Elemental War of Magic

This is the game that I've been waiting to arrive since the late 80's. One of my favorite games of all time is Master of Magic, with very good reason. It's full of strategy, allows random worlds to be created so each game is different, and with some careful consideration a person is allowed to completely dominate the opposing empires in the world. All in all, and excellent game!
Now it's needed a revamp for years, and not for the obvious reasons. Usually when a game requires an update it's because the graphics haven't aged well and on faster systems can be an ugly grind to play. Not so with Master of Magic. The graphics are rough, no question. But the concept and execution of the game is done so well that high end graphics aren't needed.
But stability is, and MoM hasn't aged well because of it. When it was released back in the 80s it was one of the last great games of the DOS era. It could be played on Win '95 with a few tweeks and an understanding computer. But even then it was a roll of the dice whether the game would work as well as it should. When Windows upgraded, the chances of having a good MoM session dropped dramatically.
Now there has been lots of interest in remaking the classic title, but nothing has come through completely. Home-brew projects never really came to completion although a few looked very promising. Age of Wonders got close, but was bogged down by micromanagement and lack of a random-world generator.
OK, let me justify that last statement. AoW DOES have a random world generator, but it misses the mark. You see, they tried to get too good with the graphics. So instead of having one 'tile' indicate a mountain and another tile represent plains, they had tiles that went: plaines, steppes, hills, mountains, peaks and finally volcanoes. Yeah, thats good and everything, but if you can only build on plains then your options for laying out your empire were limited. The maps were beautiful, but you were shoehorned into only building a certain way.
Warlords V was a good effort as well, but was less focused on empire building than combat. Not a bad thing, but not as satisfying. When Warlords looked like it was on the cusp of making a worthy successor to MoM, they decided to take the RTS route like every other publisher in the business. Yeah, not cool.
But then out of the blue is Elemental: War of Magic. This game looks fantastic and has captured the same spirit and wonder that was embodied in every aspect of MoM. True, it's billed as the "Not Master of Magic" game, but take one look and you'll see it's influence on every screen. Elemental has added some wonderful features, but appears to avoid tampering with what worked in the original title. This is something that every other remake has failed to take into account. Yes, you can make MoM a RTS game, or even FPS, but at the end of the day you've lost what made MoM so great in the first place!
Elemental avoids the pitfall, and has me salavating waiting for it's launch date to finally arrive!