Exactly. See why others and I remain skeptical: denial goes on.

Crashes and removed features I could have lived with - to an extent - IF the surviving mechanics made for a fun game. The real problem was never the engine: almost every single design choice in Ewom is flawed, poorly executed and disjointed from the other ones. This is why patches are helping little and in some cases making things worse.

Not only did I want thousands of units on the battlefield, AND customizable units - I also wanted a real-time strategy game filled with so much content I couldn't play it in a lifetime if I tried. Also, the graphics should dynamically adjust themselves to my graphic card, so that whatever equipment I have it should always look like I just bought the game.

</sarcasm>

I, too, prefer customizable units over thousands of units.

True!

I hope this wasn't in reply to me. I never asked for all of that, I said I would prefer having thousands of units on the battlefield and more diversity in faction units than customizable units. This doesn't mean I do not like customizing units, but there is absolutely no difference in units from faction to faction and I would have much more enjoyed the game with more units on the battlefield. This would have helped me believe I was building up civilization again from nothing and eventually (after perhaps a couple hundred years) was able to develop a flourishing and thriving nation with a relatively large army. You have to remember that years fly by in elemental. It makes no sense for 300 years to go by and you have healed up the land all around you and you have a dozen cities and you still field an army of 100 men, its stupid. In 300 years you should be able to grow a population of a couple hundred to easily tens of thousands if not in the hundreds of thousands if the land is being healed and food being provided, etc. Of course if the land remains a blighted hell hole than the population wouldn't grow as quickly but with the land healing, food being provided and security and order being established there should be no reason why it can't happen and for a population that large you should easily be able to field a few thousand soldiers.

I could not agree with this post more. Honestly, I'm surprised that Mistwraithe is the only one saying it. Let's set the limitations of the engine aside, for a moment, because the topic has really been discussed quite a bit. Imagine that the team was able to implement the game in such a way that the engine wasn't a concern.

I know that I, for one, would still have been disappointed with the game. Why? Like Mistwraithe mentioned, it's not very strong conceptually- and this is not the fault of the engine. Think of the strategic considerations you make during the first 20 turns of Civ 4. Now, think of the strategic considerations of the first 20 turns of WoM.

There's no need to adapt your strategy in a meaningful way to your starting position (and this is not an engine limitation), there's not really any hair-pulling over getting your economy up and running (and this is not an engine limitation), and there's no real need for serious thought about the development of your technology (and this is not an engine limitation).

The last point about the tech tree is probably what frustrates me the most. You have a unique setting for a unique game, and just endless opportunity for an imaginitive tech tree that draws you into the game, but the opportunity is just wasted. It feels more like an Enable Feature 1, Enable Feature 2, etc. system than anything else. There could be serious early-game choices about developing an agrarian or hunting-based society that could have implications for your military development, but there's not.

TL;DR: It's easy to blame limitations of the engine, but this is not the whole (or even the greatest part) of the problem. Also, the post might sound more negative in tone than it was meant to be. Imagine that it is being read by a gigantic cartoon smiley-face.

Hell, I could do that in a minute if you really want one crystlshake.

I think the concerns are about using the engine, the game mechanics are an easy fix (programatically). It's just a matter of having the right design, and that you can map out on paper. The limitations within the core engine regarding random map creation and problems with random terrain generation are the real problem. Heck river's weren't linking up with the ocean properly and they just took river's out. There are some real fundamental problems with building FE on the WoM engine and those are the things I am truly wondering if they will get fixed.

If FE is the seeded, non-random, bland maps of WoM then I'll probably just cry a little and never look back at Elemental again.  To me the entire point of the game is having a kingdom builder where there is a whole ton of unexplored and unsettleable land with cool interesting features, thats unique every time I hit the new game button. 12 or so maps without rivers or terrain that makes logical sense kinda blows the suspension of disbelief aspect cruicial to these types of replayable strategy games.

And just to emphasize the point go take a hard look at civ4 vs civ5 rivers, it is an understandable opinion that civ4's rivers are better. Rivers are hard to code into a map generator and with civ5 hexes might have gotten the best of them with edge matching. Here in WoM with a ground up written engine using squares they haven't even gotten basic rivers right. Let alone complex algorithm's to radomly generate entire maps that have some form of logical flow to the terrain. In other words they had a true core software engineering failure, not testing, release management, project management, just plain old straight up we don't know how to code this and cant figure it out. And referencing the Civ issue above it's not like stardock is alone, bigger dev shops with larger brain trusts have fundamental problems with complex map generation.

The other funny thing about that is LDiCesare one of the best map modders from Civ 4 came over and pointed out a ton of problems with the maps and actually offered to help, I don't think he ever got heard from again. Would have love to have seen someone like him brought on board.

Thanks for all the insight.

However, this is the part that keeps tripping me up...there isn't much about FE that is being designed from scratch, not as far as we have been told or shown. Maybe the final product will prove me wrong, but it still seems like it is largely building on WoM, with significant changes to certain areas. I haven't seen anything that has led me to believe that anyone sat down and said, "ok we have an Engine, now lets design a new game from scratch." What exactly is going to be so different about the gameplay? It will still be a strategy RPG and will continue many aspects of WoM.

