Gamespot: Victory in Elemental can be achieved in more ways than simply wiping out your enemies. Tell us about the different victory conditions in the game.
Brad Wardell: The victory conditions are one of the things we've focused the most on. As a gamer, one of my pet peeves in strategy games is that nearly every path to victory involves, directly or indirectly, having the best economy/military. So when designing Elemental, we wanted to make sure there are other paths to victory that involve other distinctive resources than just that.
So first, you have the traditional military conquest mode. You also have the diplomatic victory that works much like what's in Galactic Civilizations, where if you ally with the other factions of your order (men or fallen), you win. You also have the spell of making, a powerful spell that you have to (a) research at great expense and (b) capture and hold enough shards of magic to get the mana to cast it. And lastly, you can win by completing the quest of dominion, which we'll talk a lot more about in the future.
But these four victory conditions are deceptively simple, because there's a lot more to them than what you'd normally expect. Without going into too much detail, let me give you an example:
Because so much of the game's key choices are made by the player character deciding how much of their essence to impart into their minions, you can't easily tell how powerful another player is. It's not like in GalCiv or Sins of a Solar Empire, where you see a big, honking fleet and know a particular player is going to wipe everyone out. That's because the power of armies is not obvious. One player may focus on making their player character ridiculously powerful, with relatively few champions leading armies. Another player may have tons and tons of armies. Who would win? It's not obvious.
But that's one of the parts we expect to be the most enjoyable about the game. It's not about players knowing they've got the game wrapped up in the first half hour and spending the next four hours mopping up. There are many different and subtle paths to achieving victory. The guy who cranks out eight cities in the first 20 moves will have a very weak player character for a long time (since those cities will involve taking a lot of their essence to revive the land they're on). There's just a ton of different choices for the player that are fun and interesting.
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