Pawels is another one of those MP from AOW forums....ignore.

Well that sure answers my question, but I think he's wrong...

Hexes are by far superior to squares...

So only Elemental lovers are welcome here? If you like another game and are not yet convinced that Elemental is the best thing since sliced bread, you will be ignored?

A forum is not homogenous.  My personal opinion is that people who like AOW:SM are welcome here, as long as you like Elemental too.   I think Elemental is going to be *at least* good quality, and get better with time, but time and many, many viewpoints are what's required to really compare one game to another game of a different era.  And people are still entitled to "extra-like" particular games.

Best regards,
Steven. 

Most people on these forums are pretty nice, but every internet forum will have the occasional rude or immature person. It's better just to ignore them and to recognize that they don't represent the rest of the group.

Regarding MP, it does sound like Elemental will have less focus on multiplayer and more focus on single player. I think it's generally good for games to focus on one of the two, if you try to please both crowds equally your more likely to please neither.

AOW did pretty well with both. I don't know that I share your opinion that its better to focus on one of the two, but I understand it. Elemental is not going to kill AOW because it lacks a competent MP option even if the SP is solid.

>1. In multiplayer how does it handle tactical battles?

I don't know, really. In SP you can set the treshold of units to be included for playing tactically to be an option. (v. 3 beta)

>2. Can you craft magic items? This was one thing I loved about AOW:SM.

Craft with your own selection of bonuses? No. Research and buy them for your units? Yes.

>3. Although there are human types of units you can create from your population can you also create more exotic units rather than just recruit or train from diplomacy/adventuring?

There's four options: One, you can find special creature lairs - spiders, ogres, etc. With the appropriate research, towns with these can produce units for you of that type, in addition to your regular troops. Two, you can find special allies on adventures. Three, you can get 'summon creature' tablets, scrolls etc. Four, you can get summon spells and cast those (But only 1 of each creature can be active at a time.). This was as of Beta 3-4.

It is also worth noting that you design and equip troop 'blueprints' for your cities to build, including their unit cards, equipment, etc.

>4. AOW:SM had the main map, an underground map and a shadoworld map that layered onto the main map through gateways and stairways. Is there any scope for extra maps to be tacked on to the main map? Could dungeons cover this do you think?

I agree that would be tempting, but while dungeons may have something like that - the description sounds like it's intended, but it wasn't in at Beta 3-4 so can't really say.

>5.
Dunno.

Hexes are more difficult to code but they can still be represented using square tiles by placing them in a brick pattern rather than a grid pattern. I'd still prefer hexagons though visually.

But if the tiles were placed in a brick pattern then any tiles already made could be used without changes. And Elemental has already required complicated code of subdividing the main tiles into 4 again for the cities. A brick pattern could be piggy-backed of this subdivision code.

Hexes and squares isn't really a big coding problem. Once you figure out how to organize them, the rest is easy enough.

However, hexes are really bad for a few things, first and foremost, multi-hex structures look really bad as buildings usually are square(ish) and not honeycomb-lookalikes. Secondly, while hexes are a better way to handle diagonal movement, it is not so good for longitude movement.

Also, my impression is that most gamers that aren't boardgame grognards find squares easier to relate to. In a local DnD campaign, one of the GM's wanted to use hex-based battlemaps instead of squares, and while that didn't cause a problem, as such, most of us were more comfortable with squares. (It was rather problematic with straight east - west, fairly narrow tunnels.). 

As such, preferring hexes is entirely okay, but it's not a flaw to not have them. In fact, since Elemental does use decimals in movement points, it can happily deal with the 1.44 diagonal movement cost, making squares and hexagons equivalent for movement purposes, and that is the only real flaw with hexes. Not sure if it does, but it could.

I have been looking forward to EWOM for a long time, I have sort of burned out on AoW after many years, but I am disappointed to find so many whining fanbois here who act like little girls who have wet their panties when someone offers a differing viewpoint.  Somehow games have replaced religion for blind adulation and worship for some people.

I guess it is impossible for some children to actually enjoy two games and not take sides like it was some sort of war of computer games.  Rather sad.

Of course, I saw the same thing at AoW Heaven many times too, so it is just part of dealing with little, inbred game forums.   One learns to deal with this sort of deviant behaviour after a while.

oh man you played those. I always wanted to try Heroscape and Runebound but no board game friends.

Hope EWOM can bring those games to life here.

Back to subject. Been playing AOW SM for 3 days. And wow it rocks. I thought nothing came close to MOM. But AOW is an amazing game. Not sure why some people dont like it.

Hmm, does anyone know if it will be possible to implement hexes with the modding tool?

Probably not, that sounds like a change to the fundamental game engine.

Hexes, squares, who cares?  If the game is designed around a map scheme then it will work.  The whole issue sounds like drama queen fodder  to me.  I'd suggest people play the finished game before they start crying about how it works.

I'm just waiting for my registration code to arrive in the next day or so, I pre-ordered EWOM this morning.

I agree. EWOM will not be as influential as MOM.

After all EWOM doesn't really bring many new concepts compared to MOM.

