Elemental: Reforged

"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." Stardock has fooled me on Elemental four times. I wanted to love this game. I've played Stardock games for literally decades. I happily use their productivity software. I played the living crap out of every earlier version of Elemental despite the bugs and making my reasonable PC then wheeze. I even "forgave" them when they sold off their Steam competitor, Impulse, leading to me losing every game I had there. (And you better believe when they did that, I was too young and poor to be able to afford to replace the keys.) I decided to give Brad and team a chance on all their promises that this would finally be a version of Elemental that came through on its promises. All the features of the previous three rehashes of the same game together, and more. Pre-bought this version and even bought the new DLC! And yet again. Total mess. Estimates on relative unit strength are completely broken, you can take your "Epic" party to fight a "Medium" foe and end up wiped out on both AI auto-resolve and doing the battle yourself. Or the opposite, a medium or strong force cleans the floor in an apparently unwinnable battle. (What appears to be) radical RNG. Playing this, the thing that reminded me most of the original Elemental was when I was playing the same battle for a third time, and of course then the game crashed. The original came out in 2010 (I think?) with huge promises, unplayable bugs, and features way behind the times and the guidance. This one comes out no better - at a time when we have so much more choice for AA/AAA fantasy 4X, all kinds of indie 4X and TBS innovation, even a remake of Elemental's original inspiration game that is way better than this. Let's not forget they're putting actual artists out of work by using AI to upscale the graphics - to result in graphics less charming than the original's and even more behind the times. Somehow what maybe bugs me most is that after all this, Brad decided to do audio narration of all the help files. Could that time for Brad and every support staffer not have been better used actually improving the game? I just don't know how this game can have a "Mostly Positive" right now unless every employee on Object Desktop et. al is being obliged to leave a Steam review. The basic failures of the game are just not subjective. Guys, give me my money back.

