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Just found Stardock's site for this game, a hybrid strategy/RPG along the lines of Age of Wonders or Masters of Magic. (And hey, if we can classify Heroes of Might and Magic or King's Bounty as an RPG, we can certainly classify this as one, as well.) Looks pretty impressive. Nice screenshots, not that these tell very much at this point in development except on the strategy map. I'm only hoping the deliberately asymetrical spell systems of MoM are continued, and that they do a nice city screen (such as the original MoM, which looked a lot like Civ2, and deliberately so) but that might have been sacrificed for a stronger rules-based AI. We'll just have to wait, and see.

EDIT: The site offers the game as an expensive preorder for sale when it's just going into beta, and gives you the (cough) privilege (cough) of beta-testing the title for Stardock. What a deal! For Stardock. For myself, I can see a few better ways to spend time than putting dozens of hours into testing a product with no AI, only one screen in more-or-less final state, and a lot of artwork to look at. And paying for that, too. I thought playtesters were paid? Maybe in the realworld. File this under whatever the market will bear, I guess.

One feature that was in MoM and will apparently be missing from the new game (at least, Stardock has been stating for over a year that it probably won't be in) is the ability to tailor your spellbook collection by selecting the number of books in each of five colors. This added a nice element of strategic customization to MoM, and AoW, for that matter. Do you stick with all the red books, so you can master the highest level destruction spells? Do you split with perhaps 7 red and 3 white, so you can cast basic and a few moderate level healing spells? Wish that was in, but I suspect it would add too much for any decent rules-based AI to handle well.

Read this from Stardock's developer:

Amongst the major strategic elements to the upcoming PC-only game is the new diplomacy system in which the player, who exists in the game as the immortal sovereign of their kingdom, can have children who in turn can have children and so forth and can thus build diplomatic relations with other factions by arranged marriages. These marriages have off-spring who may (or may not) be friendly to different factions based on their family ties. These off-spring also exist in the world as playable characters setting the stage of players having to choose whether to place a particularly gifted family member into a battle even if it risks the ire of related factions.

Sounds very much like an implementation of Paradox's Crusader Kings dynasty/characters. I'm not sure how much of this will make the final cut, since it's almost a separate sub-game from the main Master of Magic-like gameplay, but still, it sounds very interesting.

Definitely looking forward to this one.

Monolith wrote:Definitely looking forward to this one.

You know that they spoke to Atari first about doing an MOM 2? But Atari wanted control of the marketing, all followups, and feature set, so Stardock dropped the idea.

I'm glad they did. They don't need a name to make good game. But then, they just might be able to pull off making a true MOM 2 - hopefully Elemental will get as close to a sequel as possible.

Where did you get the info on Atari's demands, btw? Has it been openly available?

Monolith wrote:Where did you get the info on Atari's demands, btw? Has it been openly available?

I interviewed Brad Wardell, Stardock's CEO, about 2 years ago for a transcribed phone interview piece I do monthly for a national magazine. He stated that off the record, so it never got into the piece, but after he began making E:WoM, he openly discussed it in several publications. So I have no problem in mentioning it any longer.

He also discussed how he was playing a game in the lobby when he was supposed to be helping his wife during delivery of their first child, the jerk. I'm surprised she ever let him have a second.