There are several things in MOM I will miss in EWOM

1. Craft enchanted artifacts

2. Flying units

3. Tons of spells that are diverse in effects (This is a killer, based on what i read in the beta, the spells are all similar, I doubt they had the time to change it plus the focus of AI means the more fun spells in MOM cannot be added as the AI can't use them properly)

In short, MOM has a greater focus on the "magic" part of things, while EWOM appears to have more civilization components particularly researching technologies and more city management aspects.. Frankly, I'm more interested in the former , while I don't really want so much in the later.. I'm a wizard, not a scientist!

But I still ordered EWOM. Why? Because how many fantasy TBS games do you get every year? 1 every 5 years??

With all the effort and fanflare by Stardock, and despite that If EWOM flops or isn't a big success , I can betcha no one will ever dare to make a fantasy TBS again for years..whether SP focused or MP focused..

The main question, if EWOM is an AoW:SM killer, is for me about how much the tactical combat has been improved from beta. Or will be improved later. And while I agree with PawelS about the lack of interesting races, this is something that can be modded.

My guess is that EWOM wont be killer of anything at release. But it could very welll be the fantasy TBS a year from now.

Whatever you do, don't criticize the graphics.

(Nice to see you Alex. )

Yes!!! Someone else who's an AoW: Shadow Magic obsessive fan
Best fantasy 4x ever made, incredible. I dont think it will ever be topped until those devs make a next official game in the series though.
I do admit that i got interested in Elemental because of the similarities, although they are still very different games, Elemental seems way smaller (no offense, but frankly its just elf humans vs goth humans).
Im sure ill enjoy it alot, and the modding will be great. But as for killing AoW: Shadow Magic, no chance.

Been playing Elemental now for a few hours. There are still some graphics issues and looks like a memory leak in there as well but these will be ironed out quickly I'm sure.

Got to say, this is an awesome game and for me this is an AoW:SM killer by the looks. The game is way more balanced than the betas and is really immersive. It is certainly different to AoW in many ways. I honestly don't know if I'll be going back to AoW now - which is saying something for me because AoW was always the first game I installed on any new computer.

The hex issue and races don't stand out as much as they did in the betas.

Stardock have done a great job with this game.

Well I will disagree. I've played MOM and while it was a decent game AOW and AOW:SM blew it away. But since we have played these games, we will not convince each other that we are right.

As far as Tactical Battles in MP goes they should make it an option, not take it out all togather. I won't even play the game if tactical battles are not in. Also it should be up to the individual play if they wand to manage thier Empire while a TCBattle is going on or watch it. And they should be able to toggle between the two

I think that is impossible to do.

I think your the first person that I have talked to that actully liked MOO3.  I Loved MOO1 and MOO2 and really had high hpes for MOO3 but is was so bad that I went back to playing MOO2 until GalCiv 2 came out which for me replaced MOO2 as my favorite Space TBS game. 

Did they improve all the issues with MOO3 since a year after it came out? If so then I wouldn't mind giving it another try.

Agree until I can play an undead king, AOW is still my favorite, but at the same time, I am only at 85% download right now so who knows by this afternoon I might disagree

The only 4X games I've been able to continuously come back to are Civ4, SMAC, and AoW:SM. I don't think that'll be changing any time soon. I thnk it'll take a lot of modding for Elemental to rise above AoW:SM. Speaking of which, someone should get swolte in here to start modding (among others like JediKnight, Darth, dwigg, Crawler and SaberCherry).

Since I play AOW:SM mostly SP I'd say that your wrong about the patch hurting the SP game. If anything it enhanced it. And with the enhancments made the multiplayer game better as well.

Tell me what SP element did the Community patch 'hurt?'

If you're playing singleplayer, you should be playing with one of the many new race or race addition mods anyways, which pretty much means any community patch changes are minor in comparison.

Well as I mentioned in the quoted portion above, MoO3 with Bhurics patches, and one of the developed mods (there are 2 or 3 right now) is a very different game from what QS pushed out the door in a jumbled mess.

I do not disagree that MoO3 even with the 1.25 patch was mostly unplayable.  However, Bhuric fixed alot of the major AI problems (such as troop transports never landing because the AI would disband them the turn before they landed...), and the mods have added/changed various gameplay elements to make it more difficult/interesting.  Of course it is still best played when you can give up the desire to micro, and accept a more macro approach.  The Dev Plans actually do work as advertised, only that you need to read one of the explanation threads on them to fully understand how to set them up.  The AI ship design is also improved (via a mod, but you can actually configure the designs now as you like for automation purposes, though it requires you to do text editing yourself), the research tree has had some new techs added to help the AI with the inevitable food/mineral overruns as well as cleaning up the weapons so that there are more and better tradeoffs in what you chose.

It's still a bit rough for most people I think, and if you can't give up the micro aspect then it's still probably not for you, but if you want to focus on the big picture (mostly ship design and fleet deployment, tech spending, diplomacy, espionage, ...) and not worry about how many industry DEAs your gas planets build then it's quite fun.  For me I like it MUCH better than galciv2, but mostly because I cannot stand the open space movement in GC2 since the AI is absolutely horrid at it, thus, there is little challenge to the game for me.  SotS is probably better than MoO3, but even there the focus of the game is different enough that sometimes I find myself wishing certain design elements from MoO3 had been adopted.

Anyway, if you still have your CD and are bored sometime (not likely with EWOM fresh out) it's worth checking it out.  Or just pop over to the Atari forums and read up on the latest mods, ask some questions, and if anyone is still around over there they will help you out.