Just whining

S   P   I   R   I   T   U  A   L

My suggestion: do MoM 2 yourself.

I can agree about some extra things that Elemental could have though.

I agree it was supposed to be the spiritual successor.  Plus, I think Atari has the rights and perhaps they don't want to sell (or the price is ridiculous).  A spiritual successor is fine with me.

To the rest of your post.

Races--absolutely need more distinction between them.  Race specific units.

Spell--oh boy! Need lots more

Champions--more plus have two kinds.  Heroes that help cities, heroes that fight.  Better equipment.  Should also gain experience over time.

Artifacts--see above.  Need to be able to find more of them and be able to create them.

Races - yes, they are very similar, actually there are only two "races" at present. But I don't want elves, dwarfes, orcs. . . 

I like this game, because it is different. Most of fantasy worlds have the same races and i an fed up with them. The present races in the game could be very cool. But they need distinction. They need different clothing, story, architecture, lands, strenght and weakness, units. They need different culture. And with that we could have a living, new fantasy world. And i think this isn't too difficult. If the game will work properly we will get this distinctions somehow.

But please, don't make a MOM, i could very love this world if the races had different cultures.

1.1 Beta is just another buggy broken beta, after 7-8 months one would expect something better, this version isn't much better than the crap they put out in April! The magic system blows chunks, tactical combat is just boring and the game just keeps on crashing!

They should consider renaming Elemental to "Beta Testing the Broken Game"!

Isn't the point of beta testing to discover the bugs?  Did you really think there wouldn't be any?

I half agree with you, they do need more distinction. But I don't think race specific units are the way, rather race specific attribute bonuses, special abilities, technologies and buildings.

I suspect however that will be in one of the expansions.

I think that the problem is that EWoM is NOT the spiritual to MoM. MoM is a fantansy TBS game; EWoM is a post apocalyptic medieval world. MoM has really distinct races requiring radically different playing styles, original sovereign choices that really matter, bland through fabulous units, heroes and champions who are, with interesting and useful skills, and upgradable with the really cool weapons, armor and amulets/rings/whatever that one makes, buys or (best) wins in the extremely good tactical combat mode, a very good mana management system, buildings that matter, and is mostly about having fun, not micromanaging whether your mounted scouts will be equipped with spurs or not. EWoM has almost none of this, except truly bland units. It has the potential to be a great game; it will never be MoM2 and, as far as I can tell, no attempt has been made to be MoM2. There is very little evidence that anyone who has been involved with EWoM has ever even played MoM. Unlike me, I'm playing it now, not the 1.1 beta. Still think EWoM can be a great game. Guarantee it will never be a classic that people are still playing two decades from now. Too bad; hope someday someone will actually make the 'spiritual successor to MoM'. I also hope that Stardock turns EWoM into the game that it has the potential to be. It is too bad that EWoM has been tagged with the spiritual successor label (their own fault); it will ensure that EWoM will be most recognized for that singular, epic, fail, rather than on its own, not inconsiderable, merits.

Is Stardock even caplable of releasing a stable version of this game, months after it's buggy release?

I love trolls:)

Dear OP,

Just wait for 2.0.  It's going to be sweet and have all that stuff you talked about.

The game was released at the end of August, stability was improved with the subsequent patches.  Since April was a beta, I think I am going to second Rune.

I hope so.  I think race specific units would be cool, but this could be accomplised with what you suggesting by having more distinct attribute bonuses, abilities, techs, and buildings would also be great.  They could all make race specific weapons or armor which in a sense would create a race specific unit.  The Tarthians could create a special bow for their woman archer corp.  Trogs could create special two handed swords to harness their larger size.  Perhaps, the Altarians could have special lances for their horseman.

The problem here is people have grown to expect betas to function more like a demo of the final product than an actual technical bug fixing stage.  A lot of companies do betas that are nothing more than marketing stunts.  This is a real, actual, beta build.  If you are not comfortable TESTING something that is incomplete (the new AI isn't even plugged in)  don't download it and wait for the final release.  

As to the current state of features, it needs more work, but this is a major step in the right direction.  I'm quite pleased with what I'm seeing in this build.  This just became a different game and there's going to be a lot of work ahead fleshing things out.  It is a lot more fun already though, no question.

Well, I'm actually considering something along those lines. The modding potential of EWoM is interesting, but with all the major changes going on there is really no point in trying to build anything until the game system settles down and we all know what we've got to work with.

Since..

.. I take it Wintersong will lend me a hand

Don't get me wrong, I really like EWoM. Stardock is a nice company that actually support their products unlike some others and I think it can turn into a nice game. They did however, botch the whole project by releasing an incomplete/extremely buggy game and then saying Ooops .. and now they're trying to fix it by basically building a new game on top of the old one. 1.1 should have been 1.0.

regards,

Tobias

It is not a total new game, some of the rules have changed but the art assets and the way the engine runs is the same.  Why keep whining about the same stuff?

Umm yeah, you're aware that 1.09n is NOT a release of the game, right?  It's a beta test...

