No.

Well lucky for us there is a Game of Thrones game but it will be an RTS ... It might be slow paced however.  There are some pics and a video on gamespot. 

Actually, I seem to remember reading that brad was something of an Ice & Fire fan, as am I (that's the book series), funnily enough. It's sad that dynasties have gone, but without nerfing heroes, it would have been impossible to balance dynasties. You can't just hand out the most powerful units in the game like that.

This was the original idea for essense. You would only be able to gain more casters my sacrificing your caster’s own casting power. So it was a choice between the logistical advantages of multiple casters and the sheer casting power of a single, sauron like uber sovereign. This was an idea with great popularity, that disappeared with the (otherwise great) introduction of global mana.

I agree that being able to hand out casting power willy-nilly is too much. While it is currently being controlled with mana maintenance, I’d argue that this is the wrong way to do it, because it allows you to just imbue for a couple of turns and then dismiss when you no longer need that caster. More than anything, mana maint is used for too much at the moment, and even if it was effective for limiting imbuing, it has the consequence of just preventing you using magic, which is not particularly fun.

And giving casting powers to children automatically for free has its own problems. Assuming the game is set up correctly and casters are amongst the best units in the game, it’s a very random way to hand out such units. Child births are randomly determined, and marriage is a pretty secondary thing many players just forget about. More than this, it gives much more than diplomatic value to marriages and the father of the groom stands to gain a lot more than the father of the bride, making sons more desirable.

So i’d argue the best solution would be to require imbuing for all casters, but just balance it with a better technique such as essence. The only question is how gameplay mechanics should be distributed over the different attributes. Personally I’d do it something like

ESS = Spell Power (damage equations etc) and spell resistance

INT = minimum casting requirements for spells, initiative bonuses, income bonus for cities

It's half-baked AND not core to the gameplay. That combination is fatal. Core stuff that simply can't be done without will benefit from its removal because devs won't be wasting time playing around with dynasties when they could instead be working on stuff that matters more.

I love it when Firefox crashes and eats my posts...

My point is valid because I'm coming at it from what the game is now, not what it should have been. Today, the dynasty system is a secondary thing. You could turn it off and the gameplay wouldn't really change significantly (and except for not being able to farm champions it wouldn't change at all).

What it should have been doesn't matter anymore. It is what it is today.

No argument there. You remember Brad's infamous comment that "game development is 90% engine/tools and 10% game"? Maybe it's true for a literal definition of 'game', but it's insanely wrong if your goal is to make a high quality strategy game. It seems now that FE is getting a better balance of effort.

Looking at it now, to make FE they have a certain number of people and amount of time to work with. They have to take that and wind up with as good a game at the end of it as possible. Ignoring everything but where we are today and where we have to go, is devoting resources to dynasties going to get you a better game then devoting those same resources to improving the economics?

Maybe I just look at it differently then you do because I'm a software developer myself. The way I see it, there's core stuff and non-core stuff. Non-core stuff is what makes a good game great, but it doesn't work unless the core is there. It's like the furniture in a house. You need it, but you probably need walls more.

Multiplayer is to me what Dynasties and Essence are to you: something that should have been great but was instead half-baked and neglected. The way I see it at this point, MP in WoM was a horrible mess. It should be fixed. But would fixing it in FE help anything if they don't fix the core stuff first? Not really, because the best MP system on the planet being used to play WoM would still not be any fun because it's being used to play WoM. Similarly the best dynasty system any game has ever seen wouldn't make WoM fun because the rest of the game is so weak.

My hope is that FE gets the core right, then in the third game with a sold foundation in place they can go back to stuff like dynasties and MP and do them properly. I have no idea if it'll actually happen that way, but it's never going to happen if they try to do it in reverse order.

I actually got the game cause I thought dynasties, essence and the multiplayer were part of what was going to set this game apart from other 4x games.  Seems like the game which already tastes like a vanilla wafer is going to taste like cardboard after losing even more features from what is already a fairly featureless game.  At least the dynasties gave an illusion of depth/replayability......

And they have even been reducing the amount of support for modding along the way too.  Maybe they should change their website advertising for Elemental:WoM that was mentioned in that other thread.  Many or most of the advertising points have been found to be untrue (or in the case of modding, are getting more untrue).  Too many "wouldn't it be cool if..." just results in a game that turns out not to be that cool at all.  A lot is riding on Fallen Enchantress, for Elemental and for the future of the Stardock games divisions.  So far the signs are fairly good, but FE really needs to hit the spot for the future of Stardock games.

Best regards,
Steven.

The fluid design is what caused a lot of the problems. I don't see how more fluid design is going to fix it. The game is not a testing ground, it should try to be a finished product (even with continuous patches, every patch should be a finished game). Good design can't be stumbled upon.

Edit: Just to be clear, there's a difference between incremental patching and what's happening now with E:wom. Incremental patching = game continously gets better with all areas considered against each other. Right now = work on some, ignore most other.

If it makes you feel better, I hate pragmatists too. It's not a lot of fun to have someone tell you that what you want can't be done with the budget available, and it's really not fun to be the guy doing it. Course, that's not as bad as promising stuff you can't deliver, which is a lesson I had to learn very quickly in my day job (realistic expectations are the single most important thing for user satisfaction).

With dynasties it's probably no-loss either way. Dynasties don't hurt much by being there in their present state. Essence if it's ignored as a mechanic kind of does. MP is actively harmful in that not only does it suck up servers that aren't being used (ie: $$$) but someone who sees MP on the box then actually tries it will go away a lot unhappier then someone who sees "single player only". This is a case where no MP is preferable to bad MP because of the reputation damage and unhappy customers bad MP causes (and the people who weren't happy that MP existed at all).

If you're asking me, I'd rather see it removed. As-is it isn't worth playing, and it's just something that the QA team has to worry about. So if they're not going to invest effort in bringing it to feature parity with SP, they should remove it entirely and set people's expectations correctly that this isn't a MP friendly game (though at this point people who play a lot of MP games already know that, "Stardock" is a four-letter word amongst that group).

Yeah. If I could go back in time, I'd bring a copy of the results of WoM with me to the start of the project and tell them "start by copying MoM/AoW:SM or this will happen." You could do a lot better by taking stuff from those games (where it worked) and simply iterating on it. Blizzard built a pretty successful business doing exactly that.

And they still keep on cutting features which work in AoW...
*Cough! Siege warfare! Cough!*