Making the world a better place–literally

I love the resource overlay icons - very nice:-)  Also a big fan of meaningful terrain.  Rock on!

[Edit]: First!

Love the look of those icons. The art department has outdone themselves.

Playing devil's advocate... lets say I establish a city, would I be rewarded with extra resources by spreading my city like a spider-web to gobble up as many resources as possible. Or do resources play a different way?

I'd be happy with a single city tile, personally, with buildings abstracted inside it rather than the sprawling messes we get in WoM.

This is not enough! Tell us moooooore. Explain yourself

Most excellent...

Derek has another post about FE, where he explains that you get terrain bonuses for the 3x3 grid centered on your city starting point only, and the bonuses are not harmed by building on those tiles.

I hate to say it, but I agree about the on-map cities; they were a noble experiment, but they don't seem to work all that well.  They're particularly disproportionate to the size of the world, which is a little jarring.  And the distance-skipping from one end to the other is kind of goofy, too.  As an alternative, if they quadrupled the structures per overland tile that would go a long way to mitigating the problem, but may make the individual buildings too small to appreciate.

There is 1 advantage is having city buildings on the world map. You can see what is in the city without the need to enter a city screen.

A solution could be to keep the city small. In a mod of mine, I intended to make cities not larger than a 3x3 grid.

The icons where already available in the artwork list or WOM but I have to agree that it looks nice on the field.

With all the new features similar to MOM, I can't wait to start modding this game.

For the first part, does that mean that we will no longer see things like the Oasis, Iron/Gold Mines, etc on the world map, but rather as an icon on the area in which these resources exist?  Will future resources, ala Adventuring, still be there and function the same as they do in WoM, or will they sneak into the world as an icon over the area?

For part two, is this to imply that we will be using some of our magic (and civ tech) to help improve (exploit) certain tiles?  If so, I really like this idea.

I disagree with 1-tile cities.  I actually really liked how WoM handled city building, it gave a person (both owner and attacker) a quick glance as to what was there.  It was also one thing that allowed Elemental stand apart.  I will agree, however, that the instant travel from one side to the other was a little goofy.

In fact, one thing I would like to see (now that we'll have rivers) is the ability to build a city on a river, and then expand it onto the other side of the river.

Can you? Really? Or do you end up mousing over? I know I do.

Rock on, dude!

I really like the idea of using magic to exploit a resource.  For most games, including WOM, you have to build on the resource.

Why not have a resource that isn't usable until you cast a certain spell on it?

This would create another dynamic in the magic tech route.

Looks and sounds great.

I've not been following the boards closely in recent weeks. Did I miss some news that Essence is back in the game as a sovereign stat that's also a resource you can invest? That would make me very happy, but it seems awfully like a Freudian typo on Brad's part. 

Another great Master of Magic feature   I assume there will be something even better than Master of Magics surveyor. When you click on 'surveyor' I want it to put up images of cities on the 'best' places to do so depending on types. Ex. yellow city for gold. White for magic. Red for production etc.

The other part though about healing or descecrating the land, I assume it to be about the magic or diplomacy way.

I love the MOM Change Terrain and Transmute spells from the Nature books. It's pretty cool to fine tune the land around your capital or important cities. It would be cool to have some functionality like that in FE.

Looks good! Really looking forward to seeing this in action.