Releases March 17, 2026
Journals
News
Elemental Preview from GameSpot
The previews for Elemental: War of Magic are rolling in this week, and the latest to hit my inbox is from the fine folks over at GameSpot. “Our brief tour with the game covered several other additions to the game, such as combat balancing, which is currently intended to fairly let players who focus on combat develop a small army of highly trained warriors equipped with pricey weapons, but to put them on even ground with players who pursued a different research path, such as civi... [read more]
News
BigDownload Previews Elemental: War of Magic
BigDownload.com got a preview of the upcoming Elemental: War of Magic , and have posted their thoughts on it. “So much was revealed during our short time with Elemental: War of Magic , that we feel we'd hardly scratched the surface of what's possible. All too briefly mentioned was the multiplayer mode that will offer Myth -like combat.” Read the full preview at BigDownload.com . [read more]
Dev Journal
Elemental: Kumquat Graphics Engine
Elemental makes use of a brand new 3D engine developed specifically for PC strategy games. Its multithreaded design along with dynamic LOD (level of detail) allows for it to look great on a wide range of hardware. To see and understand why Elemental can look good on low end hardware and yet benefit further from higher end hardware see for yourself how the dynamic LOD works: Look very very closely here. This isn’t one 3D object. This is dozens of 3D objects. The engine det... [read more]
Dev Journal
Elemental: Researching Technologies
After the Cataclysm, much of the accrued knowledge of the world was lost. One of your priorities will be to find scholars who can recover this lost knowledge. Elemental doesn’t have a traditional technology tree. Instead, it has 5 research categories (the Kingdoms and the Empires have different categories). When enough research has been done, a breakthru in that category is made and the player is presented with possible technologies to learn at that point. When choosing... [read more]
Dev Journal
Elemental is a turn-based strategy game that takes place on a world that was once filled with magic but now finds itself recovering from a great conflict known as “The Cataclysm”. In this post-cataclysm world, only a handful of of beings are capable of casting spells. These beings, known as Channelers, have begun to set up realms across the world. As one of these Channelers, you are the sovereign of a Kingdom or an Empire. The Kingdoms are realms set up by sovereigns who chan... [read more]
Dev Journal
Elemental: AI difficulty levels
In Galactic Civilizations, Sins of a Solar Empire and Demigod, the difficulty levels of computer players were either hard coded or very hard to access for players. In Elemental, the difficulty levels are in an XML file called CoreDifficultyLevels.xml The game will read from the different difficulty levels and display them in game. Players can create new difficulty levels themselves if they’d like by changing this file. In Galactic Civilizations, I only had 3 real variabl... [read more]
Dev Journal
Getting ready for beta 2. It’ll either be this Thursday or the following Thursday. Last week I was visiting journalists on the west coast showing off Elemental so i didn’t get to work on the AI and some other pieces of the game that I think need to be a bit further along before beta 2 starts. The modding tools won’t be part of beta 2 (they come with beta 4 which is expected to start sometime in July). Now, the richness of the included modding tools is not because we’re anti-DLC.&... [read more]