Stardock's new game -- Elemental: War of Magic

[Martok]

Links to a couple more previews:


Edge-Online

Gamasutra



Some excerpts I found particularly interesting and/or cool:

Elemental, which has been described by Wardell as a "franchise," will feature random map generation, integrated modding, city building, unit design, tactical combat, multiplayer and most of all, magic.

As for multiplayer, Wardell said that there will be two modes: standard skirmish with simultaneous turns and a "Wars of Magic" mode. The latter is a persistent mode hosted on Stardock's Impulse Cloud servers, and offers a "variety of different game types."

On the technical side, the game runs on an internally-developed 3D engine that’s been in the works for “a couple of years,” according to Wardell. It’s made specifically for strategy games. In Elemental, gamers will be able to zoom out and view the world as a cloth map that strategists can play on or zoom in for greater detail.

“If you like Civilization or are a Master of Magic fan, this is a must-get," he claimed. "I’m zealot of those games, so I’m kind of a target audience for it."

As with all of Stardock's games, it is targeting low system requirements, but also features an engine that dynamically scales performance to the number of CPU cores on a given machine.

As more cores are available, says Wardell, "the world just becomes richer. In the most extreme sense, this engine's been designed as such that at the lowest end with a really old machine, you can play almost with icons. But at the high end, you can zoom in and see squirrels running around in the trees. It all depends on your hardware."

Gah! I know I'm fawning over this bloody game like some idiotic love-struck teenager, but I can't seem to help myself. There's just so much good stuff to get excited over.