Well either Brad deliberately misled us about the date so as to surprise us, or someone let the cat out of the bag a day early, because Gamespy has released an (apparently) exclusive first look at Stardock's new PC title.


A fairly interesting feature is your leader/avatar, known as a "channeler". He's an immensely powerful character, but you can -- if you so choose -- to portion away some of this power to hero generals (whom you can hire as wandering NPC's), and also to grow your empire in the founding of new cities and whatnot. It sounds like it should be an interesting balance between having an individually strong leader, or sharing out his abilities so as to expand your realm.


There's five schools of magic: Life, Earth, Air, Water, & Fire. Of course, each school imparts its own bonuses and penalties. Your leader will also have a choice about being a positive or negative channeler -- apparently positive channelers will create verdant, lush land around their cities, while the empires of negative channelers will see something along the lines of Mordor-like terrain. Also (to directly quote the article): "Each type will receive various military bonuses or penalties based on the kind of terrain they're fighting on and which school of magic it's most connected to."


I have to admit, this part sounds particularly cool:
The world map also plays a significant role in the way the game plays out. One of the design team's mantras is that everything the player sees should be "real." That is, everything in the game should represent a real strategic factor the player must take into consideration. Cities aren't just single-tile icons. Instead players can grow their cities according to specific strategic dictates. As cities expand, players can choose how to spread their cities across the map and can locate individual city elements within those tiles. This can lead to cities being used as fortresses to block specific mountain paths or a situation like the classical Greek cities of Athens and Piraeus in which the Greek city-state's naval power was extremely dependent on maintaining a thin, vulnerable strip of land that let them control the port city of Piraeus.
I suspect I'm going to have a lot of fun with this aspect of the game.


There's some excellent news for modders as well:
Elemental will also mark Stardock's entry into the realm of Spore-style game broadcasting. The game will do much more than offer support for modders, as the company is developing a back-end infrastructure through its proprietary Impulse service that will let players seamlessly integrate new races, units, spells, technologies, buildings and much more into their game. Every time a player starts a game of Elemental, they'll have the opportunity to seamlessly incorporate new content straight from the fertile minds of the game's biggest fans.
Can't wait to see what people come up with.


Finally, the bad news:
Elemental: War of Magic is currently scheduled for a February 2010 release.
Gah! Over a year. I may very well go mad before then.