This is not a "early beta". I am not trying to be mean in any way but the entire Elemental release is the beta for FE. A lot of the stuff that is cropping up should of been nailed down over the last one and a half years since elemental was released. The only reason I have held on to elemental is because of galactic civ and how much it change from expansion to expansion.
This is my fear as well. A lot of the feedback listed on the FE Beta forums have persisted since Elemental. It *seems* as though Stardock doesn't have the desire/ability to make this game what it should be. I genuinely hope I will be proven wrong, and as others have said this is just a beta and there will be changes to the final product. I also don't want to come across as too cynical; as someone who played Elemental at launch, FE is immeasurably better already.
The problem with this is boring endgames are kinda endemic to the genre, due to the slippery slope nature of the genre.
If you do something about it, you often get blasted for clumsy "comeback mechanics". It's really a difficult design problem and a no-win situation.
I agree that in 4x games vs an AI opponent, there comes a time when you have the tedious job of 'mopping up', but in FE this point seems to happen almost at turn 1. There is no point where the AI offers me any challenge whatsoever.
Sadly, whenever I start to think about the costs of stuff in FE I get to the conclusion that there has been very little thought put into how to price things in the game. The valuation in FE seems a bit random, and in some cases, where it's easy to spot the "pricing" model, it is clearly broken (eg. the hero leveling model, at present).
An example: Why does a bear cub give an instant ticket to level 2? I need to kill about 6 Darkling Warriors or 15 Rock Spiderlings to get the same amount of xp. The risk/reward/opportunity cost model is off. The case in point is of course easy to fix, but i'm stating it as an example of a general problem.
Yup. Even worse, how come when I kill an army of 50 spearmen and 3 champions, I get 170 exp, but when I kill 1 forest drake, I get 350 exp?! The ironic thing is that with quick and fireball, I can 1 shot the huge AI army, so this relationship is accidentally pretty accurate. Monsters in general, regardless of difficulty, give WAY too much experience.
Not that I disagree ith you completely, but "materials" have been abstracted into production, which I think has been a good thing. There are still several other resources--gold, metal, horses, wargs, diplomatic capital, crystals, and mana--but with a couple of exceptions I don't know which of those would make sense to spend on a building. Also, most buildings do have a maintenance cost. It's not terribly difficult to make a city self-sufficient and give it all of the available buildings at the same time, which I understand is the problem you're really getting at.
As far as the city builder itself goes, I have gotten so used to deliberately making weirdly-shaped cities so I can "capture" resources within the city walls that I'd kind of assumed that was the objective. If it is not then I would think that an abstraction like a city that automatically grows as it levels up would be desirable.
I don't think resource capture was the design goal behind the current city building mechanics. I think it was a misguided way of 'personalizing' your cities to make up for the lack of building differentiation.
I get that 'materials' equal 'hammers' in a Civ comparison. My problem with the current city paradigm is how bland it is. In Civ, city placement on the higher difficulties (immoral and up) was one of the MOST strategically meaningful decisions you made. I would spend several minutes deciding where to put my first city, based on my desired strategy (cottage economy, production, GP, etc), and other factors like hills for defendability, rivers for their health benefits, forrests for chopping etc. Other cities were just as crucial; maintenance mechanics made spamming impossible, so you had to make very cerebral strategy decisions as to where they would be placed (resource capture, deny AI, future potential etc).
In FE, most land is unsuitable for city placement, so already most of the choice is gone. You basically just settle any land the game will let you settle, as long as its 7 squares away from another settlement. There is no strategy in this process really. Resources don't matter nearly as much, especially in the early/mid game. There is no maintenance to dissuade you from city spamming. There is no unhappiness/health to keep growth in check until appropriate civics/techs/resources are acquired. After my 2nd game, I completely stopped caring about my cities, and that made me really sad. I used to love seeing my cities on the top 5 list in Civ.
Further, there is no incentive to specialize your cities as there is in Civ. Specialization makes you invest time and thought into their micromanagement, which makes each city you build 'special', as well as providing the player with another level of meaningful strategic decisions. 'Most' buildings do NOT have a maintenance cost, and the way materials/gilder/grain is handled, it makes no sense to specialize your cities for any particular function anyways. I thought with Derek Paxton in charge of design, the mechanics of a 'deep' 4X strategy game would get some love. So far, FE is fairly shallow. Civ5 was a complete disaster for some similar reasons (resources didn't matter, silly expansion mechanics [ie global happiness], tech tree pacing was way off etc etc etc)
