Any news on the release date for FE?

Frogboy mentioned when they sold Impulse that they now have the money to do as much as they want with Fallen Enchantress, so it may have been extended for that reason. Based on my perception of how done it is (which is rooted mostly in what Derek's revealed in dev logs and the stated goals of the project) I think we can probably expect it within six months, but a more specific estimate would just be guesswork.

Thanks, dude, I really hope they take their time and get things right and have a masterpiece... Which IMO means making a glorious multiplayer game.

Stardock has never been much of a multiplayer developer, and it doesn't seem to be a particular focus here. It will probably (hopefully) be less flawed than WoM's multiplayer was at launch, but I don't think you can expect much more. Stardock and most of Stardock's fans are in it for the single player strategy. Multiplayer is sort of an afterthought, thrown in because it can be rather than because it's a major goal. The campaigns have historically been treated similarly, but it's been said that more work is going into the FE campaign, so we'll see how that one turns out.

Honestly though, in strategy multiplayer and single player are supposed to be pretty similar, so I wouldn't expect huge problems so much as just a small community and less bugfixing than other areas of the game. If the single player experience is glorious, the multiplayer should be too.

Maybe, if they actually implement it. Or they could stick with Brad's previously stated plan to continue taking MP in a "different direction" from SP, which based on WoM roughly translates into "half the game doesn't exist."

Actually my feeling is that if the single player is glorious the multiplayer should probably be fine too, but the other way around I am not sure. You can get away with multiplayer a lot better than with single player, in my experience, since a good AI is one of the toughest things to implement and as it is now in ELEMENTAL the AI is just unable to do all the stuff players can do.

Personally I believe that spending more time perfecting the multiplayer would improve a lot the lifespan of the game, that would mean fixing bugs, adding a play by email option and balace spells. Also making certain things optional, so that player would be able to customize their games would help.

Perfecting the single player on the other hand would mean to teach the AI how to use spells and skills as well as players do, which is a real tough thing to do. As stated in other posts even Age of Wonders Shadow Magic (IMO the best game of this genre yet), shows lots of flaws in what the AI can or cannot do (and believe me the developers of that game worked hard and well on the AI, which is quoite challenging in fact). The fact is that after a while even the best AI can be anticipated! Should the AI units come out of a city when the enemy armies enter their empire or should they not? Should they all regroup in the main city to sustain a huge attack or spread around and try to defend all cities with equal defending forces?... All these strategic choices are so hard to make  even in real time and even for player who know their opponent, how can we expect the AI to have the right formula each time? In AOW units regroup in the main city, but make quick attacks to approaching enemies if they feel those enemies are weak enough... Is that always the best tactics? Sometimes approaching a city with a weak force is a strategy to catch the enemy off guard... and so on...

In Elemental at the moment we are far from that in terms of AI (haven't tested 1.3) - Even in tactical battles teh AI seems to keep attacking the closest enemy even if it has a huge amount of defene and will almost certainly destroy them...

How so? Large swaths of the SP game simply don't exist in MP. Lets say FE boasts major improvements to tactical combat due to the unit skills and such. Since tactical combat itself doesn't exist in MP (it's auto-resolve only), there's no change at all in the MP game despite that improvement in SP.

Realistically the built in audience for these games is primarly SP. If the SP game is fun, you might be able to lure some of those people online for MP games. But if people try it in SP and find that it's still not fun? They're going to play something else, not jump into MP.

AI is also something that MP would benefit from because coop is a popular form of MP game... except that WoM also doesn't support coop or AI players in MP.

The path here is pretty clear. If they want to improve MP, what they have to do is bring it to feature parity with SP. At that point it simply inherits all the improvements being made in FE for SP, which will boost MP as a bonus and gives SP players a reason to try it (a better challenge because humans > AI). What they have right now for MP support is "WoM-Lite" and that's just not worth caring about. Trying to change it to balance spells or what have you won't help it because the game itself is a weak version of WoM. There's no reason for SP players to want to try a weaker version of the game, and there's no reason for MP players of other games to want to come here when they have better options elsewhere.

I've said it before and I'll repeat myself - FE should either bring MP up to feature party with SP (so we're playing the same game), or they should just disable it entirely and save QA & server costs. The status quo simply isn't good enough to be worth keeping (and seems to primarily exist to tick the box saying "yes this game has MP" in reviews).

I really hope that if FE does have Multi-player that they won't force us to use auto-resolve. It is fun to fight another player on the Tactical maps. I can do this in AOW:SM and it is fun.  Personally MP should have everything SP has with options to turn off stuff you don't want instead of taking features away to speed the MP game play up, (AKA. Dumb it down.)

No idea if FE multiplayer will force us to just auto resolve all combats. In Age of Wonders MP is autoresolve only when player meets player, which still makes for a fantastic strategic\tactical game, where you still get to deal with the (not so) dumb AI during battles, while you have to compete with real people on the empire management and also when dealing with the many strategic and magic options that the world map offers. In fact being AOW much deeper than EWOM (sorry but true), it is quite hard to tell if EWOM could ever be as good in multiplayer. Especially being Elemental a game all about teleportation instead than using all sort of movement bonuses and skills.

Once you deprive a strategic game of both movement and combat, in fact, there is little "strategy" left to enjoy.

I think SP AI is far superior to MP people. The fact is that at my level of strategic excellence, humans are as predictable as a good AI, if not more so. Humans have a habit of needing food and sleep. They have this concept called time and they seem to think its a precious commodity. AI's will play a game to the bitter end with honor and dignity while humans often crash to the desktop after the first battle doesn't go their way. Humans refuse to commit time to my turns. They are difficult to schedule around and take little things like treachery too seriously. They hold grudges and covet my resources. I can trust Capitar as an AI to keep a fair treaty, but a human would betray me at the first sign that I am betraying them. 

I don't particularly like humans for this kind of game. Can any of you honestly say that you'd spent even 4 hours a day playing with me?

I don't have that much time to play games nowdays, so I no longer care that much about multi player. Scheduling time to play games with my friends is too much work. I like the single player "competitions" that the Civilization games have over at CivFanatics, that's kind of a multiplayer mode that I can play whenever I want.

I used to be the exact opposite some years ago though.

Actully you do not need to auto resolve between players in AOW:SM if you don't want to.

Yes I can. Human opponents are much more challenging than AI currently and no they are not as predictable as the AI in most cases

most likely not in 2011