** Don't let you fool by the dev comment below. A damage reduction attempt because the reviews went haywire. They speak volumes. Dev tries to play a strawman on this review by picking a balancing topic and trying to "rule out" the imbalance and bug feast they have fabricated with that one fish alone. Review limit disallows me to put in words gently how stupid that one topic was. Note: Some of the "nice" users, had their "nice" comments removed. They keep the game bad and alive and made initial review look better. The dev decided to make a snowflake move and ban me in the forums, after I stopped posting there for a while. Banning for a review. Insulting me in the "reason" section. Has his emotions not under control and tells me to get a life (removed it) ** While reading it, remember, 1 DLC out after release. Context: This game is being developed over around 16 years and has been sold as a finished game 3(+1) times under different names. - Elemental: War of Magic - Elemental: Fallen Enchantress - Elemental: Sorcerer King** **spin-of that tried to refine the failures from previous one, this one failed hard - Elemental Reforged (feeds from the previous 3 games) They fixed: visual glitches and slow-downs that began after playing the game longer. They forced you to restart the game regularly to make it run smoothly again or make the glitches disappear. Not needed anymore. They haven broken: almost *everything* down to every single tooltip. Balancing became worse. You blindly skill into a spells: They did not manage to add mana cost information to this day over the course of all the game versions. You skill and find out that doing 8 damage costs 100 mana, which is crazy expensive. But you can skill it early at level 4. You won't kill anything with it. There are spells that arbitrary do less damage (with not other side-effects) and cost more, than other spells. There are spells that simply make no sense. They don't want to implement certain changes to solve certain balance issues, so they will instead debate that a brick should be round and not rectangular, wasting your time. For example there are a couple of spells that increase damage proportional to your level, but the cost is instantly high & fixed. They'd have to add a feature to the game engine to scale the cost dynamically with your level as well. But they won't tell you that, instead they will debate that the spell is strong *later* ignoring, I never asked to make it stronger, just also useful *early* since you can skill it at level 4. As said, its like talking about whether a brick should be round or rectangular. Why should a spell do 8 damage (does not kill anything) and cost 100 mana? (crazy much for the first ~50-100 rounds). Tooltips were broken in previous bug-riddled game. They did not manage to fix them. But they have managed to break the rest of them. They did not add *useful* tooltips to skills though. An example would be to show how much resource an active skill costs before skilling it. Which is important, as should be clear from abowe balancing issue example. Some details on tooltips of buildings don't even show certain information anymore, you have to read the description and then compare stat changes in details. The game has almost *all* aspects broken that require some sort of re-calculation. For example you buff your city with a spell that's based on a resouce "radiance" and your city get one extra "radiance" later: You have to remove that or those spells and cast them again for the effect to update. Often game fails to calculate correctly. I have 0 unrest, but the city incomes are reduced by an imaginary unrest that doesn't exist. Persistent through game reloads or turns passing. Everything is thoroughly bugged down to incorrect displayed information, calculation and tooltip. You skill abilities, that increase critical hit chance or damage and then you check the sum and it does not add up at all, no matter *how* you try to calculate it and what ideads of possible calculations you put into it. I should have 80% crit chance with end-game hero skill and equipment, but tooltip shows 50% (thats not a hard cap). Some enemies get roughly crit every 2. hit, some get only once every 20 hits *consistently*. Without having any anti-crit abilities. Over and over again, not just random chance. An enemy has 58 attack (roughly = damage done) and an ability that does fire damage equal to its attack (~58). I have 20% fire resistence and constantly receive 77-88 damage. Enemy has NO elemental or magic damage bonus and no so called "swarm" bonus from surrounding me with its allies. I debuff -4 atackt on enemy. Now makes consistently 81-92 damage (more, not less). You never know, is tooltip wrong, is tooltip correct, ability buggy, is item buggy or its tooltip description? With one ability its even crazier, there are 3 numbers. Tooltip on the skill shows for example 29 damage, when targeting enemy tooltip tells enemy will receive 39 damage, at the end enemy receives 13 damage. Even reloading doesn't properly work. It does cancel certain actions that the AI did before reloading. Certain *states* in the game are not correctly reset or are reset: You end your turn, auto-save triggers not at the end of the turn, but the beginning of the next turn. However also before AI monsters move around and attack. This monsters might attack you or your cities. However, when you reload, they suddenly don't. Many skills are bugged and don't benefit from bonuses, but tooltips will show you the bonuses applied. As in previous titles, the game still can't properly show how far your army will move. It shows *green* path to where you supposedly can move them, the army starts moving, stops earlier than previously shown as reachable and the path becomes *yellow* (=out of movement points). There are other issues that amplify this issue (which btw is common in the game). When your army stopped *before* reaching the destination, next turn the game won't cycle to the army "because it has still some way to go automatically". But the army will just walk 1 out of its 3 movement points and you won't be notified that the army has movement points left, like in any other *normal* game, instead the turn will just end with 2 movement points unused. Another example of issue with this: If you had such a long movement path set, ended your turn, then an enemy army was spotted, you would maybe want to move your army other way. But some other issue forced you to reload the game. After reloading ALL your armies will instantly execute their movements. Now your option to cancel the movement has been taken by the game. How much non-sense can you add to one single feature? Stardock: YES. You have to be very cautious in the game to not accidentally use this "feature" of laying a long path, for your armies because it triggers all sort of issues I just barely outlined here. I have to cycle cautiously through all my armies before ending turn to ensure to never have any longer path set, because it causes so much troubles. LIke with the movement example, the devs have managed to develop issue-synergies. One issue works flawlessly with others to amplify annoyance. Imagine one simple feature with 5 bugs and 10 synergies with other issues? A masterwork not everyone is capable to achieve. But if you just dump one game after another without ever completing them, you craft exactly that masterwork. Often what they did felt like "recycle as cheap as possible, don't change anything to reflect it in the UI": There are invisible equipment slots, I figured out they exist only by accidentally equiping from inventory clicking the item... You could in older game see your resistences against fire and other damage types. Now you can't, because they moved things around and there was apparently no space, so they decided thats an investment to much. I've probably managed to give an insight on about 1% of the bugs this game contains...

