Man, am I burnt out. Somewhere in between the very cool games (pikmin!), the poledancers, the small people, the school girls, and the large quantities of beer, I became a wee bit dazed.
You've read the previews up on other sites so I don't want to repeat any of that. The one thing that stands out is that AoWII captures the whole 'detailed magically fantasy world in a box' better than any other game I've seen. You really need to see it in action...it's delightful. :-)
Here are the questions folks asked before I left:
Then Lennart asked very seriously, "If we have minotaurs, how will we explain where they came from? We need to maintain world continuity. Centaurs bother me because I can't figure out if they come from a man having sex with a horse or a horse having sex with a woman." Another guy piped in, "Obviously, it's a man having sex with a horse, since it would be physically impossible for a woman to give birth to a baby centaur, but a horse could manage it easily..." To which Lennart responded, "Well, it's all dumb anyway. Everyone knows that no one has sex with cows, so minotaurs are 'psychologically improbable'. We can't make a game only perverts would buy." Josh vehemently denied this point. "In America, it's quite common to have sex with cows. We have a lot of cows. It's only in Europe they restict themselves to horses" The conversation degenerated at this point. There was talk of having an entire minotaur race, complete with minotaur mages and minotaurs riding minotaurs. All I can say is God bless beer. Now I'm off to crash. Hope this helps a bit. Looks like it will be worth the wait.
Yep. Cities of a particular race will get certain inherent bonuses.
Yep. They are really concerned about making it somewhat balanced. This is going to be a tricky problem, but they have a lot of good ideas.
Talk about opening a can of worms. We talked about this one for easily an hour. I asked the question and everyone looked at me in stunned silence. Someone broke out laughing.
Yes! You'll be able to do complex event based maps using the editor.
This really didn't seem like an issue. The Triumph guys have thought of a lot of really cool tweaks that weren't mentioned on the forums, so its really not a fair question. More things happen in a shorter amount of play time. If I were to classify the game I'd say it's more 'densely packed'. That's a good thing. :-)
-Danc.