@ Solwen:
your idea of military control really interests me. i like the idea or replacing culture to suit the xenophobic nature of the WH world. as you say, it will be exceptionally simple to implement (mainly building changes, and the changing of the 'culture' to 'military control') but the thing that im not sure about is that all the old cultural buildings, (monuments theatrs etc) will create an excess in happyness making unhappiness not an issue. I know unhappiness is a pain and i hate it too, but it is an essentical part to the balance of the game. so, im wondering, what can we do to prevent over-happiness?
-should we replace SOME cultural bonuses with happiness and otheres with GPP (bards)?
-or eliminate theatres etc altogether (i think not).
-or keep culture and have some cities have cultural boarders (ie cities in the centre of an empire like the capital), and others with military conroled boarders (ie cities on the outskirts of the empire). this is probably going to complicate things again but im gonna say it anyway: we could have the 2 bars, culture and military control. these 2 bars 'compete' in a sence to determine the cultural boarder, ie if the military control (MC) in a city is greater than its culture, the MC determines the boarder, and if the culture in a city is greater than its MC, the culture determines the boarder. we could give some minor aditional bonuses to MC (extra defence) and cultural (extra happiness) buildings that only come into effect if the corresponting bar is dominant. (ie if MC is dominant the defence bonses apply but the happiness ones dont and vice versa)
@ Solwen:
i personally dont like the idea of reducing the FOW.
but i love the idea of religious spys
@ Fliptop:
First - you make a good point here, it would be much more simpe to get the non civ components sorted out with fewer civs. im not too sure how ploe is going about this conversion because it is beyond my comprehending, but im pretty sure he plans on installing civs in stages. you would have to talk to Ploe for details.
Second - it dosnt make much sence ot remove these civs to replace them with more 'popular' civs when they are already installed. i personally want all the plethora of races to choose from. having a choice between empire, high elves, dark elves, chaos, orcs and Dwarves would extremely frustrate me, there is just no diversity with few civs.
Third - the magic system from FfH is only going to be a base, i think were doing away with 'mana nodes' but im not sure what other changes are happeing. as you say, that will be one of the last implementations as it will probably be difficult.
Fourth - Religion has been one of those points of discussion that really are variable. there have been lots of different ideas on how to implement religion and im not sure what one we chose to stick with

(i havent actually played the mod i a while) unfortunately i think the structure building to found a relgion requres a programmer (that was my Core religion and Sub religion idea that flopped) and as we dont have one it never worked out, plus it was overcomplicating matters. Quests would be cool, having a prophet from the gods come to your people and offer a quest in exchange for the gods favour would be very fun indeed, but im not too sure how easy it would be to implement without a programmer

i dont want civs to be forced to have the same religion, the point of this game of the change history, What if the Orcs had followed Isha, or what if Darkelves had followed Assuryan? What if Empire converted to chaos worship? of course, we try to make it more attractive for civs to found their correct religion so it fits the fluff (ie a shorter tech path) but i would still like diversity.
Fifth - i think cults could be bettrer implemtented through the use of religious spys, such as the one Solwen posted
Sixth - there will be no alignments in WH, this was decided in a very heated discussion. Alignments just dont seem to fit he WH universe as most races appear neutral, and very few are evil. and some that can be considered evil, Orcs, Chaos, Khemri, dont actually like each other. Orcs fight chaos as much as empire do. so evli alignments would not work, and that means neither would good.
I certainly hope magic items will be implemented, i would like to see heores start with magic items as described in the army books that can be transfered to the unit that kills them. it would also be good if units that killed heroes got a hero promotion themselves as the elimiation of a powerful hero is not a simple feat.
Oh, and we certainly do know about fluff, i own almost every army book and have written out a brief history of each civ and leader that we hope to implement (if you join the team there is a thread in the team forum called
"Warhammer Background: What is this Warhammer thing anyway?" that has a lot of fluff in it. (i think we should move that thread to public Ploe) Plus i have been playing WH fantasy since i was 9. masada certainly knows a lot as do many other team members. as masada mentioned, it is just too difficult to implement all the fluff without a dedicated programmer.