the AI.

To be honest I have no idea what it would require for me to enjoy playing the game. I'll just let SD decided that for me and wait and check what the next big patch / expansion does and see if that was enough. And continue doing this until the game is good. I don't see any other way of figuring it out.

The layout is of no consequence as long as the AI is acting like the women of the Batley Townswomen's Guild.

This man is obviously of superior intelligence. And by that, I mean that I happen to agree with him.

A medieval warfare game where heavy cavalry provides no bonus for charging? Hell, fix only this (and flanking) and I'd love the game.

A long time ago, there was an idea floating around with Updated Weapons to have an Updated Mounts mod to add a charge ability to the all the mounts. The general idea was going to be to cut the units move cost by like 75% and give a huge attack bonus( like 100%) as well as a huge defense debuff. If people would like to see something like this, I can probably put it together in about an hour.

It's nice to see that Elemental is still getting some serious attention, and that the problems with it are recognized and attempts are being made to address them in future versions. I may not have gotten exactly what I wanted with Elemental, but it's certainly making progress toward something I could recommend to friends. Unlike, for example, GTA IV which while being a triple A title from a well known developer, has received more attention from third parties when it comes to addressing things like a lack of antialiasing (or even the same sort of postprocessing used on the Xbox version of the game). While I was one of the lucky few who could play GTA IV as it shipped, after the patch it was rendered unplayable and I had to patch because I purchased the game on Steam. Then, when they further patched the game, it seems they rendered my previous saves unplayable so when I upgraded my video card (not for performance issues - the new patch decided that the settings that worked fine before the patch were too high for my video card [8800 GTS 320] to handle and decided that instead of even trying to render at those settings it would do me a favor and not render textures for pesky things like buildings, streets, etc) I came back to find I had to replay the game from the begining, and couldn't even make it look as nice as I know it could with just a little simple AA. Rockstar hasn't patched the game in ages, they don't care because they fumbled early and didn't get as many PC sales as they had hoped for. Despite the fact that saying "screw putting effort into formatting the game for the PC, we don't sell many copies on it anyway" is self fulfilling prophecy, that's exactly what Rockstar clearly intended to do with a title that was descended from a lineage of PC games.

While Elemental suffered from something similar to GTA IV early on (lackluster reviews leading to sales below expectations), at least Stardock is giving it the attention it deserves. Rockstar didn't so much as apologize for their carelessness in porting a game that worked alright on the Xbox 360 (essentially a low end SFF PC), and rendering it into a game that didn't look any better and would hardly function on vast numbers of high end PCs when it was released. Of course, lest it affect sales, efforts were made to address issues with the PS3 version of the game, and apologies were made, since they're a part of the market that Rockstar actually cares about.

I suppose I went off on a tangent, but having just upgraded my video card and being unable to force AA in GTA IV without using the ENB third party modification is fresh on my mind and I can see some parallels between the two titles at release.

Uff this game lacks a lot to be fun.

I tried to play 1.19a few days ago and in addition to game being really laggy on my monster machine if not in cloth map mode, it lacks most fun things MoM had like different factions, fun spells, fun champion abilities, item crafting, huge fun maps to explore, troops that are not all humanoids. It lacks functional things SotSE had like a good research screen that makes sense and lets you plan your tech path (Sword of the Stars is the perfect example of a great research system and UI, Civilization 5 is another for UI at least but even older Civ games have a better system then Elemental).

I better not mention tactical combat (or the lack of one; even MoM had it better; maybe I was just spoiled by the games like HoM&M). Also I hope to see the dynasty system work in the future with sovereign growing old and dying while children taking over.

I think a lot of people would be better off just buying King Arthur instead. Or wait for the sequel which is due this year sometime. Elemental may be really good some day, but I can't see it happening any time soon. Have to see what the expansion does.

I think that's how most people here feel. I also think that's why they went with the expansion, so they can almost re-engineer the whole game.