only if they have a spellbook maker or something like that so I can save "silly spellbook" and "tournement spellbook" as different.

Does Stardock plan on relying on third-party publishers for Europe distribution, and if that's the case, will these publishers handle localization of the game?

Or if you plan on handling worldwide publishing yourselves, would you rely on the community for translation?

Frogboy, if you see this and have the time to answer, I'd like to ask if the names of the nations are work-names or their actual names. I don't want to intrude on your creational process but if Humans and Fallen are both divided into adamant Kingdoms and Empires it feels a bit.. dichotomic.

Modular Spellbooks! Every time you research a spell, you can put it in one or several custom spellbooks that you define yourself. There'd be one big spellbook with all your spells. Going into it, you could define which other spellbooks it'd show up in.

Most people would likely only have two or three main spellbooks - World Spells, Battlefield Spells (if any), Buffs, etc. But with modular spellbooks, everyone could sort them however the hell they want! You could download that "800 Silly Spells, including Luckmann's Dancing Ferrets, Landisaurus' Thesaurus, Swicord's Archaic Stopsign, and Pigeonpigeon's Exploding Pigeons (not to mention Vandenburg's Flying Deathtraps)" without it completely cluttering every single spellbook, no matter how the game itself categorizes those spells (battlefield, etc).

It would be funny to see a Scandinavian Localized version. Mixed Norwegian, Swedish and Danish. Take whatever words are the most archaic in every language when deciding what to translate to, and bam. I'd lol.

I think Gal Civ and Sins of a Solar Empire where eventually localized by third-parties yes.

Man, don't forget the Finnish!

In terms of quests, I've often wondered if there's not an opportunity to weave gradually developing, multi-episodic quests into a game like this.

This would be similar to the "Good / Neutral / Bad" episodes that came up in GalCiv 2, but with a thread running between them.  So, if something comes up, and I send a character out on a small quest early in the game to rid the countryside of a marauding band of Orcs, maybe I see a reference to an Orc chieftain named "Thugrak". 

Depending on the outcome of that first quest (do I find and slay the warband, do I hire them as mercenaries to serve in my own army, do I pay them money to leave me alone?), there's a branching storyline.  Wouldn't take more than 3 or 4 "episodes" to create an engaging narrative thread, and I'm assuming you could build the scripting language so that you don't get the exact same result every time.

This is also the kind of thing that modders could go crazy with.  Let them craft their own quests, with their own outcomes, and provide their own writing.  There would be a lot of duds out there, but there would be a lot of gems that would rise to the top, and be easily included in our ongoing games.

Something along the lines of those pop-up text passages you used to get in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, if that rings any bell?  Otherwise, it feels to me like we're left with the simple, engaging but somewhat tedious "Go here / bring me this / kill that" experience where every quest begins to feel exactly like every other quest.

That sounds like something out of Castles II: Siege and conquest.

Great game, and I loved having the storylines.

Ron, that was the game I was thinking of, I just couldn't remember the title!  The storylines were the most fun part of that game, and definitely added some flavor "on the cheap", from a development standpoint.