Frogboy

You only have to look to the Heroes of Might and Magic series to see siege combat done well. But guess what? Attacking cities/castles was my least favorite aspect of that game. The rest of the game was fun; taking a city was work.

The same series also added some line of site by adding obstacles to the map that affected range combat. I suppose some liked it, but I just found it confusing.

Even my current favorite space 4X game had a DLC expansion that made invasions far more "interesting" by adding troops, bombs, and requirements for specialized ships to take over enemy planets. While most of the DLC was interesting, my friend and I still play the "vanilla" version because the simple, elegant invasion system of the original is simply more fun--so much so that it outweighs other cool stuff the DLC offers.

I really do look forward to updates in LH (or any other game). And the changes LH has offered are so good that I don't even consider playing FE any more. However, please be careful to remember the appeal of LH's combat system is that it is fast and fun. And it needs to be that way to keep the game moving along. So, yes, combat changes are welcome--as long as they don't bog the game down.

Well this is great news, good to see LH still getting worked on.  It's my favorite game in a long time.   

The stuff you have listed above for 2.0 all sounds great, any improvements to the diplomacy aspects of the game would go a long way... it's kinda still the weak link me thinks.

Regarding your questions:

1) Quarterly is frequent enough I think.  Quality over quantity I think.

2) Quests are always good as dlc because the quest/rpg part of LH is really cool, fits in really nice... but the quests get a bit repetitive.  One thing you could so is even just add alternate endings to existing quests (just clone the quest and change the end) so that when you start a quest you don't quite know what going to happen even if you think you have seen the same quest before.

Maps are always nice too (tactical and stamps) because they're are bit painful to create/mod (going by the lack of modded ones published).

See this is a good idea... a bunch of small/mid sized wildlands would make a great dlc.

I'd also like to see this.... I know maybe difficult as dlc... but it would be great.  Minor factions.

I also think some kinda of more siege like city battles would be cool.   As others have said, doesn't need to be a full blown siege as that can become boring. 

Well that's a start i guess.  But I think the first thing would be to create tactical maps for city battles that have the defenders behind walls... with limited choke points.  Then if the city spawns archer militia... the defender should have a nice defensible position to start with.  That should mostly be able to be achieved without coding.

Then... if you can have a defensive bonus for being "behind a wall"... or on a particular tile (like in the city where the defenders are).. you start to get more of a city sige type vibe.  You could have tiles that act a bit like the Krax fortification ability... maybe when you're defending a city you get 5 x autocast Fortify tile that you can "cast" on whichever units you choose.  That soft of thing... again that almost do-able now.

2nd this.  

Thanks.

Spot on!

To add to this: fighting the AI is less fun than fighting monsters. Ai armies are very generic, with no special abilities and no spoils after you beat them. Prolonging these fights by adding sieges etc likely hurts the fun factor of LH more than it adds depth.

Another thing that wouldn't be super hard to add to sieges might be some sort of unique city defender. All you would need is the art. Something more unique then militia, like maybe a unmoving archer tower. This would just a be a normal ranged unit that spawned back with the archers and couldn't move. It could have some special characteristics like resistance to normal physical attacks, with catapults being an exception. This would be much easier to add then say damageable walls which would require new tactical maps and a bunch of other stuff.

This is more wishing and brainstorming then DLC ideas but...

Minor factions would be cool but they would actually have to do something interesting. I think it would fit the lore more if they were refugee camps or shattered cities from the cataclysm more then true minor factions. They could spawn troops that fought nearby monsters and have unique champions that led them. You could use them in several ways; ally with them using diplomacy, conquer them, or complete several quests to get the city and their leader. Again this would be a a fair bit of work and C++ to make so it is unlikely to be DLC. 

What I would love to see personally is for caravans to come back in a fun way. They were gutted early on in FE. Something like a system were you add in new trade resources like silk or silver that spawn randomly. Having a trade resource would allow a city to build a caravan and create a trade route with another city. However the gold bonus on the caravan would depend on the combined trade resource in both cities. Thus you would want to create caravans between cities with trade resources even if they belonged to other players. Unless you had a gold producing city you really wanted to have the bonus, but ya depth. 

- Really excited for LH 1.6 and very glad you are taking the time to release it only once you've thoroughly gone through it.

- LH 2.0 is another milestone that has me drooling. Imo, that the update is free I think has a downside. Don't get me wrong...free is awesome and appriciated BUT you'll be upgrading from 1.9 to 2.0 as if it were a regular update. Players will not have the choice to choose not to play with the changes and if the changes deviate too much from what LH is about (like FE was to LH) or if there is unexpected crashes or balance issues, there may be many players that would rather not play with the changes and stick with 1.9. Steam does not let you install earlier versions of a game.

- If I could offer a suggestion? (I'm going to anyways...so you can choose to ignore. ) Aim to have 2.0 the last patch....the polish patch. That would perhaps mean 1.9 or even 1.8 would be 'the mega release', fully expecting some updates to be needed. This way, IF players are having a difficult time with the transistion, adjustments can be made...

