General Feedback & Improvement Suggestions

from Elemental Forums

Hi ppl & Stardock,

After some hours of testing the game I came up with a list of stuff that I noticed. So I wrote it down while playing to give some feedback.

Here we go:

 

-Add an "END TURN SOUND" when pressing turn, clearly marking when new turn begins (sometimes you already click around in the new turn and then an event from the new turn pops up kinda lagging behind the new turn)  - there is no clear perception of when the new turn starts exactly.

-When moving units, sometimes the camaera jumps to the next unit after you used your last movement point, sometimes it doesnt. Make it consistent,

-Add more dominant messages when new stuff was finished building this turn the icons to the top right are to small and dont catch the eye. You dont recognize them on a 16:9, especially not perceiving them as turn summary icons. Make em flash or inmplement a "turn sumamry report" into the game, which can be disabled in the options

-Add to news whats next in queue of town so player knows if he needs to change queue or not. if queue is empty show: not building anything so player knows that queue is empty

-Spellbook: put the "next spell to learn queue" somewhere more seperated to the rest, where its always visible and not leaving sight when you turn a page.

-Spellbook: Make the "turn the page button" more prominent and give it a bigger hitbox

-Spellbook: sperate different types of spell (strategic / tactical) more prominent (colors?) and add option to toggle between the two instead of putting them all in one list

-Battle: Add dialog box to "auto resolve battle" asking "Are you sure to auto resolve: YES/NO"

-UI: open "Study Spell" Dialog when clicking on bottom left progress bar

-UI: open "Research Technology" when clicking on bottom right progress bar

-add 'N' to shortcuts to cycle through units additonally to tab (its standard in old civ and mom, so ppl might be used to it)

-add "customize keys" tab to options

-Diplomacy screen: power rating is shwon for other factions but players power rating is not shown, so player can not satisfy his instant need to compare his strength to the other faction

-Put minimap on bottom left where it belongs ;)

-Add towns to minimap

-Do somethign about warfare technology being a no-brainer: You just need to grind warfare with Prio 1! For examlpe: MoM had some more diversity by having the different paths interlinked. You needed temples for healers, needed stables for cavalry etc. not just one path. In Elemental you start out with junk and the only way to be competitive is to skill warfare with prio 1.

-Put current pop/max population more prominent into town UI, not just in a tooltip that cannot be triggered in so many occasions (like nit being able to see it when inside the build menu, where one actually need to decide whether to build a new hut or not). Just put it into the main town UI-> Pop : actual/max

-Research technology screen: having the button "completed" next to "done" on the bottom right is confusing. "Done" accepts the current selection but "completed" toggles to another view mode which is usually select via the left side. That button "completed" should be moved somewhere else, to better fit into context

-Remove the neccessity to press SHIFT to select more than one unit in a town. just toggle selection on/off via one click, without shift.

-Make it more easy to see the faction of units on the map. Maybe allowing them to be colored by faction would also help. I find it hard to intuitively see what unit belongs to what player. I have to use mouseover function, which is cumbersome.

-Do not elimate remaining MP for units that enter a field where another unit with 0 MP is.

 

Bugs I encountered:

-Town names in the 3d world were different from town names in the town UI and on the cloth map. No repro so far. See screenshot:

 

-One crash, but I dont see any crash logs. Are there any?

7,630 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

Some more stuff:

-When using "Imbue Champion" on a tile that has several possible targets, it should ask you what character you want to cast on!

-Ordering a unit to move should first draw the movement path and a second click should activate the movement, so you always know what your unit is going to do. I often had them take routes I dont wanted them to take, but didnt see it before it was too late. Age Of Wonders did it well I believe.

-Alert the player when population in a town is maxed and new huts need to be build.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Tiny buttons, oh the lovely tiny buttons...

-Put minimap on bottom left where it belongs
End of quote

you can move some of the display windows around...

Offworld Trading Company
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

couple more...

+ Ability to cycle through all towns , not just the idle ones.  (The Pgup/Pgdn only cycles through some not all... not sure if that is a bug or not)

+ Ability to choose which unit is the LEADER of a stack.  (you'd think that is one of the benefits of being a sov/king)

+ Make weapon techs improve upon existing items.   (ie, a warhammer higher tech weapon, should not be worse than a Mace, lower tech weapon)  

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

-When a town is selected at the edge of the screen and the construction menu is open, you can deselect the town by left clicking somewhere on the map. However, the screen then jumps to the city which is pointless, as the player just deselected the city to do something else.

-A town list aka Master Of Orion would be a big help organizing your empire.

-Always put exclamation marks on the ressources around your towns (toggle in options?). Raiders kill your stuff and its so annoying to find it again.

-The icons (material / gold / especially food) are not very good. On 1920x1080 they are so small and hardly understandable.

-Camera Controls when pressing middle mouse button are inverted on X axis but not on Y. That means one axis moves the camera, the other axis moves the viewpoint. It should be either both axis move the cam or both axis move the viewpoint.

-Archery seems a bit overpowered. Maybe units in the line of fire could be occasionally hit instead, or the damage is reduce the further the target is away. ATM archery + magic are totally outgunning melee armies.

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

-Why are caravans cycled through with tab? Dont you use tab to cycle through your ACTIVE units? Auto-caraverns are not of interest when you want to cycle through units.