I can’t believe it’s been 20 years since OS/2 2.0 shipped! It certainly changed my life.
To recap, here’s an article I wrote…for its 10th birthday. 
Just a head's up, Beta 3 is scheduled for April 12th.
The Beta 3 series of Fallen Enchantress will be revolving around faction differentiation. It also contains a lot of tweaks and balance based on player feedback.
One of the things we’re working on for Beta 3 is beefing up the spells -- both visually and in terms of their power.
In the above screenshot, you can see Flamewave which makes use of the new particle system being developed for Fallen Enchantress.
This week we met with the press and one of the topics that kept coming up over and over was just how much better Elemental: Fallen Enchantress looked and played versus 2010’s first attempt at a fantasy strategy game, Elemental: War of Magic.
This begged the question – why would Stardock tie Fallen Enchantress to Elemental: War of Magic which was a pretty mediocre game.
This article on Gamasutra goes into some depth as to why we are pursuing this strategy.
Gamasutra:
Related articles:
http://www.vg247.com/2012/03/30/stardock-elemental-sequel-to-make-up-for-mediocre-first-game/
If you’re in the beta:
Some of these articles are asking for feedback from beta testers. Feel free to give your impressions. Beta 3 is coming soon, final game due this Fall.
By default, Fallen Enchantress draws a black outline around units, buildings, and mountains.
However, if you go into options and click on the video tab, you can choose “disable outlines”.
For those of you who are in the beta, let us know which you like better – with outlines or without outlines.
I had forgotten how much I enjoy these things.
It's great to get out and talk to "my kind". That is, hard core gamers. Today I got to talk about now just Fallen Enchantress and Sins of a Solar Empire but the transition from 32-bit gaming to 64-bit, mobile gaming, DirectX 11, and the impact HTML 5 is going to have on game development.
Sins of a Solar Empire always demos well since it's got spectacular effects in it. Fallen Enchantress gained some new spells recently that show well. I can't wait to see what the team does with the new particle effect system with light sourcing and bit strips.
I was reading some articles that covered the Stardock 2012 report and in the comments section one thing that came up over and over was the allegation that I "badmouthed" Steam or Valve or what have you and that I "suddenly" liked Steam after we sold Impulse.
It's annoying when people try to fabricate a narrative that has no basis in reality.
As a reminder:
http://frogboy.joeuser.com/article/315154/Brads_Impulse_Launch_Review
"You would have to pry Steam out of my cold dead hands" -Brad Wardell, June 17, 2008 during the Impulse launch.
and
https://forums.stardock.com/375282
"Well first, I’m a fanboy of Valve because they are everything I admire – excellent. I don’t really see Impulse or Steam as an either/or thing. I use Steam. I don’t want Steam to be “beaten”. But I think as excellent as Steam is, there is a lot more to go and I do not like concentrations of power. " -Brad Wardell, February 2010
Running Impulse never meant we wanted Steam to fail. The reasons we ultimately sold Impulse are well documented. But us liking Steam and Valve today isn't some recent conversion. You can compete with something and think that something is good.
Had a great day demoing Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion and Elemental: Fallen Enchantress. The updated game mechanics, graphics, and new magical spells like Tidal Wave, Fire Storm, and Grip of Winter demoed really well.
So far, what demoed the best was the upcoming counter-strategies available due to recent changes in how weapons and defenses work (this won't be fully available to beta testers until late Beta 3).
Feedback was very positive. Given the...difficulties we had with WOM, it was good to see excitement on the direction FE is taking.
Explains the basics.
In this screenshot, I have the amount of ground cover set to “none”. It’s a personal preference but I prefer less “stuff” on the map. Others have argued it makes the game less pretty.
We have completed our annual customer report for last year. Each year we send out a survey to our customer base asking them a host of questions so that we can better serve them.
In exchange, we share the results of these surveys along with a report on what went right and wrong the previous year along with plans for the forthcoming year.
We are pleased to present you the full report here: https://www.stardock.com/press/CustomerReports/Stardock2011.pdf