I played EWoM early, once, then gave up. It may be an RPG world but it is the blandest post apocalypse RPG world ever. Two sides and ten factions that can't be differentiated without reference to the manual. Silliest dungeon generator ever (so they just sort of happen when I research them?!?). No quests worthy of the word. etc. A game with huge potential and very little delivered. Been following the foums for 7 months and seen a few improvements but nothing that makes me want to play the game again. And that progress does seem to have slowed from a walk to a crawl.
Indeed, what would be wrong with taking a few pages from MoM? I understand that they are self-limited by the (very poor) choice of a non-fantasy world but there is much in MoM that would make this the best fantasy TBS game of all time. As it is, this game lags significantly behind MoM, a 20 year old game. A really sad statement to have to make but I have played MoM a couple of times in those 7 months and it is a much better game than EWoM - at least in the sense that it is actually fun to play. For games, fun will always beat boring.
Maybe EWoM will eventually evolve into the game it could be; maybe FE will be that game or maybe someone will actually use the engine to make a mod that makes it all worthwhile (as FFH did for Civ4). here's hoping.
Despite the overall negative tenor of this post, I do admire and respect Stardock for continuing to work on this game. I hope that amongst all the criticisms they will recognize a few examples of the positive sort and take them to heart.