- Thoughout these patches, are you going to attempt addressing AI concerns? AI building Outpost Upgrades? Special faction abilities that the AI can't manage at the moment (Arcane Monolith as an example)?

- I think I'll really like monster lairs having ZoC. I'd love it if that extended and changes how Wildlands work. #3 @ http://forums.elementalgame.com/452034/page/1/

- Changing how tech trees are handled? This one worries me a little. I really like the tech tree system in this game; one of the aspects I thought MoM was missing. Please don't remove it. 

Now to your DLC questions/comments:

-  You ask how often we would like to see DLC releases. I would answer with 'it depends' on a few things. First: on how willing you are to go back and improve existing DLC. I've noticed in the 1.6 changelog that some changes are being made...but they are pretty minor. There is an entire mod from the community dedicated to trying to make the Undead work...I would have thought those efforts would have come from SD's end. Second: I bought DLC 1, 2 and 3 to keep the game driving forward however I don't consider them DLCs...more like small addons. They don't impact the game dynamically enough. DLC4 was the first that accompished a dynamic release. Thus, if quality is sacrificed for the sake of quantitiy, then I would not be in favor of rushing out DLC releases. If you have the resources to release once a quarter, you'd have my money.

- As to what I would like to see:

a) Stamps. Definately! (though, I would have thought some unique undead style stamps would have been released with DLC4)

b ) Tactical Battle Maps. Maybe. If battles could be more closely tied with strategic map enviroment and/or if tiles could start having modifiers, then yes. If you just want more tactical battle maps, I'd recommend including them in a stamps DLC.

c) Magical spells. No. As part of a larger release only. Toss in the odd new spell to a new faction...or new battle map... or something like that.

d) New factions. Absolutely! New factions mean new abilities, spells, quests, loot, weaknesses, traits, music. DLC4 was an awesome attempt, but has some balance and mechanic concerns. The AI needs to be able to work.

e) Loot. No. Imo, loot should be naturally embedded within other types of DLC. I was pretty dissappointed with the first go around on the loot pack as there were not enough items and they were not unique enough. I also like serious fantasy...so no lollypop and bunny slippers. Imo, the Black Market Bazaar mod has accomplished way more than the loot pack mod.

f) Quests. Yes please! More quests. Unique quests. Quests. Quests. Quests.

Other suggestions (sorry I don't know if these will require C++...not a programmer):

H) Music. I'm dying for some more music in this game. I'm NOT saying the existing music is bad....quite the contrary. Just saying that there isn't enough good. DLC4 should have some of it's own too...as well as any other faction release DLC.

I) Cutscenes. Any excuse to have a one-screen cutscene and there should be one. The first time you conquer a city. The first time you lose a city. The first time you raze a city. The first time you sneeze. The first time you make a treaty. I simply love little cut aways that progress the story further!

J) Classes. A new class or two in which to level your heroes. See the Ranger mod for an example. Have some new loot and new quests, etc. 

K) Minor Factions. In GalCivII, I really loved that there was the occassional minor faction. Sometimes the faction would even join your cause. Sometimes they would join someone else's cause against you. LH could have something similar. Lone Cities that cannot produce settlers, yet that can involve themselves with diplomacy, alliances, trade, etc.  

Keep up the excellent work!

ps. sorry for the wall of text.

Imo, I wouldn't mind if the general tree were modified to be hero specific however I really love the class trees design. Wouldn't want to lose that.

Very exciting news!

For DLC, I'd go with quarterly as well, as it seems an appropriate frequency with which decently-sized DLCs can be made (Crusader Kings II has probably the most successful DLCs I've ever seen).

As for preferred DLC, I'd go with a (stamps pack), b (tactical battle maps) and f (quests are gold). However, I'm much more interested in new mechanics. Crusader Kings II kept adding new mechanics (sometimes with factions) that always made playing fresh, even if you're just playing the more familiar factions.

That said, I'd throw in a request to fix The Dead DLC. It's a great DLC in principle, though I still think its implementation is lacking. I really look forward to the day my Improved Undead mod becomes obsolete, and the undead can feel challenging/refreshing, both to play as and to play against.

But we have a dwarf race. They're called Ironeers.

Unless it is SD's intension to overwrite this faction....which I would be more than okay with. Golems are very lacking. Imo, why not have several different kinds of Golem? Stone Golem. Iron Golem. Crystal Golem. Easy and more Dynamic. You can even guess which requires iron to build and which requires crystal.

How about additional planes?

He he. Probably a red herring. Would conflict with the integrity of the unique universe. A shame though.

I would like a cut scene DLC, such as when you meet a new hero, run into a new monster, you die, a rival dies and meet another leader for the first time.  You know that sort of immersion thing?

Oh! and lesbian romance.

I would like to see DLC monthly or quarterly. Every 2 months might be really nice.

I'd love to see new Wildlands if that is possible, after that items, spells, and quests since I feel like the game can still be a bit repetitive with what you find (the more variety from one game to the next the better in my opinion, it's extremely fun to find stuff you haven't seen before). New factions would also be cool, but unless they are pretty drastically different I'd rather have more items and quests and such.