There's been little to no advancement in the FPS genre,  unless you count adding a cohesive story and doing away with keys.  The games play almost exactly the same,  perhaps location based damage,  and the ability to look up and down.  Xp points?  To what purpose?  All they do is cripple the game,  add xp points,  and let them progress you up to the actual FPS.  Unlockables aren't an improvement,  they've existed since the C64.  Make your own "Class"?  What class?  It's an FPS.  Shoot stuff.  I had lagfree multiplayer on TEN with Duke Nukem 15 years ago on a 56k modem.  Stats tracking is nothing more than tagging on a database to display meaningless information.  The controls are the same today they were 20 years ago,  WASD.  So is responsiveness,  unless you're talking about laser mice and USB ports,  which have nothing to do with FPS.  Laser mice were designed to address the shortcoming of the ball,  and the USB ports were designed with throughput in mind.  In fact,  the truth is,  USB actually has a limit on the number of simultaneous keypresses and huge problems with polling rates. 

As far as racing goes,  adding a physics system doesn't inherently make a better game.  In fact,  for most,  it makes it worse.  Honestly,  when was the last time you heard someone lament the fact that the latest racer didn't properly simulate the (Insert car name) cooling problems.  In fact,  adding a real functional physics engine is extremely counterproductive,  once people played and realized that no car is going around a bend at > 60mph without completely losing traction and wiping out,  they're going to quit playing real fast.  People want a fun race,  not to deal with the problems caused by the true physics.  Trust me,  I've modded the crap out of my car,  no one's going to spend any amount of time dealing with the issues I've faced just to play a game.  Seriously,  hands up,  how many people want to play a sim where they're dealing with cooling issues due to a leaking EGR housing?  That's what I get to do tomorrow.  Pretty sure no one's eager to play a video game of me trying to seal a poorly designed government mandated environmental part.

Why is it "So hard"?  Because there's little that needs improving other than streamlining and presenting information clearly.  The games do what they're meant to do very well.  TBH everything you're lamenting here is completely counterproductive and/or would take me a grand total of 10 minutes to implement and maybe 100 lines of code.  Unlockables?  Really?  TBS have it, it's a tech tree.

Suddenly I'm strongly reminded of one high-profile company who's art director lamented the fact that Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 were going to be "Old top down views" instead of First/Third person.  Like an RTS can be played that way,  or that Diablo 3 would be anything but a shooter at that point.

Some heroes were scouts/pathfinders who would increase the stack speed and there was a group fly spell. And flying ships so you could do orbital drops with your space mar... err... I mean soldiers.

Still - the speed of the stack was always limited by it's slowest unit. No exceptions other than being transported by a ship or other transport unit.

Mostly you had to do your transport by roads or if you could manage - magical roads.

And the pathfinding was awesome^2. You could tell a unit to go halfway around the world and it would do it. In Elemental, units are often dumbfounded by the task of navigating around one bend of the coastline. So they stop. And wait for you to hold their hand, giving them small orders to move more or less in straight lines. The GalCiv heritage shows. =P

Ahh true about the speed of unit stack,thx for the reminder

Stardock, are you going to implement anything like the above, or should we just forget about it? I dont mean this in a rude way, I mean it as far as licensing goes and all that.

Ehh, MOM. God bless DOSbox that lets me still play it. At one point, I put DOSBox on a PDA so I could run MoM there (turned out too slow, sadly)

As for stack speeds - WindWalking spell allowed the hero to act as a "ship" for his stack, and one hero (Jaer the Wind Mage IIRC) came with it as a default ability.

I am not saying that Elemental ought to be a clone of MoM (although that would rock ), but I agree that there is much to be learned and imitated from MoM. MUCH.

Well, somewhere in this thread, I did mention something along these lines. I mean, given the fact that SD and Microprose WERE in discussion to take up MOM 2, I'm sure Microprose are just waiting in the shadows for some kind of far fetched copy infringement.

Without copying the spells, they could see that a lot of stuff needs to be implemented. For example, you have Death Magic. Why can't you cast a spell on your units to give them life drain? Or making them undead  / "imbued with evil". Strangely enough, there is a faction skill "death cult" feel like it sooo dosen't belong there lol. And can't you pick that even for a Kingdom?

I'll repeat something I said before, It seems that there were some pretty MASSIVE last minute changes following the last beta. I'm basing myself on reading relevant threads during those times. I saw some skill/talent/building lists which left me thinking... wh... why... did you take that away!? Noooooooo

So it feels that the game got a good swing of the quick fix axe near the end, so that it would remove problems they had with balancing / making them work properly. Hopefully most of them will come back.

So yeah, Stax77, you are on the money concerning the copyright infringement. At this point SD might be under close scrutiny, and shouldn't attempt any type of "copy pasting" of spells/buildings/concepts/features of MOM. Although, I would be curious how far can copyright infringement go with spells. I mean, who can claim (C) on the Fireball spell?

Cheers,

V