I'd heard a lot about Stardock's new fantasy-strategy game Elemental before coming to PAX. It sounded interesting, but I wanted a closer look. I got one.

Elemental looks like the PC game of the 21st century. It draws its inspiration from the combined progress of decades worth of strategy gaming, but it does so in an elegant, approachable way. It takes the depth of a Galactic Civilization and melds it with a modern design sensibility. This is no more apparent than in its world map, or lack thereof.

From the furthest zoom, Elemental looks like a Tolkien illustration, a Total War-style map drawn in an elegant cloth-like style. Zooming in, the engine adjusts to a full 3D view akin to Civilization, icons shifting into tiny armies and sprawling landscapes. As the camera approaches the ground, forests separate into trees, individual units viewable from a near-third person angle. This is all done so smoothly that you can barely tell where one level of detail ends and the other begins.

But being a true PC game, there are also endless options hiding behind the simple interface. Have a slow system and want to play the game entirely in the cloth map-mode? You can. Would you rather your barracks look more like a farm? Use the built-in unit editor. Want to import someone's custom-crafted spaceship units into your game? Well, Brad Wardell might think you're insane, but it is technically possible.

I didn't get to see the game's real-time battle engine, which Wardell has described as "tactical, with X-COM being a major inspiration, but designed to be relatively short." However, I did observe world-ending spells cast, cities and road networks, and a very impressive unit and building editor.

After a quick look at the game in action, I sat down with Stardock CEO Wardell to talk about the ambitious title, the state of PC gaming, and his troubled past.

Shack: Where to start.

Brad Wardell: Well, once I got out of prison, that chapter was closed. But as an ex-con, I knew that the big house would change me forever...

Shack: [laughs] We should cover Elemental before we get into that. Now, there aren't many companies that are still making these kinds of games anymore. Do you take a conservative approach in figuring out whether your audience can support a game like this, or do you just make what you think is fun and go from there?

Brad Wardell: Oh, well, we're gamers. The people here are all part of the game development team. We just want to make the game--we're looking at moving the release date up again to where we can spend more time working on it. Not because the game needs more time, as much as, we enjoy making the game. So we want to have more time to put in little touches that are just fun. And there's no real business justification other than "we really enjoy the games."

Like, I'm writing the computer AI for Elemental, right? Now, I write in C++, but I learned to script in Python, so I want to port the AI to Python so that other people can play with it after we release it, because that's cool and fun.

Shack: Let's cover the basics. Elemental is... what?

Brad Wardell: Elemental is a turn-based fantasy strategy game in which you play the leader of an empire or a kingdom that is trying to rebuild the world after a terrible cataclysm by building cities, and researching new technologies, and researching new spells, and going up against potentially 31 other players, online or offline.

Shack: I'm a big fan of Civilization, and judging from the demo, it seems like you're blending a lot of interesting genres.

Brad Wardell: Oh yeah. A lot of my friends that are game designers--they look at themselves as artists. I am not an artist; I rip off from every game that I can.

Shack: Well, great artists steal, right?

Brad Wardell: Yeah, so I steal ideas from Civilization--here, I'll give you an idea. At the Game Developers Conference, me and [Civilization 4 lead designer] Soren Johnson--our algorithm for rivers in this game is from Soren Johnson. We were having a heck of a time making cool-looking roads and rivers, and he said, well, here's a way, a technique to do it. And we were like, oh right, we didn't think about it!

Shack: That's really cool.

Brad Wardell: Yeah, so games like X-Com, and Star Control 2, and of course Master of Magic, we love those games. And so we take bits and pieces, and we take our own ideas of things we wanted to see in games. I think the family tree feature of Elemental is pretty much something that we're bringing to the genre that's fairly unique.

Shack: Talk about that tree.

Brad Wardell: Well the idea is that, in these games, it's pretty normal to have heroes, and you can recruit heroes in this game as well. But we wanted the player to have more diplomatic tools than the usual treaties or tribute or whatever. And instead, while you are immortal, you can get married, have children, grow old and die. And you can actually arrange marriages and that kind of thing, and they'll have offspring that are a genetic blend of the two.

As an example, lets say I'm playing as the Altar, and we have an AI player, and their daughter is married to my son. She becomes a part of my family; I can control her, she's a unit in the game. Royalty in the game are actual units that you just get. Well, now she's my unit. Alright, I have her in my capitol city, and [she] just has babies or something. Or what do you know, she gives a 25% morale boost to any army she's in. Maybe I'll send her off with the army. Uh oh, she died. Well guess what, the other player's going to declare war on me because I killed their daughter.

Shack: There's the potential for some very twisted scenarios there.

Brad Wardell: Or how about this. The AI player's sovereign gets killed. He's out of the game. What happens to his kingdom? Well, his daughter is in my family, but what if his son was married off to some other family? Now there's a civil war in his kingdom. Some of his cities join my side, some of the cities join the other side.

One of the things in Galactic Civilizations is that people felt there was too much randomness when a civilization surrendered, who they surrendered to. Now it's not random at all. You can predict what's going to happen when someone surrenders or breaks off.

Shack: It's an interesting system. You have all of these components moving around behind the scenes, but when you look at them on the screen they're organized in fairly sensible tabs, with a pretty comprehensible progression. Almost in the same way that when you zoom out of the map, things become gradually more simplified.

Brad Wardell: Yeah, one of the things that we really wanted to do with Elemental was make the game seem more approachable. With Galactic Civilizations, you were bombarded with quests everywhere. There was like 12 quests right out of that main screen, and you click on a tab and you get a hundred little boxes. If we did that with this game, it would have been so complicated that nobody but the hardcore would have played it. And so many normal, non-hardcore players could get something out of this. I think they really enjoy games that are presented in a straightforward manner, but have a lot of depth to them.

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