I'd make the point that a spiritual successor to a 1992 game cannot be better graphics alone.  MOM got combat, both strategic and tactical, almost perfectly right.  It was what made the game great, but it was about building your killer units as early as you could, and then taking SODs out to crush your opposition.  There was no economy of note, other than gold and mana.  There was no commerce, there was no improving resources.  Recall, there were resources in that game, light diamonds, gold, iron, mithril, and adamantium.  That game had a lot of resources, but you didn't do anything to them.  You settled your city by them, you got the benefit of them, and they were applied locally to that city with the construction of the proper building (nightshade needed a temple, mithril needed a smithy, etc).  In a lot of ways, the MOM economy is what we have now, in EWOM, almost exactly.

But this was a 1992 economy model.  A 2010 game should have more depth to it, IMO.  MOM was very unbalanced in its strategic combat; there were killer combinations that made a win, even on impossible, almost assured.  Tactical combat also was weak, with AI simply marching to whatever it considered to be the strongest threat, and grinding itself down on it.  If Stardock allowed EWOM to have that tactical AI and that strategic AI in a 2010 game, very few of us would play it.  AIs have come a long way, and strategy has become more deep than "build the biggest stack and go crush everyone" of the 1992 genre.  There is stealth, diplomacy, technological advance (which MOM didn't have, recall.  No tech tree in that game, only a magic tree), terrain control and effects, and a host of other gameplay improvements.

Opposition to a deeper economic engine seems to stem from not wanting things to be too "complex".   Let me try this argument; we wouldn't want EWOM to exist without the "complexities" of these added gameplay elements that have come into being since 1992.  Why would we want EWOM to exist without more complexity in the economics as well?  I don't see how economic depth gets in the way of fun; I see it as another balancing act that needs to be paid attention to, like where my scouts are, what units I'm building, and what allies I'm trying to make.  I don't see anyone arguing for a simpler diplomacy system, or a simpler exploration system (yeah, just abstract exploration.  Start with an FOW, and just expand it 2 squares a turn out from my cities.  Who has time to build all those scouts and send them out, that's distracting from my gameplay!)

"Old Man" Winni ("bah, in MY day, we only had zeroes to program with, and we LIKED it!  You kids and your fancy "ones".  Who needs 'em?!")

A complex economy is needed not for immersion, that's just a bonus for role players.  It's needed for depth.

I don't give a flying **** about playing an economic sim.  I'm here for a war, pure and simple.  A production economy is necessary for my war.  No actual production means no products.  No building up supplies, no capturing supplies, no nothing.  If you don't have one, all you have is battles, not war.

If you want to get away from this idiocy of a regiment of horse archers taking thousands of resources and dozens of turns to build, you have to get a real economy.  It's killing the game having a few overly simplistic mechanics that can't scale inside a game that's trying for so much of it everywhere else.

Yup.

There are lots of "build a huge army as quickly as possible and go destroy everything on the map" type games already in existence.

It would be nice to have a game with real and lasting strategic and tactical depth within and among all facets of the game.

I would love to play a game where each individual game world could persist for days or even weeks, where I can micromanage whatever aspects of my realm, heroes, citizens, economy, buildings, quests, etc that I desired.

Stardock, if you aren't willing to do that with this game, please, at the very least, create the tools so that I might make that sort of game possible, even if just for my own gratification.

And here is the problem with streamlining resources, what difference does destroying an iron mine make when there are plenty of other different metal ore mines out there.  They are all tagged as the same resource so your attempts at denial really won't amount to a hill of beans unlike Civ4 & 5 where losing an iron resource can be a substantial strategic concern depending on its scarcity.

When resources become streamlined they can ruin the strategic elements too.  Maybe the real question is how much strategic depth should Elemental have?  Then decide on resource implementation afterward based on that.

The whole "no drops" thing really bothers me in Elemental. They gave Champions and Sovereigns an inventory, but the only way to get items is to buy them from the store after researching (along with a miniscule selection of quest rewards). This is boring and goes against the RPG portion of the game. 

Taking a page out of Titan Quest's book of tricks would work wonders here: humanoid monsters spawn with equipment, and on a rare chance they can spawn with magic/unique equipment. Kill the monster, it drops whatever it was wearing and you can loot it. In Elemental, the system is already half-implemented - every unit has "equipment". All that's needed is to allow looting of the equipment after battle, and the ability to spawn with randomized equipment. That Ogre Shaman might spawn with a normal Wooden Staff 95% of the time, but 5% of the time it might have a magic one. Or that Bandit Leader might have a boring Small Dagger most of the time, but a Poison Tipped Dagger once in a while.

