There's not much that can be said on this top that hasn't been already. Hopefully the major issues will be addressed this time. I'll definitely be more skeptical of Stardock's hype with FE as well. 

I will give it an honest try. If it doesnt turn out well, its back to Kings Bounty, Football Manager or whatnot. I am rather difficult to please, so there is a limited number of games that I like to play.

From what I understand, almost everybody is working on FE; WoM at this point is just a couple of guys plus Brad when he can find the time.  So I wouldn't base your concerns for FE on what you feel about the most recent WoM patch.

Nero, you seem to be pretty badly misinformed here.

First, it's not the same team that released the piece of crap WoM. The team working on FE is fundamentally different, as the project manager / "main guy" is Derek Paxton instead of Brad Wardell (who runs everything else in Stardock as well).

Second, Stardock will not go out of business, regardless of how their games perform. Stardock makes most of its money not from its games but from elsewhere. The biggest motivator for them to make good games is their reputation, not the money.

I have faith that the game is going to be great.

Derek Paxton will keep things ship shape and in order.

I like everything I've seen so far.

Nero, I never said that their reputation hasn't taken a hit. We're on the same page. And I think it's pretty clear to everyone, incuding them that they  can't release another game like they did with WoM. I don't think that's going to happen. Let's wait and see.

Winnihym (man, your name always makes me think of Winnie the poh )

I had completely forgot about PAX (I mean, who knows about it..?   It's E3 and that German gameconference and that's it. PAX makes me think of some "indies exhibition") but we'll see what we'll get there....

You're right about the developer journal on magic. I too was very underwhelmed & disappointed.

....Looks like we're NEVER gonna get a replacement for Master of Magic

I'm hoping the radio silence is because they learned something from WoM and Brad's thing for talking up stuff that never made it into the game. High expectations and what ended up being confused customers are really bad things.

One of the things I learned from that whole process is that there's good reasons why most other game companies don't have that kind of open process.

Yeah, I'm in management and people will complain they don't get enough information. If we push out early (and inaccurate) information and then say there is a change later; Mutiny on the Bounty. I've landed on 1. share macro-level information that is 100% accurate 2. when the micro-level is determined, share it.

Also, the ladies don't like premature informatulation.

This may not be widely understood but the factors that led to WOM's initial release being so disappointing were pretty unique.

Let's bear in mind, the entire team from Galactic Civilizations II (and all expansions) worked on WOM. We have very low turn over so it was the same team. Same designer, same developers plus new ones. Same artists plus new artists.  That should, I hope, tell you something about the nature of game development.

It's very easy to forget that game development is really an exercise in software engineering. What I mean by that is that the "Game" you play is a very very thin layer on top of software whose development is much like any other type of software.

WOM is not anything like what I had designed originally. Its problem lie almost completely with the difference between what our new engine could do and what the design called for. Thus, a lot of things had to be changed in WOM, late in development, to match what the engine could do (not to mention that the engine turned out to be very buggy).

This is why most companies today license their engines from third parties so that they can focus purely on the game layer.  But strategy games are a different animal. Games like Civilization V and Elemental and the like have to create their own engines and it's no small feat to do on the PC in 2011.

With Fallen Enchantress, the game was designed from the ground up knowing what the engine could and couldn't do.

With War of Magic, today, the limitations have to do with what I can personally implement with the engine in a reasonable amount of time.

Will people like Fallen Enchantress? I think so. For one thing, there's no release date or budgetary pressure on it that was on WOM.  Our company's revenue or health is not dependent, even in the least, on the success or failure of our games (otherwise, we'd likely not be making brand-new hard core PC-only strategy games in 2011 <G>).  

With Fallen Enchantress, there is one god father -- Derek Paxton.  But he has consulting help from myself and Jon Shafer (in WOM, while I was on paper the designer, because I was running the rest of Stardock, the design process effectively became whoever was working on the feature doing what they though was good). So there's a pretty good set up there.

Now, when will FE come out? My guess is that it won't come out in 2011. That's not an official date but given that it's July and we like our long public betas, you can pretty much make the guess.

I would also like to get WOM in a place I'm satisfied with before the betas of FE hit the streets and while v1.3 is better, it's not where I'd like it to be. That just means FE will be more polished when its beta begins (i.e. I'm not stealing resources from FE).

Hope this helps.

Do you still think you'll have a chance to dig into the tactical AI in WoM?

Thank you for addressing the concerns, Brad.

I understand all too well the issues of developing new software and invariably it takes a heap more effort than anyone ever anticipates. As such, for me at least, the bugs and crashes are to be expected and I'm not really worried about these. My issues were really regarding the balance and mechanics.

It sounds funny, but I'm heartened that WoM is not being given much priority and that changes are only being implemented that can be done within limited time-frames. I'm also really heartened that FE is not likely to be rushed even though we keep yelling to be fed more and more information. This basically means FE should be a different animal.

I guess my big remaining concern is the Tactical Battles because it still looks like the mechanics of WoM and FE are very similar and will share the same issues. There are many other posts in here with different perspectives on combat but pretty much everyone is concerned about the Tactical Combat mechanics. It would be good to see this at least sorted in WoM before the beta for FE is released but this may be one of the 'too much time' distractions that would get in the way of the FE timeline.