FIIIINNNALLLLY!

I always marvel at how infantry in Total War did their thing in Rome and onwards.

Nice!  I was really looking forward to some serious player vs the environment gaming in addition to player vs player.  Looks like we'll get it.

will “World Difficulty” effect how soon higher level monsters spawn, was a bit unsure if you would have this.

the UI really will need some love maybe even some nice art in it?

so any plan of adding attack types for weapons?

No. The spawn rating of monsters is dependent on players going up the adventure tree.

What the world difficulty will do will be to determine how ambitious they are.

I would like to see a lot of crazy magical stuff in there over time that has nothing to do with the faction on faction stuff. That won't happen until months after release but that's the goal.

i was wondering if space ponies were going to make it in?

Can we expect a TB vid or is that on hold?

how many spells will be going in by the time its all said and done?

All the ones in the official list at least. But I think we need twice that many.

so it will be dependent on one empire or will it be everyone that would contribute to the spawn rating?

wouldn't a better would be monster aggression or will there be more behind "world difficulty" then just monsters?

Thanks for the update Brad.

What part of the choreographing of battles is the problem? Is it syncing the attacking and defending animations?

I'd love to see spells based on something other than INT, for their effects. Right now it's a no brainer that if you want to cast good spells, all you do is just pump INT and all your spells that rely on a stat will be better. It would be a lot more interesting if, say, a "Dodge" spell was based on your Agility score, and a melee defense spell was based on your CON, etc. It would let players figure out a "build" for their Sovereign that they like, with a goal of using an array of spells that work well with that they like, and opens up the potential for really fun Sovereign creation. One Sovereign might invest heavily into INT/AGI and go as a "battlemage", melee fighter with high defense/dodge (but low hp) and a bunch of point-blank AoE spells. Another might be STR/Essence for a brutal melee damage dealer protected by Earth spells and enough mana to cast/maintain them all, etc etc.

About UI. Can you do stuff like in KingsBounty? I relly like that interface, it is colorfull and pretty, got a lot's of ornaments and still pice of art. It has a lot of gems, leafs and vines around each window, it add a great amount of fluff to game. I can draw you somthing if ya want

And if we talk about it is a bit of broing, add a posobility to upgrade your buildings, change their apperance or somthing, I DONT WANA W8 to BUILD another thing ;p You coud add somthing like:

Name: Garden with potatos (can discover or build from begining)

Type: Building enchentment

What it do: food +1, gildar +1, town populairty -20% You plant a potatos in your garden in exchange of pumpkins, You can eat more but it is a dull food.

And you can upgrade buildings in infinity, just to change it look and type of warking in small way

What do you think?

I'm guessing this was in regards to spells. 

Yes, you will Need a LOT of different spells. An example of spells/powers that may be inspiring is 4th edition powers, for all 26 classes. Each power in a sense functions as a spell, in that it's an attack of some kind or some variation on it. And there are thousands and thousands of powers now for all the classes.

Maybe glancing through them, for inspiration... would be worth your time. (An easy way to do this is get a DnD Insider subscription, download the character builder, and then run the Quick Character option, set them to level 30, and then go look at that classes levels and read the various spells.)

See in 4th edition D&D they really made it so that a fighter has an attack, and a wizard has an attack.. neither run out of power. But those same classes also have encounter powers.. powers usuable only once per encounter, (simple math to avoid extra complexity, by 30th level a character will have 2 at-wills, 4 encounter powers, and 4 daily powers, and 7 utility powers. But as they go through the progress, levels 1-10 is heroic, and building their base powers.. level 11-20 is Paragon, kingdom level events, and you begin to replace earlier level powers with new ones, encounter and daily, and level 21-30 is epic level, you still are replacing earlier encounter and daily powers, but now the powers are appropriately epic. And going up to epic level the at-wills scale up and do more damage now.)

All of that just gives a great way to provide interesting combat experiences.. of which you should be able to find things that are just super compelling.. more so than just a fireball.. and so on.

And this is great to hear about the monsters becoming aggressive! Thanks, I'm really excited now!

Thanks for the update, now go get some sleep

i remember that good spell from DND playing as a cleric i allowed the party to kill first ask questions later made the loss of a major npc annoy the dm but the story could go on.

4th is bad vs 3.5 removed to many classes and roles as well as many other things 

Ye i was very interested in how you guys would handle a fantasy based game , because you made two extremly good sci-fi game (my brother and i still do weekend-lans with sins of solar empire). But i must compliment you on having such a structured and public beta-testing. Developers that talk to their eventual customers are the ones that get the strongest followings , but then you know that already

I made a suggestion a while ago to have damage numbers pop up when you use spells that I thought would make casting them more fun. It's always neat to throw a fireball and see big red numbers appear as you damage things, whereas in the earlier builds you were left to guess just what was happening. Might help with the engagement issue, it's always fun to see immediate results like that.

Awesome news Brad!

[[PS. I always liked the concept of barbarians in Civ4 as well.]]

+

Yeeeeeesss please!

Is there a chance you can work on getting Tactical battles go really fast?

There's a problem...

Tactical combat is nice and all... as long as you're playing alone.

In MP that might be a problem. And while auto-resolve is an option, tactical spells need tactical combat...

So is there a chance you can introduce a "simplified" model of tactical combat that excludes movement but allows to distribute attacks manually? I heard of you "SP 1st" take on features of elemental, but an optional system isn't likely to impact anyone's single player experience anyway, right?

I have in mind a combat model resembling that of Disiples 1 and 2 (but not the 3rd, it's a blasphemy what those wreckmasters did with it...). I don't request that much art along with it. A simple modification based on Current auto battle/combat results page could do the trick for those who can't afford an eternity to wait for 15 players to finish their battles.

Someone mentioned having 50 reasons to see this game finished, well my "reasons" are there mainly because of MP. It would be sad to see it unplayable due to time requirements...

I fully support this course of action.

Re: Multiplayer - our main focus for release day on multiplayer is to make sure it's FUN to play for the widest number of users and then, from there, create lots and lots of options for custom games.  We're still evaluating whether tactical battles will be in MP initially or whether to implement them somewhat differently for MP later on.

With regards to monsters taking out cities, I just hope it makes sense. By that I mean that the monster attacking should be one capable of actually razing buildings for it to make sense. It looks pretty stupid (and is extremely annoying) if a lone wolf, no matter how hungry and rabid, manages to raze an entire level 5 city.

Razing buildings/the city should be limited to human(oid) foes and giant monsters. Huge golems, dragons, you know, big things. Even a civilian population could take out a mundane monster like a wolf or boar using pitchforks, even if several of them died in the process.

Long story short, razing cities should make sense. Maybe have both pillaging and razing. Bandits might be more inclined to pillage and burn a few buildings as opposed to taking the effort to raze the whole place to the ground.

Yet another bombshell!

I preordered on the grounds of MPing a Fantasy wargame, with TB's! 

I highly highly approve of this idea. If a lone wolf takes out a single building, fair enough. If it destroys my million-population uber-fortress-of-doom.... not so good.

There's no need for that because experienced players will probably finish all their battles in just 2-3 minutes.