You place to much value on past success and not enough on future success. The reason why we all love Stardock so much is because they love to break the mould and make something new. Nothing like SoaSE had been done before, but it was still going to be the best strategy game of the year. If we wanted conservative rehashed game design we would go to EA.

I like the look of the new ideas presented for this game and I personally can't wait to see how it all plays out. 

On another note... The post looks like 50% teaser, 48% update, and 2% Frogboy finally drew a horse!

Either you are kissing up to the devs   or you are very, very easy to please.

I am just happy to hear anything from the Frog, but this update was a bit scant on info compared to previous updates. As I said, I am pleased with anything we get.

Awesome, awesome to the max.

  Lets not drag our other ongoing discussion into MULTIPLE threads. 

Anyways within the other topic I explained why channelers and essence will not be changing and why trading between human players should use the traditional trading system which has a solid history of working.   Heck if I can cast spells changing the life & death of the realm I should be able to teleport some resources to a friend.  I should be allowed to trade with anyone once I find them despite their distance on the map as seen within the vast majority of other TBS games.  

Why would they develop 3 times the code, 3 times the Ai work for it, and do 3 times the QA effort on something like that? Do you really think there's any chance such an optional feature would even come remotely close to generating enough extra sales to make that a positive return on investment?

I agreed w/ Denyru when I saw the original post but if you combine the information that Boogiebac provided, I think this is a damn good update.I'm especially stoked that he shares the idea of a fantasy world having only a handful of cities and then many smaller settlements. I know there was a few of us that were worried it would end up like Civ4 where every there would be tile spam. So um yeah...Whoohoo

I look forward to hearing more after the internal alpha.

Ah I had missed Boogiebac's post, which I agree, definitely fleshed this update out quite nicely. Also the news that there is internal alpha NEXT WEEK with more promised goodies after that...well, to say I am excited to hear that is an understatement!

The graphics keep getting better and better! Very nice work indeed!

The idea's you guys are tossing around though... Wow! Really looking forward to conquering that living breathing world!

certainly.  Having a good Queue system helps too.   Like if I'm playing and I Q up 20 turns worth of stuff, then I don't even really need to worry about AI involvement unless something 'unexpected' happens (like deamons spawn on my doorstep, that would be a problem).  I always liked in Supreme Commander how I could queue up a good 5 or 10 min at the begining of the game.  I'd sit and Q up my entire base, then walk off to make a sandwich.  By the time I got back my defences would be about up and I'd have tanks rolling out ready for combat.

May I suggest also having some sort of system that helps ensure players are aware of upcoming important events or meetings that would best not be AI controlled.  Like if the council of mages are meeting to talk about something, we wouldn't want somebody to be AFK.    (of course ignore this if such events won't happen)

I'm all about playing by e-mail (I do it with my father in Civ 4, and I'd like to do it with more people in this) so if there was a notification something like 40 turns in advance (whatever is twice or 1.5 the turn buffer so there is time to plan) that relates to real time (and can adjust based on time zones) for the meeting to take place.  That way people can plan ahead and know exactly when they need to be around for the wizard council.

I guess the voting and communication could also just happen over several turns, and that might be an easy fix.  Now that I've typed this I conisidered the fact that maybe you don't NEED to all be communicating, that would just be more fun.

I am a huge MoM fan, a big Stardock fan, and a huge Frogboy fan.  I love at least 95% of the ideas they have released about what they would like to do with Elemental.  I am starting to get worried.  So many ideas that take a simple TBS game component and make it complex (Cool as hell and more realistic but complex, harder for an AI to manage, and more prone to bugs and exploits).  I am a programmer and have been for about 20 years.  I don't work on games but from my experence every component you add doubles the complexity of all other components it interacts with.

I don't want to sidetrack this thread so I will cut this short and start a new thread on this topic.

Sammual

how big a game world can we make?  A subjective question, yes, but let me give some background.

The OP mentions D&D, and that's a perfect point of reference.  D&D Online was the MMORPG I'd wanted to make since I was a kid.  But the implementation of the game is such that you leave a main city and bam! you're in a dungeon.  The designers wanted to have friends play a complete adventure within a 2 hour (or so) game session.  But that's too small to give a real sense of being within a fantasy world, imo.  There's no world exploration.  No sense of space.

I'm looking for some description of the sense of time/space that is realistically available within a given Elemental game.  Can we create maps along the scale of a Middle-Earth?   Smaller, like a Greyhawk city and it's immediate surrounding towns and neighboring cities (size of a country?).

Is it practical to create a campaign world (D&D terminology) or is it more focused towards smaller-scale single game sessions?

I think it's fair to say that the dev position on this is "As big as we can possibly get them." There's been talk in the context of 64-bit operating systems of maps that could take many, many months to complete. I'm very happy to think of that in the singleplayer context, but I have no real idea how it might work for any multiplayer mode(s) of Elemental. My guess there is that the final limiting factor might be your online gaming crew, much as it is offline when you play a real RPG.

or the limits of the machine if 32-bit

you mention the 'frequency of ... items'     So are items going to be present on the world map HoMM style?   I kinda assumed they would only be found in dungeons and things like that, but you made them sound different from dungeons and creatures.

Lets just say... they are allowing you to make full use of 64 bit windows... In other words, you can make it as big as you want, plus some. This assumes of course you have enough RAM to handle such a game. 64 bit can handle up to around 16 exobytes of RAM, so you could theoretically make a game that is actually bigger than the earth... Sure you may never see a single AI player in your lifetime, but you could do it...