Once upon a time…
In 2008, right after we released Galactic Civilizations II and Sins of a Solar Empire, we at Stardock felt pretty good about ourselves. We had assembled an amazing team of people that could make amazing games and we thought there was nothing we couldn’t do. Hubris attracts Nemesis.
With space conquered, we set our eyes on making Fantasy Civilizations. It would be half Master of Magic and half what we had learned from making Sins and GalCiv. The game would be called Elemental. It would be the ultimate 4X fantasy strategy game.
We dreamed big, envisioning a game packed with depth and nuance, an expansive fantasy world filled with intriguing characters, a rich lore, and quests weaving through every corner of the map. It would combine civilization-building with deep RPG elements, unique units each carrying their own backstories and stats, and a world players could truly shape through terraforming, magical dynasties, crafting, and more.
We wanted it all, from dynasty systems where heroes could marry, have children, and pass down traits visually and statistically, to intricate city building, powerful spells, extensive tactical combat, and robust modding tools backed by a built-in social platform for sharing creations. Heck, we even had a companion book from Random House exploring the lore. The vision was ambitious, and we were excited.
But there was one hitch. We designed Elemental to fit within the constraints of a 32-bit engine that had access to only 2GB of memory. As it turns out, trying to stuff a universe of possibilities into just 2GB is, well... challenging. We built, what we thought, was a sophisticated memory manager to deal with it. But we would still get random crashes even though we were keeping the total memory allocation well below 2GB.
Disaster
We trimmed, cut, streamlined, and reshaped, trying desperately to fit this vast universe into a smaller memory footprint. When Elemental: War of Magic was released in 2010, it was chaos. It was heartbreaking. It simply didn’t deliver on our dream. It very unstable. And we had spent so much time trying to work around the memory issues that the game we released lacked the refinement that our players expected.
Undaunted, we learned, iterated, and adapted. Two years later, Elemental: Fallen Enchantress emerged—a refined, streamlined take that kept much of the strategic depth and advanced AI, delivering on many of our original promises. We gave it away, free, to everyone who bought War of Magic.
Fallen Enchantress became highly regarded among strategy fans, praised for its intelligent gameplay, engaging mechanics, and innovative features, like the ability to zoom from a richly detailed living world to an elegant, strategic cloth map—an innovation since widely adopted across the genre.
A few years later, we delved into other aspects of our original vision with Elemental: Sorcerer King. This iteration emphasized a robust crafting system and compelling quest mechanics, finding its own niche audience despite stepping away from heavy strategic depth. This wasn’t a 4X strategy game but instead was a crafting/adventure game. Player vs. World. It was fun but not what players expected.
Yet, Elemental remained fragmented. We had 3 different games that emphasized different aspects of the original design.
War of Magic focused on the player using magic to shape a world.
Fallen Enchantress focused on leading a fantasy civilization.
Sorcerer King focused on questing and crafting.
But none of them fully realized what Elemental was supposed to be.
Not forgotten
…Time
Passed…
Stardock grew. Went on to make other games. Publish other games. We started other studios with our friends like Mohawk Games (Offworld Trading company, Old World) and Oxide (Ashes of the Singularity, Ara: History Untold). But the team didn’t forget about Elemental. We thought about it every day. Even 15 years later.
Remarkably, even 15 years later, most of the people who worked on Elemental are still at Stardock. And scheduling has worked out that we have the opportunity to bring them all back onto a single project.
In a normal company, what we’re doing is insane. Every person who was on Elemental back in 2008 is in a lead role now. You would have one of them on a given project, not all of them on one game. But we want to do Elemental justice.
And so here we are. We have remastered the original engine to be natively 64-bit. We’ve updated the graphics engine to DirectX 11.
And we’re rewriting a lot of code to bring all the pieces into a single game. The Terraforming and Royal Dynasties from War of Magic, the deep unit design and Civ building from Fallen Enchantress and the crafting and quest system from Sorcerer King.
And to be sure, this will be a fantasy 4X strategy game. Elemental was never intended “everything to everyone”. It’s a fantasy civilization game in an RPG world.
Reforged
So here we are, 15 years later. We’ve been working on this for a long time and we’re excited to share with you the progress we’ve made.
This is what Elemental is:
A vast, procedurally generated fantasy world where every game feels fresh and distinct.
RPG-level depth where every unit has a unique story, stats, and place in your kingdom.
A sophisticated dynasty system originally dreamed up for War of Magic, allowing your characters to marry, produce heirs, and inherit traits dynamically.
Rich terraforming mechanics to shape the land itself according to your strategic vision.
Enhanced crafting and quests inspired by Sorcerer King, ensuring deep immersion and story-driven gameplay.
Tactical combat that's engaging, strategic, and now powered by an advanced AI that makes auto-resolve battles both practical and satisfying.
A beautifully redesigned UI optimized for modern displays, razor-sharp at any resolution, fully leveraging today’s PCs.
Integrated modding tools more robust and user-friendly than ever, empowering our incredible community to expand and personalize the world.
An immersive story-driven campaign rich with lore and meaningful decisions that shape your civilization’s destiny.
Now, we can’t fully hide the fact that this was a game originally made 15 years ago. The art assets were made with tools made by companies that don’t even exist anymore. But the gameplay is quite unlike anything else out there.
Elemental: Reforged is our love letter to you—our fans who've kept the dream alive. We can’t wait for you to finally experience Elemental as it was always meant to be.
Thank you for joining us on this incredible journey. It’s going to be epic.
— Brad Wardell, Lead Designer and CEO, Stardock Entertainment