Elemental: War of Magic Previews
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Other additions to the game include the fleshed-out roles of independent hero characters. While you start the game with a single wizard character and can later sire children who can become heroes under your banner, you can also find neutral heroes that wander the world until either you or one of your rival nations hires them, at which point they may bolster your nation as one of your vassals, potentially adding a miscellaneous bonus of some sort--scholar characters, for instance, increase the rate of your technology research, while wizards increase your overall magic spell power. Stardock frontman Brad Wardell was quick to point out that recruiting these heroes will be crucial to victory, particularly in the early game, in which you'll start with nothing more than your wizard hero in a completely barren world.
While your character does have a store of gold coins and magical essence (the latter of which powers your magic spell research and can also be partially sacrificed to create a new town), Wardell pointed out that it may not be to your advantage to immediately build up town after town after town. Apart from the expense of your wizard's essence, and the opportunity cost of spending your turns exploring and meeting new heroes or discovering "resource caches" (Elemental's equivalent of the Civilization "goodie hut," a small stockpile of treasures just waiting to be discovered), towns will not act as revenue generators by default.
And a bit from Big Download:
Using spells depends on control of a Shard, which will grant access to a number of useful spells -- attack, defense, and support. Learning a spell requires spell points, which are generated by cities. Spell point generation is governed by research in a particular city. Ultimately, taking care of one's network of cities is important to victory. There are high-level spells that do incredible damage that can only be accessed by the proper maintenance of one's resources.
For example, one of the Fire spells causes a volcano to grow up from the ground, no matter what might already be in that area of the map. Not only will this wipe out any cities or units at ground zero, but it will also make that immediate region permanently impassable to wandering units. The offensive and defensive benefits of this are obvious.
