If you have 10 or more cities, having a squad escort a caravan, which you can do already by the way, gets bloody expensive. At least the road stays, or at least, I think it does.

Quests pop mostly around your cities but not exclusively by any means, resources pop in your ZOC and that is a pain the butt because you normally have to research the first item in that tech when you've only found a couple of cities.

Monsters should not be able to spawn in non foggy areas. I was running an army along this morning and during the end of turn phase there was this little light two squares away and pop, a bunch of high level trolls...what's the use of the scout's cloak if monsters can just spawn right on top of you?

The spawn is much too aggressive, I liked that in the early game in civ because you could level your troops, and I like it here as well, but once you've got your empire set up only Events should cause a lot of monsters to spawn in areas that are technically under your control. I don't mean those little events Jarusk comes up with, because how does someone invading a dungeon way away from my empire (since I have cleared everything in my space), cause a bunch of monsters spawn around my cities?

The end of all strategy games is pretty dull, once you get over a certain hurdle, you've won. You know it, the AI remains oblivious and it becomes a plodding micro management nightmare. I wish AIs were better about surrendering. It's been a long long time since I bothered finishing a gal civ game, or a civilization game or any 4x game that wasn't played on a small map.

Well, in MoO2 I think you could destroy planets entirely. With the healing spells in this game and the nice mana regen you can get later in the game I will admit I just carry a team right through the enemy destroying everything, you don't need a tp point if you never go back to town. It's one of the big reasons I train mages so aggressively in the early part of the game, getting them to lvls 8-10 with nice levels of mana, because my sovereign will eventually leave my territory for war and likely not return for any reason.

To be fair, in this game you can play different victory scenarios that don't require that end game messiness. What I am not fond of so far, in addition to tactical combat magic issues, is the fact that negotiating with the AI for treaties is...pointless? I am typically way ahead in tech, way ahead in every department and their tech pact has a way higher value than mine? What?

I could see deployable installations like the perm level 1 cities of the subraces.. with enhanced defenses or other bonuses, that didn't grow like cities but reather had a ZoC based on the attack strength of the forc3es stationed there or some such.. Or have some modified population potential so they could train there and expand at least one or two spaces from the initial location.. That way you could go and grab resources, control strategic choke points, with9out having to really invest in its growth.

I echo the sentiments of you guys regarding the late-game micromanagement and it's tediousness (as with most 4X games). Nevertheless, after I get to a certain point in 4x games, I find that my brain basically goes on autopilot and i don't really think about what I'm doing, I just keep playing for ONE... MORE... TURN... until I happen to randomly complete an end-game goal. It's like with CIV and MOO and all the iterations. I haven't played enough EWOM to finish yet, but once the game starts lagging and music and SFX starts disappearing, I go cloth map only to speed things up while turning into a zombiegamer until the game crashes... then I go to sleep 3 hours later than I should have...

But as mentioned, most 4x is tedius almost by nature as it just feels like glorified spreadsheet/accounting, number crunching, but with pretty graphics... the late game just becomes a blur to me and if i ever finish a game, I get treated with a cutscene of joy, and then it's over..... and then i wonder why i spent the last x hours playing instead of doing something more productive... that "YES!" fistpumping factor is not there for most 4x games at the end... I know this isn't an RPG per se but maybe a more RPG-like epic "yeah it was worth it" ending instead of leaving it to our own imaginations... not sure if this makes sense, lol.

I know part of the reason tedium sets in for me is the way I play 4x games. I'm a pacifist wuss, I try to avoid war whenever possible, even if the game has "war" in the title, lol. So I always try the diplomatic route and focus more on killing wandering creatures etc, and also making friends, even if it means giving up a pile of gold. I almost never initate a war with anyone. Maybe I need to be more daring.

Another late game thing for me, anyways: I like the quests in the game, but I find that the number of variety of quests is sorely lacking, especially late game. I think I've come across the same quests in random order each game (silver flute, 3 crystals, the ring of seeing, potion search, and free horse and maybe some others i forget - but there seems to very few quests)... if i have the time to learn to mod this game i'm going to try to create some quests... I play lots of RPGs and I like to think I've made up decent quests before for other games (e.g. NWN) so maybe I can help reduce some late-game tedium with some SUDDEN PLOT TWISTS (TM)...

