Yes, it's interesting how the title always contradicts the game.

The first game was called War of Magic, but spells played only minor role in the conflict, being weak and overpriced.

The second game is called Fallen Enchantress, but aside from a melancholic hooded lady in the intro, I failed to find her in the game.

And now the DLC is called Legendary Heroes, while the heroes have been nerfed to oblivion almost.

What the game resembles now is the collapsing European social states, with tons of crippled "heroes" suffering various ailments like broken bones, dementia, , cracked skulls, amnesias, etc. draining the resources of your empire in upkeep. However, no fantasy author besides Terry Pratchet ever touched the issue of senior fantasy heroes, so at least it provides a good comic relief. 

So you never played the scenario? Nor did you ever play either as or against Resoln? Otherwise, I find it hard to believe you never met Oracle Ceresa.

Your description of E:WoM is pretty much spot on. Can't say anything about LH, though, except that it's not a DLC, because I haven't played it.

A few comments.

The Enchanted Backpack: You have no idea how close I was to making it provide +1 accessory slot (though it itself cost 1 accessory slot so the net effect was that it was pretty useless).  I was going to inlcude a description on it for something like "Not nearly as useful as it appears.".  I thought it would be funny, but at the end of the day to many people would see it as a bug so we didn't do it.  Then we considered making it give +2 Acc slots like Alestein suggested but at that point you have so many acc slots for the ui to display that it wasn't worth it for the item.  I don't mind a little bit of wonkyness for cool stuff, but not for a pretty lame bonus.  +1 init isnt that exciting either, but it doesnt cause ui issues.

The justification for the +init is just that with the backpack to store stuff you can be more responsive in combat.  Yes I know you can have examples of naked guys with daggers.  But its important to remember that we arent attempting to simulate real combat.  We are a game abstracting concepts for fun.  So I dont worry about the realism argument, but the fact that its kind of a dull effect does bother me.

Encumbrance: Encumbrance wasn't pulled because of balance issues.  It wasn't that it needed to be tweaked or made better and we cut it instead.  I had no issues with the balance of encumbrance.  My issue was that it wasn't adding any value.  It gave us intermediary stats to play with that didnt do anything.  Plate armor increased your encumbrance which lowered your init.  Instead now plate armor lowers your init.

A strategy game is about making decisions and the more direct the consequence of your decisions, the better.  Requiring players to think through both steps of that decision when they were considering if they should pick a +init trait or a +weight capacity trait.  Of if they should use a 12 attack/+2 init/40 weight weapon a 16 attack/0 init/10 weight weapon was not a clear decision for most players.

And the biggest reason was that damage types and weight were supposed to be distinguishers for different weapons.  The stat differences were supposed to be what made hammer feel different than axes which felt different from spears.  But we found a much better way to do that in LH by giving the weapons different types of attacks.  Once we were able to make axes and hammers play differently, we didnt need the minutia stat differences (that many players simply ignored or weren't aware of).  I like stat differences between them to, I like that hammers are slow weapons, but we apply that directly so the players can more easily see and understand that decision, not through a translation mechanic.

Everything above is simply one guys opinion.  There is no right and wrong for a players personal opinion or for which game they would prefer most.  Some players like more granularity, some like a lot of stats and minutia (one mans "minutia" is another mans "detail").  So I don't begrudge anyone's opinion nor am I saying anyone in this thread is incorrect (since they are just sharing their opinion).  But I just wanted to share our thoughts since some people are curious about what goes on in our head as we consider these issues.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us Derek. It's nice to see that despite everybody has their opinion as you say, at least there are motivations and reasonings behind design decisions.

However, there is something I am curious about. My personal perception is that the game is becoming more basic and losing some elements. Perhaps that's not the same perception from the developers' point of view. Why do I say that I feel the game is becoming more simple? Because with each new patch there appear to be more mechanics simplified or just removed. And despite I agree with some of them I feel that could other could just have been fixed and would have been Better. Take fame as an example. Yes, fame is a great addition, but wouldn't have been better to fix influence and use influence to recruit heroes?

And despite I agree that one of the best ways to make something complete is to start small and do a few things at a time, I wonder if you are reaching the point of becoming too basic. As Burress says in another thread, one of the biggest attractives of this game is the high number of concepts that ate mixed together and how this mix works. And specially an expansion should feel like adding not like removing or shuffling.

I'm just going to reiterate what has been mentioned a few times now, and that is that the game feels more and more 'dumbed down' and 'slowed down' to me.  Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of new things that have been added, but the player has fewer and fewer choices to deal with in the game.  While some may think that little minor things like stat points, encumberance, and such did not add any value to the game, I disagree with this assessment.

