Question: will groups in tactical battles actually all participate?  I’m referring to a group of 4 soldiers in combat when only the first guy in the line fights, and whom ever he kills in the opposing group simply 'vanishes'.   Are they all going to step up to the plate in combat and spread out within the tile?

I think for diplomacy to be good, the AI needs to be able to make the player do things that aren't in the player's best interest- just like how the player can do the AI.

Just to bring up some stuff from the Elemental creation process relevant to this:

1. The tactical battle system is 100% new and based on initiative rather than teams taking turns.

IIRC this is something a lot of people wanted in Elemental (because it's more D&D'ish). Good to see you're listening. Also, Chief, remember that "talk" we had last where you told me about the way you envisioned battles with Sovs throwing spells back and forth that could be "countered" before or after they're cast? THAT would be something to implement here.

2. The economic system is all new.

Could be interesting, but it should support the creation of HUGE armies.

3. The food/housing/prestige mechanic is gone and replaced with something more intuitive and we think funner.

If Elemental showed us one thing predominantly it is that what the Players/Community think is "Funner" and what the Dev Team thought was "Funner" were more often then not two entirely different things. Ask more specific questions of us this time around and maybe, just possibly...USE those ideas. . Remember the MASSIVE "Petition for Huge Armies Thread" ? Remember when you and I talked about Huge Armies? When I saw the video on Fallen Enchantress on GameSpot the armies in the background, while they did look cool, didn't look like their sizes had changed much.

As we all know, there's No Shame in "Borrowing Ideas" from other games in the game development business. Do yourselves (And Us Players) a favor and Please "Borrow" the MASSIVE ARMY idea from the Total War series. Of course don't go real time with it, keep it turn based, but please, Please, give us HUGE ARMIES in this one .

Don't make me post that very much remembered "concept picture" with the massive armies marching toward each other . We both know almost everyone here would say "We Want That!!!!".

4. The combat system is very different with damage types, resistance types, etc.

This was something The Community Screamed For during Elemental development. Again, it's AWESOME to see you've chosen to go this route in more detail this time. Seeing as how the combat system will be pretty different this time around and you're going back to some ideas that were passed up on for Elemental, this would be the Perfect Time to bring in some more ideas the community wanted to see in Elemental and didn't get....*coughHugeArmiescough*

As always, you da man, Chief!!!

.

..

...

Sorry, I couldn't help it...heh.

AoW:SM does, and it manages to work as a multiplayer game. It also has tactical battles in MP, which EWoM is also missing.

This doesn't make any sense. Where is the demand for this "Elemental-lite" competitive MP game? It's not on the forums, where people want the SP game only with humans > 1. It's not in EWoM right now, going by the current arena count of two ranked players. I have a hard time believing it's coming from people at SD who simply don't want to work on MP, because it seems like trying to make it a different game is more work rather then less.

Help us out here. The community is being pretty clear in what it wants, and that what you did last time didn't work. Why insist on doing it again when all we want is the stuff you plan on building for SP anyway?

Caravans. For example.

I shouldn't have to go through every town to find out, which caravan just got destroyed.

Hero equipment and the shop. That doesn't have to be explained, does it?

No order in which multiple pop-ups appear. Ie. A battle starts, whoops, diplomacy screen in my face, whoops, research screen in my face, let's chose a research option, ups, can't, first have to do the battle... it's maddening.

Unit icons, are there a dozen units in it or just one? Can't see on the cloth map.

Cloth map itself, can't see beaches on it!

Then we have unit control, right click by accident somewhere, and off goes the unit (preferable through forests which cost more movement points). No line showing the movement path of a unit. Hard to see which unit is selected on the cloth map. Yeah, green border as Tarth, which has green units, on a green map...

Also, units with move orders should move at the beginning of a turn, or the turn shouldn't end when units have reached their destination with moves left. The way it is, you always have to redo moves to make sure, everything is save and has moved like you want.

Research screen, there is no information what comes when, you have to use outside information to see that diplomacy tech screen for example is totally useless...

I could go on for ages. That's just the first things that come to my mind.

I have a question? And a Rant apparently...

What am I supposed to do with the Extra copy of Elemental I possess that would have made a great Gift but I was forced to wait, and wait, for it to actually be finished to the point where I would really considered it Giftable?

It has not reached that point yet and now a new game is being presented to us?

I must confess that this new age game design process that game buyers face these days has some pretty funky shit built into it and concerns me deeply.

One can only assume now, that given this list

1. The tactical battle system is 100% new and based on initiative rather than teams taking turns.
2. The economic system is all new.
3. The food/housing/prestige mechanic is gone and replaced with something more intuitive and we think funner.
4. The combat system is very different with damage types, resistance types, etc.
5. Its user interface will be new.

what I bought first time around was ill concieved and not worth anyones time and effort. Why does that just sound wrong.

What really caused this Rant was that item #11 is totally missing.

#11 For a Game that rave(s) about its Moddability, it apparently it does not warrant mention. Dissapointing...

Looking forward to FE.  Very promising.

Uhh...in what dilusional world are you speaking of? I've gotten more OOM errors with the 1.19 series of betas than I have since I originally bought the game (July during beta 3).

I have a question about MP. Now with this new cool tactical combat mechanic, wouldn't it be perfect with a TC only MP mode?

Really looking forward to the beta!

Yea, I'd really like to throw my (unasked for) two cents in here.  I'm really baffled by this stance, since it's something I've seen asked for since the beginning (I know I've been whining and moaning about it since before the game released).