While most focus seems to be on global resources, equipment is a resource as well, especially if you could design units with the looted equipment. Maybe you don't get Iron to make metal armor, but you got some from fighting the enemy empire's soldiers, so you can build some of yours that use it!

no not a clone.. but for those of you who have no idea what a marketing class looked like, or worse.... have never played a computer game and read forums (thus seeing the way "spiritual successor" is used, ad nauseum) let me define it for you.

Throw away your dictionary.com definitions. In every single usage of "spiritual successor" that I have ever seen in the known universe, it means a game that is basically taking what worked in game one, and trying to build upon that or make it more modern while still keeping the same flavor of the first game. Now, astute readers will probably find the one example in my above definition that is slightly different.

Sometimes, (AND YES THIS IS ONE OF THOSE TIMES, FEEL FREE TO READ OLD STARDOCK/BRAD POSTS AND INTERVIEWS,) when a company says spiritual successor they are talking about COPYRIGHT. For instance, when Hellgate London came out it was billed as "the spiritual successor" to such n such game, which the developers made years before (diablo maybe, I forget which game). Sometimes, as in ELEMENTAL, the devs tried to get the IP of a game (such as MoM) and did not for various reasons. What they then do, to avoid legal problems is NOT call it MoM II (which they wanted to do) but calle it "Such-n-such game, the Spiritual successor to MoM". This implies that they want(ed) to make a MoM sequel, but couldn't for legal reasons.

So when you see Spiritual Successor as hundreds of thousands of us did, describing Elemental, it better be DARN SIMILAR to the game they are trying to be a successor to. EVEN MORE SO, IF THEY ARE QUOTED TALKING ABOUT TRYING TO GET THE OLD GAME'S IP AT ONE TIME OR ANOTHER!

And not to be overly agressive, but who says we have "so much more than MoM". Did you play MoM? That game was so basic but had tons and tons. I would NOT say that Elemental at this time has "much more than MoM". I would say updated, or more advanced... or better graphics, but not "has much more". That could change, but it hasn't yet.

I like this idea too, but It would probably require a lot of balancing as it could cause some series wackiness for an empire's economy. Since these weapons could be sold, players would gain an incentive to become a kind of monster bounty hunter instead of putting any effort into expanding their real economic endeavors.

In general, I agree that the difference in cost of weaponry between a champion and a regular unit probably needs to end as it doesn't make a lot of sense, but I whole heartedly disagree with the rest of your post. On this first point, I feel that all non magical equipment should simply be free for the sov and his champions. If you are the mighty king of a faction, it would stand to reason that you would have full access to the armory of your military at all times. However, the cost for a regular unit, both in terms of training time and resource cost, are abstraction of the experience of a soldier in training. The more complex the weapon, the long and more costly the training. This is fully in line with real and fantasy settings, where using a weapon takes time and experience to become combat effective.

Now, as for your larger point about looting, I don't remember that part in the Lord of the Rings, where the battle of helms deep finished and everyone went out and picked up all the weapons and then used to them to make a well equipped army. However, on a more serious note, I don't see how looting a weapon will somehow make the training times of units decrease. So if I gave someone a bow, that makes them a combat ready bowman? Or Does giving a man a longsword and some used armor make him a gallant knight? Obviously, the answer is no, as in both of these cases a trained soldier would instantly kill both of these feeble combatants with their superior training. A key, decisive battle turns a war effort due to the excessive losses by an opponent, not simply because you can now loot the corpses of the dead. Under the model, a player could sacrifice the vast majority of his army secure in the knowledge victory will secure him a significant bonus to replenishing his forces while putting a huge burden on his opponent. This is not how wars are fought, and it would simply detract from the real dangers of overextending a war effort.

I think this entire debate comes down to a simple question. Do people really want to worry about actually making weapons/armor? I mean I have played Settlers and can easily say that is not exactly fun times for me to have to build 18 buildings and manage a whole host of workers so that I can make 1 suit of armor.

This said, I think that it might be workable to allow a champion a small chance to loot a non-standard items from enemy champions. Say there is a champion/sov who has a +2 longsword when you defeat him. In this specific instance, I think adding a 5% chance to loot the item makes perfect sense as it would be a significant moment in the experience of the character.

In general, I think this particular idea about weapons as a resource would push the game in a bad direction, as it would add a significant advantage to players for victory in war, while ignoring the development of their empire's infrastructure.

Key word here being "SETTING".  Personally I would rather hit the next turn button than play wack-a-mole.  The more slider options during game setup the better.

