1.09p - Post your impressions and bugs here

I've been unable to play any of the betas!  They always freeze in the screen after you choose opponents and where (in previous non-beta versions) it was generating the gameworld; it never (well almost never -- see below) gets to the map where I can start to play (never means 2 to 5 minutes, when I run out of patience).  Am I just not waiting long enough?  I end up killing the game with Task Manager (which says it has 0 percent cpu usage).  I am connected to the internet when I try to play.

The system: Vista 64 bit, 2x ATI radeon 4850 video cards, 8 G RAM.  It played fine before the beta patches started coming out.

Also, I've noticed that the text that pops up when the mouse hovers over things on the setup screens has disappeared.  I used to be able to hover the mouse over a trait for the faction leader or the faction and get a popup window that explained what it was -- that no longer happens (it was nice). 

When I first started the game (all prior betas), it used to show the splash screen, then go all black with just the feather cursor, then would freeze there until I clicked escape, at which time the menu for how to begin the game would pop up.  I fixed that (first tried this with 1.09p) by going into options and turning off the use mods checkbox (even though before I got the patch I emptied the files from the mods folders, but left the folders intact).  The next time I restarted it showed the splash screen, showed the stardock logo, then showed the start game menu, and I was able to generate and play the game (it even started!).  Unfortunately, I had to quit playing right away then; every later time I tried to run (with the use mods off) it shows the splash screen, then goes straight to the startup menus (no stardock logo), then hangs after choosing the opponents.

RedShirt - Speaking of hijacking threads, perhaps you should post this in the support forum.

Impressions are fine in a single thread, but bug reports are actually better off in single posts in the support forum.

At least that's my opinion.

version 1.09p

2 games, Medium Map, Max Factions, Played as a Custom Empire/Custum Leader

 So far been testing out the Hero~Zerg strategy for starting games.

   Both games were played on normal & hard. My empire dramatically outstrips the AI players in terms of Faction Power rating without ever building a single Unit. By turn 20-50 having 15+ heros and 1,ooo+ gilder & 500+ surplus ore was easilly acomplished. Generating gilder, tech & lore due to recruited Hero abilities kept maintenance costs at nearly nil for those 50 turns. Earning 20+gilder per turn this way seemed easy to do in both games. The AI response was better than previous versions, especially for defending the capital. However, diplomatic AI is still severly lacking. It is still possible to Declare war on a faction numerous times within a single turn. And doing this via Diplomacy for Gilder & Resources again dramatically increases your Empires/Kingdoms treasury (* see crash note #1).

   I see a faction agreeing to that Peace treaty multiple times in a turn or even over the span of several turns as an exploitable feature of diplomacy. But it sure feels godly when your that powerfull that early in the game; >','<

   Also note that it is still possible to buy items from a rival faction shops without agreeing to a NonAgressionPact. Simply move your Hero unit adjacent to said rival faction & wait for the area of influence to overtake the square your they are in. Then buy everything you need & leave or camp that hero & trade those items to another hero 1 square away for transport to your main host.

Crash notes & other Bugs during those 2 previous games:

1; Save Game Killing Crash after declaring war on 1 faction 9 times in 1 turn for gilder & resource rewards from 9 factions. Crash persistant on End Turn even after successful save game after 9 diplomatic Was Declarations. Save Game crash avoided by simply spacing out the war declartions over 2 turns. This exploit was repeatable every turn afterwords as well. With very few corrupt games metioned above. Seemed it was simply 'luck' that determines if the save game killing crash occurs.

2; Game crash after Capturing an enemy capitol while the hero of said city was 1 square outside the factions zone of influence & wedged between another factions zone of influence.

3; Strange resource spawn bug, saw 11 Darkling Camps spawn near the Kraxis faction in the 2nd game over the span of 9 turns while looting that factions Goodies Huts. Only played that game till turn 56, no crashes yet in that one, but I'm guessing having that many camps may have led to a game crash in late game play. Will play a later game on max dificulty to late game stage and see if it happens again.

4; Strange Goodies Hut spawns. In both games those wandering hero's of mine found patches of Goodies Huts tightly packed. 10+ in both areas. all level 1-3. loot was phenominal but felt strange to find and loot.

5; Recruited Hero disapeared from map & from the hero bar on the left between End Turn click & start of next turn. Reloading from the previous turns auto save restored the missing hero. This happened on 2 occasions after completing a low level quest with a recruited hero.

6; Recruited Hero is selected & attempts to move itself out of Sovereign stack while inside a factions zone of influence. Note, during this bug the faction was not hostile at the start of the move, the move itself was a hostile act. Doing this made the hero attempting to move disapear from game. Reloading turns auto save restored the hero. Moving the whole stack causing war made that same stack bounce 1 tile away from the target. it did not bounce the stack out of the Zone of influence.

General Impressions on version 1.09p

   Overall:   thumbs up for this patch/version

   Alot of changes if your jumping straight from 1.09e like I did. Felt a little strange getting used to all the changes. However I must add my opinion that it has been a major improvement to E.WoM since so far I've only expereinced those 2 crashes in 2 games over many hours of game play. And 1 of those crashes was due to my test to see if the AI was changed regarding the above diplomacy exploit.

