Righting a Wrong - Elemental: Fallen Enchantress

While this new editorial on IGN starts out by slamming 2010's Elemental: War of Magic for its UI, AI, and lack of polish, it goes on to praise the changes and attention to detail that Stardock is giving the strategy/RPG's follow-up, Elemental: Fallen Enchantress. And let's not forget that those of us who purchased War of Magic are getting it for free:
Stardock has also re-evaluated its priorities with Fallen Enchantress, cutting out multiplayer -- a feature that was broken when War of Magic launched -- and fleshing out other systems like unit creation. Stardock openly admits that unit creation in War of Magic was not as intricate as intended. While you could design the units you created in your villages (outfitting them with armor, weapons, and mounts), it ultimately boiled down to which units had the highest attack and armor. In Fallen Enchantress the goal is to have a well-designed unit be able to beat a seemingly stronger one. The example given was a smaller army with high fire resistance beating down another, much larger kingdom who had focused on fire magic and weapons.

Fallen Enchantress should also have much more diverse factions and built-in mod support at launch. War of Magic had 10 factions, but Stardock readily admits that, due to memory constraints, it really boiled down to two. Since then the studio has improved its use of memory, as well as hired new staff like ex-Civilization developer Derek Paxton. The result: 10 truly differentiated factions.
And if you want even more information to sink your teeth into, there's a new ten-minute video preview up on G4.