Yes it's a beta but come on. After having suffered the 1.0 release and the subsequent patch mania it feels like we're back on square one. My definition of a beta is something where the major ie gamebreaking bugs are gone and theres a list of known bugs so that testers know what to look for and report the as yet undiscovered, hopefully minor bugs. This beta is so bug ridden with CTDs, dozens of minor bugs and design flaws that it's ridiculous. Lets call it an Epsilon release instead and hope for the final version to appear in a near future. I sincerely hope stardock realizes that this final version needs to be better tested cause ff it's 1.0 all over again I'll give up on EWoM.

regards,

Tobias

PS. Still a stardock fan, I have faith! DS:

Call it what you like if you don't like it go back to 1.09E and wait for the actual 1.1 release. I'm not suprised that there are more CTD bugs in this Beta to be honest most seem to be DX related and the rewrote parts of the rendering code as well as multithreading the AI (multithreaded code is always harder to debug).  As for minor bugs and design flaws they gutted three major game mechanic areas and rebuilt them then they needed to adjust and rebalance everything, not suprising the first pass is far from perfect and I for one downloaded the BETA knowing this would be a possibility.

I think you have unreasonable expectations of a beta test.  You should expect all manner of bugs, CTD's included.  

Well, maybe you just should not force 'your definitions' on something, that has widely accepted definition already? Beta is not RC, its beta. Its distinctive feature over alpha/development branch is feature freeze. Pre-1.0 stuff was not exactly beta, it lacked content and features. Current pre-1.1 is as beta as it can be, and amount of bugs and their severity does not matter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_release_life_cycle#Beta

About races/species; I love that Elemental only have human races, of varying degrees of degeneration. Not a multitude of elves, fairies, dorfs and whatnots out of absolutely nowhere. But I do agree that increased racial variety would be a welcome addition to the game.

If 'Gamma' follows 'Beta' and is considered Release Candidate, then one can suppose that 'Delta' would be the actual released product. Epsilon would thus be "Beyond release".

Which is actually sorta accurate when it comes to Elemental itself, but not in terms of the 1.1 patch and certainly not in your context.

Re: the rights to Master of Magic, that's actually where Elemental started. Stardock tried to purchase them, Atari wanted too much or there were strings attached, and they started making their own instead.

Now, I will agree that the setting is to MoM as MoO3 is to MoO, which is to say "realistic" to the point of ruining the fun of the lighthearted nature of the original, but that ultimately doesn't bother me for two reasons. One, Stardock doesn't quit on their games, and at one point there was talk of having Elves, Dwarves, etc. as optional races for multiplay/sandbox. Even if it ends up in an expansion, well, they're giving those away, so it might as well be a patch if you bought in early. Two, the game is modable. The community was already working on Elves and Undead before the 1.11 overhaul, and even if their aren't enough MoM fans, anyone who likes D&D or Lord of the Rings should provide all the material we need.

OMG if i read one more post with the same old MoM shit like the 1000 posts before i am going to flame so hard the internt shuts down from overheating.

If they would at least label the threads with 'Same old MoM is the greatest thing since the invention of boobs' i could evade them, but noooo of course not ...

The ironic thing is that the release version of MoM probably had more bugs than Elemental does presently

I don't think I really want a MoM2.  The concept that they are taking with Elemental I think is going to be great.  SD sure seems to want to improve the game so I am willing to wait to see where 1.1 and the future expansions go.  Hopefully in 1.1 or the expansions there will be greater distinction between the factions.  I don't need Elves, Dwarves, Trolls, etc, but right now they are all basically the same.  More distinction will equal greater depth and is usually more fun.  I also want heroes to be a little harder to find and to develop more over time.  If there are less of them, and you have invested some time into them, again in just a better immersion into the game.  Right now, all the heroes kind of seem the same.  That is where I think MoM is a good game to get some ideas, you were really invested into each game.  It was hard, and getting a hero to Demi-God level while you have hand crafted 3 different items for them was just plain cool.

I think SD is simplifying Elemental to much.  They are also trying to balance the game to much.  I understand for multiplayer it is a necessity, but games that are balanced are boring.  Same faction just a different color.  MoM was one of the worst balanced games of all times.  Gnolls and Klackons were almost worthless.  Basically anything that lived in those mud houses were worthless, except the Trolls.  It would be fine with me if SD put some advantages and disadvantages into each faction that made one better than the other.  Make the starting point completely random.  If you don't start with food or a natural resource, or whatever--then go find it.  Seeding every starting point with everything just dumbs the game down to much.

You worry me Osisris, I am a MoM fan.  I think Elemental could take some things from the game.  I don't want a clone of it, but they are some great things to learn from it.  'Same old MoM is the greatest thing since the invention of boobs'---are you crazy--nothing is that good.

Yes MoM was great, i agree. But it had a buttload of flaws. My problem is that every single one of those who post of how great MoM was never tell us anything new. At all.

I just think the devs know by now how cool MoM was, really, they got it by now. Even the guy who wrote Fences must be thinking about a MoM mod for it. The next window blind comes in nature or chaos flavor with little trees and fireballs. And the next animated desktop loads MoM and play an Ai vs. Ai match on your desktop.

They tried something new and i for one like that. There is no denying that E:WoM is atm .... lacking. But either you have faith in Kael and his team or you dont.