The new Fantasy Game!

Fantasy Civ IV.  That's what I think.

Not MOM is being annouced tomorrow? 

Here is a quote from Frogboy

I suspect that Dominions will have a strong influence on this game. I expect lots of emphasis on variety, customisation, and scale. Probably not the finely-honed balance of Civ 4, but rather loads and loads of cool content.

Although they should probably try to get Leonard Nimoy to do some voice work. "Beep, beep, beep, beep".

I expect to see a strongly Master of Magic inspired game with a HoMM like map and movement.

Huge flashy particle effect spells.

Focus on tough choices between empowering yourself, your Heros, or your infastructure (Including your armies).

A non-cheating AI that knows only what you would know in the same situation that is hell on wheels until we find it's blind spots.

I expect to see my dream game.....

Sammual

Fantasy Civ IV already exists, it's called Fall from Heaven II.

I expect more of a MoM-like game, with a 3d engine for the graphics, and maybe some Dominions influence.

And, hopefully, a great ai as in Galciv.

Like someone else said, I'm expecting my dream game.  I've played Master of Magic since release.  To this day it's my favorite title.  Even with it's age, it's still the most fun I've had on a pc.  I was SOOO excited when I heard that a sequal was coming, devistated when it fell through, and bursting with joy when I heard Stardock would be doing a Not-MOM anyway.  I really can't wait!  It's a dream come true for me. 

Just please don't forget the artifact creation for our heros.  That was one of the coolest parts of MoM.  That being the ability to create items for your heros to use.  That just rocked. 

I think it will be an epic RPG on a massive scale never seen before...

ABOUT CAREBEARS!

I really liked the Heroes of Might & Magic series, from the first one on up to HOMM3.  HOMM4 was a bomb.  I'm kind of expecting this to be something like that.   But it would be really cool if you could found your cities anywhere (like in Civ), research all your spells, fantasy techs, & stuff, or even better, if you had zones of influence (like in Civ and Galciv) where you could cast kingdom-wide spells and it affected your whole land.  Actually, I'm surprised no one has done that earlier.

My favorite series of all-time, though, is Warlords--who ironically, are the same publishers who screwed up HOMM4 when they took it over.

LMAO!!!

Hopefully strategy and full of fun

HoMM4 was 3DO still, did you mean HoMM5?  I'm assuming you're talking about the SSG and then Infinite Interactive Warlords series?  3DO was going under already when the third was released, the fourth might not have sucked donkey balls if they'd had something resembling a proper budget and staff.  NWC had already been dismantled by the time they got to it.

Yeah, 3DO laid off 3/4 of the staff and all of the R&D ahead of HOMM4, and somewhere in the middle of it they transferred over to SSG.  SSG has always been awesome:   I liked all of the Warlords titles, turn-based, real-time-strategy, and all--and they put out Panzer General and Fantasy General.   I figured the HOMM4 flop had more to do with the less-than-glowing transition from 3DO to SSG.   And anyone with just a little common sense should know that if you lay off all your R&D, that is a death sentence for your company.   That had to have something to do with the disdain marketing and R&D culturally tend to have toward each other.

Confused people...

Ubisoft bought the franchise, but this was post HoMM4.  They'd even started doing concept work for HoMM5 before they were bought out.

SSG is an australian developer, not a publisher.  They split recently for logistical and creative reasons on amicable terms to go back to doing just what they like, harcore historical simulations.  II is the guys that joined SSG to do warlords with them, and then separated to continue their own games later.  Entirely unrelated developer houses, the only thing that overlaps is their publisher for a few of the titles was Ubisoft.

MoM did that--you could cast both tactical combat spells to aid your units and global spells to do things like curse an enemy's cities.

Frogboy broke his own date. Thanks to mittens for posting the link in IRC

http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/elemental-war-of-magic/926527p1.html

Not to mention global spells that affected everywhere on both maps for as long as you kept them active. "Eternal Night", Dark Omens", "Nature's Cures" etc. were a lot of fun. Not to mention there was a Death category global enchant that made neutral undead pop up everywhere except in your own territory, same with "Armageddon". 

Nothing like making the entire game area shrouded in eternal darkness, screwing over any good spellcasting and sending legions of the walking dead to ravage the world for making you feel like a grade AAA badass evil overlord.

Global enchantment were -to me- one of the main things that let you feel WAY WAY beyond spellcasting units/heroes. Made the player/adversary wizard status mean something. Rather than Age of Wonders which, though a good game in its own right, made you feel like just one more guy on the field. (albeit a cut above the rest)

Oh, and the Spell of Return was also great. The lead wizards were so badass they could cheat death.

And then there was the Spell of Mastery itself........ Definately the coolest "research victory" (kinda...) around.

I'm expecting some Kohan influence in unit composition/regiments system to keep micromanagement down, and maybe a similar resource structure as well.

That would be neat, then again I've been dying for a Kohan/Ogre Battle crossover-style game for years now.

Looks great already, sign me up for the next beta.  I know what I will get for my B-day in Feb 2010.

Well, there are two pretty screen shots at the URL Annatar shared. I'm hoping for about eleventy-million tomorrow on the official EWM site.

thxxx for the link Annatar "Karma King" 11 !

The GameSpy preview talks about 5 schools of Magic : the 4 elements + Life magic. No Death Magic ?!

Sweet!  Thanks for the early heads-up, Annatar. 

All five schools have "positive" and "negative" aspects, apparently. And, biologically speaking, death is a big part of life

Turn based games are a turn off for me. I didn't like the GC II demo, or the Fire Emblems. I like Total War, but that had the cool real time battles (I can't wait for the next total war!!!)

Mittens gets the credit He's one of the SD devs, linked that article on IRC a few minutes before I posted it here