Yes, I'm the same PawelS 

You're right that it shouldn't be possible to utilize the cities of ALL races, some should be friendly to your race, and some hostile (like in AoW, where you have to migrate some cities that you capture, because you have bad relations with that race).

I think you have a good point. By allowing someone to keep other factions cities and all its benefits you are in essence diminishing the importance of your own faction and instead allowing an indirect way to make CUSTOM FACTIONS which would not be a bad idea since in the end I always find myself saying "well if I could just get a unicorn from the elf tech tree that will cover my healing and I can get an orc fighter as a damage dealer... etc" all in the name of getting my units to be just what I want. The flexibility to customize my GAME to my liking is always key for me in order to enjoy the game and have FUN.

From a Rping stand point it is just silly to see a Paladin fighting with an undead, a demon, and a black guard as it heals and casts bless etc totally opposing schools of magic and total contrary to what a paladin stands for( now I know one can rp a paladin gone evil but to keep its merits as a paladin as well??? or to see undead and demons fighting for the common good??? Well I guess all is possible as long as the game is flexible enough for those who are hard core and would be instantly upset/put-off by such to turn a switch on or off for other faction city/tech tree production/integration.

Indeed, but keep in mind that we won't have many races in EWoM vanilla.

Actully this is what I would love to do. To beable to design my own troops out of the combined races that are controlled. Now of coarse for those who don't like to micromanage (cannot understand why would not want to micromanage thier empire that is the funnest part) you would have options that you can adjust what you do or donot want to micromanage. 

Oh and if we could design our own troops please let it be as fun as the ship design of Galciv 2 (the best part of that game in my opinon.)

I do.

As do I. In some games (like Age of Wonders) the campaign is much more challenging and fun then regular scenarios since in the campaign the developers made sure to put hard challenges on the hardest difficulty while the regular scenarios may or may not be challenging.

 

However, the campaign is only good for 2 playthoughs if there's no alternative paths and such.
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Well I played the campaigns in AOW:SM and while that game is my favorite fantasy TBS to date the campaign was not all that great or challanging. I've had more fun and more challanges through player designed maps. And my AOW:SM now has well over 200 units (well actully more.)

In fact this discussion has prompted me to reload the game (AOW:SM) with all the mods I had backed up to disk from 2007. And I had forgotten how much fun that game is with the exception of the AI players not using navel units that well.

There are some updated "big" mods available @ AoW Heaven. The 3in1 pack, which combines 3 big mods is also updated [10.3.2010]

Here is the link: http://aow2.heavengames.com/downloads/showfile.php?fileid=828

I am so happy you are the same PawelS,  your contribution to the AOWSM modding scene is invaluable.   

... a 3rd idea below.

When you capture a new town, you can utilize the population if the town is of same race as yours.   But if they are foreign to your race, the population is 0.    It does not mean they are all killed, it is just that you cannot use them at all.   That also implies you cannot produce units of a foreign race.

(To recap Frogboy,  there are a few races.  For each race, there are a few fractions belongs to it).

I'd like to be able to make a race of Flying Squirrels.

Rocky and Bowinkle meet the Dynasty system in Elemental... A race of flying squirrels?!?!?!

The most important thing about the factions is that they look and play differently.

It does feel like there are only two factions or playable choices right now, Men and Fallen. Capitar, Pariden etc. are not different enough, they are just a sub-faction of Men with some minor modifiers that might affect gameplay but not significantly so - they feel the same.

So indeed instead of focusing on Capitar and Tarth, I would focus on the race of Men and the race of Fallen (altough I would call it something else). An evil Sovereign who wants to build an empire could attract followers from either race. The game is all about the Sovereigns reshaping the destroyed world the way they want to. So let them corrupt the race of Men if that's what they want. All the more epic story. Rebuilding Tarth does not sound quite so exciting.

I'd like to see more Races than two, but certainly not any generic fantasy races. For example, I would rather have Sand People and Northmen, who would also be Men but look, feel and play completely different. And with the engine capable of dynamically altering the world, I could see the desert or snow covering the lands more as they gain influence.

The post apocalyptic setting also makes it possible for lots of "new" races to rise, so I would not miss on that opportunity. How about a race of mutated Ratmen who are now breeding faster than Men? They could be the result of a magical experiment to create a slave race and one of the evil Sovereigns could be responsible for that. We don't know much about the Fallen, perhaps something like this is to be expected?

 I can barely keep up with the threads at a minimal level and play the beta!

1) I also vote for more variety in the races.

