I am looking forward to this. I liked how Warlock had lots of variety in bonuses you could attatch to your city, while the only unique thing about your city in Fallen Enchantress is your city level up buildings. Those are pretty bland in most cases, so I never get get attatched to my cities.

Actually it's quite easy to make the cities more diverse using the base resources, assuming the three resources are interdependent. You'd just have to make sure you can't get high resource of each type in one city. For example, if you have 5 grain, you can't have more than 3 mat (and 3 essence), that would make that city into a farming/population type of city where you build mainly tax offices and the like. Just the same, high production city (5 mat) might not have high grain/essence, and the same for high essence cities (whatever that does). That would pretty easily make 3 distinctive types of cities. Or more simply, maybe use some sort of "resource cap" per tile, where you can't exceed say 9 resources, so if you have 5 of one type, the other two would be low... and finally you'd have general cities that has average of each (3,3,3) making essentially 4 types of cities (or 7 if you count 4/4/1 type cities).

The problem right now is that so much of the current city leveling system is linked to grain, and so much of the production is linked to mat. If you relax the requirements for both of those (have some base buildings that generate both food/production without needing the linked resource), and instead focus the three resources into three differing paths of city development, I'm pretty sure you could make an interesting system.

Don't get me wrong though, I'm not against making more use of surrounding terrain, I've been saying something along that line for a while now. But that's not the only way to make unique cities.

Thanks for keeping us updated. Haven't played in awhile, some of my summer classes are finishing and 2 more will start soon. Can't wait to see the changes.

I like updates.  Thank you.

I'm pretty bummed we have to wait several more weeks for Beta 4.

I am positively thrilled that we are seeing this degree of thorough development and willingness to totally re-envision clunky aspects of the game.

It all sounds great, but what about fixing the main issue of the game crashing before it can be finished? Putting a bunch of hours into playing this great game only not to be able to finish it is soooo frustrating... note my comments that I posted in the wrong thread the other day https://forums.joeuser.com/423812/page/8/#replies   also to add one more observation of a pathing bug, it would be sooooo great if you could move your units and unit stacks through your cities whether or not the city is full of other units. Not being able to really is a pain in the ass.

Would love to get back to moving units in ships... not to mention naval warfare, how cool would that be? However, recognizing the huge undertaking that this game already is, and how great its becoming, I would be playing it for hours just the way it is, assuming everything worked! Can't wait to see if that gets achieved

Keep up the fantastic work guys!

It doesn't really feel like the game needs yet another resource. Some of the "resources" that are already on the map could be more meaningful already. More buildings and more tradeoffs to building those buildings would go a lot further in my opinion. Essence is going to be a hard sell to myself, and I suspect a number of other players.

It is a tile resource like Materials and Grain.

For a lot of people the game isn't crashing very much any more at all. But if you do get a crash, please attach files to dropbox and explain the details.  That's the only way those types of bugs will be fixed.

Indeed, if the last Beta 3 build is "crashing all the time" then we need to hear more from you. From a stability point of view, the last beta 3 build should be pretty solid. I'd want to know if there's a hardware incompatibility that we need to address.

I was hoping for henchmen that can actually be built and such in a patch while we wait for beta 4. 

But what does essence do??????????

I think  essence may be dog poo, and you have to train a special squad to clean it up.  If you don't your troops take a morality hit when they tread in it.

Take as much time as you think is right to provide a polished and refined Stardock game.

I got excited with every beta release so far and I'm pretty sure that this time around, the end result will get the golden crown it deserves.

Keep up the updates, I love reading them although I don't comment as often as I would have liked.

Excellent work, Stardock !!!