Removing tediousness is good. Look at X-Com re-imagined, they took out weapon magazines and everyone objected at first but almost everyone was happy with the change. Overall they removed a lot of tediousness from the original xcom and the game is great fun to play. You just get into the nitty gritty and have a great time.

Real life in game does not equal fun gameplay. Real life is tedious, I don't play games to experience real life

I don't like the new X-Com either. Having to manually change magazines is realistic and can be the difference between life and death sometimes. Neverending ammo is childsplay and something one would get from as I said it...GAME GENIE GOD MODE!

Making some comments as I look through the article.  Saying the weapons were replaced with ones with different abiltiies is inaccurate; the weapon abilities already vary both by type standards, and with some individual variation.

To my eye; the problem with the weapon system wasn't so much the hard to tell number; but UI flaws:  while the first number ni your armor was piercing defense; that was never explicitly said, so people didn't know what their pierce defense was.  Second; the effects of armor were never made clear within the game itself in any place I know of.  This made it hard to figure out how much armor was going to reduce yoru damage; especially with some of the weird rounding effects: since it always rounded down; a 4 damage weapon vs a 5 armor target (a common occurence if you make a 4 damage militia vs any unit that has no defense; it'll have 5 when it defends);  you do 0-1 damage in that case; the formula comes up with iirc 4/9 * 4 = 16/9; soo 8/9 to 16/9 damage; so it gets 0-1 after using the always round down system.

Until I read the armor system on the forum I had trouble figuring out how armor works; this again is a failure in the ui rather than a failure of the damage system; a clear UI with appropriate tooltips would have made this all entirely clear to all the users.  Also I concur with others points that there's a lack of armor choicse in fe that really let you itemize against certain damage types; and the weapon selectyion is a little thin due to too many of the weapon abilities being too weak. 

Hero changes sound promising; but hard to tell in practice;  having a fleshed out tree is certainly useful; the only question is whether it will allow for enough variability in gameplay to be interesting; or if things will too readily devolve into giving the same heroes the same build over and over again.

This reminds me of one of the fundamental flaws with a game called Battle Dex; an online ccg/ tactical war game.  There you hads 12 cards; and all were available from the start to play.  While it's nice having accses to all your cards; it makes the game play very similar from game to game as long as you use hte same deck.  While things may play out somewhat differently depending on map and what your opponent does; there's still a strong sense of similarity from game to game; especially as a number of cards are things that are equivalent to low-cost summons.  This means that you may use half your cards up before you even see the enemy; and having a standard open like that means there's a lot less choicse to be made. 

I think there will be enough variability with found items or game considerations changing what you do; or just having enough heroes, but it's something to keep an eye on.  Another example is Vow of Poverty in d&d 3.5; which gives mad bonuses but means you can't use any magic items, and barely any mundane ones.  While it's effective; sometimes people remark on it being boring as you know EXACTLY what your char is gonna look like as they level up

Other stuff sounds promising, as long as its' well balanced, which should be rather feasible.  Will weapon abilities change in the base game to match the new system at all, or receive other changes to fix the current balance issues with them?

Yeah, it's one thing to say "people never worried about the damage types".  But it's quite another thing to say "they didn't worry about the damage types because the UI wasn't clear and the way damage worked in the game wasn't explained well".

is it only me, but I love the idea of prestige in game/influence) to use to gouge and persuade AIs....

Don't they mean the prestige for working out how fast all your cities grow?  ie.  Prestige/No. of cities = Growth of each city (unless no more food for that city).  I'm pretty sure that's what they mean, and influence is still in.  But I could be wrong, you never know.

I believe that Kael said that both Prestige and Influence were going in LH.  That's a real shame in my view because I think both of these are great concepts.    

You cry about about weapon choice and then mention xcom: classic?  The game where for 80% of it you use nothing BUT laser rifles if you have your head screwed on straight?  You know... the weapon with the best LR accy, no ammo and a nice fast snap.  Plasma were for selling.  You might have a blaster bomb, or maybe an explosive... overall in that game ammo management was a laughably tedious "awake check" aka were you awake enough to reload everyone up to max before every mission.

Also... in classic fantasy decapitation and sunlight were far better than a stake or a silver bullet.

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Anyway, moving away from that, I like the Unrest thing for more cities, but I will miss prestige and influence, but I can see that making things more gold based will lower city and rushprod spamming.  If it is set up right it will be  much more interesting balancing act between few and many cities with the new foody things.

No I did NOT mention X-Com (CLASSIC) I just said I don't like X-Com and there are MANY versions of X-Com and I was referring to the latest one. If you had any sense you would have realized that. So, don't bring up anything else about what I say unless YOU have the FACTS straight....thank you very much

Also in classic fantasy you didn't always have the sunlight at the flick of a finger like a lightswitch and decapitation was rare. Wooden Stakes and Silver Bullers are the most common destructive methods of lore. Read some books , watch some movies get with the program. Oh and not this modern day love story crap where vampires mate with werewolves....how ridiculous.

I'd like to see him retained for GalCiv3.  I think there's some good lore in that game (better than Elemental for the most part), but it would benefit from some further imagining.