Yeah, I guess Merchants' Guild isn't really the right word for what I'm looking for. More of a consortium of independent traders who more or less watch out for each other - meaning that if someone has a reputation for being hostile to trade, that person will have trouble attracting any traders to deal with him except for a high premium.

I'm strongly against the idea of having all trade between players exist within caravans moving on the map due to the following problems:

1)  There's way too many possibilities for exploits, bugs, abuses, cheats, etc., .   Lets not place a brand new untested engine on a brand new airplane without any backup options.  I want the game to succeed.

2)  The traditional trading system we've seen from the majority of successful TBS games have all used a trading screen window where the trade completes within two turns or less.   This method has a solid history of being successful. 

3)  If I play a massive size map and my brothers/friends exist on the opposite side we would NEVER be able to trade or at least for the majority of the game.  Please include a trading system where I can trade with my brothers/friends even if they do exist far far away.

You place to much value on past success and not enough on future success. The reason why we all love Stardock so much is because they love to break the mould and make something new. Nothing like SoaSE had been done before, but it was still going to be the best strategy game of the year. If we wanted conservative rehashed game design we would go to EA.

I like the look of the new ideas presented for this game and I personally can't wait to see how it all plays out. 

On another note... The post looks like 50% teaser, 48% update, and 2% Frogboy finally drew a horse!

Awesome, awesome to the max.

Why would they develop 3 times the code, 3 times the Ai work for it, and do 3 times the QA effort on something like that? Do you really think there's any chance such an optional feature would even come remotely close to generating enough extra sales to make that a positive return on investment?

Ah I had missed Boogiebac's post, which I agree, definitely fleshed this update out quite nicely. Also the news that there is internal alpha NEXT WEEK with more promised goodies after that...well, to say I am excited to hear that is an understatement!

certainly.  Having a good Queue system helps too.   Like if I'm playing and I Q up 20 turns worth of stuff, then I don't even really need to worry about AI involvement unless something 'unexpected' happens (like deamons spawn on my doorstep, that would be a problem).  I always liked in Supreme Commander how I could queue up a good 5 or 10 min at the begining of the game.  I'd sit and Q up my entire base, then walk off to make a sandwich.  By the time I got back my defences would be about up and I'd have tanks rolling out ready for combat.

May I suggest also having some sort of system that helps ensure players are aware of upcoming important events or meetings that would best not be AI controlled.  Like if the council of mages are meeting to talk about something, we wouldn't want somebody to be AFK.    (of course ignore this if such events won't happen)

I'm all about playing by e-mail (I do it with my father in Civ 4, and I'd like to do it with more people in this) so if there was a notification something like 40 turns in advance (whatever is twice or 1.5 the turn buffer so there is time to plan) that relates to real time (and can adjust based on time zones) for the meeting to take place.  That way people can plan ahead and know exactly when they need to be around for the wizard council.

I guess the voting and communication could also just happen over several turns, and that might be an easy fix.  Now that I've typed this I conisidered the fact that maybe you don't NEED to all be communicating, that would just be more fun.

how big a game world can we make?  A subjective question, yes, but let me give some background.

The OP mentions D&D, and that's a perfect point of reference.  D&D Online was the MMORPG I'd wanted to make since I was a kid.  But the implementation of the game is such that you leave a main city and bam! you're in a dungeon.  The designers wanted to have friends play a complete adventure within a 2 hour (or so) game session.  But that's too small to give a real sense of being within a fantasy world, imo.  There's no world exploration.  No sense of space.

I'm looking for some description of the sense of time/space that is realistically available within a given Elemental game.  Can we create maps along the scale of a Middle-Earth?   Smaller, like a Greyhawk city and it's immediate surrounding towns and neighboring cities (size of a country?).

Is it practical to create a campaign world (D&D terminology) or is it more focused towards smaller-scale single game sessions?

Lets just say... they are allowing you to make full use of 64 bit windows... In other words, you can make it as big as you want, plus some. This assumes of course you have enough RAM to handle such a game. 64 bit can handle up to around 16 exobytes of RAM, so you could theoretically make a game that is actually bigger than the earth... Sure you may never see a single AI player in your lifetime, but you could do it...

I was thinking along the same lines. It'd need to be automated and simple to use (as otherwise there'd be a tendancy to manually attach guards to caravans - shadowing them around the map - which would be soooooooo tedious)..  you could have a slider saying how much you want to spend on the security of your trade network and then that could affect either the size of the force, or the probability of a force being there at all to protect your caravans in tactical battles whenever they're raided. This would give you another interesting risk versus reward decision to make in the game.. do you gamble on keeping extra funds in your coffers and take a few caravan raids as acceptable collatoral damage, or do you beef up security across the length and breadth of your empire and make the bandits weep!

I jst got a new a new rig (i7, 6GB ram, gf 9600, winXP-64bit) and I was wondering how close will we be able to zoom?

could I zoom in and see people walking in the streets? to different between buildings? etc etc

Wardre