I like the idea of a more complex and logical economy.  Separating equipment costs from training costs seems a good idea as well.  Perhaps with population working as a resource, a given city (especially a large one) could work on producing more than one "thing" at a given point in time.  I also like the idea of differentiating various types of resources (so lumber and clay would serve different purposes, etc)

Re Master of Magic.

If we had done a Master of Magic 2 it would have been MOM with updated graphics and MP. That was the design document I had written and submitted at the time to Atari.

If you call your game <Famous Game> II it better be true to the first game.

Elemental, however, was never intended to be MOM 2.  Then again, Elemental was not intended to be Elemental v1.0.  That isn't to say v1.0 wasn't considered complete (I get a bit annoyed when people equate "complete" with "i like it").  I don't like GalCiv II's economic system to this day but it's still a complete game.

The difference between Elemental and other games (including MOM) is that we're the studio and the publisher and we're going to keep working on the game until WE are satisfied that it has reached the vision we have for it.  You won't find much bigger fans of MOM than I but I also remember that MOM shipped in a state that was so broken that you couldn't actually lose the game (when it wasn't crashing).  

Games of sufficient complexity and originality can be challenging to bring to their full potential. Unfortunately, Microprose wasn't able to let Simtex keep going forward with MOM as I believe that MOM could have been a full blown franchise (i.e. multiple games in different genres) that would dominate to this day. I'd have bought an RTS in the MOM world and an RPG in the MOM world but that's a different discussion.

New people to our community also should try to understand WHY our communities are different. Not better. Just different. And a big part of that is that we make these games for you guys. We LIKE talking about these things with you. We like talking about different game concepts and seeing what we can do over time.

Too many people forget what game development used to be like.  They think it's all "crank out the game, put out a patch and move on". It doesn't have to be that way.  Elemental is a long-term thing for us.  That's why these discussions matter. Who knows when we may revisit something in the future in a mod or an expansion or something else.

I'm a little late to this party, and I've had the game for less than two weeks.

Regardless, I could go either way on this debate.  I would be content with a global resources, HoMM-style system with markets being used to exchange basic resources one for another (i.e., gildars for materials, materials for mounts, etc.).  In HoMM3 (I think), the exchange rates were based on the number of markets you had built.  In HoMM4 (which while not critically popular, was my favorite in the series), the exchange rates were static for all city-based markets, but you could get more advantageous exchange rates by traveling to an independent market in "the wilds."  However, if Elemental were to use an HoMM-style system, I would expect it to be more sophisticated, with exchange rates having a neutral level and then being influenced by the availability of the various resources controlled/produced by your kingdom.

For example, if I wanted to exchange materials for mounts, there is a neutral exchange rate (and I'm pulling these numbers out arbitrarily) of 20 materials for 1 mount.  However, since I have a large number of materials stockpiled and produce so many materials per turn, that devalues the materials; so the exchange rate is 30:1.  If also, I have no mounts "stockpiled" and I do not produce any mounts within my kingdom, that raises the value of mounts; so the exchange rate is then 40:1, or something along those lines.  You could also have neutral markets in "the wild" where the exchange rates are influenced by the resources produced and controlled by all the kingdoms (or all the kingdoms that have settlements on the continent where the neutral market is located).  All these exchange rates would vary over time as (your) kingdom(s) produced/controlled more of the various resources.

I would also be content with a local resource, Colonization-style production economy, where raw materials were gathered on the local level and could be processed into finished goods either locally (if the appropriate production facility is local) or transported to a city with the production capacity to process them.  The number of finished goods produced was dependent on the level of production facility, the number of workers present, and their skill (whether or not they were a specialist).  If Elemental adopts this type of system, the number of caravans would need to have a higher limit, though, I think.  With my understanding of population as a resource for v1.1, it seems to fit this style of economy.  The economy of Colonization was complex but not complicated.

Just as an aside, and maybe I'm missing something, but I don't understand why the harbor is not an economic building.  Historically, water routes were the most efficient and lucrative method of trading.  Christopher Columbus traveled to the Americas, risking his reputation and even his life, in search of a sea trade route to the East, because sea trade was safer and faster than travelling over land and much larger loads could be transported.  Harbors should provide some kind of economic benefit in Elemental.  I think they should provide both food and gildars.  Sea trade could be automated like in the Total War games or not.  You wouldn't even need to create a new unit type.  You could just sail an empty transport ship to a friendly (or neutral) faction's port (or even another port under your control) and be given the option to establish a trade route, which would then be automated.