It was said the caravans can be ambushed. This is good. It would be nice to be able to add a protecting army to the caravan. The army would follow the caravan and in the case of ambush it would protect the merchants. I miss this feature in GC2.

I was thinking along the same lines. It'd need to be automated and simple to use (as otherwise there'd be a tendancy to manually attach guards to caravans - shadowing them around the map - which would be soooooooo tedious)..  you could have a slider saying how much you want to spend on the security of your trade network and then that could affect either the size of the force, or the probability of a force being there at all to protect your caravans in tactical battles whenever they're raided. This would give you another interesting risk versus reward decision to make in the game.. do you gamble on keeping extra funds in your coffers and take a few caravan raids as acceptable collatoral damage, or do you beef up security across the length and breadth of your empire and make the bandits weep!

One "item" that immediately comes to mind would be on map "Mana Generators/Shards", as noted in the awesome map layout provided in the OP.

I jst got a new a new rig (i7, 6GB ram, gf 9600, winXP-64bit) and I was wondering how close will we be able to zoom?

could I zoom in and see people walking in the streets? to different between buildings? etc etc

Wardre

The last I heard was zoom in to see leaves on trees - I personally picture it as being like the zoom in Empire:Total War - but that is 100% my own view.

that was a very old comment by frogboy,   Its the last I heard too, but they have not really been pushing that recently as far as I've seen.  It would be really awesome, but I'm not sure how they would do it without having to create several vastly different layer detail for each model.  Not just normal drop in poly count, but on completetly different scales with leaf and grass physics.   It would be quite a feet to pull of and have look good, especially on top of everything else they are doing.    Perhaps it will happen, I'm excited to see.

I wouldn't be suprised to see it. Just think of Sins. Zoom way out, you see planets + icons around planets. Zoom in a bit, you see ships icons. Zoom in further, you see ship models. Further, you see really high detail ship models. What they are going for isn't to overly different, so they have the know how. Poly counts could be a pain, as could making all those high-rez models... So I would put the chances of seeing that feature at around 50-50.

Displaying the leaves on trees - it was one interesting project on my university. I don't think we should insist on it. However zoom layers are a very good tool. Perhaps it would be nice if it would be possible to store the zoomlevel and use a shortcut to switch to it. As for me if I play GC2, I use mostly 2 zoomlevels and adjust them by the mouse wheel. The shortcut would reduce the time to adjust the view.

If I understand you correctly, you're saying that the zooming in Elemental could work similarly to how it does in GC2. If so, well that's pretty much a given. More than a given, really.. We know there will be a cloth map zoom level, where the terrain and everything on it is replaced by an abstracted representation of it all; and we know that we will be able to zoom in and view the actual world itself - we just don't know how far we'll be able to go, or what detail it will be rendered in.

Note that, while we're shooting for some pretty awesome zooming capabilities, the scale on the main map has been heavilly abstracted.  We think it works well, and you can definatly zoom out to the entire map, then in to see the leaves on a fern, but you dont zoom INTO the leaf itself.

Anyways, I'm really proud of the scope pulled off....it took a long time (most of the work up through last December had been engine specific) but I've never seen a land-based strategy game that feels like this.

Lol thanks BoogieBac!

Why would you WANT to zoom into a leaf? Illogical, I say!

Would you say that the zooming scale is similar to Empire: Total War? (if you have had a chance to look at it)

Wow this is all great to hear. Thanks for the update.

Empire:Total War is more along the scope of what we want in Tactical Battles....more of a realistic scale between the world and the units.

On the main map, unit's are more abstracted (a 'realistic sized' unit on a tile would be a dot), but the entire map does some crazy scaling that I have a hard time explaining.

Maybe some screenshots would explain?

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That's great to hear, but man am I getting too hyped up about this game. I'm already expecting it to kick SoaSE in the pants as far as immersion, amazement, strategic depth, etc. All based on a little information about a pre-alpha build. Can't wait to see this engine in action!