This is my very first post just to express the sadness about the missing multiplayer  

I love most of the Stardock product and I especially like their attitude but I really don't get the multiplayer thing.  The internet is basically one of the greatest inventions of our time. Why in the world should we not use it for a turn based game, for which writing some network code should be comparatively easy? Multiplayer also adds a huge amount of replayability: there are already thousands of "custom sovereigns" out there online waiting to be battled!

PLEASE make it happen Stardock. GalCiv would still beat Civ5 if only it had a multiplayer. I'm sure a lot of people would still play it, even years after its release.

I'll be waiting for the final, polished product. All you beta-testers (and Stardock of course) don't let me down!

Look at Warlock: Master of the Arcane- I think that will have MP.

I'm going to get both, and hopefully both are worth it.

Will modding support be enabled at some point before release, so we can go wild and put the system under as much strain as possible? (Also so we can tell you if there's a couple easy-to-implement modding XML features we'd really like...)

Also: hurry up and give me cancer!

This I can only applaud. I really hated how cities became huge map covering blobs in EWoM, and I was sad to see it was carried over into FE. Having to keep building certain buildings over and over didn't help. It was a lot of non-fun micromanagement, and it didn't help immersion either. While it's understandable that you, the sovereign, are involved in such micromanagement (do we build a house, a workshop, a barracks, or start building a wall around the town) when you are building your first town and only have a few dozen people under your rule, it doesn't really make sense for you to still worry about such details when you are building your sixth city and rule thousands of people.

We won't know the details until tomorrow, but I know the population mechanic has changed so you won't have to build houses anymore. I don't know what other changes have been made to the buildings, but keeping that in mind I would make the following suggestions:

1) No building should have to be build more than once in a single city. If you find yourself thinking "I could really use a second (insert random building name) in that city", then change how the building works. Make it scale with population for instance. There could be some very rare exceptions to this, but I can't think of any right now.

2) No building should have to be build in every city. This condition is a bit softer than the previous one, because I can imagine certain conditions in which you would do something like this. Maybe you're rich enough to build a library and a military academy in every city. Maybe you have to build a mana generating sacrificial altar in every city, just to keep up with your enemy who controls way more shards than you. But in general, if you find yourself building in every town almost every game because there is no real reason not to (apart from a small construction cost and upkeep), then CUT IT. Make it something the town core does on it's own.

3) With every building ask the question whether you, the sovereign, should be making this decision, or if it's something your population could figure out for themselves. It's a matter of scale; small stuff like houses, workshops, pubs, and vegetable gardens, these things your people can handle on their own, and should be covered by the city core. But large stuff that have a large construction cost and/or upkeep should be decided by the sovereign. Things like building city walls, palaces, theatres, temples, and arcane universities.

I agree...just having the city "run itself" because it might be inconvenient to the player is a highly subjective matter.  Maybe I do want the choice to build a vegetable garden or not.

I also agree that having 10 different buildings which all give +10 research and all look exactly the same is annoying and tedious, but having a single building which upgrades - both in look and boni - very differently depending on faction, for instance, could be an interesting design decision.

I feel like this "kitchen sink" attitude is what got WoM into such trouble.  Every added feature has its pluses when examined in isolation.  But as WoM showed, a successful game is much more than just a list of neato features.  You have to have a unifying structure and a commitment to reject new ideas that don't conform to that structure no matter how awesome.

Being able to micro the planting of gardens in your cities for some small efficiency gain is a perfect example.  Sure, some people will enjoy having such an option.  But does it fit within the concept of the game that Stardock is designing?  I doubt it does.  So implementing something like this, (and especially giving it an explicit advantage) would just distract and dilute the design of the game.

I remember Master of Magic well.  What kept me coming back game after game was the exploration aspect and the chance to meet new heroes.  The game was never well balanced (i.e. Paladin).  The AI was never tough.  The key:  Every Game was Different.  I know this isn't MOM2 but you seem to be capturing the exploration aspect with this new game (wild lands, spells).  I hope you also nailed the hero/champion part.  If so, I will forgive a lot of ills and sing the game's praises.

All I want is for New Game to have more meaning than 7-Eleven.

Cheers

Sure:  Make the UI easily moddable.

I prefer fewer improvements... if you want to spend time coming up with 1000 of anything, make it items, champions or monsters or some other content that is more dynamic towards the gameplay. With 1000 improvements, I'll find the 10 good and build them every time.

I am suggesting that there are thousands of improvements, but you only get maybe 100 in each game. Random techs and random quests would provide much of the random opportunities. I am talking about replayability here. Especially from the city leveling system. 

Maybe it would be better to focus on thousands of weapons or spells, but dammit I want thousands of everything! I will probably make my first mod just content additions. 

I wouldn't mind lowering the number of buildings considerably, and transfering most of the improvements into building upgrades. There's all sorts of interesting stuff you could do with building upgrades/expansions. Mutually exclusive upgrades, upgrade level requirements, special requirements for special upgrades (requires a champion, requires a quest item) etc.

each player in FE has its own strategy. We’ll be talking a lot about how to make it so Altar plays differently than Pariden in a way that players will easily observe. If armies end up similar on all sides, we did something wrong and will have to work at it.

Great news, my biggest fear about FE was each AI using the same AI routines and following the same strategies; ala WOM.

Many thanks for working to make each fraction play differently.