Ya, I don't really understand why if you request 10 units you have to wait for all 10 to finish to get any of them. This could also creat a problem. Lets say you have requested 50 Knights to be built in a particular city. You have enough equipment on hand for 45 of them, but it will take a few days for the rest of the horses to get there. Then one of the factions you are at war against takes your reasource of horses preventing you from finishing to the knights. What happens? Will that city be building them forever unless you get that source of horses back? Will you have to cancel your production and build something else. If that happens do you loose the equipment you gave to the 45 of them? Will the knights just finish building, except 5 of them wont have horses?

No matter what your reasoning is you don't need 46 lines of text to say "I agree with Fintilgin".

This is an important point. Until a soldier participates in his first real battle, everything he has learned up until that point will be nothing but theory. If he survives then he can start to build up real experience.

As well the training a unit has should determine what you can equip it with. I make a unit of spearmen and train them with both spears and longbows, they should be able to ditch the spears for longbows when the situation requires it. Defending a castle tower is a great job for a longbow but a spear wouldn't be very useful up there. The alternative is to attach units permanently to one weapon type, but in the above example that would leave me with an undefended tower due to my lack of deticated archer units. Not very ideal.

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It would be nice if we could train units with different equipment on the spot. Using the castle example again, lets say I have only 1 unit of archers and 20 units of spearmen. The archers can man the tower but that will leave the walls bare. The castle armoury has enough longbows to outfit them all so I deploy the spearmen to the wall and give them all longbows. Since we have a unit of archers on hand we can use them to give the spearmen enough training that they can load and fire a longbow without shooting themselves in the foot. The walls form a hexagon and each face can support 2 units. Instead of 1 unit of archers defending the entire castle grounds we now have 1 unit of archers in the high tower and 12 units of green archers leaving 8 units of spearmen to defend the gate.

When the siege starts those novice archers are going to learn quickly. Even if they have poor accuracy the sheer weight of fire will have some effect on the attacking enemy. As an added bonus they retain thier spears because they are defending a stationary position. (lets just imagine they left them on the floor or something). If and when the enemy gains the wall using siege towers or ladders, those soldiers near the gaps can repel climbers with spears while the rest of the unit continues to fire thier longbows.

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The combined arms approach is great because it lets you do so many things. If you were defending your multi-tile city in Elemental you could draft workers to be militia and arm them with a weapon that would keep them off the front lines such as crossbows since they are easy to use. The more arrows headed at your enemy the better.

The system we get will probably fall short of this ideal. But even then if we can avoid welding units to specific weapon types it would be a fantastic bonus.

When you have old, outdated equipment, can you choose to put it back in your equipment pool, or can you only sell it?  I could see having both options.  However, keeping anything on-hand is going to carry with it some sort of upkeep (it costs money to keep inventory).

Here's another thought- with this level of customization, it's going to be freaking difficult to tell how powerful another army is in comparison with your own.  Can we have some sort of overall score/range that is a rough estimate of the power of a unit/squad?  It could be an estimate that becomes more accurate as your heroes and/or units and/or scouting ability advance.  I know there needs to be some sort of mystery behind not knowing everything precisely, but I imagine the AI should be able to calculate unit power, so we should be able to as well.

frogboy said there was no 'super-cutlass' or anything like that, so your regular cutlass should never get outdated - is how I read it.   Just over time as you pour research into it, the cutlass would eventually get better (so those with a cutlass get +2 rather than +1 I assume)

Also, Frogboy?  What are you doing up at 2AM on christmas eve answering business questions?  

I hope that we will be able to mod the weapons to be a bit more realistic. A cutlass and a machete are both swords but one works more like an axe and the other one cuts like a chefs knife. The difference between them would not be huge but would be very important when you get down to the 1 vs 1 combat scale.

From the sound of it basic units are not going to be very complex under the hood, even if we can customize them visually. Heroes and channelers should be a lot more interesting.

Shouldn't the summary show 14 turns remaining?   9 for the swords and 5 for the training?

Also are "non-person" units like seige engines or battering rams going to be made similarly?

Nice concept, and I too would like to see a horsey.

Dear Brad....I am wondering about that picture what you drew.

Units will only have weapon/armor/helmet slots? That is _NOT_ enough. What about slots / number of arms for example? Even a simple human should be able to hold a shield and a 1h weapon or a 2h weapon. What if a creature will have 4 or more arms?

Also even if we are talking about normal soldiers, and not heroes, there should be an additional slot for leg armors...

Den, maybe they train with wooden swords, or you need to put weapons in the barracks to train people with. 

There's nothing to say that all swords are swords. There could very well be different kinds of swords, although I see very little reason to actually extend it beyond a number of base sets.

I basicly want to have everyone take a step back, breathe, and loudly ask themselves "We want this, but does this actually add something to the game?"

I do that every day. You don't even need to divide weapons into sets. Just classify the weapon based on what it can do. As with anything you can take it too far. But remember what I talked about regarding the difference between cutting and slashing? The worst that can happen is that we end up with 4 numbers on our UI instead of one. And likely 3 of them will be so low that they can be ignored. Complexity within the weapon system will allow for complexity in the armour system. The last thing we want is oversimplified combat.