I really liked Fallen Enchantress Legendary Heroes, but it had a lot of issues that they never fixed. I was hoping that this one would be better, but its looking like it is not. After awhile the game crashes every 7 to 10 turns, mostly at the end of the turn. There is an NPC in my current game that has a score/ranking of 20k but only has 10 cities that are all smaller than mine and it looks like its score goes up several hundred each turn and as far as I can tell there tech is behind mine. So who knows whats going on there. When the game crashes less than 1/2 the time you can send a bug report. It looks like there are other issues with how things are calculated but maybe I just do not understand what they mean by +50% to wealth when you are producing it and the number goes from 20 to 23. There are many times when you cast say fireball on the enemy and you see the numbers showing the damage that you did and then you see the fireball sail across the map and the graphic of it exploding. The only new feature that they added that annoys me is they added a new resource you have to spend to create cities and you only start with 10 and you have to also use it to bring one of your kids in the family line out as a hero. If I could get a refund I would.

I've put a ton of time into this game, and really quite love it, despite crashing many times and freezing and many issues...but only when heavily modded. Because god it is slow. It is legitimately the slowest 4X I have ever played, even on the fastest setting. But the reason I can't recommend it is the devs, and the community they create. The forums and discord are a cesspit of sycophants. Give suggestions on how to make the game more enjoyable for the sort of players who would like faster gameplay (like making the fastest setting not incredibly slow still), they will start insulting you. Point out a bug that allows your trade partners and non-agg pact factions to steal your outposts? They tell you essentially "learn to play"...when stealing resources is literally the exact opposite of non-aggression. I regret buying the DLC. Especially as almost all of the DLC data is actually in the base game files so you can literally just copy it, make your own mod and run it (as long as it isn't on steam) and have access to most of it. Which is beyond scummy. This just guaranteed I won't buy anything Stardock ever again. Edit: developer responded saying they have not seen any of this behavior. The same dev that said to another reviewer "as someone else said to you, get a life". Yeah man, this isn't it.

would be a great game if it did not crash all the time

I LOVE the original game, and this one too. However, there are far too many bugs in the game and for $30 it hasn't been worth it. *Edit - Played more of the game (30 hours more) while it still has bugs, got involved in the Discord and finding the devs very involved. Changing the review as I have high hopes for the future of this game.

I tried and tried and tried... My favorite 4x is AgeOfWonders: Planetfalls which has all the same 4x mechanics as this one. I hate to compare but everything except the RPG part (maybe) it does better. So there are npc enemies all around the map and they also get stronger with time which i think is a cool mechanic. They also have an roam/attack timer. Not once was i anything near their strength. I would even say it was impossible for me to be in that time. I played on hard or challening and there are 2-3 difficulties above. Also research feels strange. I felt like i can only go eco and then maybe later units spells whatever (whit leveling enemies and you not getting stronger because you research eco - what am i supposed to do?!). Example: At season 45-49 some random drake unit walks my region and so i try do go back with all i have (2 champions 1 summon) and they attack me and kill my only units. Then they just attack my capital boom gone. At this time i got 1.4 income - JUST 1 basic unit has an wage of 1.1 (i´m not sure any amount of them makes any difference vs the drakes) It´s not a bad game i guess but it´s impossible to play like a 4x cause you gona lose (if that makes any sense)! So as it stand i can´t recommend it and will probably not play again...

Nope, nope, nope. This one really sounded good, and the prologue, though a bit dull, was enough to keep me going. Started the second campaign scenario, and could not generate enough wealth to keep a viable force in the field. I had two gold mines, and city was producing wealth (barely), but I was still in the red. Gave up in total frustration.

Unfinished and full of bugs. This would be fine if they weren't trying to release paid DLC, or developers telling negative reviewers to "Get a life". I was willing to give this game a chance, but the behavior of the people behind it is completely unacceptable. I won't support a developer that acts like this and I regret giving them my money.

This is a really good 4X game. It combines the 4X concept with truly solid RPG mechanics and a well-crafted world. I’ll probably be playing this game for a very long time. The game can be quite challenging, but the game mechanics apply equally to all factions. In my last game, for example, an AI faction was wiped out by roaming monsters. Overall, the game runs pretty well. So far (~13 hours), I’ve had maybe 3–4 crashes, and I’d say the developers still need to work on that. I’d also like to see some of the visuals and sounds used a bit more effectively. For example, there’s an ambient “rain” sound, but visually, it’s not raining. Regardless of that, I highly recommend this game to all 4X players who like the setting and graphics and (like me) often don’t really get much out of current 4X games.