Master of Magic - Implode's Multiplayer Edition

Anyone else looking into the upcoming elemental: war of magic? I just pre-ordered to get into the beta (starts in a week or so) and I'm crossing my fingers that it doesn't suffer from the problems that other similar games by the developer did (stardock, they made sins of a solar empire and galactic civilizations). Namely, having the entire game based around one resource (money) took much of the depth out of the game and made all the races play the same (as opposed to master of orion, where the races had major differences because money, food, industry, and technology were different resources with only a few means of interchanging them).

The designers journals talk about MoM quite a bit, and while it's not a MoM clone, it's definitely very close. If they can manage not to simplify the technology, combat, and resource systems to the point of boredom like Galciv did, but build on the strengths of Galciv (the diplomacy) it could turn out to be a new classic.

I can dream, anyway.

yup, i've preordered too, i hope that "everything moddable" philosophy won't shadow the rest of the game development.

galciv bore the hell out of me, but i liked sins very much. in fact, it's one of few real-time strategy games that I can enjoy.

So, any thoughts on Elemental? All I have is a detailed report from my brother, who says it pretty much sucks on its own terms, and when you compare it to a game like MoM, as so many have done, one begins wondering why it was compared to MoM.

I had such high hopes for it...but like everything stardock has done, it's a poor knockoff of what it was attempting to copy, and the development team seems to have spent all their time insuring they could cram as many bugs and poor performance in as possible. It was actually MORE functional in the beta - they took out multiplayer for release. Yes, you heard that right. The little multiplayer button in the main menu? It just pops up a message saying "we're sorry, we're trying to fix single player first before we turn multiplayer back on." Not to mention their design decisions were....questionable in many ways. Also, throughout beta, the devs kept posting on the forums asking the community how they should make their game. Community input is nice and all, but......you'd think they'd have some ideas how to do their job right in the first place. I suppose that is a lot to ask. SO - yes, your brother is right. Perhaps in time the community will pick it up and make a better game out of it, there's certainly a push to use it's engine to remake MoM by the forumgoers.

Implode remains the world's only hope for a good multiplayer MoM game. Maybe we'll get lucky and his asian MMO's servers will burn down?

LOL...that fire could be a blessing. Thanks for the rundown Lupine.

Man, dark times for MoM right now. Not even the dragonsword website that had so much mod community activity is up.

Nonono, we are back.
And twice as active:


Patch, Catnip mod and a new Real-time tweaker - a magic tool by ILSe.
http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=56

A tournament is running currently...

Just saw this in the store today actually http://www.elementalgame.com/.

So there's been a bunch of patches, has anyone tried it? Given its by Stardock who as far as I know, own the rights to MoM, is it at all MoM-like? Or should I just stay clear of it... :)