Elemental: War of Magic Preview

Another hands-on preview of Stardock’s Elemental: War of Magic is available over at Game Central, courtesy of the game’s showing at the 2009 Penny Arcade Expo.

Not only is magic a way to win, there is also a family tree system of sovereignty. The way it basically works is you arrange marriages between sons and daughters across multiple kingdoms. What this entails is, you are the true leader to your kingdom and of those whom are married to your kin. This mechanic could make some matches very intriguing; imagine you played the game as a diplomat, one that hardly resorted to violence, and your opponent was a ruthless barbarian, who took over kingdoms by force. And let’s say he takes out the ruler of a kingdom in which you have an heir. Suddenly, you own that kingdom’s entire military force along with your own, so it’s bad news for that barbarian.

There is indeed one more way to achieve yourself victory in an Elemental game, and one I thought was particularly interesting and am curious to see how it plays out: quests. Role-playing game-like quests. To get quests, one of your units would have to trigger a quest by walking into that quest’s tile. We weren’t informed of what sorts of quests would entail, but what we do know is if a player completes a certain number of quests, they win the game. I’m looking forward to seeing what kinds of quests would be in the game, and as to what game could be most comparable to (King’s Bounty’s story quests, Sins of a Solar Empire’s kill X amount of enemies quests, Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword’s build certain units quests, etc.)