To me, offering MP as a DLC is one of the most rational uses of the DLC system that have been suggested.  Those players who will only use the SP version will pay $50 for the game and be perfectly happy.  Gamers who want to enjoy the experience with friends or other MP gamers would certainly gladly pay an additional $10 (or whatever) for this feature.  The modding tools ought to be delivered via DLC...certainly the modding community is a tiny portion of the playing populace.  I don't particularly like the idea of paying $3 for a new cool spell or weapon though.  This simply breaks the game, especially for folks who are playing MP (some will have DLC features, some won't.)  Features are great items for DLC, but content ought to be delivered in expansion packs IMO.

That being said, whether E:WoM should deliver it's MP as a DLC is up for debate, especially since they advertised it at release.  But as we all know, the entire game was suffering at release, so shifting tactics at this point wouldn't be entirely unreasonable.  Perhaps they can propose a similar plan as what they are using to deliver FE : those who purchased the game in 2010 get the opportunity to snag the MP DLC for free, other who purchased the game prior to the MP release get a discount on the MP DLC.

How is it criminal?  Do you not know that making a profit is the American Way?  Unless you can show me something in writing that says "You are absolutely guaranteed to receive a multiplayer version of this product with your purchase," all bets are off.

For this to work, it would require a very careful package.  Essentially DLC that does not appear to be sold as DLC by differentiationg the SP from MP as two seperate products.  It is a micro micro expansion rather than missing content so to speak.

So you think it is reasonable to sell MP for E:WoM as DLC when it would be illegal (though unlikely to be enforced) and cosider it a possible course that they might take, but you also hold that they will not abuse DLC because they wrote the Gamer's Bill of Rights (which there is no enforcement)?

It *is* reasonable insofar as they have had to back out on / alter so many promised features already, so what's one more?  Is it any more criminal to have you pay for a promised feature (which they never said they wouldn't do) than to not include the promised feature in the first place? I really don't know, I'm not a lawyer.

However, I personally have faith that Brad and The Team will do the right and just and honest thing.

This:

was meant to be tounge-in-cheek.  Doesn't come across so well on the interwebs, I guess.

There are no plans to cut multiplayer from either War of Magic or Fallen Enchantress.

The only question is whether Fallen Enchantress will include tactical battles in MP out of the box and whether additional features (like Co-Op) will be added at launch. Those are questions I can't answer because it's way too soon to know for sure.  It'll depend on time and budget.

Relatively few people play MP. That is a fact. Civilization IV had great MP. Hardly anyone played it. HOMM has had MP. Hardly anyone played it.  There have been plenty of developers talking about this sort of thing at GDC over the years.  You put in MP for marketing reasons. Not because people will play it. The ONLY reason MP gets put into TBS games is because of game reviews. And when I say that, that's not just my opinion but the opinion of pretty much every major game developer who makes TBS games (we talk about these things when we get together).  

So don't try to make the argument on economic grounds. It's not even a close call. The reason we'd enhance MP in future updates would be to satisfy our hard core forum fans and improve potential metacritic scores.  And that's a viable enough reason to do it. But we won't sacrifice the single player experience (i.e. eliminate some single player feature because MP would be hard to implement for it). 

There are any number of reasons why a feature would work in SP and not MP. Some are balance or design reasons, others are technical reasons, and still yet others are simply business reasons. To say that the only reason that a feature would be unimplementable in MP but not SP is that the feature is somehow being implemented wrong seem a bit on the rude side.

This may be true for existing fans of the game, but usually when you market a strategy game as having multiplayer, your average prospective player will assume that the game is balanced for competitive play in MP.  Fortunately most of those folks stick with Shooters or RTS style games and have little interest in TBS.

Another issue I just though of for E:FE MP would be cooperative play, where the players are on the same team going on adventures, etc (EDIT: I guess I thought of it because Brad mentioned it. )  It would be difficult with the current system to have multiple PC heroes on the same team.  Who gets to be the Sov and control the stack on the strategic layer?  In that regard how do any of the characters do anything on the Strategic layer?  How is order of tactical battle determined? (I know this is planned to be fixed in FE.)  There are a lot of bits to consider for MP which do not have to be considered for the SP experience.

I really think it could mean both in the case of Elemental, a game that is both an RPG and a Strategy game.  I think the concepts I proposed would at least need to be considered, if not for very long.

I think different types of multiplayer would help.  Multiplayer designed for friends to play together against AI (less worry about cheating, turn enforcement) should be much cheaper / easier to implement than competitive multiplayer pvp where you are playing with unknowns.  The friend coop is what I use this, HOMM, and Civ for.  I don't really care if I can ever play multiplayer against people, or with people I don't know.  Did GDC devs mention anthing about how much multiplayer was used coop vs comp?  

I think for you to not have tactical battles in MP, you'd need to really improve the quick battles.  I find the current system in EWOM to be broken- it was actually better pre 1.1 due to sovereign's casting tactical spells based on INT.  Then again, I felt the old system needed to be modified not replaced.

Co-op multiplayer could have an audience.

That said, I'd prefer the resources spent on tactical MP be spent to make quick combat work like it should, if it comes down to a choice between those two things.

The only multiplayer I want is COOP with a friend...WITH TACTICAL battles!
I just cannot play this game without tactical battles.

As I have said many times.. my friends dont own Elemental, but they would be very veyr interested if they could play it with me in COOP with tactical battles (kind of like how Total War Napoleon and Total War Shogun2 do the coop campaign).

There really is no reason for me to play the multiplayer that is in the game now though, as there is no tactical battles ):

As pointed out, it is less of a problem with friends. There are various things that can be done during it, with the simplest being to give those not in the battle a black screen and saying and battle is in progress. Or like in Age of Wonders you can let them observe the batter (a bit trickier, but not much). Finally you could let them do things like organizing build queues that do not change the game (best solution, hardest to do).

Or just have the possiblity of non-simultatious turns which makes the point moot but has been stated as being difficult.