2) Personally, I believe there should be more of a good/neutral/evil characteristic as well as style. One of the things of making an alliance of factions to fight "evil" is that unlike evil, all sides have a say. It wasn't hard for Nazi Germany to have "allies" as they just made them do it at gunpoint. England almost attacked Russia because of Russia attacking Finland in WWII. It took Pearl Harbor to get the U.S. involved in sending troops and not just material.

3) Occupying another city should be a lot tougher, recruiting them should be tougher still. Troops forced to fight for the occupiers of their homes tend to not be very enthusiastic about it. Those units should suffer penalties. There are plenty of historical examples of the problems of occupying territories and the problems were increased by different cultures, religions, and yes, skin color. Examples are plentiful even today still.

4) Refugees - a bliessing and a curse. Let's say we stick with men and the fallen. Cities of men falling to the fallen should spawn refugee units that leave to either form new cities to start over, or join another faction of men. Somehow I doubt if this were a real world and the undead took over a human city, the folks we be ok with living there. "Well Becky, they one fair and square. Not much we can do but toil for them and let them eat the children."

It's been mentioned before, but that poll is of pretty shakey value. I didn't even respond to it because I couldn't find enough information on the different factions to offer an intelligent response. Dwarves are "merchants of iron and blood', whatever that means. Not much of a basis for chooseing a favorite team. So with that grounding in ignorance I move on...

As I understand it you've basically got "Team life" and "Team death" which are supposedly not the same as good and evil, but who are you trying to kid anyway? At any rate each side has 5 sub-factions which are cultural differences for the good guys but mostly different races for the bad guys. Pretty stock stuff.

We already have a fair amount of control over our Sovereign in the same way we could build our own Wizard in MoM. If I understand this post it's suggesting that we should also be able to not merely select a starting race as in MoM but to build our own race from a palette of racial (eats rock, breathes fire) and cultural (efficient miners, fast breeders) traits. Yes, that's a cool option and I like it.

So there are three levels of playstyle customization right off that bat. Team Evil or team Good. Wizard. Race. I like it.

This is a terrible idea. Every 4x game that has different races maintains racial identities after conquests. MoM did it, AoW did it. Heck Moo2 did it. For that matter the civ games do it even when the difference is only cultural and not racial.

So I think it would be a jarring lack of an expected feature if Elemental is missing such a long standing part of the genre. It would also be completely immersion breaking in the basic setting. This is supposed to be a ravaged and half-dead world, so if I take over a city of demons, even if butchering them all is SOP where do I suddenly get 200,000 humans to repopulate the city when my own kingdom only had 35,000 people in it? Cultural conflict between conquering troops and occupied cities is a long standing part of the genre complete with racial and faction modifiers based on cultural hatreds. Why would you throw out such a rich tool for weaving your worlds backstory right into the mechanics of the game? If you want then using something like AoW racial migration option where the conquereing army has to sit on a revolting populace for a few years while you slowly to do to New Mordor what China is doing to Tibet then that makes more sense. Having magical options to ease tensions or even mass convert all the occupants of a city to a new race would also be cool.

But to chuck out all those cool gameplay and world reinforcing options even though they have been a core part of the genre since the beginning and were a core part of the game that directly inspired this one? Terrible idea.

i think there should be more different starting races...

it is true that most people probably want to create their own race BUT

- i also want to be able to acquire different races within my game

- i want to have different races as enemies

for me it would be tedious if i had to create several races in the beginning just to get some variety

i also think the current fractions are (at least from what i know so far) not distinctive enough... therefore i'd also prefer less but mor distinct races that serve the purpose of future customization better

for example use only maybe 2 different human races (warroirs / mages) and add a dwarf race (the smaller size units can serve as default model for other races like gnomes, halflings, goblins etc.)

and also make the fallen races more distinct - a human, a dark elf/undead like race with a dark/pale look, and a beastmen/orc like bulky race that serves as default for the more bulky and barbaric races

I'm wondering if anything's happening on this front. Choosing between the kingdoms still feels like a choice between Men, Men, Men, Men and Men. 

They just look and feel so identical and the kingdom names also sound like they all are of the same european culture.

It really wouldn't hurt to have some scandinavian, celtic, arabian, african or oriental or whatever influence in there to give more flavour. (And different kind of unit setups.)

I think custom races only benefited GalCiv2, so I'd expect the same for Elemental. 

Reading between the lines of the OP, then if you keep racial bonuses quite light in game effect, then I can only see it being light "chrome" to the rules that won't upset game balance.  So in other words, sounds like an appropriate feature that will improve the replayability of the game.