I know the guys are working on perpetual patches which is kind of good... hopefully the late game tedium gets resolved in creative ways, too...

Part of the problem is that if you don't cover everything with cities to spread your influence, there are hundreds of monsters spawning and attacking the ones you have.  Influence stops 95% of the spawn points for monsters.

The OP is obviously not an EMPIRE BUILDER type. All games that are Empire builders run into this mid/end game routine with lots of units to deal with and lots of cities to deal with and lots of ai units to deal with and just LOTS OF THINGS TO DEAL WITH.

Go play candlyland if you can't handle it pal. It's the way of Empire Building. Even the simpliest Empire builder out there "Empire Deluxe" is like this.

Plus I don't get any slow downs on my computer playing into 300-400+ turns. So you might have a high end computer but it's not optimized and you probably have a virus you don't even know about. Get you a program called Malwarebytes and run it as it's one of the best for finding hidden trojans your high class anti-virus software never does.

Look kids, it's captain fanboy! No feedback other then "this is the bestest game evar!" is welcome when he's awake.

The memory leak is a confirmed problem by the devs, and something being worked on. Saying you don't have it means absolutely nothing.

Look kids it's Capt Troll who always adds nothing to a thread when he posts but trollish remarks about someone else. Haven't the moderators already told you about this once? Why do you persist are you trying to get banned? Also memory leak confirmed or not those that don't have it obviously show meaning for something. Their systems work and yours doesn't hahahahaha So, quit trolling Tridus I'm watching you.

Other than the framerate slowdown after hundreds of turns (though I haven't had it show up yet at 568 turns this game), I have so far found late-game pretty manageable. In my current game I only founded 6 cities, but two of those were to control an area of intense monster spawning - though I should have just formed an Accursed Valley (raise mountains around it) from the beginning. Would have been a nice wildlife preserve I haven't built a pioneer in like 300 turns.

The rest of my 19 cities were captured during battle, and other than making sure they weren't squandering resources and garrisoning them, I ignore them unless I need to build up an army.

In 1.05 the spawns don't seem to be so out of line (1.01 had crazy powerful mobs with power ratings of like 8000 for me) and I find them a handy source of gold, but if you're getting swamped by mobs you could turn the World difficulty level down a notch and keep the AI at normal.

You can also just leave cities alone and keep them as outposts. There's no mechanic that penalizes you for leaving outputs undeveloped - just our sense of "But it could be improved!" . Only thing you might need to do is garrison a strong unit or two (preferably something ranged and something melee) and, if something too big pops up teleport your sov + army over and wipe it out. Or if you've got channeler children, that's a perfect duty for a 2nd or 3rd army to level them and your troops.

What speed are you playing at?

have you considered Epic which will slow the "fun" things down so that more interesting things are happening later on?

In a pre-release interview Brad said that he found this cumbersome in 4X games as well, and to prevent this in Elemental, the game would let you build on resource tiles that are not actually in the city itself but in the ZOC and to make those resources global instead of local. This sounded like a good idea to me. But now, it seems this isn't really a solution. In practice you want to secure important resources as quickly as possible by building a city close to it. This way, you still end up with a lot of cities to manage (although there isn't actually that much to manage).

Some thoughts to make this less annoying:

- having an auto option where you could set the specialization of the city: an arcane knowledge city would then automatically build new arcane buildings when available through research. Same for farming improvements, mining improvements, etc.. 'Multiple specialization' would have to be possible too.

- having a message telling you when a city is completely in the ZoC of your other cities (so you could raze them without any negative effect on your ZoC) AND at the same time giving you a nice incentive for razing this, maybe giving a random, powerfull weapon or spell to the player that is 'found' while plundering and razing. To prevent 'milking' this game mechanic for the loot, the city should at least be level 3.

Um, right. There is obviously a strong difference of opinion between Tridus and RossAnderson48. Opposite end of the spectrum as it were. But even so you have to admit RossAnderson48 telling the OP to "Go play candlyland if you can't handle it pal" was pretty poor behaviour. Tridus probably shouldn't have pulled out the Captain Fanboy comment but some reply was deserved.

No, there's a book you have to get from a Quest. It's either a L2 or L3 Quest for "Moraih's Spellbook", it adds a moderately high level set of spells that allow you to create mountains.