Simply perfect. If that works out as described, it would be a compeltely new way to handle unit production. And a good one at that!

That sounds great.  It sounds VERY ambitious.

I have a question about the 'Training' component of unit creation.  I've noticed from the screenshots that all units have level ratings.  Would the 'Training' component cause the unit to start at a higher level or would it just increase the base stats of the unit?

Sammual

Perfect.

About the caravans : they are just pictures but when can you attack them? They need to have a real unit. Another thing : will the warehouse really be full to expand the goods to other towns? It would be good to have some sort of control over it. For instance a town receive 10 units of coal. You keep 5 then send the 5 to another town. Waiting to have a full warehouse is a little counter productive .. because you won't build bigger warehouse or you would stop supply to your other towns !

Maybe instead of creating the caravan at the start, create it at the end of the "line". You tell to the game thaht the town Blablabla needs coal, then the game create the caravan from the nearest town, and if the town can afford to let the coal go elsewhere. That would be easier to track the needs.

About training : will there be a way to learn "special moves" to soldiers? Like a simpel awarrior with club could learn the special "bash" attack. And a unit can only have as many special attacks as their level (a unit level 5 could have 5 attacks). As you said it, training a soldier is a matter of time but also of what they learn. How to break a shield? How to take cover against AoE spells/Abilites? How to fight certain kind of ennemies (like.. hum.. dragon?)

EDIT: Oops ... Forgot to say that .. You gals and guys rocks. 'Nuff said.

Sounds like Kohan with the vector and surplus/shortfall.

Will you be able to buy the things you're short of with your gold like Kohan?

This is something i would not want to see overcomplicating things to be honest, but it can be a reall good addition.

Sounds really great, Brad.  Very strategy oriented.  It sounds like:

GalCiv freighters = Caravans

GalCiv ship building = unit building

Civilization resources will be implemented, although more of an integrated function

My fear, as expressed by others, is that it will be too micromanagement oriented.  This will greatly depend on how easy it is to obtain resources, produce them, and then manage them.

I'd also love to see some really cool and useful pre-built units, so you don't have to "roll your own" as much as in GalCiv2.  Of course, user generated content can make this better or worse.  Better in that you have more options.  Worse if there's too many options to consider strategically.

I'll be excited to provide feedback on this, and am really interested in seeing how this concept evolves and hopefully becomes really a fun element and not overly realistic.

As a baseline , this sounds wonderful. Great flexibility, strategic depth, unlimited types of units ...

But some warning flags, where you have to be careful:

- The game is called War of Magic, and we have been promised populous-like, global havoc. So, in such a game you don't want to spend more than half of a campaign trying to achieve the capability to produce a basic warrior with a blunt bronze sword and no mount. While the overall approach seems great, it shouldn't turn the game into a low-life, ultra-realistic thing. After all, if you are calling down meteors from the sky against your enemies, you would appreciate not having to micro-manage and tear your hair out just to produce a couple of knights going against the dragons.

- Too much micro-management will certainly be a risk. For me, starting to decide where the resources will slowly have to travel seems about the limit.

- While I fully agree with the tech tree approach + training, it can also be said that in a fantasy game you can have any number of magical / mystical ways of improving your units or create new, unique units.  For example, for me it seems much cooler to reserach astrology and be able to produce especially deadly warriors thanks to the right alignment of the heavenly bodies, instead of only dealing with realistic research and resources like iron smithing. I think a combination of both would be best: the realistic techs as a necessary basis, but then you have to go further to develop the fantastic skills.

If this is just taken into account the game would be amaaaaazing!

You hit the nail on the head.  What this system will do, in practice, is bring a more realistic and more fun way of playing the game - just because you have the technology to build something doesn't mean you can realy build it.  Just because you can now, theoretically, train elite guardsman, who ride griffins, are armed with magic swords, etc. doesn't mean you're going to start cranking these things out.  Do you have access to griffins? Has your sovereign imbued one of his armories with the ability to create magic weaponry locally or do the arms have to be shipped from across the world? 

The unit can't be built until everything that is needed is in the town. so indirectly yes.

I am going to have so much fun raiding caravans.

Sammual

P.S. Brad, if I raid the caravan containing magic swords for my opponents griffin riders can I use them even if I don't have the tech to make them?  Can I use them to gain that tech?

I've always liked the Settlers mechanic (the original game, I haven't played any of the sequels) for resource distribution.  You've basically got supply sites and demand sites.  So, for example, say you have a city that harvests Wood.  If there is no demand for Wood, it just gets stored.  However, if a different city has a demand for Wood, such as constructing a unit/building that requires it, the resource would automatically start being shuffled towards that city.  The user doesn't need to do anything, it just starts happening as soon as there's a supply/demand imbalance.  If there are two cities requiring it, then it gets shipped equally to both.

