Nah...most Civ mods don't come anywhere even close to the scope and scale of Elemental.  Take Fall From Heaven 2 for example, it still felt near identical to the vanilla game with some different fantasy races thrown in.  The mechanics in Civilization don't translate well to a fantasy game where technology is not the focus (like FFH2 tried to do).  I've played FFH2 quite a bit and it doesn't even come close to Elemental.

And yes, it is much harder to mod Civilization to be something other than history because it takes full conversions to do that.  There are going to be less fantasy full conversion content than Elemental because Elemental builds the modding mechanic so seamlessly into the game itself.

I don't understand the complaints of steamlining or dumbing down for Civ 5. I've seen a number of claims of that, but no actual examples. I've played the game and I've found it to be deeper and more complex then the previous version. Almost everything I used to do in Civ 4 I still do in Civ 5, and there is quite a bit of complexity added to military and culture. I think many of the people complaining about streamlining are still basing their opinions on an old preview article that talked about making the game more accessible, which ruffled some feathers.

This isn't to say that the game may not have some issues. The AI complaint appears to be unfortunately be quite valid, and I much prefer the old diplomacy sytem and interface. But the game is certainly not dumbed down in any way. The culture complaints I think are way off too....5 of the 8 cultural systems are incompatible with one of the others so it's not just a matter of picking cool abilities and forgetting about them. Plus the abilities you pick are quite important so which way you go can have a pretty significant effect on gameplay.

It's not worse. AI is bad in waging war, because it doesn't seem to grasp the idea of tactical combat. Diplomacy is weird. Major civs pull some crazy stunts and it's hard to tell whether they like you or not. On the other hand, diplomacy with minor civs is perfect and very transparent.

But compared to elemental, it's all mindblowingly advanced. AI in elemental fails on every possible aspect, not just tactical combat. And diplomacy is not just bad, but virtually non-existant.

Comparing civ5 to elemental is actually quite insulting. Civ5 has it's problems, but it's a well defined and finished game, with clear design concepts. Now you may not like those concepts, but as a product it's very decent. Elemental on the other hand is a mess of unfinished concepts that will take months to sort out and balance. I was actually far more excited about elemental than civ5, because there are so few fantasy empire builders, but right now, civ5 is simply more entertaining on every level. And mark my words, modding in civ5 will take off very soon, but elemental will have to wait quite a while for it's major mods, because the core concepts of the game will be heavily altered in the future, so any serious mod development is pointless right now.

See Tom Chick's review.

I've played civ5, it disappointed me so much. I don't know why I lost "one more turn" fun at civ5, but clicking "next turn".

I read his review before making the post you responded to. He does not complain about the game being dumbed down. In fact some of his complaints relate to the game being too confusing (too many numbers, etc.) and not always giving him the information that he needs. Though I don't find the numbers at all confusing.

According to the comments in his review the low score is almost purely based on the bad AI, something I can understand having an issue with. He also dislikes the diplomacy system which I can understand as well. As I mentioned above though i strongly disagree with his problems with the culture system and i do not think he fully understood it and it's implications.

He also discusses the "streamlined" social policy feature which is basically a tech tree with unlockable permanent bonuses as well as the "streamlined" diplomacy feature which he compared to Civilization Revolution.  Then there's the complete excision of the religion and espionage dynamics.

In short, Firaxis removed a lot of features from the series but didn't replace them with anything.  Some people seem to like this simplification, but the general consensus I'm seeing is that the series has been "dumbed down".

You and I agree on so very little here, but if this ends up being the case (simplification in the granddaddy of all TBS games?!?!?) I'll be a very sad panda.

I got Civ V yesterday and while I'm impressed with the game it just doesn't bring me into the gameworld like Elemental does. In Elemental I have an immediate connection to the gameworld with my sovereign unit. Secondly, I can design my own units which is very cool, albeit somewhat limited. Elemental has more revolutionary features then Civilization V.

That being said, Civ V is much more finished then Elemental is. The graphics are much better, terrain looks nicer, and plays smoother. But for me it's the revolutionary features that attract me.

I thought Civ V was going to steal me away from Elemental, turns out I was wrong.

CAVEAT: I've only put about an hour of "fiddling around" time into Civ 5, so I have yet to see some of the more potentially braindead combat AI and diplomacy issues, so I'll address neither in comparison to Elemental (which is godawful in both respects) except as meta issues.

