Good interview, really pants trailer.

Regarding magical creatures being rare, I think this is an excellent decision. Making the appearance of unicorns or dragons something truly special is an excellent idea. It's very similar to a theme in George R R Martins A Song of Ice and Fire, it's a fantasy epic but magic and magical creatures are a rarity, mostly it's just man, man's squabbles and man hitting each other with pointy things. When something other worldly does happen or is even alluded to it's really special, as in "gasp out loud" special. And that works really well.

I have a lot of trepidation in regards to the art style.  I'm not one for a comicy look on my strategy games. 

I can't stand the title either.  They should just drop it and continue on with the 'civilization' franchise, renaming it to something akin to 'fantastic civilizations'.

maybe stardock could just license the MoM theme music?    Just keep it in its 8 (16?) bit format and it'll be gravvy.

should be pretty fun.  For those a bit hesitant on the lack of magical races, i'm sure if you brought it up enough they could consider conjuration as a parth to victory.  That way the avenue to have a high (or at least higher) fantasy army exists, but at a cost to other paths, same as putting essence into expansion or heroes and such.

looking forward to it a lot.  Just hesitant on that art style.

(On 99% humans)

Eh, it would be nice get to know all these "usual" games in the genre so I can go and pick one up immediately.  To my knowledge there is hardly a decent 4x strategy fantasy game out on the market today. Historicical (i.e. 100% humans): yes, in droves.  But fantasy ....

Yes I've played HMM5 (hardly strategy). AWSM is decent but already too old. D3 too ugly. MM old. There is no such game out, so whatever people prefer, it's not about avoiding boring repetition. 

As a side note, I must say it is a bit surprising that Stardock came out with Silmarillion as the major influence for the gameworld considering this humanocentric approach. In Silmarillion you have: armies of super-powerful elves of every variety, ARMIES of DRAGONS, ARMIES of BALROGS (sorry, don't want to be screaming, just to underline that Silmarillion is even way beyond a generic "fantastical monster army".

For playing with humans we have at least Civ, Medieval Total War, Europa Universalis, etc - the list is looong.

One of the coolest sieges in fantasy must be the Fall of Gondolin, where armies of balrogs march upon the hidden elven kingdom.

That WOULD be nice in my humble point of view.

It can still be based on humans, but please don't deny us the pleasure of some fantastical units. What are we otherwise supposed to mod about - the 105th type of hoplat soldier ...

Yes, I tend to agree. The fantastical unit has to be well thought out, well made (graphically etc) in the game, make sense in the game system etc. The usual skeletons, zombies etc do get repetitive and feels like standard fodder.

It should be noted however that fantastical/fantasy unit does not necessarily mean powerful unit. Dragons, liches, yes for sure. But badly equipped centaurs could be about as good as human cavalry. Just that it makes for more variety and is thrilling for the imagination. I mean, the reason to choose a fantasy strategy game is to indulge in the fantasy (at least to some extent) otherwise one might as well play historical.

The unique trait of Silmarillion is actually that it plays out BEFORE the time of man. Elves rule much of the world, and they are much more "magical" than they ever are in LOTR. Same for the evil side: Sauron is just a necromantic apprentice to the real evil.

A touch of such an epic dimension would make the game feel more like a saga and build a really good fantasy atmosphere and environment if properly handled.

