The pot calling the kettle black about reading posts, eh? Need I remind you: https://forums.elementalgame.com/405438

How about your "constructive" post #6, my reply in #7, your yet again "constructive" post in #8, and my retort in #9 in which you conveniently did not reply.

I don't give a flying <bleep>how many CTD errors your reported two years ago. I read your post history and I know mine. What matters is is RIGHT NOW and two sentence bitch threads about SD mean jack <bleep>. How about you constructively add to this project instead of whining?

[Edit] I fucking hate swear words so I removed them.

Why is everybody saying how "awesome" this news is.

This is still so far away from becoming a fun game. A bit of random events, diplomacy and improved AI is not going to make me play this.

I don't want that much.

Good spell design, including balanced and interesting spells that are properly implemented.

More unique races/factions with different types of units.

Strategic AI has a few quirks bit other then that it seems pretty good to me. I reckon myself a pretty good player and sometimes the AI gets a higher score then me. The game is somewhat easy because tactical combat is so easy to abuse. The reason being unbalanced equipment and basically nonexistent tactical AI.  I routinely stomp AI armies five times my size without losing an unit. The fact that they get such a large army is good, the fact that I can kill them so easy is bad. 

I'm looking forward to global events. Hopefully they are very rare but game changing. I personally don't want to see a flavor of the week like in HoMM. If they are to common then they won't be a big deal and we will get repetition. With larger and rarer events that actually effect gameplay you will get a feeling that every world is actually different.

I enjoyed GalCiv 2's events, especially the major ones which could turn the entire tide of a war. I hope they do add something like "mega" events, with an option to turn it off of course.

Alborrelli, I don't really understand your point.  I am getting all the new changes to WoM for free, 1.2, 1.3 and anything else they are going to do to it.  I am also getting Fallen Enchantress for free.  Then, I am getting another, yet unnamed for free.  I just don't understand what we have to bitch about.  Seems like a very great deal for those of us that have been playing the game since early on.  Yes, I would have liked it if the game had been released with many of these changes already in place, but in the big picture, I am going to end up with more games(s) for less money. 

Well, I can't really argue with that.  I am bored with the game also, I haven't even tried to play it for more than a few minutes at a time for weeks. 

will be really cool to read a blog or two on what exxactly these map changes are, once the news is ready. i want some info i can argue with people about

but i'm not going to get really exited until i hear more details about the changes to tactical combat, or if the spells are going to get an overhaul (specifically, damage formulae), or simply some of the cool new units and content we can expect in FE.

really hope some parts of the game get resuscitated, or new content added. right now it seems like there is only one viable way to play the game, and i have no desire particularly to experience it again. maybe once magic becomes more interesting, balanced and viable, or monster recruitment is on a level, or there is a different way to build a sovereign, but right now none of these things are true.

@alborrelli: Look at it this way. It is awesome as SD boys could have just cut their loses and gave up on EWoM altogether (and I am sure that was on their mind). After who knows how long the game is not yet even stable. It is lacking content and "fun". Many parts are badly designed (I do not mean graphically although many places could use that as well) like tech and spells and diplomacy (basically the core of the 4x game). If I was in charge I would probably scrap the game and do something else. I am 110% sure Blizzard would scrap it long time ago (probably would not even try to sell it). So lets just be happy this game will one day be done and praise the SD for their effort to keep their willpower and spirits up.

I know I just bashed the game a lot , but it is the truth, but once it becomes good I will praise the even more and recommend it to anyone I know.

Some people are happy about the info Frogboy gave here. Some are not.

Some think that the "new stuff" is not a "gift" to us early adopters but actually a moral requirement that is deserved.

My favorite is the psychic fanboys who know everything SD is doing, and why they are doing it. Like, "SD could have just cut their losses and gave up..." etc.

I realise arguing with fanboys is pointless, so I will address it to Stardock and anyone who wants to read it can do so as well.

1--Stardock is owned by Brad as he said in another post "I am the sole shareholder". This was in response to someone's intelligent question/observation about why would SD release an obviously unfinished game like WoM. Commenter thought it was because of corporate higher up pressure. Now unfortunately for me, I have had a business degree for longer than some of you have been out of Kindergarten. So a few things strike me as weird. Brad, are you saying that you are 100% owner of Stardock? If so, are you also implying that you have no liabilities to banks, other lenders, or financial institutions? Are you also saying that none of these "money men" have a vested interest in seeing such-n-such game be released so they can start seeing their loans/equity/interest etc... being paid back? Or even that you personally are interested in starting to see a ROI for WoM, and that's why you released it when you did?

2-- I find it hard to believe.. nay IMPOSSIBLE, that the maker of Sins and Gal Civ would release those games in the shape they were in (50 times better than WoM) and also be the same company to release WoM, and then state "We thought it was done. we really did" Hogwash. If you or anyone at Stardock thought WoM was "done" when you released it on Day 1, then you guys are in denial, or way worse programmers than the gaming community gave you credit for. I don't know how to thread, how to parse, code, design, re-engineer etc... anything about codes or AI, but I know that someone with a job in the industry should have been able to spot the WORST memory leak I have seen since Daggerfall on day one release. And to defend Bethesda (back in the day Daggerfall was known as the crappiest release of a PC game based on stability..) they had the memory leak fixed in about a week.

