That, sir, is very welcome news. Let the MOM wishlist threads begin! Where do me and my friends sign up to preorder?

Pre order? Bah! Where is my 2 year signup for TGN?

Good luck - hope the numbers all work out but please dont bet the company on it! We love you too much for that!

Fantastic!

I agree with Kevin the Kitten in that I wish you all the very best, but please don't bet the company on it. Stardock makes fun, addictive games and we your fans would like to have you around as a company for quite some time to come.

Having said that, I'll buy the game, not because its MOM2, (I haven't played MOM1) but because Stardock is making it.

Hear, hear!

Granted, I'd not necessarily buy the next edition of Deer Hunter just because Stardock were to make it, but anything remotely in my areas of interest is a given if I know Brad and Co are behind it!

-BiffMan
~SDC~
[Message Edited]

Myrror and Arcanus beware here we come again...
(where did I put my hammerhands lately?)

*sigh*

Best of luck Brad, I hope it goes well for you. I'll have you know though, that I may not forgive you for making me break my promise to myself that I wouldn't support another Atari project... even an 'indirect' one.

And... please, please, PLEASE don't be swayed too much by the 'I just want the same 15-year old game with new graphics' crowd. There's a LOT more work than that to be done to update MOM for a modern audience...

[Message Edited]

I haven't played MoM but definitely will buy MoM2. GC is one of my favorite games of all time because of it being an excellent game as well as the superb support and superb updates.
Good luck and thanks!

I just want the same 15-year old game with new graphics. If it aint broke...

... then keep playing it. I love my MOM as much as anybody... It's still on my hard drive after all these years... and when I feel like playing it, I do.

If you're going to spend $1M+ in development, and use up the full-time talents of all these truly talented people... why not do something new (i.e. a full sequel), rather than the exact same game we've all been playing for 15 years...?

Good point

I suppose I just worry that they'll screw up
I hope they don't change it too much..

Now those are all sentiments I understand...

I wouldn't worry too much about these guys though. They do good work.

In fact, that's part of the reason I'd like to see them add a healthy dose of their own 'magic' to one of my favourite games...

I think keeping all the old and adding a bunch of new stuff rather than implenting too many new rules sets etc... would be the way to go. The game remains just as addictive to me today as it was ten years ago. It's just such a pain to run now and even an optimal machine it crashes frequently. I think the one big question would be how to conduct tactical combat as this is definitely on of the most dated parts of the old one. Only problem is, it's still fun regardless. I lost my interest for Age of Wonders 2 pretty quickly. Part of the reason was that combat got a bit dull. But also the spells weren't nearly as fun and units were kind of dull. I really liked the multiple figure units vs. single creature dynamic and how it impacted spell usage.

It would be entirely possible to add a horde of new planes, a dozen new races and 20 new schools of magic, but I would avoid going overboard as this would only make testing a nightmare.

Although I do think planes linked to each color of magic would be an interesting idea. Maybe rather than full fledged magic worlds, these could simply be like large campaign areas with an objective to be seized. For instance, conquering the Tower of Necros on the plane of Death gives a wizard enhanced casting/summoning ability with that school of magic until he loses it. Perhaps a unique summons creature for each plane conquered regardless of spell casting ability would make it worthwile for a mage that can't cast from that color to master a plane too. A win objective could be to master all the planes.

I think the trick to avoiding the MOO3 issue is to not bite off more than you can chew. MOO2 was a great game that brought a number decent changes to the game but it stayed true enough to the original to be a recognizable sequel rather than a confusing mess that didn't play anything at all like the old games. The key is to enhance the existing games rather than blow the doors off the walls and do something completely different.

All good points. I think the issue here tends to come down to scale. If you increase the scale of the game (i.e., by adding new planes, new units, new spells, bigger maps, etc.), then you're going to have to sacrifice some level of detail. If you don't, you end up with a problem... detailed tactical combat is great when you're fighting 2-3 battles a turn. If you have to fight 20-30 every turn, then it becomes a nightmare, and you start wishing for a simplified, GalCiv-type system. Similarly, it's a lot easier to have 100 unique, interesting spells (or units, or whatever) than 500, etc.

The important thing, IMHO, is that you don't try to do both (ala MOO3, et al.)



Who suggested that one? I like it myself, but in an even bigger way. A plane for each school of magic, with maybe 2-3 races associated with each, and all have different properties... now there's an idea that could expand on the MOM concept without breaking it...




Fair enough. I do think though, that if Stardock had any intention of doing something 'completely different', they wouldn't bother paying for the liscence... they'd just make a brand new game.

It's good that they will probably develop MoM2, such a sequel is long overdue.

The first thing I would suggest is for the game to be moddable, and possibly have scenario support. People have their own ideas over what that would like to see in MoM2, and if the game is moddable everyone can make their own mods and be happy.

What should be moddable? Pretty much everything, really - opposing wizards, city names, heroes, spells, units, number of planes, graphics, terrain, picks per wizard, etc. With scenario support, it should be possible to specify what specific stuff is found at locations on the map as well as the usual random stuff.