My own personal experiences are quite a bit different for each game, and from what little I've seen Civ5 is lightyears ahead of Elemental in many ways.

Crashes and Instability - Until Elemental 1.07, I ALWAYS got a crash to desktop when alt-tabbing with Elemental.  Since then I've gotten fairly consistent out of memory errors doing so (and during fairly long games).  In addition, late stage games start to slow down pretty painfully on my still pretty snappy system (i7 920, 6g, GTX 275 with the most recent drivers).  I've seen nothing close to this for Civ, though I need to push towards a longer running game to see if it holds out.  I do enjoy your snarky comment about the "blue line they drew in microsoft paint" in reference to a river in Civ.  Civ's graphic are so far beyond Elemental that I guess you'd refer to the latter's attempt at inland water to be "bad ASCII art" or the like

UI - Civ's works.  It'd definitely way too spoonfed compared to Civ4 (for my TBS dollar) and a bit too much in your face, but it's in complete opposition to Elemental's bland, confusing and in some places missing "UI".

Combat - To be honest, I was never happy with Civ's way too abstracted view of combat in general and it seems to have taken a distinct turn for the worse with the hardcore overpowering of artillery or the AI being too interesting in just rushing you one at a time akin to those cheesy martial arts flicks from the 70s and 80s.  That said, it's still Einstein compared to Elemental's Special Ed.  Short of abusing mechanics (such as the outdated 10 damage to all enemy targets minion spam), the AI is pathetically easy to beat in any combat situation unless I somehow forgot to bring a single caster.  Or hell, even a horribly overpowered melee sovereign (pre 1.08 perhaps, still not sure on that).

Game Mechanics - The base framework for Civ (building, research, culture, etc.) are still working pretty damned well.  Show me any one part of Elemental that works on it's own (magic, combat, building, diplomacy, AI, unit design, dynasties, questing, resources) let alone as part of a greater whole.

To sum it up, people who want to compare Civilization V's issues with Elemental's need to do 1 of 2 things.

Either admit that you're hopelessly in love with Elemental and can't get past the rose colored goggles.  If this is the case, embrace it and just wait for Stardock to just make a great thing better (as has been posted by any number of people).

Or realize that while Civ has it's flaws, it's fixable with tweaks and a powerful modding community.  Elemental still needs the basic FRAMEWORK to be fixed before modders can do anything but patch the biggest holes.  Elemental *MIGHT* someday be a great legacy game like MoM (or to a lesser extent AoW) and we'll look back on this time as the dark ages before the great enlightenment.  And while I'm regaining more and more hope that it's coming (given a number of pretty heartening and posts about specific issues by devs and Frogboy), it's still going to be a long road to recovery.

Well I think saying it suffers from the same problems as elemental is a huge exageration. That's like saying someone with the flu suffers from the same problems as someone with the bubonic plague. Both have unfortunate issues but one is far worse then the others.

And it's not just the professional review scores that are way better then Elementals. The metacritic average user score is 9.0, which is even significantly higher then starcraft 2 (granted I suspect it to dip down to SC2 range with time). Meanwhile elemental has an average user score of 6.0. So the people in general agree, not just the reviewers.

And regarding stupid AI decisions in civ, yes that's very stupid. It doesn't hold a candle however to some of the idiocty in elemental. Someone posted a strategy on how you can win impossible/impossible in elemental (at least in 1.07) without ever leaving your starting town, building any buildings, casting any spells, or building more then a single catapult. Civilization at least plays the game, and sometimes it seems to play it well and other times the terrain confuses it and it play horribly.

Couldn't agree more with you DrAngry.

Also tried Civ 5 the last couple of days. As much as I want to love Elemental, but...

Civ 5 is fun with a clear vision when it comes to design and with basic game mechanics that are actually working, although there are slight frustrations along the way (Combat AI, Performance, Diplomacy). Elemental is only fun at game setup stage and when dreaming about the vast possibilities of the game that fizzles quickly when the actual game starts and annoys you with a constant stream of frustration, because of crucial game mechanics that are not working at all and therefore are bound to be edited and changed in the upcoming months. I chuckled when I read comments about Civ 5 being worse than Elemental.

Even though I will watch the progress, I switched to Civ 5 and return to playing Elemental once the core mechanics are working correctly.