So I've been trying to figure out for a while now what keeps stopping me from sitting down to play this game. At first I thought it was item randomness, and while that is part of it, the same was sort of true for master of magic.
Then I realized that the issue is that every 4x strategy game always involves exploring your landmass first, whether uncovering the overworld in shadow magic, revealing your island on civilization or exploring to your fuel cell limit in orion.
Fallen Enchantress does not have this. In fact every single game I have started placed my empire smack dab in the middle of the map. There are simply too many directions to choose from and without being able to explore due to frequently upgrading monster lairs near the staring position, it is sometimes impossible to root out a clear start and end point for an empire. Typically the first city could end up looping around behind to the last.
My suspicion is that the map script being used is 'pangaea' due to the lack of naval units, but the pangaea mapscript does not fit well when there are monster spawns capable of appearing anywhere on the map. War of Magic actually did this better. Most starting positions were at the edge of the map, or seperated from the larger land mass. In either case there was a very clear 'starting' position for the empire that you pushed outwards from.
The notion of a hostile world does not need to be hindered in any way using a map script that provides the player with a defended rear, it simply encourages the player to expand in a given direction, and puts the forces allied against the player in a clear direction. Along with the pioneer spam the start of the game is simply too chaotic to put forth any strategies.
In short, I would like to see more dynamic winding maps with players placed at the end points to converge with each other (and other hostile forces) in the middle.
