Damn I really wanted to find a clip of The Zeppo to post here

I look forward to eating some fallen cake. Could we get some of those awesome hard flower candies on top?

I like this. I think that the best games have had a strong vision behind them.

So now that we've seen the icing... any chance we can get a few of the ingredients?

I'm excited for the way Elemental is going. The way is forward and I for one am damn excited. Thank you for the post Derek. You guys do amazing work and I for one appreciate it. Fallen Enchantress is going to be great!

Will we be able to sign up to help you beta test it, once you get it ready?  I think many of us from the beta and even the reg game would love to help test it!

If you want to avoid taking away from the strategic at the expense of ground-level gameplay, does that mean that our tactical battles are never going to get more depth?

Or if they are going to, how does your perception of what proper dungeons would be significantly differ from what a tactical battle should be?

Which is exactly the problem with tactical battles. They have no depth. There is very little there in terms of actual tactical options.

Please make sure to give reason for casting spells to enrich/defile the landscape. Kingdoms gain mana slowly through area of vibrance, while Empire defile an area to get a quick one-time boost of mana, for example. Shaping the land in this way should not automatically happen, but should be something that the player wants to work towards for the strategic benefit; foiling an opponent's plans by disrupting their terraforming would be an equally exciting and tantalizing strategy.

Otherwise, what the heck is the point of those spells? Sure, it looks pretty as the land turns green or cracks and burns away, but what's the point? There has to be a reason to want to expand this area of control where you can turn the landscape.

Thanks for reading, Derek!

WhiteElk, coding things is a nontrivial pursuit. It is not affordable for Stardock to add things they don't intend to even use.

As an aside, "cannon" is a thing that shoots; I beleive you mean "canon".

I agree!  Derek, can you provide some hooks for linkable maps?  That means, you can concentrate on what you do best, and modders can do what they do best - expanding the game in innovative, non-standard ways, that are just not feasible for core releases with limited resources.  So you can make a chocolate cake, and the modders can put a delicious and adventurous icing on top.   Modding can increase a huge amount if the modders are given enough interesting hooks, whereas main releases are always limited by scope and budget, no matter just significant the numbers are.

If you provide some hooks, that costs just a little amount of time and money, and many modders do fantastic things with them, who can lose?

+1 for hooks for linkable maps!   What do other people think?

Best regards,
Steven.

Let me start by saying that I agree with you (I remember the times when I used food flavours to talk about Elemental back in the betas pre-1.0... now I talk about pants, apparently).

One reason by which it's difficult to dissapoint me with the game is because I actually set my expectations very low (see OP for some of the reasons) and follow the "As long as it's fun" motto. That doesn't mean I end totally happy with all its elements (Dynasties, I'm looking at ye in your latest incarnation!) but it would require an apocalypse to freak me out.

I'm happy that you mention dungeons because that's one of those things with some meat to talk about. Yep, this is no RPG and explorable dungeons by themselves are a bit off of the TBS that Elemental is (if you start with different levels, fog of war to explore, treasures, parties limited to champions, etc). But it also depends on how they are done. And forget about Multiplayer.

I must agree that Tactical battles also break the pace (in the same manner) but as they are more popular (and already in the game), it seems easier to ignore that and keep them. And our current Tactical battles are quite easy without complex ability system, complex city defense, complex battlefields,... huh? Imagine if they had all that stuff. Hell, some people would prefer city development as reduced as possible because for them it breaks the pace they like (war, war, war,...). What was the OP about everybody wanting something different?

It has already been mentioned but if it hadn't, I'd mention it myself: if you don't add them in some way (which as I said, I agree with your reasons), make sure to give some serious modding tools that allow such a thing. We can link to different maps (Tactical maps) but actually having people being able to add extra planes to the game, explorable dungeons and similar stuff are one of the things that the most serious modders of the community (of which I'm not one ) could appreciate (and lets not talk about the players, specially MoM's ultrahardcore fans of doom). I suppose.

Maybe people would develop explorable dungeons as tactical maps (one or some linked) with "dungeon" (or sewer, palace or whatever) scenery (blocking paths and all that), with some triggers for "events", FoW for exploration, maybe battles go in their own tactical map or maybe enemies are placed on the map and move, etc. Maybe some prefer explorable dungeons as a mix of text-adventure and some tactical battles tied to it (lenght and difficulty based on the dungeon). There could be some that having explorable dungeons as pure text-adventures a la Space Rangers 2 * (I made a thread about this long time ago in the modding section) would be more than happy. Oh, and if someone mentions "We suck at writing", then I should say "HerrGamenon, I choose you!!". One of the things I want in the game are text-adventures. By mod or by Stardock. Hell, I would love to make a game (a real game, not just a mod) around that.

As a reminder, I agreeded with the OP about the canon game.

* great example of mixing different things and not "breaking the pace" and keeping some as optionals.

One thing I wouldn't mind seeing, is "dungeon" type goodie huts where you can send adventurers, and have all sorts of various things happen from that, kinda like the lairs from FFH, perhaps though with several of those effects rolled into one: like adventurer gains 2 level, finds a +1 shortsword, but is having to run from a dire skath.  You wouldn't know the effects until a few turns later, during which time the adventurer is unavailable (might be 1-4 turns, depending on how epic things get)

Higher level adventurers will gain less experience from dungerouns, but less likely to have bad things happen, and more likely to get loot.  In the real bad cases, the lowbie adventurers would just die, while the high level adventurers may end up angering Shabranigdo, who then makes a meal of Farmer John's cattle, then Farmer John, then comes for you.

There's plenty of work to do without explorable dungeons. FE can be a great game without them, and if you feel you can do that successfully and simply 'don't know' if you can pull off explorable dungeons, then you have to make this call. I'm looking forward to FE.

However... when you say the word, 'explorable dungeons' it sounds like some tacked on appendage that one might imagine 'optional'. If you find a better name for it though, it could be something more than that, something that you could actually get alot of miles out of. An explorable dungeon is fundamentally an alternative map. If you allow switching between different game maps, you can make not only explorable dungeons, but alternate planes ala MoM, an underground world map ala AoW:SM, different planets, whatever. How about a different tactical map for each world tile, each with its own unique challenges and defensive qualities?

Once you have the framework for a 'world within a world' you can do alot with that. So many things then go from 'not technically feasable' to 'we need a few more artists'.