One or two mods should ship with the game. One mod that is mandatory is a Classic mod - so players who just want an updated MoM can have one that ships with the game. This assumes that the standard MoM2 game is different to the original game.
[Message Edited]

Modability is always awesome, but not if it adds months to the release date. Just so I can say that I was the first one to do this. Hey Stardock, is it done yet?

I'd take it even so. Given the choice between a good game in 12 months and a game that makes me say, "Oh my... the things I could do with this!" in 18... I'll take Door #2, thanks.

I have a rather long argument in support of modding that I think I'll save for another time, but suffice it to say that (IMHO of course) it's the single most important feature you can possibly put into your game these days.

[Edit: I forgot... Hey Stardock, when's the Demo coming out...? ]
[Message Edited]

Okay boys (I'd love to see girls saying whohooo, MOM was a great game )
Enough talk about why MOM was soooo great, let's talk about what YOU think was WRONG with it.
I am one of those MOM fans, who still play it under dosbox, and one, who playes it until the sun comes up, so don't take me for a badmouth. And I always play it in impossible level.

1: battles were cool, but, after a while the small battles got real boring (for this reason I didn't conquer cities after a while, only capitols). Of course there was an auto option, but getting one of my heroes killed because of some stupid computer not wanting to save him, make the auto option a no-no (the battle would take too long even with auto option). One way to help this, is to make an auto-AI, that would make us all happy (for example, have loads of options with which you can change the behavour). But I don't think that will be the perfect answer, so there must be some other way... (like units being able to move much more in battle)

2: After a while, even when in impossible, you have no match, you just don't feel the same joy of trying to survive, as at the first half of the game. At the end, finishing the game is like doing a chore. I know that's nearly every game's problem, but it still is a big one.

3: this is related to nmb 2. You only get the greater champions, when have no more need for them. For example, I got Mortu the knight, whom I never got before, at the end of the game, and I only didn't kill other wizards, to make Mortu get stronger. Sadly, this didn't excite me too much...


And of course, there must be multiplayer support, and that is where you will have a bigbig advantage over MOM (you should have a playbymail support too maybe)

My twocents
Nagypapi

Stuff I think needed attention in MoM:

1. 9-unit stack limit. This gets annoying when you have a big stack that must pass through a city that has another big stack and then you must move the units one or two at a time. If 9 units have enough movement points to get to a point, they should do so even if another big stack is on the path they would take.

2. Mopping up. If you are clearly dominant and have the game won, the mopping up phase of the game could take many hours. This could be prevented by having a Domination victory condition. If you own 2/3 of the cities on the map, you win. A similar victory condition could also apply if you have 2/3 of the magic in the game - that is, your magic capacity is twice as great as all other wizards combined.

3. One spell at a time. When you are casting a spell that takes several turns to complete, and you need to cast another spell, it's annoying that only one spell can be cast at a time. It should be possible to cast Instant spells independently of another spell, and possibly two or more spells at once. Alternatively, this could be a power granted by a pick or a retort - call it Concentration.

4. Bugs. Examples are Chaos Channels flight not granting true Flight, uberpowerful Galleys, the occasional hero with 30 abilities and the crash bugs.

5. Auto button. The Auto button in combat is deadly to heroes. In auto combat, Heroes should not engage the enemy in hand-to-hand combat unless ordered. Perhaps Auto combat should work by making the user give orders to each unit.

6. Strategic combat. This is used by the computer players for deciding the outcome of computer vs computer battles of all kinds (computer vs computer/node/ruin/tower). The battle outcomes here are simply unrealistic, in that the computer wins tough battles more often than it should.

Most of that made sense but I don't see the point of allowing multiple spells to be cast. If you're casting a really nasty Global Enchantment I think that should tie up your spellcasting efforts. Besides do you really want the AI dumping constant firestorms on your units and casting corruption on your cities while casting global enchantments. I think that would get pretty annoying.

The auto button issue would probably be best resolved by allowing players to turn off auto for specific units rather than putting together a really intelligent AI. I only used auto on canon fodder myself.

A domination rule would be cool, although I actually like the mopping up/domination phase of the game so I would prefer to be able to turn win conditions on and off. The game could definitely use some more win conditions though. Given Gal Civ, I'm not too worried about that.

Diplomacy was the weakest feature of the game if you ask me. When the AI is consistently asking you for spells like Time Stop and offering stuff like bless or warp in return, it gets pretty irritating. It could definitely use a tone/offer/counter-offer upgrade. That and you really never had any indication that an AI was about to go to war on you. And as with most 4X games of the day, Alliances were completely worthless.

Definitely needed more than 4 AI opponents. I'd always be so disappointed when I quickly mowed through 3 AIs in quick succession only to realize that the game was almost over.

I'd be happy to see the overall number of races whittled down to 8 or so... then make that the max number of players per game, and you can concentrate more on giving each one a unique, GalCiv-type AI...

[Edit: sorry for the double post... server issues I think...]
[Message Edited]

"I think we're going to do it" I am too stunned after reading that statement, have waited a long time for a developer to remake MoM. Best of luck Stardock. I extremely happy that I signed up for Dengrin net now.
[Message Edited]
[Message Edited]