Entorwellian

Tried it out for a few hours and the improvement from WOM is incredible. The UI is a lot more cleaner, the RPG mechanics and character progression choices are great, and I haven't experienced any crashes as of yet. However, magic still feels vastly underpowered and too expensive, whereas in Master of Magic and Age of Wonders I was able to fling enchantments and spells around without having to worry about becoming mana-bankrupt after a couple of turns. If I am understanding correctly, its

I think you've hit the nail on the head with why the surrounding landscape seems empty and boring: It's just *there* and we can't interact with it in any meaningful ways (except for arbitrary defense bonuses). Heck, there doesn't even have to be a huge graphical change as we can fill in parts with our imagination as you describe with your example of Civilization's use allocating labour to different tiles. To further elaborate, Civilization's case (the older ones), they just shows a little whe

^^^So movie critic reviews aren't valid because they have never made a big budget film?^^^ It's pretty bad. I mean I was pretty lenient with it because Brad Wardell is a game programmer, not a novelist. But holy jeez the atrocious grammar, coupled by the fact that there was an actual novelist that was writing alongside Brad, made me stop reading it a good 30 pages through. It reads at a grade 4 education level, and that's being polite. I'm enjoyin

You don't give a game 9 out of 10 when it's missing multiplayer and a host of game mechanics, regardless if the reviewer was playing through the betas or not. It's akin to saying "Sin: Episodes gets 10/10 due to the promise of new episodes down the pipeline."

Controlling the length of a tactical battle. This should be a toggle that the host could control which can be set in an option menu. A default could be set at 5 minutes or so initially, but this can be increased or decreased depending on the host. I guess this would be close to how Sword of the Stars handles tactical combat. Randomization vs. Richness. If the environment plays a role in impeding movement or blocking line-of-fire for ran

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6695988/Entorwellian.xml (May 6th edit: changed some of the stats and descriptions around) Beta-tester name: Entorwellian

Getting this too with the latest version. I click either the Kingdom button or the "A" button and it crashes back to the desktop.

Displaying all the units and spells as cards would be awesome. Even though the graphics were basic and rudimentary, Master of Magic did the whole card thing quite well and made it feel like you were playing a mix of Magic: The Gathering.

Sorry if it's been said before (only read the first page), but killing off bots for the A.I. would be a terrible thing to waste. The only multiplayer strategy games that me and my group of friends play are Sins of a Solar Empire and Civ IV with hard/king difficulty compstomps. Elemental still looks really fascinating but not having any A.I. players for multiplayer available would be a travesty. I know they're difficult to program but most 4X games we play are best when you stomp an impossibly