I've never played Dominions 4. The magic is very powerful? Are you allowed to change the world so that you destroy an entire continent or cities with volcanoes or eternal blizzards? Can you morph your landscape to add extra fertile land and summon entire armies of the undead whenever wish? Is the cost of doing these types of spells so prohibitive that you can only cast something of these spells once every 10 turns?

I tend to think that dominions does not have powerful magic in that sense. It probably has good magic, but I don't think there are any blue-bolts in the game. I find that a lot of the magic in D&D is rather weak compares what should be possible in a 4x game. Of course I've never played dominions and I do not know what you consider powerful magic in certain terms.

Wow, you know nothing about Dominions, yet you say what it does and doesn't have.

How about a mid level global spell called the Burden of Time?

"Causes greatly increased aging for units. Increases unrest across the world
each turn. Also kills about 2% of the world's population each month.
Population in provinces with a Death scale die a little more swiftly."

or maybe the high level Utterdark

"Plunges the world into utter darkness. Income and resources in all provinces
except caves and deep seas are reduced by 90%. All units except undead
and blind units have their combat values decreased by 6. Units with Darkvision
are less affected according to the extent of their Darkvision attribute."

or how about creating a second sun to increase the heat (and death rate) of the world, or freezing over all water so that you can't sail across, or causing half the people in a country to be diseased and likely die within a few turns, or putting the entire world under a perpetual storm, or how about "Life after Death" where all friendly units get an extra life so when they die they instantly reawaken as a zombie, "Army of Rats" where all enemy soldiers are permanently shrunken to the size of rats and given the affliction Fright, or hundreds of different summonings (the spell list is roughly 100 pages of the manual (which is 400 pages)).

That is much better worded than your first post, still i am not really sure i buy into that.

Because, you know, if i dont judge AI behavior by comparing existing games, what do i judge them by? What do you compare them to? I for one dont know anything about AI coding, so i can compare only to other games.

Also your three points are useable on every gamepart in existence, ever. Graphics, design, sound, whatever.

"the exact ratios of each limitation vary from developer to developer, but some combination exists pretty much everywhere, and it's why AI / graphics / sound / design is terrible."

I did not say what it does or does not have, I only speculated on the possible things.

These are global enchantments? How much does it change, how you play the game? Do you change any of your strategy or tactics? Blind everyone seems like a huge buff to undead. I really don't know how the mechanics in the game work, so I can't say if those spells are powerful in the sense that they drastically change your approach to the game vs. they sound really powerful.

All those serious spells change game drastically. One of those can basically make a nation going from top to bottom within one turn ... But yet, all of them can be predicted and dealt with. 

Dominions is a game that for me resemble the reality most of all games. The "balance" in normal life comes from millions of factors (luck, morale, food, history, heritage, tradition, military strength, economy, determinations, weather, politics, geography. science etc.). This makes "overpowered" nations so rare and usually they do not last for long ...

The complexity of dominions is so great that it becomes a truly balanced game, there is just so many ways of playing it, and to everything you attempt someone can find more than one counter. In MP this game is a beast from different league; in my opinion it is ahead of all competition by years.

Unfortunately it is also very time consuming  

At first: Magic is not unfair, it is the great difference between the 4X games.

But let us talk about AI: We have a good AI in chess today. But it needs 50 years and tousands of developer and player for it. In my opinion, the best solution is an AI editor for the internet. Please give us the possibility to wrote a better AI. You can't know all strategies and a strategy games, you implement three or four or five, but if we know them, the game is dead.

If you want a game that will be played in five years like today, you need an interaction between players, a multiplayer! But there are so few good multiplayer-4X-games in the wild. As a player with over 10 years mp-experience in AoW I can say: Nobody want to see a 10-minutes-fight between two players and do nothing in the time. So it needs two things: 1. Play the game on the world map (with zoom for example) like in Warlock and 2. make the game more automatic. AoW has the problem with a shorter viewrange and movementrange - you need more microactions to manage your moves. MoM has a lot of passive actions, so the mass of fights are fast and exiting by magic: You can win 1-unit vs n-unit fights, but you can loose a whole army against a settler with very powerful spells.

In MoM we have great magic. Different schools with different focuses: destruction, summonings and fantastic creatures, speels for a better normal-unit-army and so on. Very cool, but the best are the spells to fight against other schools (i.e. to make the enemy spells more expensive or block it) and turn the game completly : I mean the spells like Zombie Mastery, Armageddon, Dead Wish and so on. Nobody will retreat a game after a few hours of gaming, because he had no chance to win anymore. This is the difference to games like Civ, MoO, AoW, Warlock or FE

In my opinion a 4X with a good magic system has great chances to be an AAA title.

