Elurian

Um, he's sick. My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with the girl who saw Ferris pass out at 31 Flavors last night. I guess it's pretty serious.

I'm not crazy about arcane/divine/psionic etc. in the core game, but it would make a lot of sense to have the "key stat" that determines a spell's power be a flag that can be easily altered for purposes of modding.

Quest: "The Channeler in the Iron Mask" aka "Dopple, dopple, who's got the ganger?" You've been gone for some time and have returned to your capital to find that your place has been taken by a lookalike sent by another channeler as a puppet on YOUR throne. You can: 1) Try to convince a loved one (member of your dynasty) that you are who you say you are by escorting them to the fishing hole you visited as a child. 2) Demonstrate your prowess

Elurian Teldarien was an elven paladin/sorceror who specialized in augmentation magic to strengthen both himself and his party. In the final battle against the undead hordes of Aeloryk, Thrall of Acheron, Elurian fell to the Dagger of the Damned. With his last breath, he was able to lend strength to his oath-brother, Induriel Bladebane, who managed to drive Aeloryk off...though not before the vampire flung Elurian's body in front of the saddle of his skelet

Simultaneous + Time Bank would be good. I don't think "hotseat TBS" is as viable today as it was 10 years ago, simply because a far greater percentage of people are likely to be online or LANed than playing multiplayer on the same PC, which was really what hotseat was for. Simultaneous play removes a lot of deadtime from the game.

The manual was very cool, and the MoM strategy guide is probably the best one ever made - full details on spells and units. I firmly believe most die-hard strategy folks want visibility to the mechanics, rather than vague swags at the mechanics where patches can have sweeping impacts without any visibility to what was really changed. Don't tell me "Armageddon deals a devastating blow to all in the area" and then change it from X gajillion points of damage to everything on the map to Y p

Wizard creation tops the list. Interaction of race selection with wizard creation. Huge # of research options that played off of race/wizard combinations and dramatically changed game play. Some customization of units - I think Elemental will be even better here. Turn-duration buff spells were cool, as were some of the permanent effects you could achieve. Chaos channels! Item creation. Good globals. Lots of flavor from heroes and ite

Very cool. Hope you've got some serious ghost-writing going on that novel, Brad - we want to make sure the game gets plenty of Wardeliciousness.

Great priorities. I love the fact that ya'll have thought through #9 already. So many really good TBS games end up rarely being played to completion beyond the first time because it's a foregone conclusion and mop-up just gets old. Dominions 3 is a great example - as much fun as the game is, I never finish anymore, because I can own 60% of a huge map, 80% of the dominion and 90% of the income/gem income, and still waste 50 turns just trying to finish because t

I would very much like to see: A) Branching quest chains (long chains with different sub-quests depending on a decision point). This doesn't have to be extremely sophisticated - Castles 2 and the recent King Arthur both do a decent job of accomplishing this with text (i.e. do you support the pope or help the followers of the old faith, with different rewards/consequences for each. B ) Ability to select from a list of rewards for very difficult quests, whe

Outstanding timing - we who took some time off for the holidays salute you!

I like that you can modify physical attacks to other types - without that, there'd be a real problem with traditional troops having a single damage type (mundane). There's a similar issue with PnP D&D - you can pump armor class pretty easily, which means in a caster/fighter showdown, a caster can boost defensive capabilities and shrug off any physical attack easily, but a fighter has to boost multiple types of saving throws; that's one of the more subtle but swee

Looking good, though I still really like the idea of simultaneously positive/negative traits for more definition (to accompany the other strengths/weaknesses). History in particular adds a little flavor, which is the one place I feel Stardock's otherwise brilliant games have sometimes struggled. MoM indicated ranks with books, and it was a nice touch. Can you get away with that as a nice homage without any fear of "those who sat their lazy&

IMHO this is what made MoM so addictive, and the degree of customization is probably the biggest reason I prefered MoM to Civilization. Race customization in and MOO and GalCiv is one of the biggest things separating those from other strategy games. I'm really excited about the combo of sovereign and race customization and would love to see some helpful but not overpowering synergies available for sharp sovereign designers. I also like the point a

Love it - way to fix a problem and enhance the strategy at the same time. More depth would be awesome, but I'm just happy having a replacement in the event of assassination.

BG2, Daggerfall (after bugs were out), Star Control 2 (yes, it counts as an RPG :)), Planescape Torment, MM6. Special mentions to NWN, SSI's Goldbox games and a little known RPG/action/puzzle/strategy/trading game called Spellcraft.

Alt-tabbing causes music to continue playing on desktop; cannot re-enter game. Vista 64 system.

Preordered twice, at the very beginning of the year. E-mailed [email protected] to try to confirm over 2 weeks ago. No response to my inquiry; no key in the mail. Anybody have any ideas???

Agree with Tridus re: having the option to disable in multi. That said, there's still room for some options as far as how the auto-resolve works. Personally, I like the script capability (though I don't particularly want to WATCH the battles if they're autoresolved, the way you do in Dominions.

Shape-variance is a VERY cool idea for another game, but not what I want out of Elemental. Would be better with a game that's more of a sim or city building exercise than a TBS MOM-like. Here, I want to focus on big picture stuff and interactions between leader, race, units, spells, etc. instead of having to screw around with where stuff goes.