   Magic had been dramtically altered. At 1st this change did not sit well with me. But in hindsight for potential multiplayer battles I now think its a very good thing. In version 1.09e it was very easy to create 8 or more Imbued Heros all of whom could have upwards to 50+ mana. My fear was that it would be a trivial thing to assinate enemy Player soveriegns with mages. Now it won't be that easy to do the same. Just takes some getting used to. As for low level attack spells, researching lvl 2 spells and Mind Thrust seems to not take all that long and with 20+ Int it does some good damage early on in the game. Duh, and its all prettier.. hehe.

   The creature spawn is also a nice touch. So far my 3rd game on rediculase has seen my soveriegn killed numerous times & my single city empire wiped from creation by those roaming beasts. LOL... about time I got a little worried about them. I'll be trying that dificulty setting again tonight. Want to see if the hero~zerg works in that mode as well.

    All in all, Stardock has not disapointed me in regards to its continuing efforts to make this game better & more enjoyable to play. So eager for multiplayer to get all its kinks worked out. Hmmn, multiplayer, drooool.

   Have fun everyone.^^

Played two games to mid-game and have just started a third.  Have settled in to play towards the end game.  Am enjoying the increased AI challenge!  It now feels like I am playing against potentially dangerous opponents rather than playing a fantasy sims builder.  I've enjoyed my time with 1.09e; but the 1.09o+ versions are really getting fun!

I'm playing on a rig which has an integrated graphics card.  I am well under the required specs yet suffer only the occasional crash and hang.  I play on the cloth map only, and I still can't play all the tactical battles, but I can play some!  For the nearing future, I'd hope that animations can be turned off for tactical battles so the full game might be available on underpowered rigs.

Great improvement over all, still some bugs though:

* Sometimes a unit who is killed in a fight is still alive when your back on the main map.

* Load game from within game crashes the game one time out of three (Sort of)

* Demon gate crashes the game

Just finished a very long game. It's amazing how much the game has improved compared to 1.09e. It's so much more fun to play. Today, for the first time in a very long while, I felt truly excited about the future of this game.

That said, obviously, there are still a lot of things that need improving (crashing mainly, imho). Still, 1.1 will be the patch that takes this game from mediocre to lots of fun.

Comments:
-Sometimes you end up with no source of metal for a very long time. It's not very fun, to be honest. The Naturalist sovereign talent is sort of mandatory, if you want to go Conquest for middle->end game.
-LOVE the small changes to tactical combat. A HUGE improvement through just a "little polish". The new unit stats and accuracy rolls and so on make a lot of sense and already feel balanced.
-I still feel that population isn't a real cap on the amount of buildings you can have. Before you get even close to population cap, you'll run out of gildar paying upkeep for those buildings. If a building costs 5 "used citizen" and takes 2 gildar, it doesn't take a math genius to figure out that you'll never get to the population cap, since you need 20 citizens to produce those 2 gildar through taxes.
-The AI is a lot better, but still letting the game down. Late-game I just roll any army with my groups and parties, while the AI is still using single units.
-The game is a lot more about WAR in 1.09p than it was before. You're literally drowning in gildar and materials. This is positive, but it puts more strains on other tech trees to perform. I feel in particular the MAGIC tree is nearly useless. This is because Arcane Knowledge is so easy to come by now, you don't need any special building to get that.

Regarding the build queue, I think we need "trade goods" and "housing" ala Master of Magic. Trade goods could boost gold income in the city by a simple percentage, and "housing" (or call it something more like "Development") would boost the city's prestige by +1 while it is enabled. This would go a long ways to help out in those times when we can't afford to put anything in the build queue (or can't/don't want to for whatever reason), and open up a lot more strategies in empire development--wouldn't have to see the build notification screen all the time, either.

Give an option to default to one of these when the build queue is empty, that way the notification doesn't keep popping up.

This would really add the missing element to the build queue.

Game is full of crash. Put it on large map with full AI opponents and it will crash all kinds of bad. I dunno, I sure hope this gets ironed out soon, I have had this game like 3 months and it still is not really playable. Even pre Beta in it's Beta release state after the official Beta it still would crash. Those same crashes are happening but now there are even more because of more beta features.

There are some underlying things happening that are good, but honestly until you get this game stable it does not matter what you do. Fix the crashing, it should be priority number one.

One issue I noticed is that in tactical combat, if you have an opponent exactly two square away from one of your units/heroes and click directly on them to attack, the unit will move into the adjacent square and attack for a total of 1 action point. The AI appears to still have to spend 2 action points to move into the square and then another to initiate the attack. This gives the player a major advantage if they position effectively, and is rather broken in conjunction with the Dominate ability.

The difficulty of the game just shot up about 50% because of the monsters. They're making it tough to even get your second city started. If they were semi-opportunists before, they're fucking ninjas now. As I've said elsewhere, that's gotta change.

This build seems like it's full of more minor bugs, but fewer critical ones. Certain buttons becoming non-functional if you were interrupted by pop up messages, the cwazy amount of quest spawns, units that were killed in combat being able to finish their turn before they're removed from the map...