Why do I disagree?  I recently re-installed E:WOM 1.0 and played around with it a bit.  Sure, the game crashes a lot, but the game played at a pretty quick pace.  There were several reasons for this.  One, units were more readily available.  Mainly heroes, but in E:WOM cities could walk and chew gum at the same time, so more units were getting produced.  THIS is important, because the more units you have to work with, the better smoothing of statistics that comes into play.  When you only have a few units, randomness dominates the game more, as a few 'dice rolls' can make or break your empire.  With more units/stacks at your disposal, recovering from a bad day with lady luck is easier to do, and player skill comes into play more.

Some players cried about 'you need to choose between guns or butter', but I still don't buy this argument.  Not everyone in your city is a skilled armorer.  In fact, your stone masons probably aren't useful at all in crafting armor, but are great at building buildings.  And your sages probably aren't that helpful in stone masonry, but they don't need to be as they have their own disciplines.  A compromise on this would have been to give a 50% bonus to a city engaged in only building or only troop training.  But by doing both, gameplay pacing improves considerably, as you can get more units in play, hence increasing your strategic options (remember the AI is doing the same, so you have more enemy stacks to face), and again smoothing out randomness.

In fact, as a related example, Galactic Civilizations DOES allow planets to build both ships and planetary improvements at the same time, and gives you a bonus if you focus a planet on building or research.  And you could do this on a planet by planet basis, on the fly so to speak.  The result is that more ships are in play, again giving you more decisions to make, instead of a few make or break decisions, and giving you that immersive 'feel' of running a vast interstellar empire.

Also, back in the old days when we could tweak stats, we had several decisions to make.  This has been detailed already, but to recap, you had some choices.  more toughness? Higher attack strength?  Higher dodge? Higher speed? More movement points?  Some combination of the above?  This allowed you to fine tune the customization of your heroes to whatever role you had in mind for them.  Also, as you had a larger pool of heroes available (for a fee of course), you could build 'parties' of heroes, in multiple stacks.

And, we had individual mana pools.  Yeah, some of you are all about the global mana pools, but this makes spellcasting and gameplay 'lazier' IMHO.  The individual mana pools forced you to manage your magic resources more meticulously, again adding to the immersion of the game.  Whereas with global mana, the only question you have now is whether you have mana or not, not which hero currently has mana to spare.  This is an excellent example of dumbing down the game.

Plus, with individual mana pools, you could have created a situation where spellcasters came together to cast strategic spells, combining their power for said spells.  This would have added to the strategic decisions a player is faced with.  Where should my spellcasters congregate to cast that spell, and which units do I pull from other duties to do this?

  With the smaller pool of heroes in LH, well your 'party customization' options are limited.  Sure, units can do the combat duties, as they always could, but again we lose in the 'immersiveness' of the game.

Don't get me wrong, I like the concept of traits trees. But if we had them ON TOP OF stat points, this would accomplish a few things.  It would make heroes incrementally more powerful, and give us some design balance decisions to consider.  If we felt a hero was a little weak on his dodge or whatever, we could focus stat points on that, without taking his entire focus off of whatever task at hand (summoner, assassin, etc.).

More decision making is not a bad thing.  In fact, some of the best 4x games out there have a LOT of decisions to make, and options to tweak.  By removing more and more of these from the player's control, well you lose out on immersiveness.

The one bright point that has always stayed with us, thank goodness, is unit design.  I'm specifically referring to weapons and armor in this case, and I do like the traits that go on top of that.  Micromanaging stats for run of the mill units is certainly not as desirable, so abstracting these into 'generic level gains' is perfectly fine.  But, on that note, one place that could add to game options would be to allow for the creation of 'hero type' units.  Such as a solitary mage, ranger, or healer that is added to army stacks to perform some function.  These individuals could have a few more stat/design options, but not be as flexible in design as true champions should be.

As for encumberance, yeah I thought it added some immersiveness to the game.  I still remember that situation where I was having to shed some weight to wield that really heavy double axe thingie, and ways to increase the amount of weight Bacco could handle so he could even use the thing.  This added to the RPG aspect of this game, as I had a problem to solve, and helping Bacco with his problem increased my connection with this character.  As others have mentioned, balancing COULD have been accomplished with penalties, and skills to offset those penalties, rather than the either/or we have now.  Plus, as you worked to lessen those penalties, you'd feel the unit's (mainly heroes) effectiveness increase, again giving you a problem/reward mechanic adding to the immersiveness of the experience.

