I am so with Winter on this. I don't even need a menu, just elemental.exe and a splash screen. Only request is that it not blue screen my computer.

The screen shots did give me a question for your "Just ask here." thread....

They could add DX10 later, but when XP is a major part of your audience and the game isn't meant to be Crysis anyway, it's probably not a priority. 11 at this point would be a total waste of time, the installed base for it in terms of hardware is non-existent.

I do agree though, it looks great in LotRO (outside of Moria, inside there was some shadow bugs).

It doesn't have to be Crysis to get some neat effect action.  RTSes are hardly Crysis, and quite a few of them have a dx10 port.  Plus, I don't think you need dx11 cards to use dx11, just for some of the features.  I'm not as intimately familiar with it as I could be...because I don't really care yet until it's closer to release.

Anyway, it doesn't have to be a priority...if it was a priority, I'd think it'd go much deeper than what I was suggesting.

Oooohhhhhhhhhh........ ! Let's see what tidbits we can extract from these:

P1:

• The wolf is the "Ebbenwolf" from Boogie's concept art
• The mountain in this is HUGE! Looks like the terrein will be more on the lines of SimCity than Civ 4.... will we be able to do this sort of thing w/ magic?!
• Coastline looks too steep to launch ships from..... Just an artistic effect? A local problem? Or is there no navy system in place?
• The terrein looks surprisingly un-gridded.... what scale are the grids in this? Can you move about or build WITHIN a square?
• The city is irregularly shaped.... this suggests a "tetris" system like we talked about a long time ago.

P2:

• The road is still alarmingly uncurved..... need to work on that, Boogie!
• Interesting to see the essence effect in action: the scraggly trees and brown ground are the default "dead" landscape. This means the black landscape from the fire shard pic is the "Mordory" terrein..... or did they change it?
• Beach in the lower left. I assume this means the upper speculation on navies is moot: it IS a local effect.
• The red line appears to be the boundry of "revived" land, as opposed to a political border.
• It also extends to the water, which looks lighter. Does this mean that we can resurrect oceans, too?!]

P3:

• Hmmmmmm...... the building with the sheet looks like an archer training facility, the red-roof one looks like an inn or tenement, the tall one seems to be a town hall or watch tower, the thatched-roofed-hut looks like a commoner's house, the garden is probably a farm, and the stockaded place looks like a barracks.
• The torch on top of the tall building: my guess is signal fire, but it could be some sort of mana-generating-ritual-device.
• There is a crack in one of the barracks houses. Does this mean buildings are ageable or destructable?

P4:

• Now THIS is interesting! Looks like each unit can hold various items (the guy has a scroll, some sort of evil potion, and blue goo)
• THERE IS VARIED TERREIN!!!! Yesssss!!!!! Wonder how it's generated?
• "Swamp Dread" (named Geoff, I'm sure). I'm glad to see that we won't just be seeing the same old dragon/troll/spider dichotemy.
• The "scroll" on top indicates that we will be able to script units.
• The "timer" button is wierd: is it a real-time start? Or a real-time stop? Or is it a RESET?! Looks interesting.
• @ first I thought the discs along the bottom were unit selects, then I realised that they REPEAT. I think this is how "simultaneous turns" work!: each guy gets to move to the extent of his points, then another, then another, in the sequence dictated by the order of the circles.

P5:

• Nothing much here to analyse, except that a few units appear to be losing their sowrds (although they are likely dead). Cool GFX, though.
  

Holy excrement the game looks good!

This is a good example of the fact that games can look very good so long as there is competent art direction and style without having to have massive system requirements and multi-hundred-million-dollar graphics budgets. (And, conversely, games with big art budgets can still look bland.) I very much like the look of the game, shadows or no.

There is a mix of very good and very bad details in these screenshots.

I love buildings; can't say the same about units (lone swordman, wolf, spider).

Grassland texture looks very bad.

Well, I guess it's going to be better and better in next months.

Yeah, right, you're really helping me now with trying not to get to excited about this game. Nice job!

As for the graphics: Don't analyze them, there's really now point in doing so at this stage. They are only trying to show the "feeling" of the game, but only as intended now and even that can chance if its isn't fun/working ect.

Or analyze them, but realize its of little to no use yet. Fun to read though!

I have to say, the hardest part of this project (so far) has been making this scaling system that allows a fun, playable game across all spectrum of system specs, world settings, zoom levels, and stages of gameplay. It's not a game where we get x polys to work with and y draw calls and we make it look great as possible.

On some systems we have X / 2 polys, others we have X times 1000 polys...its quite a wide range and juggling all that, while managing appealing visuals, has been considerably tougher than with GC2 (you throw a black sphere and some nebula in the bg and BAM you have your environment).

So thanks to everyone who's digging the artistic direction, and for those that aren't feeling these shots, know that we'll be polishing the visuals 'till the day we ship (and past that, even) so things will only get better and better

Sweeeeeeeeeeettttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt.  Can't wait! 

BoogieBac - The art style is probably not what I would have picked: I tend to prefer "realistic" over the impressionistic-influenced style Elemental has taken.  That said, I think it works very well for the genre, and if it makes it easier to scale across system specs, zoom levels, etc., I'm all for it.  I have a decent laptop now (7900GTX Go, 2GB RAM), but when I first started playing GalCiv2 I was on an old desktop with integrated graphics.  So, I can definitely appreciate Stardock's philosophy of having low minimum specs, and definining minimum as "fun to play" rather than "the .exe will run".

Keep it up!

Also, where is the Secret Graft Depository to get into the Alpha?  I believe suitable donations would include:

1. Cash (no Electrum, of course)

2. Immortal Souls

3. One's voice

4. Pink Space Ponies

Tasty. Hadn't seen pics 1 and 3 before. As for pic 4, I believe Frogboy said it made it look like HoMM style combat, which it wasn't.

I love the artistic style, personally.  I think most people don't realize that space games are inherently easy to make realistic looking because it's mostly empty space and spheres.  Natural landscapes and people?  Now that's hard.  Stylized is simply the only way to go if you want to support a wide range of platforms.

The hard cliff edges are ... interesting.  Probably the issue here is that they don't have a tile merging feature or art yet (i.e. if you have land next to water, you need a different graphic/textures/method of rendering beach there.  But it occurred to me that a lot of top down civ conquest games don't support cliffs at all.  ALL water/land transitions in Civ are beaches. The only impassible land is mountain, which takes up a tile.  The wolf on the mountain made me wonder something else...

Will Elemental support walkmap-type terrain instead of tile-based?  That could be VERY interesting.  Your city might be located on a plateau with only a few choke points...   Or you might have a city on the side of a mountain.  Some land may be vulnerable to naval attack, and other might be more like the cliffs of Dover...

The maps are fully 3D. We've known that for some time already! And that screenshot, among other earlier ones, make it pretty clear.

Looking good. I'm still a bit puzzled about the simultaneous turns thingamajig.
Good thing that a FAQ is coming up

Good stuff. I cant wait for the beta to happen.