Ultimately it doesn't matter as long as FE turns out good. I don't care if it is a  whole new game or just a better realization of what WoM could and should have been. As long as it is fun, polished, and stable, I'll be happy. I still argue that the core of WoM is good, so if FE improves on that, I'll be pleased.

I think they probably have a board up in the Stardock labs that says: Things we need to add!

-Unique units and factions

-Interesting environments

-Scary monsters

-Balanced combat

-Interesting combat

-Magic

-Spells (Well 25 or so is fine I guess)

-A well functioning tech tree

-A well functioning economy

-Competent AI

If they have the board up I am sure FE will be at least a passable game for the genre. I mean AOW was fine, but those oldie games are dated. We need to raise the par quality even if recent games in the industry have become facile and redundant. For 50 dollars I expect these things to have a very high quality. As a side note, I would be willing to pay ten times that for an original concept game that was well made and fun.

I don't think we're actually that far apart in what we're saying. Yes, you need solid core mechanics, and yes you can do a lot of that independent of the engine. And certainly some stuff should have been sorted out on its own. I always go back to the economics discussion because it was the single best thread this forum has ever seen, and also because essentially nothing from it made it into the game. They probably should have known before starting that thread if the game was going to have global resources since the entire discussion was predicated on local resources.

But originally the design of this game was for RTS combat. It was designed with that in mind. When suddenly they decided that they weren't doing that anymore (original explanation was because it "wasn't what people expected in a TBS game", but now I think the engine was also a factor) and had to redesign it for TBS combat, that has a knock-off effect on other stuff. At that point you can go back to the drawing board and redesign things, or you can try to adapt on the fly.

Another issue is that when you're redesigning the whole combat system on the fly, you've lost time that would have been spent on iteration of the other systems. Games that have well tuned mechanics also have something in common - those mechanics were built, tested, and iterated on a lot to get them just right.

Not all of it is the engine's fault. But more then none of it is the engine's fault, I guess is what I'm trying to say.

From where I stand, interesting combat starts at interesting choices for unit design.  And interesting choices for unit design starts at interesting choices of city planning, which arise from interesting, flexible choices in economy planning, which arises from interesting, diverse, unique technical and magical research trees.  One faction should be allowed to research "religion".  That lets them build a church, which prohibits slavery as a technology from being available, whiich means that my ore production will suffer for the rest of the game.  However, my church can be upgraded with more squares, more citizens working it, and more technology to allow for the spell "heal" to be incorporated into units, which allows me to field the designable unit "priests", providing I choose to train my citizens with 18 intelligence, with one point being gained per turn, until that unit is trained to cast that spell.  If, instead, I followed religion down a tech tree of "nature worship", I will be allowed to build a grove in my city.  The grove will reduce the output of the city's materials by 2/turn, since we don't cut down trees in our grove, now do we?  Upgrading the grove to give it more tiles and citizens eventually allows me to incorporate the spell "entangle" into units, provided their charisma is above 16.

On the other side of the world, the trogs have just discovered "alchemy", and are faced with a choice; research towards transmutation, or towards potions.  Potions are for the weak (I'm looking at YOU, Wraithes), so the trogs go for transmutation.  This reserach allows them to uproot a forest tile in the city radius, and put in a smelting pit, that allows for the conversion of base metals to gold (-1 ore/turn, +5 gold/turn, and a tip of the hat to Isengard).  As they improve the smelting pit, they eventually lose the -1 ore/turn, and in fact gain +1 ore/turn with enough upgrades to the smelter (We can call the top level "Mr. Fusion"), and allows units to be designed that have metal armor, provided they have a 20 strength; no problem for the 18 base strength trogs, which can crank those out in 2 turns.  The wraithes, in the meantime, have spent THEIR effort on the diplomcacy tree, and have understood enough of the pre-cataclysm runes to be able to speak with the creatures guarding a nearby ruined temple, which they believe to hold an ancient device that, when placed in a city (takes 1 square), increases the output of all the shards within the city radius by +1 mana/turn, and enables the spell "firebolt" to be placed on a unit.  The wraith warmaster thinks they can just take the ruined temple by force, if necessary, but the negotiations seem to be going well, and the creatures seem to be willing to let the wraiths have the artifact for just a simple sacrifice of 10 population.  A bargain...

The point of my little daydream is that this is possible, but it requires a game design; a detailed, comprehensive game design that shows how all the pieces work together.  What limits this game design is what the engine can do (ie, if the engine doesn't allow me to pay population in a diplomatic negotiation, then I can't do what I just said).  I get that.  Presumably, the designers have a design that works within the current architecture of the engine.

I'm not getting the sense of what that game design is.  I'd like to see that design document.  It would go a long way towards allaying fears.

Yay skill trees!  That said, I have the horrible impression that we'll actually get a simple semi-randomized list of traits to choose from.  A step forward, but still depressingly uninteresting in comparison to a real skill tree where you have to make long-term meaningful plans for development.  Not to mention the graphical flair and ambiance you can place around a skill tree (vs a list).

Also, can anyone say paper doll?

Can you conditionally test for Shader 3 and use if available?