A 4x game should be immersive, and there are plenty of other games out there that fall short in this aspect, by not providing players with a lot of choices to begin with.  Sure, you can overdo immersiveness with 'option overload', but I don't think LH is anywhere close to that threshold currently.  I don't think E:WOM was ever at that threshold, but I've felt the game design retreat r.e. immersiveness with each patch and iteration.

Someone recently couldn't understand why I would want to pick an earlier patch, instead of the latest patch.  It is BECAUSE a feature I personally liked was removed by some earlier patch, and I wanted that feature back, and was willing to deal with more instability to GET that feature back.  As we don't have a patch library where we can do this, I'm pretty much stuck between 'vanilla' and 'latest version'.  I personally think that E:WOM got worse IMHO when the focus went away from just tweaking balance and towards changing how some game concepts worked.  Sure, we got some new toys and interface tweaks, but the overall pacing slowed down, hence dragging out the game more than I think it needed to be.

And LH drags as well.  Fast pacing should be exactly that.  I guess in some players mind I'm asking for extremely fast pacing, but by getting more units and features in play sooner, objectives can be accomplished more quickly, and hence more objectives can be accomplished in a given time span.  Some of us don't like playing for days all the time (that's what the 'epic' setting is for), and might want to be able to finish a game in less than 8 hours occasionally.  This gives us more time to go back and try the other empires, again adding to the replayability factor and resulting immersiveness.  So how is Pariden different than Tarth and the other empires?  And what about those custom empires, how are those comparing?  By being able to complete a game sooner, assuming there is enough backbone there, you will want to try out more of the options.  But if it's taking you weeks between new games, well at some point you just lose interest, and abandoning a scenario because it's taking too long to get the reward for all your work I think lessens your desire to replay the game.

But if you have a lot of 'well, if I had done this instead of that' decisions during a game, well then you have reasons to replay in the first place.  But the fewer of those choices you have, the less reason you have to replay over and over.

Wow, I wrote another essay on the subject...

No problem.

@tjashen: I hear you.  But keep in mind that your points are subjective (as are mine).  For you, more stats and detail makes it more immersive.  For other players it does the opposite, creating a barrier to playing and enjoying the game.  Complexity is never the goal (in your case or mine) but it is, at some level, a consequence of all designs.  We try hard to minimize complexity while retaining the depth, but isn't all or nothing.  It's a spectrum from wildly complex and overwhelming to incrediably simple and boring.  We are both trying to find that right spot on the spectrum that is right for the game, we just have different opinions are where that spot is.

Your example of the smoothing of statistics is a good one.  You are right that it smoothes out the individual stats.  That's what I don't like about it.  I want the players choices to have more meaning than that, I want them to be more specifically felt .  I chose option A and that changed the game for me in a way that I can understand and feel.  Not that the player chose option A and he is pretty sure that at some level it contributes somewhere (this was the dilema with damage types on weapons, it was a real choice, it provided real statistical benefits, but most players didnt feel the difference).

@Derek Paxton: I applaud your decisions, I enjoy last patch a lot more than what was before.

This is a 4x game with RPG elements, and in that regard IMHO is one of a hell great mix put together. Can it use some polish here and there? Everything can, as long as is meaningful and has a purpose. 

When I get a new weapon, or research new equipment, I want to be able with a quick look to see what are the gains / loses of using it instead of what I am currently wearing. I don't want to be forced to go on a min-max number crunching for every single item I could equip to upgrade or simply change the way my character plays (going from melee to ranged or from Axe to Pike for example). Before it was a minigame inside the game deciding how to equip, and how this will affect my character, and what changes to rest of equipment I should make etc. It was not needed. The focus is on the map. Territory, resources, dangerous mobs, enemy players, governing cities, new settle locations, outposts for resources, wars, diplomacy, research, mana management etc. Spending 10 minutes each time you get a new sword or axe to figure out what you gain and what you lose wasn't really adding anything to game and very confusing for casual players or players who just got into 4x to experience the gameplay.

We have loads of players in the thread coming from different genres (or who played other 4x, or simple RPG / strategy games) and there will always be something like hmmm I liked how they did that in game X, why can't we make it here same.

Good example is with peeps complaining about XP split. Have any of you played HOMM series? How many times you had 5 heroes of same level? It was always a leader - main hero with highest level, best gear, best troops etc, and several utility heroes to fetch troops, guard resources and castles, pick up loot etc.

You guys did a great job with this xpac, cheers