Before I tell them to set this up I wanted to make a post and gauge interest in this:
There's going to be a new fantasy strategy game from Stardock in the Elemental universe. It's NOT a sequel to Fallen Enchantress.
I'm looking to ask the team to set up a founder's program for people who are interested in getting a sneak peak at what we're doing and getting early access to it this Fall. The founder's edition would be $20.
Here is, broadly, what the game is like:
- Completely new art style
- Asymmetrical 4X (it's not you vs. other similar empires, it's you vs. a single bad guy with everyone else as pawns between the two of you and you both play by your own set of rules)
- No unit design and no tech tree, instead you gain access to things based on what you've built in your city
- Sovereign is not a unit in the game, you instead choose the spell books your sovereign has, their specialization and their ability and use that across the world
- Shards provide magic which is divided between mana, lore (spell research) and skill (for upgrading your sovereign's specialization tree)
- Much more quest focused (spells written by Cracked.com's Chris Bucholz, they're awesome)
- Champions acquired via completing quests
- Crafting (players find ingredients and recipes through the course of the game)
- Multiple continents, islands, ship travel
- Tactical battles heavily focused on what spells and abilities you have and how you use them, feels a bit like Hearthstone but the battles are still elemental style except with more units - instead of 9 ala LH you'd have up to 15)
- All units have special abilities
- Plot takes place centuries after the events of LH - suffice to say, bad things have happened
- Player *starts out* with the Forge of the Overlord - the player is very tough, has all the techs from LH from the start which is to say the bad guy is just that much tougher
Now, as you can see, because it's so different we're updating, enhancing LH on its own dev path with its own meaningful updates.
Anyway, who would be interested in joining a Founder's Program if we put it up in June?
UPDATE: The URL for the $20 early Founder's edition is live: https://www.stardock.com/buy?s=ESD-SDE-W062
UPDATE 2: The E2015 Founder's Vault is live: http://e2015.stardock.com/