Isn't that the point? I honestly would like to see the raised undead not be endlessly diversified, but make the fallen bring the better undead to the battlefield. I'm thinking something along the lines of the Warhammer Fantasy Battles Vampire Counts. They've got the ability to raise skeletons and zombies, but bring the more interesting undead to the battlefield. (I would like to see raised skeletons be a good bit more expensive than zombies but retain the weapons and shield of the unit they were raised from, making the player wonder whether they should try to kill off the enemy's strongest unit first just to raise it as deadly skeletons or kill the weaker enemies and swarm the better ones in expendable zombies). They have a very interesting dichotomy between the raised and rather faceless fodder and their fancier undead, such as wights and vampires, which are both very nasty (the vampires tend to be command troops but can also be elites. I'd like to see a system where a necromantic faction has a limited selection of basic troops (IE can't make troops based on the basic fallen), but instead get to base units on the powerful undead and get a lot of selection for powerful equipment that is naturally expensive, but have to train their units so they can't run out an inexpensive militia without wasting training time. This would encourage an army focused on their very customized and powerful, but small and fragile core of elite recruited units, but is built around the zombies and skeletons as a means of drawing attention from the powerful and customized elite units, thereby capturing both halves of the undead aesthetic: the vast shambling hordes and the immensely powerful and (thankfully) few ancient vampires and powerful undead. I think this would work very well if it doesn't conflict with the idea of the fallen (and the top ranks can be comprised entirely of fallen if vampires aren't fallen (I currently think that the fallen are some fancy type of undead), they just shouldn't be able to make cheap units of fallen, but instead have to rely on their necromancy). I'd much prefer this to the approach used with the Tomb Kings where it's very similar to the other armies in structure (not sure how they play, but they look like the mortal armies) but made out of skeletons, and it doesn't have the very interesting structure of the Vampire Counts.

I think that the magic and beasts faction will do an admriable job of reminding the player that they live in a world of magic and are trying to build a civilization while keeping the feel that the beasts are very foreign and in many cases completely wild. I think this will do an excellent job, and keeping the player's character as a main point will allow a lot of interesting aspects to be added to the fantasy while doing most of the same things as building random magical creatures.

I think this is an excellent reason to keep the magical beasts very powerful and rare. The epicness of the simarillion in many ways comes from how Tolkien was able to protray all the combatants as incredibly powerful without it sounding like an episode of Dragonball Z. The only way to make something feel that astoundingly powerful in a game is by making it and its power rare, so that you can go, "oh wow, that one lich over there is amazing, I'll need to use my best units to kill it" rather than "oh my god, men are so weak, I'll need to replace them with dragons" and losing the feeling that something is powerful by either undercutting the units that can be compared to it or ruining the power itself, both of which I think would take away from the atmosphere.

...wow, talk about a wall of text. I'm not trying to pick on you, I just needed to wax prosaic .

This.

Well by the sounds of it, the whole game is being designed on the premise of user-made content and mods. It would be rather odd if there are such strong artificial limits

Besides, it's not like this can't be made to work. Think of Lord of the Rings (the movies, not the games). In battles with tens of thousands of orcs (which are apparently not in this game, so they translate to humans), the monsters employed consisted of nine dragons and their riders, four to six elephants, a few trolls, and some eagles towards the end. The monsters with combat potential that weren't used in armies were one Balrog, a giant spider, and a Kraken-type thing. There were only three wizards who even got screen time. I'm not counting the ents, as they are pacifists and simple orders would take days to go down their chain of command anyway, and the ghost army can be ignored since there seems to be a deficit of Narsils.

Those things the nine rode weren't dragons, they were something else.  "Fell riders" is the closest they ever got naming the beasts...

Also, three wizards?  Gandalf, Saruman...  and who?  Galadriel doesn't count, she's a ring bearer (seperate thing), as well as being an elf (which Wizard's weren't -- they weren't human, elves, or dwarves, they were something else sent specifically to help deal with Sauron).

HMM5 is garbage compared to the games before it.

I am disappointed that the magical races willl be so infrequent. This actually makes me more reserved about the game than I was before. There is are certain themes/feel I look for in strategy games. Their genre is a component, but if that genre feels forced or denied or limited, I am just not interested. If I wanted to play a game that was men vs. men, I wouldn't be looking at a game with a subtitle of War of Magic.

We'll see. It's early still; I know.

Perhaps it is because they offer some larger diversity ? As while humans are definately fun, one wouldn't mind facing other sorts of foes beyond that.

It actually just says more about the wimpiness of men than the lack of magical creatures.

In Elemental, a typical mid-game army will have tens of thousands of men (hopefully) in it.

A dragon will take out thousands of men on its own.  We're talking truly epic mega battles here. 

Your cities, for instance, won't just be cranking out 1 guy per turn or 5 guys per turn. Later in the game, they may be turning out 100 guys per turn.  They all show up abstracted on the map still so that it doesn't get overwhelming but a given "unit" may represent 100 soldiers (for instance).