Stardock's 2010 release Elemental: War of Magic is a turn-based "4X" strategy game in a fantasy setting, a spiritual successor to Simtex's 1994 cult classic Master of Magic.
But the Michigan-based developer has a secondary goal with the title, beyond the main game event: an entire engine specifically built around the strategy genre, aimed at allowing modders or even other developers to create full-scale strategy games of their own.
"Most games in the past few years have been developed with engines like Unreal or Gamebryo. But there aren't a lot of game engines made for strategy games, which have very different requirements," Stardock CEO Brad Wardell told Gamasutra.