Releases March 17, 2026
Journals
Dev Journal
Iteration is both wonderful and terrifying. It is the place where you take delight in the designs that are working out, and weep for the designs that sounded good but aren’t. It would be nice if I could sketch out a perfect plan, implement that plan and have an amazing game. But it takes work. One of our initial concerns when we started to playtest was that the game felt like War of Magic. Despite the changes, many of which wouldn’t be really appa... [read more]
Dev Journal
One of the big but largely under-appreciated features of Elemental: Fallen Enchantress is the new random generation. In Elemental: War of Magic, the maps were random but the continents were not. This meant, after awhile, players knew “the lay out of the land”. Now, having a random world generator is a non-trivial thing as those who have written them can tell you. Especially if you want a map that is “fun” (i.e. no one cut off, reasonably fair, and always interesting). So her... [read more]
Dev Journal
Flavor Text in Fallen Enchantress
In every Stardock game ever, from 1993 on, the “flavor text” was done by whoever had a moment to throw something in there. Often times, it meant I did it since I type 120wpm and could crank out a lot of stuff. The GalCiv technology descriptions are notorious for this. In War of Magic, we decided that we would keep the tongue in cheek text to a minimum which in reality just made it dry and boring. Since we didn’t enjoy doing it and our fans really wanted to see our games sta... [read more]
Dev Journal
Elemental: October Status Report
Derek and his team have been busy working on the sequel to Elemental: Fallen Enchantress, the sequel to last year’s War of Magic.The final release date for Fallen Enchantress hasn’t been set yet but we do expect to go into beta around Thanksgiving. Beta and Release The initial beta will only be available to those who already have War of Magic. A later beta will be available to anyone who wants to pre-order it. The beta will be available via Stardock’s new digital store. We plan... [read more]
Dev Journal
Destiny’s Embers: The art of writing a first chapter
I’ve written about the creation of the novel, Destiny’s Embers, a book that takes places on Elemental. I’ve gotten a lot of emails and requests for the second book in the series. Will there be a sequel to Destiny’s Embers? The answer is, I don’t know. The first book sold pretty well but it was a lot of work. A lot more work than I ever dreamed it would be. Writing a book for a world class publisher like Random House was an eye opening experience. My book got a bit ... [read more]
Dev Journal
Elemental is a big world. Much of our game design for Fallen Enchantress has come from imagining how different parts of the world would drive different strategy. Western Anthys & The War of Magic For example, in Elemental:War of Magic, we envisioned the random make staking place in Western Anthys around a century after the cataclysm. This meant a barren, desolate world where the objective was to find the tiny spots of resources (fertile land for example) and gain control of them.... [read more]