You are all ignoring the fact that even if it had awesome MP, the number of people who purchase the game that will really use the MP system is a very low % of the user base.   Simple fact, most people  never play these type of games in MP.   Doesn't mean it isn't fun, or that Stardock shouldn't add it in, it just means you have to factor that in your decision on what to work on.   

Purple Paladin, no need to attack people by calling them game loners and implying people hating tendencies.   If that were the case, many of us that released mods would have just kept them to ourselves.   I'm not against MP, I am against MP taking resources away from the SP part of the game.  We were told that would be the case if they fixed MP to have tactical battles which most in the MP group would like, I assume.

In any case, to each his own, and I support the decision and understand why it was made.   I hope for those that are disappointed that E:FE will get MP at some point. 

Because they disagree dosen't make it 'right'. Brad himself seemed to be part of the group that would like to have coop MP included in the game.

And just like someone else said, they said that they would take all the time necessary to do FE. I guess all the time necessary didn't include MP. Which seems to be backed by the very low # of people having played MP. Which brings me to a joke analogy I made a few times now on this forum, which is about the fact that if you make poor car design and no one uses it/buys it. It does not necessarily mean that the people don't want cars.

I'm a bit taken aback because it seems that even veteran forum dwellers have forgotten some of the hyped features for EWOM were. And now act as if we are spoiled brats wanting to have our cake and eat it too.

If there wasn't ever any MP flaunted for EWOM, I would have most likely not bought it, and furthermore, I wouldn't be here poking at the "officially" dead horse.

The first MP 4x game I played was Moo2.  Last time I played mp with it was 3 years ago, and we only stopped because new windows OS no longer have ipx protocol that moo2 needs.

MP really adds a lot to the longevity of a game.  I am glad that Stardock is not giving up on it yet.

I have to agree with the OP here, and I am not going to write a book explaining why as it has already been said 10 times. The truth is that to make a game good you pretty much have to have MP now-a-days. I played Civ 4 for ages without MP and then when I discovered MP in the game I got addicted to the game all over again. It is what you do after you have played all of the factions and exhausted the fun out of the AI. It adds another element and should still be there and shouldn't have to be bought through and expansion, because that would be shame. 

Meh.. many of us had the opinion when Looking at E:woms Multiplayer that they should either do it right or not do it at all. They decided on the latter.. which is fine since choosing to do half arsed multiplayer only leads to A resources being wasted that could be used to improve the single player experience and B a crappy multiplayer experience.

Would anyone here be happy with the half arsed multiplayer mode thats in E:wom to be included in FE? I wouldn't.. and I would likely complain more about a half arsed multiplayer mode than I will that they left out multiplayer. Of course my preference is a full featured, fully functional multiplayer mode.. but that's not going to happen since they decided from day one to program tactical combat in a way that wasn't multi player mode friendly.

When they are talking about having to rewrite TC for MP, they are not talking about re-designing it.  As you say, from a end-user perspective all the rules and such _should_ be exactly the same as playing the NPC.  The problem is that the *underlying code* is not set up to handle multiplayer and would need to be gutted.  This is what takes a lot of time.

As a quick example (and this might get teccy, sorry), I imagine currently, when CREATURE_A hits CREATURE_B it rolls, a dice and directly removes the health from CREATURE_B and then immediately process any knock on effects, end of story.

If it was to work in MP, lets imagine you have CREATURE_A belonging to PC_A and CREATURE_B belonging to PC_B. On PC_A, you tell CREATURE_A to hit CREATURE_B.  What would have to happen was PC_A would send a message to PC_B to say that this attack had happened and then wait around for the responce.  PC_B would then have to process that message and decide that it took damage.  PC_B would then have to calculate any knock on effects, relay this back to PC_A, which then makes it happen on his machine.

As you can see, in the MP case the code has to sit around a lot more waiting for messages from the other PC, which involves a very different style of coding than just processing everthing right there and then.  And then that not to mention having to worry about making sure the TC's are kept in sync and handling any cases where they aren't (due to messages being lost, etc).

that doesnt high tbh

also do you know games in this  century are like "parfumes" ?

i know LOTS of ppl who buy DOZENS of games on steam or get gifts etc and NEVER EVER play them

i mean they download and install and play 5 min and then its over

lot of ppl do so

for a good statistics you should for example cut those ppl who played less than X hours total, who cares if someone played civ for 5 hours in his life and never attempted a online game? he just isnt a civ 4 player at all

I'm just very glad Brad wants multiplayer, and that he hasn't given it up. Hopefully we will see it in the next expansion already: Elemental FE; Play the World!

This game is already shaping up to be one of the very best games ever made, It's already on my top list among games like The Civilization-series, MoM, GalCiv, Europa-Universalis-series and Heroes of Might and Magic 4 (My favorite Heroes game, after that the series has been garbage.... But anyways, the Heroes series are more for children).

A game in this category should have multiplayer, and I'm sure that it would bring some extra costumers too. Just me, one person, could recruit at least 10, perhaps 30-40 over time through the multiplayer groups of strategy games I'm a member of, and through friends I play hardcore strategy mp with on LAN. (I have done this with Europa Universalis 3; recruited alot of newcomers interested in playing the game with me in MP.)

When I find a perfect strategy game, and that's seldom, I want my friends and online friends to buy it asap, so I can experience it in MP with no irritating quitting players.

This is true.  Also, the turn can't advance while there are battles are being fought, so players would have to wait for all battles to be fought or auto resolved before the turn could advance.  You'd still be able to change units destinations and things like that, but no units would move, no improvements would be built, etc.  So most of the time players not in tactical battles would be waiting on the players that were, and that's not ideal.

Honestly, this would be almost more work than regular multiplayer because of all the interface changes we'd have to make, and because all players move at once.

Wow, I've attempted or briefly played turn-based games in MP before. Didn't know I was in such a small percentage. Thanks for laying out your reasoning Frogboy.

If I want a fun multiplayer experience, turn-based doesn't even get considered. You have FPS, Action RPGs like Diablo, MMOs, RTS games to chose from. If I want something with hours of calm thinking, then I play something turn-based.

First of all, i'm in the MP camp, a game survives much longer / sells much better if it has decent multiplayer, especially if it's linked to an online service where you need to login to play multiplayer aka Starcraft / Anno  2070.

Isn't this solvable by letting players not in tactical combat still move their units on the map? If a third player attacks someone already fighting, queue the fight until he's free to engage. Another option is to "lock down" all armies engaging with eachother and then play out the tactical combat at the end of the turn, but that takes away some of the strategy movement directly after the fight.

I feel AoW:SM worked fine with simultaneously movement but they didn't solve the "simultaneous" tactical combat in a nice way... the other players had to wait for a fight to resolve.

The "right " thing to do is to stick to their design plan for FE, which doesn't include to have MP. This is not Homer Simpson designing his dream car.