I've only had an hour or two to play so far, and just wanted to give some first impressions on the beta (0.86). Right off the bat, the UI looks terrific. It really gives a great first first impression. The tutorial videos that work are informative, including a couple tips that could be overlooked by someone coming from War of Magic.

I started with Ceresa, who was a favorite of mine from War of Magic. I see from here that Frogboy considers Ceresa to be True Neutral, well not the way I play! The first thing I did was spot an NPC, recruit her, and immediately turned around and stole her spirit. This did not work out the way Ceresa expected; the chump-ion died, but Ceresa got no new spell ranks out of the exchange. After poking around the forums a big, I read a post claiming this spell doesn't add ranks to your known spellbooks, but only adds an unknown spell book. I think this could be described a bit better in the description, as I was planning on making that spell a staple.

Actually, I had a couple "plans" for Ceresa that didn't work out. The other was to make her a stay-at-home-mom and govern the city with her poor constitution. Then I discovered that there was no productivity or growth benefit to having her sit there. That's one game-play element I'll miss, I liked having the trade-off between helping grow a city and butt-kicking for evilness.

The level-up benefits range from meh to very very nice. Her first level up choice amounted to a minor stat increases, second was a new spell book and third was a choice between a huge boost to spellcasting or to +1 to the empire's prestige. Ceresa was positively giddy at the choice between having flocks of fools rally to the wraith banner, and being able to blast holes in even more daunting enemies.

About the first city: Ceresa started adjacent to a dark shard, and near a crystal resource and a mine. A little exploring revealed a shard of every color but life within a 10 tile radius. I thought this was a nice setup, considering I had not changed the default resource level from sparse.

I made a couple mistakes with the first city that cost me quite a bit in early game productivity. The first was to build the city on the starting square, adjacent to a dark shard. "sirmathmansir," I said to myself, "there's no way that that weird design choice (where developing a resource adjacent to the city will add it to the build queue, whereas developing a resource away from the city will not chew up your precious city turns) will still be a problem in Fallen Enchantress." I said, "obviously developing a resource will either chew up turns in both cases, or in neither case." Le sigh.

The city level-up benefits are interesting, but the balance is questionable. For example, a choice between the gallows which reduces unrest by 10% and whatever the option was to increase productivity by 10%. It seems to me that a side-effect of reducing unrest by 10% would improve productivity by 10%, and you'd also get the other benefits of lower unrest. Maybe in later game, it is easier to reduce unrest to 0%, eliminating the value of the gallows? Speaking of unrest, it is a nice complexity addition to the economy. I like complexity in a TBS, so long as the reports are there to make sense of where the numbers are coming from.

The second city mistake I'm not certain was a mistake, as it seems I might finally be capitalizing on the increased capital and production of this choice nearly 60 turns later. It was to lead with building a Tower of Dominion (the shard development kicked in after this). While this certainly helped the long term growth of the city, in the short term it ate up precious turns that could have been spent building pioneers for outposts and cities. Even though I was on a medium sized map with five rival factions, it seemed that three of them were starting to encroach me within the first 30-40 turns with outposts and cities of their own, and they seemed to be doing a little better than me, even though I started the game on normal difficulty.

Gilden was the nearest and most aggressive, so I went after their nearest two cities starting around turn 50. The first city was guarded by a level 7 spell-casting champion (how did he get such a champion already?). Ceresa was level 3 at the time, and just had her trusty mutt with her, but decided to attack on enemy territory anyway.

Let me just stop here to talk about spells for a moment. The spells so far are great!. Even level one spells feel powerful when you can apply a debuff every enemy on the field. I played a lot with the wither spell, and I like the balance of the spell. It is powerful enough that a debuff is not a waste of time relative to an attack while not weakening an enemy to the point they can't fight back. Furthermore, I predict the usefulness of the spell to wane as higher level opponents, better spells, and larger mana reserves become prevalent, which it should being a low level spell. However, although I haven't played the other factions yet, so I can't really compare, I suspect the +2 summon level might be a little bit game breaking for Ceresa. Her shadow puppy is quite strong. I guess I'll have to see how it holds up at later levels.

Back to the fight, Ceresa had just enough mana for a couple 1st level debuffs: blindness (which didn't seem to have much effect in this battle) and wither, and could only deal about 2-3 damage per turn. So shadow Rover had to do the heavy lifting. Ceresa didn't even get to soak any damage, probably because the AI deemed her puppy to be the greater threat. The opponent on the other hand cast haste and a ranged damage spell to soften Rex up. Nevertheless, Ceresa's shadow retriever played fetch with the champian's entrails, in spite of the level difference and haste. 

Now here's the problem with Gildar's AI city expansion... both cities I captured had a monster spawn on their borders, with a Medium enemy on one and a  Strong enemy on the other. My combined military might at this point might be able to take a Medium group, if they were at the weedier end of the Medium scale and I had a good stockpile of mana. I had to Raze the cities, just so I wasn't the one to piss them off (and so I could place those cities more sensibly with a new pioneer).

Gildar's third city was their home city, and I was just entering their borders to take them out, when I carelessly ended my movement next to a medium rated group of Crag Spawn. They attacked me in enemy territory... Ceresa died... but she went right back to her home city. I'm now wondering how you take out enemy sov's. Do you have to defeat all their cities and then attack them? Seems annoying, since they'll just keep founding new cities and running away. At least in WoM if the sov abandoned their last city just before you conquered it, you still had the opportunity to charge right through and kill them on your new territory.

At this point it was time to stop playing.

Here are some problems I faced, I'm sure most/all of these have already been reported, but I don't want to do the research right now:

• Guard and Explore buttons didn't seem to do anything, except eat movement points in Guard's case. I don't think guard should be a one-turn deal, that's   what Pass is for.
• One of my units had a 7 base weapon attack, and a -1.5 strength "bonus". In the mouseover popup, it tallied the total as being a 6 attack. In the stats list, it was a 5. However, I can't seem to replicate this problem now.
• Another unit has a territory "penalty" of 25%, however instead of penalizing their attack, it added 25% to their attack. A territory "bonus" acts as expected.
• A single crash while loading a game. Was too lazy to get the required logs.
• I'm certain there was something else, but can't think of it now. Another time, maybe.

-sirmathmansir