Interview by: James Fudge

If you don’t know anything at all about Stardock’s upcoming 4X strategy game, Elemental: War of Magic, then this interview is not for you until you go get a primer from the game's official web site at www.elementalgame.com . Instead of rehashing what we already know about this game, we instead focus on some elements that we don't know much about. Hopefully, for those of you that have been following the game in earnest, this interview will enlighten you on some of the most important elements of the game. To get that information, we talked with Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock and Elemental AI developer, who shared information about diplomacy, research, Random House's involvement in the game and a host of other topics.

Let me start off by getting a little of a back-story on why you developed the game. Awhile back you had mentioned on your web site that you were looking into getting the Master of Magic license from Atari.

Yeah, a long time ago. Atari first approached us about it some years ago. Atari owned a lot of old IP like Star Control 2, Master of Magic, of course Master of Orion, and a number of other titles. And that they had a thing - this is not under non-disclosure or anything - a venture they were exploring about going in and remaking those games. And we were very excited about that because we had our own fantasy strategy game that we were starting to put together, but we were Master of Magic fans. So the business guys on both sides made the deal but unfortunately at the time their legal people kind of killed it; there was just so much compliance involved that we just couldn't do it.

It was down to minutiae. I remember one of the things they wouldn't budge on in negotiations was a policy they have on children working in factories, so an officer of Stardock would have to visit any factory where any part of the box was being manufactured, and I was like "come on!" There were other issues, like them wanting to own the code after we made it, which was not acceptable to us because we have our own engines and such, and we weren't going to hand that over.. But that was quite a few years ago. We're talking probably six or seven years ago.

So you were already working on a fantasy strategy game at that point?

Right. We were really in pre-development on what became Elemental at the time.

So you've developed a number of 4X strategy games. What would you say are some of the lessons you've learned from developing those games that have kept you from making those same mistakes with Elemental?

Gosh, every game offers a whole new set of mistakes to make. I think one of the things we had an advantage in developing GalCiv was that when we did the beta it was all technical people that took part back in the day. Back in 2003 anyone that would get involved in a beta knew what they were getting in to. But nowadays everyone throws the word "beta" on things that are basically done. So one of the things we ran into with this beta that was different was that people expected to get this game and thought it was just about "ready to ship." And we're like "no, if it was ready to ship, we'd be shipping it."

That was one of the things that made us think that we have to reevaluate how we do betas in the future because it created a lot of headaches for everyone involved. Instead of reports being technical they'd be about stuff like "the color of something should be different."

Let's talk about research because I think it's a very important part of the game. I've been fooling around with research a lot in the latest build of the game I have and one of the things that I noticed is that it is an integral part of the game - maybe the most important element - besides magic, of course.

Research is really your lynchpin. The idea is that the world was devastated by "the cataclysm" so your job - the people are looking to you - to rebuild the world, so to speak. And so you're not really researching new technologies as much as you're reclaiming technologies that were lost.