I generally find that the HP or health system for units is too oversimplifed for my tastes. RPGs are a good example of this, For instance, you have 10 health at lvl 1, and you get hit for 8 damage, you're hurting bad, but at lvl 5 your health is now 50, and that same exact hit isnt so terrible.  So whats the difference? The truth is, unit health can get so much more involved without becoming overtly complex.  You could do the following: 

Have a static amount of health, say 10, and then have another stat called stamina which grows as the unit progresses in level.  Whats the difference between health and stamina?  Well health is how much actual damage the unit can take, it is static as the unit levels up when you hit 0 health the units dead. Stamina is how much energy the unit has to perform actions such as dodging.  Stamina increases with level, and demonstrates your greater skill at judging an attack and moving accordingly.  When stamina hits 0 the unit is fatigued and any additional damage is applied to the units health.  A 12 damage attack is just as lethal no matter the level, but a more skilled unit can dodge it more effectively due to more stamina.

Stamina would also recover more quickly, whereas health damage would take longer to mend (without magic at least).

Oe question sorry if you already answered it, take for example I want to have a unit armed with a weak and cheap sword and another one with a legendary ultramega expensive sword, do I have, (like the analogy of galciv2) to research the better weapons or do I have to have certain resources (wood, iron, poop, wathever) or do I just research swords up to level 47or how is that going to work?

One of the bigger factors in this whole unit creation scheme will be resource management.  How will resource abundance effect what materials you can and can't make?  If I have no access to metal, can I instead research/create leather/wooden armors/weapons which have properties comparable to metal counterparts through the use of magic or other means?  Will someone with access to metals be at a flat out advantage to someone without? Will I be able to make iron swords and weapons infinitely with one iron mine the whole game?  Will having two iron mines increase my ability to produce goods?

I'm leary of systems which claim this much open-endedness, especially in multiplayer.  What you may end up having a set of starting conditions which completely negate some aspects of the game.  Providing minerals in abundance or upping the amount of gold available to a player might become attractive options to players looking for a fast-paced game, but that also might hinder the viability of many types of units.  The game is appealing to a somewhat niche group to begin with, to further divide that community by allowing for a huge degree of options in game creation may have a huge impact on how much actual game content gets used in your game.  Now I'm all for providing options to the player so that they can tailor-make a game to how they want to play it, but I don't want a community full of people playing some Elemental version of Big Game Hunters because it's quicker and easier.

Quite right. I touched on that a bit in my old warhammer online thread about MMO tanks. You can find the link in my "hello"
 someone call for a dreamer thread but even I would advise against reading it. The first 3 (yes 3) posts alone break the 100k character count.

The biggest step forward is working how much damage a person can actually take. Once you quantify that you can begin to properly measure how much damage weapons do. Weapons that do an insignificant amount of damage can be simplified to none and calculations for weapons that kill in one hit don't need to be done.

A tech tree dependant on metal can't exist in a world without metal in it. However you CAN provide alternatives. If you can't make a metal hammer then make one out of stone. An empire without wood to make bows would use bone instead. Got wood but not in the correct size and shape to make a spear shaft? No problem, use bamboo.

Well, I just love it.  One of the problems I have with AOW is that after a few hundred games its: "OH, here comes that unit again."  Being able to do this will allow me to mess with it endlessly and give me a ton of replay value.

One of the reasons I'm a stardock fan is the depth I can, or at my option not, take the game to.  I love the auto design in gal civ 2 since at some points in the game when I'm cranking out huge units I don't want to mess with 50 planets to adjust what they are producing when an upgraded design comes out.  Sure, the govenors rock (ship and planet, but I'm hoping in gal civ 3 I can use scripts on the govenors....if I have x open spots then build y, if not build z kind of thing).  Once you hit that "I'm sure I've won" part in gal civ, the game still can take days (I like huge galaxies), and automating a lot of it is really nice at that point.  Of course, up to that point I would hate automating it since I can design better ships...but I can switch back and forth between micromanagement and macromanagement as the game dictates....I love this and hope we see it with units in Elemental.

Oh, I would also like to see a "build que" instead of a single build option (such as in gal civ).  I would like for my city to crank out unit one, then unit two, then repeat.

Oh, and on the topic or art?  I *like* quite a bit what I've seen of the art.  I think that Warcraft proved that its the game that counts, and the art is secondary (as long as it dosen't suck) and taking it this direction makes it much more playable.  Sure, I've got a good machine, but even so with everything cranked on gal civ 2 in a huge galaxy, my end turns can take 10 min just watching (too dang many constructors in the air...).  I want to play Elemental on an epic scale, with games that could take me months to finish.  This sort of unit construction combined with player supported art and mods mean this is yet another stardock game that not only won't leave my hard drive, but will keep me gaming online with others until Elemental 2 comes out .

Heck, gal civ one is still on my drive.  Every so often its fun to fire it up and play with deathstars that can actually kill entire races off .