HoMM; Age of Wonders have incredible MP.  How many years old are they?  EwoM could have great MP too.  Nothing needs to be different in the game except making it MP or hotseat.  Period.  We want to play Co-op here, that's all, just like most the other games we have.

AoW did it a decade ago, and Stardock can't?  Really? In my opinion, Elemental and especially it's sequal could (and still might) blow Age of Wonders MP out of the water; Stardock just does not want to (or can't) do the MP part.  So they say "ahhh, it would not be fun, and nobody really wants MP anyway".  Of course, they said the same thing about the tactical battles.  But just like MP, of courst tactical battles were not fun, because they were not implemented or created for fun/strategy in the first place.  Same with MP.

All the MP crowd I know and play with just gave up on Ewom and so is not around to give any imput.  It's like saying "Going to Charlie Sheen's AA meetings would not be fun".  How could they?  There really is none?

I and all my friends would be playing Ewom MP right now, if we could.  We can't.  Not because it would not be fun or there is nobody that wants it, just because it's not really there to begin with. . .

Depends if it is good.

I have been playing Civ 4, Civ 5, Shadow magic, Fall From heaven, and HoMM online about 5 hours a week for the past 6 years.  Alternating between the titles of course.  If Elemental could be at least the equal of any of those I don't see why it shouldn't last as long as any of those titles for me.

I agree.  Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic (2003) has Quests (of all sorts), Events and Tactical Combat in Co-op Multiplay (which can sometimes go on a lot longer than any Elemental stuff has, and maybe it would take longer even than FE's boosted combat).  It is not perfectly balanced, but it is fun and people are still playing MP of a game that is about eight years old.

So Stardock, what is so hard about making a co-op mode that is exactly the same as single player mode, like in AoW?  I don't mind what you've said in the past, can you step up to the plate and take the challenge now?    Make a single player style co-op mode, with all your capabilities (including Kael).  Or aren't you prepared to make one simply because of ideology, even though many, many people have said that single player style co-op would be a blast, and that it could easily help you sell more copies (and MP didn't get a chance in the original Elemental)?   Is it really that important to you to stick to your ideology, or to take no risks in something you have not done before (but has potential to be huge, even if you don't worry about "balance" in co-op, because "a strong focus on balance" is not particulary needed for co-op games which you can customize how you like, and all the humans are on the same side) or is fun your primary concern?   I would love to see a single player style co-op feature in FE, and many others would too.   And I don't think it would use many resources.

So, what do you say?

Best regards,
Steven.

No - might play hotseat once or twice but otherwise no.

Yep occasionally. Also in favor of feature equality to singleplayer (with maybe options to exclude certain aspects for the compatitive crowd if they can't do without.) and coop-functionality as that is most likely way I would play multiplayer at all.

34Y 27n as of now. + or - 2 for counting errors. A bunch of people on the fence as well, would like to try.

People who wont touch multiplayer are counted as no

"If Elemental had a true stable Multiplayer with all the single player bells and whistles, would you want that, simple Yes or No"

That is the question I asked.

no

YES, I would never have bought the game without it. Of course I realize most people don't have friends/partners that are willing to play a game that will take hours or likely days to complete; I do. AoW currently fills that square for us nicely, but was looking for better after a decade of play.

I completely agree with you. Honestly this thead has a lot of posts now, but of the roughly 50 votes, how much of the WoM customers is that? The only thing this thread proves is that there are in fact players in the community who want this type of functionality. It does not however prove that the implementation of such functionality is desired by the vast majority of users, nor does it prove that the implementation of such functionality would have a noticable effect on sales of future Elemental titles. It would be much better if some of the pro-MP folks would actually define some of these terms. For instance, many say they want a co-op experience similar to SP, but what does that mean? Quests are not co-op, nor is Tactical combat. In a game like AoW where multiple armies can be brought into a single battle, there is a measure of sense about the idea of a co-op experience. However, in WoM, tactical combat is one army v. one army so I am unsure how one would make this more "co-op".

yes

I expect most of them are existing customers who bought the game back when MP was promised but without the "it'll be incredibly stripped down and not worth playing" caveat. Anybody buying for MP at this point is someone who knows nothing about the game and just sees it on the feature list, because in MP circles Stardock has an "avoid" reputation after this and Demigod before it (shame in the case of Demigod, that was a fun game once it worked).

As for your other question... how is that a problem? Later versions of Civ 4 had quests in them (stuff like find the holy mountain and build a city at it), and those were all done per player rather then per team. "Coop" just means that I can play allied with another human against AI players, not that we need to re-engineer the quest system to let two players get shared quest completion credit. That was how AoW did it too. In my coop games of AoW, 90+% of tactical combat was one player vs one AI. Team battles did happen, but not very often.

There's no need to deliberately over-complicate it when previous games already have a proven working model that fits EWoM just fine.

It shouldn't be, if they built it correctly in the first place. Boogie just said the other day that they built systems knowing they'd have to support MP. Some of this stuff is clearly already there, and is turned off because Brad wants this different competitive MP game.

You do realize these polls aren't accurate at all, right? Stop being silly.