If you have a city that doesn't currently require Wood, but you know it will soon, then perhaps you could click a toggle in the city's warehouse to create an artificial demand for it at that city.  It would act just as though the city had an immediate demand, and the Wood would begin shipping there.  Wood stored in warehouses where there is no demand would also act as supply sites until the warehouse was empty.

Perhaps infrastructure, which is what would spawn these caravans automatically, could also be finite.  There can only be a certain number of caravans out dispatching the resources at any given time.  You could invest more in building up your infrastructure, thus allowing you to have more caravans.  If your infrastructure is low (few caravans) and your roads are poor (they move slowly) you could easily overload your empire's ability to redistribute resources.

I don't think it would add too much micromanagement, as it would all be handled automatically by the game in order to satisfy any demand in your empire.  All that would be required for the player would be a single screen listing all their cities so they can toggle on the demand for particular resources at the city warehouses, as well as an empire-wide setting for investing in infrastructure.  The player should also protect the caravans of course, as the loss of one would lower the number of caravans available until the player invested more in infrastructure.

When implementing such a system (which in itself sounds pretty nifty by the way) you should be careful to change the usual system of production queues. You have to make sure the item on top can't block everything just because one resource is missing. So production should be parallel and not sequential (with the possibility to emphasize perhaps) although then you have to avoid the possibility of a production item on lower priority "stealing" a limited but needed resource from the higher one. Maybe all needed resources for an item could be reserved until that item is finished. But then you could encounter another unneccesary delay in your production because reserved resources, which are although limited but obtainable at a higher rate than the "critical" missing resource of the high-priority production queue items, might hinder production of further items. Also under this system it should be possible to create masses of untrained clubwielding townfolk provided you have the enough population and big sticks.

I don't know if anyone can make sense of the gibberish abouve - I doubt I can after a good night's sleep - but the message I tried to convey is if you make these ambitious changes to the "usual" 4x economy it's mighty fine by me - just think it through please. And if it turns out to be realistic but no-fun-at-all, don't hesitate to throw the idea out of the window. There are to many half-baked good ideas in some games which sound nice but ruin gameplay (MOO3, anyone?) But I tend to trust your instincs on this one, anyway.

One option I would really like to see is when you have a unit design in the list of available units a city can produce, have an option on that unit's info in the build options list to divert the necessary items for that unit to the currently selected city (and emphasize their production if they don't exist yet, so you get the swords you need instead of a bunch more plowshares, but only if the swords will otherwise hold up production) and start training men if you can without the other items so that you can build up, say, enough materials for 15 elite guards for you to recruit in a hurry, and something that would go hand in hand with this is being able to design units using tech a step above what you have, so if you know that you're going to be able to make steel swords in a few turns but already have steel mining, the mining town will send steel to the foundry so that it won't be held up. This last bit is just an idea, but it would be nice to have your economy primed for what you know is coming without having to do it manually.

Short version: I want to be able to say that I want to be able to recruit a given number of a unit and have the computer emphasize making the requisite items available to that city over mundane production, and even unit production in other cities, but in the second case only if it will not slow down the actual order. If I'm making a bunch of elite footmen with swords but want to gather the resources for sword cavalry in case a second enemy attacks, I could tell the computer to get the resources for the cavalry together as quickly as possible without worrying about its impact on the footmen production, because it will only send swords to the cavalry city when it knows that another sword will be produced before the next footman is trained. That would be an amazing feature, and add a lot of flexability.

EDIT: Wahngrok, I think I get what you're saying and have already emphasized it in my idea. You want to be able to set a priority queue for all production and have the computer try to get the first unit out first, but if it is waiting for a resource that won't be available for a long time, send the other needed resources to lower priority projects until doing so would cause a different resource to delay production, which boils down to seeing if the resource will be the last one to arrive for that particular project/instance of the unit order, and if not, seeing if sending the turn's production elsewhere would delay the higher priority order. I think I explain it decently in the paragraph above this one.

I also want to have the game use the caravan travel patterns to determine what would speed up deliveries the most so I can see what effect building a certain road would have would be nice.

Although there won't be 'N units', I assume the real meaning is there won't be some arbritary scale (like civ3) where a knight is 45 units, a horse man is 20 units etc..  But instead the player free-form designs a unit, and the sum cost of all it's abilities determines the cost, which the economy then produces at whatever rate it is able.

But will there be a scaleable and realistic sense of economy though?  For instance can I get a city with 3x economic capacity of one of my designed units, and result in 3 units made per turn? Will different unit abilities consume different resource stockpiles, and are there varied, limited ways to specialize the economics of the city to generate the varied resources?  For instance, by a combination of location, infrastructure,  building, and training can I get one city to be the iron capital, while another city will be the agricultural capital, and another city would be the military capital (basically a fort and armory) for training and equiping the troops?

Most 4X games abstract the economy as distracting from the war and diplomacy and city-building, and usually they stick with the 'N units' compromise to do so. So will Elementals have a strong supply-side economic model?