haha thanks. Yeah I grew up playing this game so I'm slightly obsessed with it lol.
Most fans I've talked to on other forums so far appear to be mostly wanting MoM with a fresh coat of paint and don't want the wheel reinvented. Some have made some crazy suggestions but generally everything people come up with has already been done in one of the MoM style spin off games (eg Age of Wonders, Warlock, Endless Legend, Sorcerer/Elemental/FE, Worlds of Magic/PQ, Eador, Dominions etc) so such a change would make it feel more like them than a MoM sequel. So they need to update it but also be careful that they don't turn it into something else that has already been done and quite possibly done better.
A few people have joined up and posted their lack of faith in the Slitherine forums under their announcement and they were shot down pretty quick by fans of Slitherines other games, so their customer loyalty is a promising sign at least.
I've never played Fantasy General but apparently they're doing a pretty good job with it. I looked at some of the other games under their name and found some interesting ones..
Polaris appears to be a Master of Orion style game:
Polaris Sector on Steam
Pandora appears to be a Alpha Centuari, Civ Beyond Earth / AoW Planetfall sort of game:
Pandora: First Contact on Steam
They don't rate highly on steam but they look okay and many of the reviews (even the bad ones) all seem to talk about how hardcore the AI is so that's promising. Yeah they don't look like amazing genre changing games but they actually give me some comfort as it shows they have years of experience with 4x PC strategy gaming. Hopefully they take the good stuff from these stepping stone games and learn from the bad stuff people didn't like and put them to good use with their MoM project. Although it looks like different developers worked on those games and Slitherine just published them, so I wonder who they will put on MoM.
PS is it just me or is Pandora using the same world engine as Warlock? That is so darn similar lol.