As I've posted a half dozen times before, this can all easily be handled with game options, something that Elemental MP seriously lacks at the moment.  It strikes me as far more work to separately work on and balance two separate games (SP version and MP version), when everyone I know of that plays TBS games online is doing so with their friends and usually cooperatively at that.

I really have no interest in a reduced version.  My friends and I will just keep playing Fall From Heaven and it's various modmods until then.  It's unfortunate, because I had such high hopes that Elemental would be the game to replace that.  Increasingly, it seems like that won't be the case.

You have covered most, if not all, of the issues I currently have with this game that I hope to see addressed in future versions.

I would also like to harp on watch towers, the kind that can be garrisoned.

ALSO:

Another aspect of this game I would like to see fleshed out is Alliances.

Let the factions that form an alliance offer each other units that the other faction can control. That way something can actually be done to an enemy faction.

Another idea would be to have the various members of the factions vote on a supreme commander to control the various units that get the alliance designation. You could let diplomatic capital reresent votes and maybe allow Charisma to add a bonus.

Does anyone remember the council votes in MOO2?

Note: I know you don't like super-long posts, Chief, but this one is worth reading (IMO), I promise.

Very true, very true indeed. I do remember now it being a screen-shot from the way the old system was set up during internal testing. Still, looking back on the last conversation we had discussing the way you envisioned the changes to tactical battles for the later versions, I thought it sounded pretty epic. Sovereign's bouncing spells back and forth, countering spells with other spells or interruptions, plus the massive armies fighting all around them. The image in my head of your description was of truly epic conflicts being fought out.

If you go to the GameSpot video here: http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/elementalwarofmagicfallenenchantress/video/6300944?hd=1

Scroll down to the bottom and see a rather rude comment by someone named "Rush Gremlin". While obviously I don't agree with the majority of his comment where he's bad mouthing the game, he does seem like a rude little douche-bag after all, his last sentence says "It would be better if you could build massive armies.", which IMO is the only part of his comment worth mentioning. It's gotten 3 "thumbs up" and 2 "thumbs down". Granted that's not many, but also I don't think the video has very many comments at all which should say something about the overall excitement (or lack there of) by players as a whole about the upcoming expansion. There are a lot of videos on GameSpot, articles too, that have page after page after page of replies. It's definitely not a lack of interest in the genre that's keeping the comment count low. Unfortunately I'd say it's the lack of the game to deliver "epic feeling game-play" where the battles are concerned.

In contrast, go to this link of the older GameSpot article here entitled: Elemental: War of Magic Updated Q&A - Progress Report and Improvements Over GalCiv

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/elementalwarofmagic/news.html?sid=6250185&mode=previews

Look at How Many Comments that posting on GameSpot generated. Also notice the first picture shown is that original picture of the massive armies. It has 8 Pages of Comments. Take the time out to read through some of those comments, Chief. See what the majority of them say? Allow me to quote some of them:

MrClean44 Pg7

Posted Feb 10, 2010 8:47 pm PT

Hummm... I must have to say, this looks awesome!

Of course, we all realize Elemental's defining inspiration is MoM, as it should be, but, I also remember your dev journal posts from way back, over two years ago now, where you talked about Elemental being a mix between MoM and Total War (except in turn based obviously). It's my opinion that the majority of war/strategy game players these days want and expect massive, epic battles. Your previous hit titles like Gal Civ 1&2 and it's expansions all have massive battles, which I think is part of the reason why (from a game-play standpoint) that they were such a commercial hit.

In my advice, which is also just my opinion (and we all know about people and their opinions...heh) would be to go back and re-evaluate your initial vision from back in the early days of conceptualizing your vision. Also go through your chat history in Skype and re-read the last conversation we had (I think I have it saved some-where if you'd like me to send it to you) and what you were telling me you'd like to do, which greatly resembles in part your initial vision of a MoM/TW turn based hybrid. Of course we understand resources like man-hours and money are limited, but, I really think it would be well worth the investment to bring that vision to life in Fallen Enchantress.

For a look at what kind of buzz it would generate, just look at the bigger war/strategy games out there like the up-coming Shogun2 and some of their past commercial hits. Take a look at SoaSE as well. I think it's proven that players Love massively epic battles and that's really one of the only things IMO that's missing in Elemental. We do have some pretty big battles in Elemental, and some of them do a good job of capturing that feeling, but I think we can do better . For a good example of how many players want the epic battles, go back and look at the "Petition Thread" as well and count the possitive comments. There are Tons of players in that, far more than were against it, that wanted to see huge battles like those shown in the now infamous picture so many people raved about. That picture alone built up a TON of Positive Buzz for Elemental. In this thread someone also mentioned the animations where only one guy was doing the attacking and defending while the other members of his unit just stood back. I would recommend fixing that issue. Take the time it takes to animate all the members of an attacking and defending unit. Even if you only slightly increase unit sizes, having them all be animated during attacks would help greatly to bring the more "epic feeling" to fruition.

Granted I don't know the costs associated with paying animators, but, you already have the animations for one guy doing the attacks. Those same animations can be applied to all the members of a unit, and just set the timing slightly different for when each individual in a unit starts his attack animation and do the same for the defending units. I think the cost would be minimal while the affect on the feeling of the game would be Maximum. I truly believe the players would buzz about it and praise would be heaped upon you and the dev team as is truly deserved for making such an awesome game.

Thanks for the reply and the info Chief   This is why we players love you guys, because we know you listen to your player base and use our input (within reason of course).

Here's a new and innovative idea for MP... Leave it out altogether!! That'd suit me just fine.