Yay an update!!! It looks great. I was worried about the late game getting bogged down in micromanagment on the really huge maps. As such I am happy that most of it will occur automaticaly.

On a seperate note I noticed that there was a trade boat coming into a harbor and some caravans moving around the map. Will these internal trade boats and caravans work similar in fashion to trade ships in GC2, except more or less automatic, or will there be something completley different?

Interesting. There are so many factors to take into consideration when you plan the end result...

Hooray an update!

It seems like from what I have heard EWOM will be a little bit Total War, a little bit Master of Magic,

A little bit Spore, and a little bit something completely different. It does seem a little bit different that trade kinda happens on its own - does that mean that traders could independently be trading goods from my kingdom with an enemy? Will caravans obey embargoes or will they still sell to your opponent thru a balck market?

And are we still on track for a June beta?

I like the bit about adventurers going around and exploring dungeons on their own. Little things like that help the world to feel alive and just make the game more fun. I also like how micromanagement is more or less optional, some aspects of the game I expect I will want to control every little detail of and others I will be content to let the AI handle stuff automatically.

Also a question: Are the trade caravans just aesthetic or can we actually attack them to disrupt enemy supply lines and steal their resources?

This is Stardock... everything exists for a reason! Of course we can attack them! We are able to attack trade and refinery ships in SoaSE, and those are arguably even less important than these caravans. The chances of being able to kill them is pretty much 100%

omg those graphics are AWFUL, I hope they're not the final version!

Sorry, had to be done

cheers,

Kul

PS that post is totally 40% update 60% teaser

Man 5 adventurerw going into a dungeons and a few turns later you see one of them getting out running for his life with a band of gouls on his heels! Then those gools end up terrorizing farmsteads and then the farmers come and and whine to the king about them and so on and so forth...Man this game will really rock!

Nice graphics! What the recommended specs for those? Mouahahahahah

Hail the frog!

4 SLI'ed 280 GTX cards, 16 gb RAM, 15 gigahertz 32 core processor, and a wind tunnel to cool down said components.

I have a question though... Will the adventurers talk like WoW adventurers?

After leaving a dungeon a little speech bubble appears over their heads:

"LOL we just roflpwned that dude!!!11!1!!"

Yeah those graph paper/pencil emulation routines really eat up your processors

Thanks for the update Frogboy! We are, as ever, extremely excited

I like the concept.  Here's my only fear, though:

In GalCiv2, manually telling each planet what to build for buildings was fun at the beginning but really, really, really (did I say really?) tedious in the later game and especially on huge maps.  Twilight of the Arnor helped a bit to create global build queues, but it's still not that flexible/customizeable.

It looks like building cities could be equally micro-management-oriented.  What measures will there be to reduce this so that large maps aren't encumbered by tedious decisions?  Or will having cities be a really rare thing?

Nice update! Definitely answers a few questions, like whether it'll be 1 building per tile (nope!).

That said I'm not entirely happy with it... The middle city appears to be a mining colony. It has the required keep, barracks, housing, a mine, and mine [training?]. Does that mean that the only way to take advantage of a map resource is to build a full-fledged settlement on it? That would make me sad. I want to be able to establish a small colony near/on resources like mines or what-have-you. It would be totally incapable of anything but gathering the resource and shipping it off to cities for use; and it wouldn't be as good as a city at gathering the resource, in order to compensate for it being less of an investment than a full-fledged settlement.

It'd be kind sort of like in Civ IV how you can build roads to a resource within your borders but far from a city and build a mine/farm/whatever on it to take advantage of that resource. Not only do I like it for gameplay reasons, but also for immersion. For one, it would be frustrating and kind of... artificial not to be able to use a resource without building a full-fledged city on top of it, and secondly I think it'd make the map look so much more alive.

Pictures can be worth thousands of words, but they really seem far more open to interpretation. I strongly share your hope that end-game maps will have a variety of population center types, most of which will be nowhere near the size of a city. But the sketch in the OP made me think the engine is on the path I'd prefer. I saw the 'mining colony' as an outupost, if well-defended. The smaller and larger 'cities' have more base tiles and multiple shared tiles. And 'housing' is on the list of what can be in a tile, which, to me anyway, strongly implies that we'll be able to influence population concentrations by building (or not building) housing.

I hope some internal testing is done on large maps even before the beta arrives.  Problems can be easier to identify on the XL  maps during late game as compared with TINY maps. 

I hope the game will also include some fun optional features where we can adjust the percentage of activity such as:

   Weather:  Clouds, Rain, Storms, Tornados, Snow, etc.,

   Natural Disasters:  Hurricanes, Meteor Showers, Earthquakes, Volcanoes, Tsunami, etc.,

   Thieves/Bandits/Pirates:  Independent Thieves which travel on the map using one of the random behavior types from this thread:  https://forums.elementalgame.com/337474

   Birth of new AI opponents:  During a game a new AI opponent might appear on the map with a random amount of power/units/resources/etc., .  I recall at least one of the civilization series included this feature.

YAY, frogboy drew that horse for us.   it isn't that bad.

This makes different buildings look really big, with each building takeing up one over-land tile.   how big are cities going to actually become?  I'm trying to imagine my MoM city if every building took up a space on the over map, I'd have truely sprawling metropolises.

I'm also curious about this 'mana generator'    is that a node... errr, shard?    with something built on it?   or just like a regular building such as a shrine?

That's good to hear. The more organic the more immersive the game experience IMO.