3-- Brad, please explain to me how thse gurus, or fanboys, or whatever they are, constantly post about "never having a memory crash" or however they put the nonsense. Wasn't it you, or someone from SD stating that the engine behind WoM was "highly threaded" and since most people do not have 64bit OS, we couldnt take advantage of more than 2GB of ram even if we had it? Since I have a 6gb machine that the game crashes on and a 3GB machine it crashes on, I assume these people are lying fanboys, shills, or not playing the game. Is it possible they have 64bit OS, and 8gb of ram, and the game works differently for them and they experience no OOM crashes? If so please explain how, and I will update my PCs accordingly. Until then, I will assume I am like the 99% of people here who have OOM issues. Hey on a side not, remember how this was gonna be "the spiritual successor to Master of magic"? Well, If I remember correctly it was months if not years, before most of us figured out how to get past their memory issues. I had to have some IT guy at work make a boot disk that had like 10 lines of "REM-suchnsuch, REM-whatsacallit" etc... just to get it to work, and it was 3 years after release, on my 4th PC before I could get the item maker to work. I guess WoM is kinda like the spiritual successor afterall.

4--Brad, can you please explain to the goofballs on this site (or all forums for that matter) about "Reputation" and "Goodwill" in a business sense? For instance, people seem to misunderstand you when you state that you are "Sole shareholder" and they think this means you could have your employees "walk away" from the game if you "wanted to". And the only people would suffer would be us poor consumers. Please explain how, thanks to the internet, and numerous magazines and reviews of WoM, it is now failry puplic knowledge throughout the GAMING WORLD, that WoM was a rush job, and is a black mark on your "Goodwill" value of Stardock. Explain to them that if you walked from WoM that you would irreparably harm your company and I assume your wallet drastically. Unless you got the next COD4, or WoW game in the pipeline this could be the straw, and the ONLY Stray needed to break your back.

5-- I find it offensive that you stated "The article in PC gamer UK ruined us" or however you put it. Referring to a review that somehow doomed WoM to being a non-profitable project. For clarity, the game ruined it's profitability, not a forum post, not an internet review, or not even some magazine in a some country that has a circulation of probably 4,000 a month. If you ever need direction in how to proceed, or what to say, or even how you should think, I highly recommend the "Gamers bill of rights" some guy wrote awhile back. It was some article by a game designer stating how PC gamers should be treated. I think if you find that article and read it, and APPLY the tenets, you will recapture some of the lost fans, and lost goodwill that WoM has caused.

Now to the TS's questions. Brad, can you please give us some info about fallen enchantress or upcoming "versions of the game" besides, "Improved AI", or "Better memory fixes" etc. You see, those things aren't features, You can call it version 1.01, 1.1, 1.15, 1.19, 1.19abjcked, 1.80, 5.75 or even version "Ultimate" the point is those aren't "versions" as the commone use of the word in gamer vernacular, those are called "Patches" I realise some people are so grateful that you are kind enough to patch an unfinished game, that still isn't finished. I am happy that those patches are doing much to improve your standing amongst the gamer community, and reviewers everywhere. But let's call a spade a spade. They aren't "versions" or "features" they are fixes to crap that is broken.

Do you have any info about the new "VERSIONS" of the game, (As gamers would define versions) or is it gonna be status quo "Lots of people working, we doing our best, tons of AI improvements, Diplo should be better, fixing broken quests, correcting some grammar in text" etc. crap that is in most patch notes to virtually every game ever made.

Thanks, and for the record, 1.19c is MUCH better than day one version, or even 1.1 in my opinion. I think you are taking baby steps in the right direction based on GAMEPLAY. I personally am only on my second 1.19c game, and BOTH of them have crashed HEAVILY (more than 1.1) in the early stages. I have about 5 cities, and AIs have 2-10. So this isn't huge labor hog. Maybe I got a corrupted file somewhere, but for me, the OOM is pretty harsh on my 32 bit 3gb machine.

1.19c gives me much hope for Fallen Enchantress assuming you get the bugs out of the game ASAP.

yeah the OP is real dum... D-U-M dum.

As a practical matter, Fallen Enchantress is a new game, one that shares some art assets with War of Magic but little else. The scope of the differences between the two will become very apparent in the early months of 2011. Extensive brainstorming sessions between Derek Paxton (Fall from Heaven), Brad Wardell (Galactic Civilizations), and Jon Shafer (Civilization V) resulted in a complete redesign; combat systems, tactical combat systems, character creation, economic system, game mechanics, etc. are all new.
In addition, unlike War of Magic, Stardock does not plan to make Fallen Enchantress available at retail in order to keep its schedule as flexible as possible.

 

Sounds pretty good to me. EFE sharing only a few art assets but little else with EWOM sounds very encouraging to me.

A total redesign basically.

So does this nasty looking creature in the article.

https://www.stardock.com/press/CustomerReports/Stardock2010.pdf

 

 

Good enough news for me for now plus the fact that they'll release it when it's ready is also great as there is no retail version.

They can take their time to really get it right.

 

 

 

Thanks for bringing this article to my attention, very interesting read. I never took part in that survey although I saw it in my inbox, now wishing I did.

The thing I'm looking forward to most is mod support for the kumquat engine, looks like it'll be a long 18 month wait. I feel like I have lots of good energy for FE and the future of SD, it's just so hard sitting back and waiting for new announcements. I know we're already spoiled compared to most companies, but I wish we had even more inside information. I'm not complaining, really I'm not. SD and CEO BW have handled things about as gracefully as I can imagine to this point, GBOR and everything, it's really a lot to take in. I just hope the future remains as promising as it seems right now.