I also like the fact that SD is has chosen a highly restrictive monster unit approach. Mythical units should truly be rare and the really high-end ones very rare. I think in the end it will make the game far more enjoyable.

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'm ok with the bigshot magical creatures being a rarity in my armies. (as long as they have the stats to match their rarity)

I'd still like to have some cheap and cheerful magic forces to enhance my army though. (My negative life channeler needs his skeleton/zombie forces!) It is, after all, the army of a channeler. NOT the army of a king who just happens to be able to throw some sparkely effects around.

Then again, undead hordes etc. would be the work of the channelers spells, not something built in a city. I don't see any harm in bulking out your forces a little via magic, as it's just one more way to pay essence to increase your physical/military assets.

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.

I don’t think there will be issues with magically created special creatures, just with natural ones.

(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 ...

Well I don't think the idea is to deny the fantastical units, only to make them truly fantastical that most Fantasy TBS games fail to do. Take HOMM, King's Bounty, whatever.. you can have your stack of cool looking demon things, but you don't get the sense of their awesome power when you can kill them by the 10s with your much bigger stack of <insert mundane unit name here>. You don't really get the sense that the demons are powerful, nor do you really get the satisfaction of "Holy crap, I just won over impossible odds here.."

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.

I believe that is just what SD is going for with the title. The eye is on the long term franchise aspects methinks.

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 .

I was just struck by a question - a bit disturbing.

What is the reason Stardock wants to limit this fantasy game to almost only humans?

Maybe it is because the 3D engine being developed has difficulties enough to handle big battles with mostly humans, so a variety of creatures would just be too much at this stage of development.

Or is it a just a question of taste / style of the game?

This.

In addition to style and choice, I also think it has to do with the unit creation system.  Since you'll be able to "equip" units with different armor, weapons, etc. how would you do that on a spider?  Or a ghost?  Or a bird?  I'm sure it's not impossible to do, but there would have to be a LOT of customization made to create equipment for these units to wear.

All of this, in addition to making fantasy units more special and powerful.  Now, with an active modding community, who knows if these limits could be overcome, though...

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

I think having armies of mostly humans actually helps emphasize the fantasy nature of the non-human elements.  If masses of human infantry are common, but dragons are rare, then what you'll see is those dragons laying waste to vast numbers of human soldiers - bodies flying everywhere, massive carnage, all that good stuff.

If you had armies that were largely composed of dragons, demons, and all sorts of other powerful creatures, then they'd just sit there and bang each other on the head the same way two lowly human soldiers would bang each other on the head.  On the other hand, if most of the time the powerful fantasy creatures are fighting lowly infantry, then it actually does provide a much greater "fantasy" feel to me.

As for not having other lowly races like dwarves, etc. I guess that's another issue.  However, provided the factions of humans are sufficiently different from each other, and each has a unique character to it, the fact that they're human and not something else is a purely cosmetic issue (text labels and 3D models).

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.

This actually made me laugh out loud

To be honest though, the movies actually downplayed some of these things. Gandalf was throwing lightnings around in the books, and in the movies he would just gently hit orcs with his stick. There was a major battle between the Witch King and Gandalf during the attack on Minas Tirith that was never in the movies.

But in general, yeah, your point stands

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).

Did radagast show up? I'm not sure if he was only mentioned or actually took part.

I almost woke up my roommate laughing, good one.

And now it's time for my infamous post invoking the conventions of scale in Egyptian heroic art (did this in demigod too, it's becoming something of a habit . Gotta find some other relatively well-known art that employs similar conventions). You know how in Egyptian heroic art they threw the scale off and showed the heroes and the like as being way bigger than the average infantryman to symbolize their relative importance and skill? It only works if there's a lot of little guys swarming around their feet, because otherwise the effect of the one giant hero standing out from among the masses of lesser soldiers doesn't happen. The same is true here. Once you can raise an army of something, it feels a lot less special because it's filled the level of those little soldiers who establish the scale. If this continues all the way to the top, the effect is lost, and nothing feels special, it just becomes another army with cooler graphics.

If, instead, only the more basic troops can be naturally recruited and the most powerful things such as dragons are very rare and require a lot of effort to get, they maintain a huge impact on the player because all these factors make them stand out from the rest of the units. This lets them have the tremendous impact of the balrog, for example, when it comes out of the shadows at about 100 times the size of the numberless goblins. It's the most memorable part of the scene because of its size and that it kills gandalf, but also because it's the only one. It would immediately have lost the feeling of being special if the gates of mount doom had opened and about ten walked out.

I think SD's method of dealing with the dragons is absolutely spot on. It does everything in the right way to guarantee the impact of the dragons as individual and awesome creatures, not just the rough analog of an Abrams in Civ. I just hope they deal with the other fantastic creatures as well. For example, if griffons are rare, then having a unit mounted on them makes that unit feel tremendously special, unless everybody gets to ride a griffon, in which case they feel about as special as a horse.

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.

I don't understand the attachment some people have to elves, orcs, and the whole slew of incredibly, horribly generic fantasy creatures & races. I don't know, it could be that the prime of fantasy I've experienced myself was with David Eddings, and he uses none of the generic "Elves, Orcs, and Dragons".

I for one welcome our new human overlords.

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.

The dragon. By a mile.

For quite awhile during the game, dragons are basically a force of nature. Run away.

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).

Perhaps you can settle the confusion for us, Brad?

Is the world light on magic creatures in general, or is it just that the regular armies will be mostly regular guys (as in, you won't be able to produce magical creatures in your cities), but you'd be able to recruit/summon strange and fascinating beasties into your ranks?