Yea, it's a great review.  He really went deep on that one.

Any of the devs read it yet?

I am sure they read it. Probably as annoyed as I am that the modding was not mentioned. Modding is 90% of the draw for this game. But the article was still great if you ignore my bias. 

I never even considered modding for this game at first.

For me it was MoM v2.0.

The fact that FE can be so easily modded means I'll be that much closer to my MoM.

And I would still say you are missing 90% of the game. That said, the 10% you do see is quite nice.

It all depends on perspective. I see the engine as the best thing about the game. In fact, most of development time is spent on engines. Much less is spent on the actual game mechanics. So when I say 90%, I am talking about the engine's design, the fact that pretty much nothing is unmoddable and the limitless content that can be added by the user. You just don't get this in most games. 

I suppose it's the same as people who think babies are cute, while I see them as really crappy adults.

WoM engine had terrible compatibility problems. I think it is called Kumquat. They did most of the compatibility stuff while developing for FE. They did alot of reworking and got rid of things like pixel shader 2. I know there are some posts by Brad about it somewhere. Basically, the engine development was the major impeding factor of WoM, but is now the major contributing factor of FE. Funny how that works.

Hey all.  I'm the author of that article.  I'm glad to see that some of you have enjoyed the article and felt it was worthwhile.  While it is impossible to cover every single aspect of such a huge game, as Fallen Enchantress really is, I tried my best to include nearly everything someone would need to know about the game at this stage.  

I realize that modding is a large part of what Fallen Enchantress is for some people.  As someone who was the primary designer and coder on a rather large conversion mod myself, in Mount & Blade using Python, I am well aware of the capabilities modding offers to a game.  I barely played the unmodded Mount & Blade once I started getting heavily into modding, so I do know where you are coming from.  The fact that Fallen Enchantress can be modded relatively easily is a great feature, no doubt about it. 

At the same time, the beta stage and a preview in general is more about where the game itself is now and where it needs to go.  I don't feel like players should need to apply mods to have a quality experience.  For that reason, I do not install mods or even look at them before a game is released.  I expect the game developers to provide a worthwhile experience out of the box.  I am also not aware of any mods that fix some of the bugs and other engine issues I mentioned experiencing, so time will tell.

When Fallen Enchantress is released, I will be reviewing the game and modding is certainly going to be mentioned.  Depending on the issues that may or may not remain, I may mention the game's modding flexibility as a workaround or solution to balance or tweak the game to their own liking.  Modding alone can not overcome some of the issues being experienced right now in this beta 4a stage.

Nice to hear from you. I really did like the article and the awareness it spawned of the work so far. To be fair, modding is not officially even opened at this point in the beta. I can see why you would want to focus on progress. I might ask that when you do a release article for the game and then maybe a post-release report, you might mention some of the day one mods that are scheduled to be out by then. It would seem a big selling point to people that are looking for long term content. There is already alot of great stuff coming from us modders. 

I found the article highly useful.  Today I spent more time on the perf.  Our biggest performance hit remains the outlines on the map (part of the art style). It can be turned off in the display options but we are still trying to find ways to improve the visual performance.

Ironically, the outlines are designed to make the game visually look "simpler" -- which it does. But it is the single biggest performance hit in the game.

I solved my slow downs late game by adding lots of monsters early game. Then the speed is equal as monsters are replaced by armies.