Elemental Enchantress makes me think of Game of Thrones

No.

The removal of the dynasty mechanics might be a good practical decision, but it killed all my 'game that makes me think of Game of Thrones' sentiments. Hopefully they'll return in an expansion and we can see a TBS game that lets us have units like Jaime Lannister, powerful on the battlefield and valuable in marriage negotiations.

Well lucky for us there is a Game of Thrones game but it will be an RTS ... It might be slow paced however.  There are some pics and a video on gamespot. 

Oi. Mr. Martin definitely deserves a fat retirement portfolio, but RTS for Game of Thrones? That's a serious round-peg, square-hole mess.

The business with the seasons being all vague and years-long puts long-term thinking front and center in the story. Even though none of the characters so far are old enough to have a seriously long-term personal point of view.

Actually, I seem to remember reading that brad was something of an Ice & Fire fan, as am I (that's the book series), funnily enough. It's sad that dynasties have gone, but without nerfing heroes, it would have been impossible to balance dynasties. You can't just hand out the most powerful units in the game like that.

Seeing the sorry state that family dynasties were in, I think SD made the right decision to remove them.  I rather have them gone than constantly reminding me of how half-baked their execution was.  Also, seeing all the interesting progress being made in FE, I am now more than willing to wait and give SD all the time they need to revisit them, even if that means waiting for them to reappear in the follow-on expansion to FE.

As for how to balance Champions with children, I think the easiest, and most logical way, is to get rid of the imbue champion ability.  What was supposed to have separated the sovs from the rank and file were there ability to use magic.  By allowing sovs to give champions this ability, you destroy the uniqueness of a sov.  I think only sovs and their children should be able to use magic.  This would be consistent with the story of EWoM, as well as make a big distinction between champions and offspring.  In effect, champions would become like "conventional warfare" generals (the existence of generals in EWom was mentioned early in the game's development), while the offspring of sovs would be the specialists in leading armies that required magical backup.  Such a mechanic would make marriages and offspring all the more important, too, since the more you had, the more spellcasters you could field.

This was the original idea for essense. You would only be able to gain more casters my sacrificing your caster’s own casting power. So it was a choice between the logistical advantages of multiple casters and the sheer casting power of a single, sauron like uber sovereign. This was an idea with great popularity, that disappeared with the (otherwise great) introduction of global mana.

I agree that being able to hand out casting power willy-nilly is too much. While it is currently being controlled with mana maintenance, I’d argue that this is the wrong way to do it, because it allows you to just imbue for a couple of turns and then dismiss when you no longer need that caster. More than anything, mana maint is used for too much at the moment, and even if it was effective for limiting imbuing, it has the consequence of just preventing you using magic, which is not particularly fun.

And giving casting powers to children automatically for free has its own problems. Assuming the game is set up correctly and casters are amongst the best units in the game, it’s a very random way to hand out such units. Child births are randomly determined, and marriage is a pretty secondary thing many players just forget about. More than this, it gives much more than diplomatic value to marriages and the father of the groom stands to gain a lot more than the father of the bride, making sons more desirable.

So i’d argue the best solution would be to require imbuing for all casters, but just balance it with a better technique such as essence. The only question is how gameplay mechanics should be distributed over the different attributes. Personally I’d do it something like

ESS = Spell Power (damage equations etc) and spell resistance

INT = minimum casting requirements for spells, initiative bonuses, income bonus for cities

Dont think it will be since it is supposed to cover 1000 years of story which makes me think it would be more like Europa Universalis or Total War than say Starcraft.  But  even if it is more like starcraft there hasnt been a good fantasy rts since the last Kohan game so I'd still be happy.   Makes me think maybe dynasties will be implemented in that game..

If thats a good reason to drop them then shouldnt all the half-baked parts of the game get canned.... Oh wait then there wouldnt be a sequel.

sorry couldnt help the cheap shot.....

I am hoping FE is a good game....

It's half-baked AND not core to the gameplay. That combination is fatal. Core stuff that simply can't be done without will benefit from its removal because devs won't be wasting time playing around with dynasties when they could instead be working on stuff that matters more.