This is a rude response. Parrot didn't seem to be making any judgments and was only asking questions. 

You interpreted my response as rude, I interpreted Parrot's as rude and replied in kind.  IRL, I may not have as I'd have been able to interpret his tone better, that's the problem with written communication.  Brad can take my karma point from me if he wants.

I'm coming here late but I have to say, Heart Shaped Man's post just really struck me - that is exactly how I feel.  I get bored once I've established my empire and the quests are done.  I have been playing these fantasy games for hours every day (AOW3 most recently) and something has been bugging me that I just didn't quite get.  I've noticed that I rarely finish a game but I love starting new ones.

I love the idea of just trying to create a kingdom, do quests, reach some goal, without having to conquer all of the enemies cities. Spending the time making the AI keep me off balance and challenged (rather than it trying to manage an empire) I think would make for a very interesting game.  I think of WITP-AE as the Americans.  I know I will eventually win but how will I deal with all of the scripted AI Japanese invasions?  Where will I make my best bases?  I also think of famous tactics I used in tower defense games (e.g. Orcs must die).  The point being I don't have to conquer the map to have fun (and in fact it gets quite boring if I have to). 

It is often inevitable that I will win, but it's the stories of the tribulations I faced getting there that makes it fun.

Mozo.

Written communication does make reading facial expressions difficult. In my field of work, I've been trained to be very blunt and straight forward and sometimes this comes off as rude. i took no offense from the post and I didn't intend my response to be rude. I found that I received more in-depth information from the reply than the original response as it gave examples of the spells considered to be powerful (which they do sound powerful)

Good magic can break a game quickly. it is fun to dynamically change the world to your will. Bending borders and creating things that should not be there in the first place. With proper magic system you will be seeing yourself in a RPG game lime MAGE from white-wolf. You can think it up, you can cast it... the AI would never be able to anticipate this nor be able to create such a game. This is the problem with magic is that there are no rules of why you shouldn't be able to do something... it's magic after all.

@Mozo293: I feel like you. The early game is great: A lot of exploration, weak troops and magic, but very few micromanagement.

But how about a beginning with a lot of units ("surviors") and a start in a destroyed city? With not so fast unit growth then? I think this setting has interesting and new possibilitys for a 4X-game.

I'm totally agree with The_Biz.

The problem is also in the lack of time. In order to start making AI and teach it playing, you need to have all game features implemented first. Modern developers rushes to release games in sales on beta stages (or even earlier). Due to financial reasons nobody wants to wait half year for AI coders to create and balance AI while all other game parts is generally complete. On the other side nobody wants to invest in AI development after the game was actually sold.

When you buynig the game on the release week you can only see box/pictures/trailers and cannot really evaluate AI. Assuming that developers are setting low priority for AI coding.

Those who trying to code AI while features are not done are facing risks at the project's final stages of doing useless work. This is actually happen  when completed features are not the same as planned to be on early development.

This is very much true, in my case.  I've had to rip out entire working AI systems and redo them because the design changed radically in the last month of development.

And it could be that's exactly what is meant by "magic is not fair."   When you're a developer, coding magic is a lot of fun.  You dream up all these spells that can do anything.  And for the most part, balancing them is perceived to be a simple matter of changing the level or the mana of the spell.  But then the AI guy along, and he has to abstract all this stuff out to a directed a cyclic graph.  You explode the number of states the AI guy has to deal with exponentially.

I have some particular gripes about 4x Fantasy games:

1. LEVELS AND CLASSES: All these years of game development and we still use these Dungeon and Dragon mechanics? These systems impose linearity and rigidity in the game system. I would prefer to have units and champions gain skills more freely and naturally. Kill a monster? You get points to develop combat skills. Govern a city? Administrative skill points. Give characters freedom to develop naturally. Put more emphasis on non combat skills and roleplaying.

2. LACK OF ENTROPY: Many posters noted how they start a new game when the exploring is over because they have nothing to do. The problem here is that the cities run smoothly all the time; there is no "Wear and tear" so to speak. What 4X games need are mechanics to simulate things like creeping corruption and unrest that force players to deal with internal problems.

One of the most interesting mods developed for Civilization 4 was the Revolution mod. This mod added dynamics for new civs to rise in the middle of the game, overextended empires to crumble and colonies breaking away from their parent civ. This forced players to pay more attention to internal affairs. In FE:LH, the unrest statistic could be used to implement similar dynamics like rebellious cities, city riots and the like.