Yeah. I'm trying to play it, but I've been shut down twice now by psycho monster spawns appearing out of the fog of war and just making a beeline for my main city. It's rough.

I've had a few games were there have literally been no monsters on the map at all. Plenty of adventurers to recruit and the AI were building their empires up, but no wandering critters to fight in all my explorations.

   Been playing that Rediculous Large map with max factions; finally got that 1st city established securely so I can send my heros searching to recruit more & to plunder rival faction Goodies Huts. When my slum upgraded to the next city level I selected Random Unit Spawn and was surprised by recieving 5 units of spiders. Getting them let me surive the insane ongoing roaming monster spawn I've had in this game since turn 2. I can allready tell that rushing out with heros on this setting is a rough ride & won't be anywhere as rewarding early on compared to the previous 2 games. But it sure is a hell of alot of fun desperately taking those mobs down before they link up into larger groups.

   So far 1 crash on this large map as one of my wandering heros was surrounded suddenly out of the mists by 5 single roaming monsters. Also saw that the monsters go out of their way to hunt down and Kill any wandering hero looking to be hired. Gotta be fast to hire them before they are ravaged into gristle & bits.

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 I like that concept of alternate options for Idle cities. Along this line of thinking perhaps having an option to send out a portion of your population to search the surrounding area for random needed resources for builds with a chance of losing all those slaves/citizens. Or maybe a sacrificial altar where you could trade blood & souls for those resources... (evil is what i play.^^)

I just won a game with a spell of making victory.  A medium size map with almost full factions. For obvious reason I went diplo tech. Gotta say that it's quite possible to kill people by influence pushing now. Just build townhalls, missionaries, palaces, etc. Several of my opponents border cities were completely surrounded and cut off. I managed to get the necessary shards just because my influence enveloped every freestanding shard on my half of the map, and resources too. I don't however think this is overpowered. I put alot of tech and money into influence spreading, it's just that right now AI's don't counter this strategy at all.

So Frogboy if your looking for was to improve the Ai it would probably be a good idea to make  them react to players influence pushing and push back or attack you.

I definitely want to see more options for the bad guys to get quick power boosts of various sorts through sacrifice as well as desecration of the earth. Maybe have a tech that boosts building rate and resource gain in exchange for population decrease+prestige decrease.

Only the empire should have access to the spell that desecrates the land, and it should in turn give the player mana (sucking the mana from the ground, leaving a waste behind).

Only the kingdoms should have the revive land spell, which should create more vibrant land that generates mana (maybe .01 pts per tile) so as you revive the land under your control using this spell, the land's abundance of life becomes a slow yet reliable source of mana.

The shards need to be a lot rarer but more powerful, making them strategically much more important. I shouldn't be able to get 5+ shards so easily. As the number of spells increases and the application of each spellbook becomes more unique (and each useful in its own right), your strategy will have to develop based on what types of magic you have access to. At this point, you can bet on easily getting most of the books.

I think HeavenFall has a real point here and it is important that it is addressed. Yet, I think it is really two points. The first is simply a lack of late game gildar and materials sinks. If you look at the Library, the new upgrade for the study, you can see that this building is simply 2x better than a study in every way but there is no additional cost for this boost. The building does not use more specialists, nor does it cost more maintenance. It is just not a very good resource sink. This is fairly true for all improvements and units, and so as the game progresses, the player simply amasses more and more of these global resources which can simply be thrown around the kingdom at will. While I think it is cool that improvements are going upgraded versions, I think it would be far more interesting if those improvements also forced the player to make real choices with how his resources were used. For Example, instead of an autoupgrade improvement like the library that is 2x better, you add a new building that uses 2x pop and 2x maintenance for 1.9 resource. Now, some may say "why build this structure at all since you would get more simply building 2 studies?" If we consider a city which has reached its tile limit, it become obvious that why one would make a real choice to either expand his tech resource or use the pop and gildar for something else.

The second point is simply that magic is too easy to get and require almost nothing from the reset of the game to get. I think it would be interesting to mix city improvements, tech research and arcane research. Like one can only upgrade their spell level and research spells of that level if they have build the correct improvement in one of their cities. These improvements could then be part of the arcane tech path. This would add a level of difficulty as well as strategic value to protecting your spell centers. So if you have an opponent who likes to cast nasty level 5 spells but has left their city with their level 5 spell center unguarded, you can gain a strategic advantage by razing that city to take away his level 5 spell casting.

More notes:

* Bug: Just discovered an invisible gold mine. An exclamation mark appeared over a piece of empty land after unlocking Harvesting. When I clicked the tile the gold mine appeared.
* Weird stuff: Why do I have to pay extra for trade- and tech treaties that are more beneficial for my opponent? Shouldn't it be the other way?
* The Sovereign now gets experience from battles that he/she's not participating in. Is this a new feature?

Answer to your third point - I think Sovereigns have always got some XP from all winning battles from your side (or at least hero battles).

Best regards,
Steven.

Ok, makes sense. Haven't noticed it before.