Your point is only valid if you accept that the dynasty system was always planned as some sort of decoration or secondary detail. To some of us who were with the beta well before the first version was released, dynasties were, conceptually at least, absolutely a core game play element.

The only reason that they are not currently "core to the gameplay" is that the game world as a whole was treated as a secondary detail and most dev effort went into engine work (and art assets) that reflected a bias towards modding and possibly-excessive ambitions for 3D graphics rendering. Ditching dynasties in FE is the 'natural' consequence of ditching essence in WoM--both decisions reflect the fact that the project put more time into background mechanics than it did into establishing a vivid, coherent game world.

Plumbing is a beautiful and necessary thing, but it is seldom the star of any art form. I can type that with all pompous certainty because Marcel Duchamp is my favorite dead white guy and he pissed off nearly the entire art world by admiring an American urinal enough to turn it on its side, sign it with a made-up name, and call it art. I'm not afraid of the sausage factory, but neither am I afraid of bitching about the recipe decisions at my favorite sausage factory. Seeing thoughtful posters like you take this sort of position leaves me worried that all of us in the 'old guard TBS' crowd are doomed to suffer new games that are nothing more than the cafeteria knockoffs of awesome home cooking that we used to get back in the day.

I love it when Firefox crashes and eats my posts...

My point is valid because I'm coming at it from what the game is now, not what it should have been. Today, the dynasty system is a secondary thing. You could turn it off and the gameplay wouldn't really change significantly (and except for not being able to farm champions it wouldn't change at all).

What it should have been doesn't matter anymore. It is what it is today.

No argument there. You remember Brad's infamous comment that "game development is 90% engine/tools and 10% game"? Maybe it's true for a literal definition of 'game', but it's insanely wrong if your goal is to make a high quality strategy game. It seems now that FE is getting a better balance of effort.

Looking at it now, to make FE they have a certain number of people and amount of time to work with. They have to take that and wind up with as good a game at the end of it as possible. Ignoring everything but where we are today and where we have to go, is devoting resources to dynasties going to get you a better game then devoting those same resources to improving the economics?

Maybe I just look at it differently then you do because I'm a software developer myself. The way I see it, there's core stuff and non-core stuff. Non-core stuff is what makes a good game great, but it doesn't work unless the core is there. It's like the furniture in a house. You need it, but you probably need walls more.

Multiplayer is to me what Dynasties and Essence are to you: something that should have been great but was instead half-baked and neglected. The way I see it at this point, MP in WoM was a horrible mess. It should be fixed. But would fixing it in FE help anything if they don't fix the core stuff first? Not really, because the best MP system on the planet being used to play WoM would still not be any fun because it's being used to play WoM. Similarly the best dynasty system any game has ever seen wouldn't make WoM fun because the rest of the game is so weak.

My hope is that FE gets the core right, then in the third game with a sold foundation in place they can go back to stuff like dynasties and MP and do them properly. I have no idea if it'll actually happen that way, but it's never going to happen if they try to do it in reverse order.

Parent-frakking pragmatists. I hate y'all, not least because I so often end up being one myself.

You really drove your point home with the MP talk. From the first days of the pre-beta boards, I disliked the fact that MP was part of the plan because I have zero interest in that sort of play. But I've read enough to agree with you that MP, dynasties, and essence are all problem children so far as the current state of the game goes. And I'm utterly at a loss when it comes to deciding whether it is better to see a kid like essence kicked to the curb or watch a kid like MP stay with parents who can't or won't help the kid be all it can be.

What really makes me hate you, though, is your fanning the embers of my ashen hopes for the game series. I'm not ignorant of how software development works, and that's part of why I've ended up so frustrated with what I first thought was basically a skilled, funded 'fan' effort to cook food the cooks wanted to eat.

Having gone through the long beta, I have a bit more of an appreciation for the fact that Stardock, so far, has been primarily a practical-software shop. What my naive self had hoped back when I first started calling the unnamed project NotMoM2 was to see a '5th X' TBS game that had a design approach along the lines of the Hero System. They began that project with a genre (setting) in mind and then began working to build a rule set to let folks role-play stories in that genre. To me, the Elemental project so far has been "in reverse order" because there was never a core world that served as the anchor/framework for the mechanics that you consider to be "the core." 

