Well I installed patch 1.06 and updated my graphics drivers, windows updates and scented voodoo candles. I thought old Papa Legba had done the job until that pernicious memory leak once more brought my burgeoning empire to a close. Unfortunately that was about half five this morning. Needles to say, I was not at my best in work today. If half my blood was not currently replaced with caffeine I’d be unconscious. However one error in five or six hours of play was acceptable enough for my purposes so this evening when I got home from work and finished eating my (delicous) toasted prawn and sweek chilli sandwiches I loaded up Elemental. Whereupon I got a bit too carried away with my save game housekeeping and deleted all of them. (Luckily?) I was too tired to really work up much more than a shrug and so I began my fifth game.
Which went quite well I must say, until the late hundreds where I got repeatedly and conclusively fucked my the Ev Al Empire’s Ogre troops. Mainly because my standard strategy at this point is to focus on Combat research until I can make eight man squads of archers, because archers seem to fuck absolutely everything. Apart from giant mobs of fucking ogres it seems. So I think Im going to give it a sixth attempt. This time Im going to move away from a mad dash for archers, for troops Im (hopefully) going to try for fast moving mounted troops (assuming there are any horses near my starting area). Im also going to marry off my sovereign as early as possible (I was waiting till Turn 300 in previous games). I could do with the “free” heroes that having offspring produces. Im also going to actually research the Diplomatic tech tree as opposed to ignoring it entirely. However its just coming midnight now and Im fucking wrecked and cant face another half conscious day in work. So Im going to go to bed….after I have one more turn.
In terms of critique now that I have more playtime under my belt I think that the game needs a UI upgrade, it desperately needs some decent documentation or an indepth tutorial so I dont have to google all my answers, mana and health regeneration are ridiculously slow and should be at least doubled, there should be an option to skip X turns ahead, more variety in both magic and ranged weapons, more appearance options and some general balance tweaks.
Listening to: Rage Against The Machine - Bullet in the Head