I actually got the game cause I thought dynasties, essence and the multiplayer were part of what was going to set this game apart from other 4x games.  Seems like the game which already tastes like a vanilla wafer is going to taste like cardboard after losing even more features from what is already a fairly featureless game.  At least the dynasties gave an illusion of depth/replayability......

And doesn't it show! It is beyond me why, after some 10 months on the market, why the population system is still being changed. E:wom has some of the most fluid design goals I've ever seen in a game. Why is the game still struggling with the core mechanics after so long? I sure hope FE will be significantly more "aimed".

I think someone said it best in another topic, E:wom is just a series of "wouldn't it be cool if..." stacked on each other.

And they have even been reducing the amount of support for modding along the way too.  Maybe they should change their website advertising for Elemental:WoM that was mentioned in that other thread.  Many or most of the advertising points have been found to be untrue (or in the case of modding, are getting more untrue).  Too many "wouldn't it be cool if..." just results in a game that turns out not to be that cool at all.  A lot is riding on Fallen Enchantress, for Elemental and for the future of the Stardock games divisions.  So far the signs are fairly good, but FE really needs to hit the spot for the future of Stardock games.

Best regards,
Steven.

But Brad has told us why. It's because WoM is a 53 Metacritic game that people don't like. If it had been as liked as GalCiv II then he wouldn't dare to touch corethings like that. But now since it's a failure anyway he can experiment as much as he wants. And I agree with that (though I don't suffer like others here do since I don't want to play WoM ).

The fluid design is what caused a lot of the problems. I don't see how more fluid design is going to fix it. The game is not a testing ground, it should try to be a finished product (even with continuous patches, every patch should be a finished game). Good design can't be stumbled upon.

Edit: Just to be clear, there's a difference between incremental patching and what's happening now with E:wom. Incremental patching = game continously gets better with all areas considered against each other. Right now = work on some, ignore most other.

Sure, if you ignore the part that it's a 53 metacritic game because of "wouldn't it be cool if...".  This line of reasoning reminds me of a very true quote from the world of business software:

"XML is like violence. When it doesn't work, use more."

WoM's development philosophy was probably the root of the entire problem and as a result WoM can't be fixed by throwing more of the same at it.

Based on Derek's early journals about the planning process (and his more recent ones showing off built things) it looks like FE is a project that has a plan somewhere saying "we will build this". That doesn't lead to exciting forum threads like the famous economic one from beta, but it also doesn't lead to cases where you build something then change your mind, throw it out, and start over again (hello RTS tactical combat). This is why I maintain that spending any more developer effort on WoM is a waste of time. It's not going to net anything significant compared to what FE should be able to do.

If it makes you feel better, I hate pragmatists too. It's not a lot of fun to have someone tell you that what you want can't be done with the budget available, and it's really not fun to be the guy doing it. Course, that's not as bad as promising stuff you can't deliver, which is a lesson I had to learn very quickly in my day job (realistic expectations are the single most important thing for user satisfaction).

With dynasties it's probably no-loss either way. Dynasties don't hurt much by being there in their present state. Essence if it's ignored as a mechanic kind of does. MP is actively harmful in that not only does it suck up servers that aren't being used (ie: $$$) but someone who sees MP on the box then actually tries it will go away a lot unhappier then someone who sees "single player only". This is a case where no MP is preferable to bad MP because of the reputation damage and unhappy customers bad MP causes (and the people who weren't happy that MP existed at all).

If you're asking me, I'd rather see it removed. As-is it isn't worth playing, and it's just something that the QA team has to worry about. So if they're not going to invest effort in bringing it to feature parity with SP, they should remove it entirely and set people's expectations correctly that this isn't a MP friendly game (though at this point people who play a lot of MP games already know that, "Stardock" is a four-letter word amongst that group).

Yeah. If I could go back in time, I'd bring a copy of the results of WoM with me to the start of the project and tell them "start by copying MoM/AoW:SM or this will happen." You could do a lot better by taking stuff from those games (where it worked) and simply iterating on it. Blizzard built a pretty successful business doing exactly that.

But that would be a paradox!  Oh nooes!

Best regards,
Steven.

And they still keep on cutting features which work in AoW...
*Cough! Siege warfare! Cough!*