[1.09q] Beta Impressions and Feedback

I've been playing the 1.1 betas for awhile now, and have even gotten in a few complete games (The first ever, actually.   Due to crashes previously, I'd give up once things got to the endgame point because crashing every ten turns while you do your victory march to eliminate the final opposition was just a bit too painful) and have a number of things to say about it.   Overall, I think the game's taken a tremendous step in the right direction.  While I was one of those people that enjoyed the game beforehand, the difference is really like night and day.   A lot of work has gone into building systems from which the game can actually work off of.   That being said, there are some things I hope to see addressed before the official 1.1 release.

As I am aware that the game is on a feature lockdown until 1.1 release, these are a little different in scope from the feedback in other threads and is thus focused primarily on values that can be adjusted prior to release.  I've divided it into balancing tweaks and bugfixes/polishing, for ease of reading.  Some of it is extraordinarily nitpicky, but it's less out of being asinine and more of out of a love for the game.

And now, wall of text:  Engage!

Balancing

-While specialist slots for buildings are a fine idea, they are not being used in a relevant manner.  At nearly any point in the game, from beginning to end, most of the time around or less than half of my citizens are actually 'taken up' by specialization, with the real limits being food, city-space, and other resources.   I'd suggest a considerable bump in the amount of specialists many buildings require, especially for buildings in which multiples can be built of and high-end super structures.   There is a ripe ground here for trade-off and decision making, which is an area that the game could benefit from.

-Likewise, while I like the decision to make gildar bonuses apply to taxes (this actually makes the level up bonus a little more of a decision to make, which is a good thing), there is currently--as there has been even in 1.09p--an overabundance of gildar.  Generally when building troops, the real limitations are materials (barring the Great Mill thing; that is a balance issue in itself), metal, and the other resources.  Gildar's never really a problem.    To fix this, I think a greater emphasis on upkeep costs for armies (to make them actually relevant costs one has to factor in) is the direction to take, as it'd prevent the kind of income snowballing issue that currently occurs.

-The Great Mill needs some serious rebalancing.   Materials are actually pretty well balanced and limited before that structure, and while I feel that the production bonus is fine, the materials bonus it gives is way, way too high by an order of magnitude.

-Magic items would be far more awesome if they were like that one (I wish I could recall the name) that boosts your attack power but reduces your defense.   Interesting things rather than straight stat boosts. (which, while they should exist, magical items that require crystals should ideally provide troop benefits that conventional things do not)

-On the note of magic items, many of the quest rewards should be made a bit more interesting, with similarly described trade-offs.  I'd like to see things here you simply can't get away buying at the store.

-Speaking of magic items, Elementium is a little silly.   In all the games I've played I've only seen it twice, and both times in such rare quantities that actually manufacturing any soldiers with it is impossible.  While I understand it's supposed to be rare, if it's too rare, it loses all practical use whatsoever.   I'd suggest adding a building deep in the Magic tech tree that requires a Crystal upkeep that produces small quantities of Elementium per turn.   This gives more value to both Crystal and Elementium as resources, which is great as they're both woefully underused.

-Horses are underused.  (That's an amusing sounding statement, I know!).   When I actually do find a node that provides them, the amount is generally far too small for me to appreciate.   A boost to .5 per turn instead of .3 would help, and perhaps something in the Quests tree that adds a nearby node.  In addition, I think faction specific nodes should provide alternate bonuses for the opposing faction (Fields of horses providing food for Empires, etc) but that's a completely different subject for another patch. 

-Base troop hitpoints.   This has been a hot button issue here on the forums, but I feel that things are almost dialed in as how they're supposed to be.   However, I think that if the base is currently 12 or so, a boost to 15 would produce wonders.  An aspect I learned from my Magic the Gathering days is it's really only the last hitpoint that matters.   Despite some incredibly powerful things, both players start off at a simple twenty life in that game, and yet a lot is possible.   Thus, I don't think extreme measures are really necessary.   Moderation is likely the best path to achieving combat balance, as it seems better dialed in than other things.

-Elemental magic damage needs a slight boost, especially fire magic.   Right now, the spells like Arcane Arrow in the combat tree outclass them so considerably that they're rendered totally irrelevant.   As one has to seek out shards to actually cast these spells, I think they should at least be preferable spells to use compared to the ones you can use without accompaniment.

-Some Elemental books are very underused.   Earth is the worst culprit, followed by Water.   While I agree with the idea of having interesting and useful spells over simple filler, I think each book should have a roughly equal weight as far as use, especially as the shard near the starting point is random.   This currently places some shards as vastly more preferable to others, which act as little more than mana generation fountains, or in the case of Earth Magic, situations where having multiples of the same shard doesn't even matter to any spells I can recall.

-Ships need more movement points.  Way more.

-Imbue Champion needs a range.   It's waaay too exploitable right now.

Polishing 

-On the stats/equipment screen, the addition of all these new stats tends to run over on the little panel intended for it, making the bottom row very difficult to read.   On that note, little tumbly or schwingy sounding noises when you equip and unequip items would add a bit of gravitas to outfitting your heroes.

-All of the tooltips, loading screen hints, and many of the technology descriptions need a pass to be updated to modern functionality.   Some of them are from before the game's release and are so irrelevant it's actually kind of humorous.

-Because of the rarity of horses I've not tested this in the beta patches, but in Classic 1.09 there was an issue with unit cards where units mounted on horses appeared to be flying off the saddle in-game despite displaying just fine when you were making the card.   It was kind of hilarious, but it still likely needs repairing.

-Speaking of unit cards, while I love the new "update unit card" button for heroes and the sovereign, it often reverts within a few turns back to the original, making it kind of pointless.

-And again on unit cards, I find often that sometimes the stats get stuck on the cards.  That is, it takes a bit of wiggling around with the HUD to get them to update.  Also, they sometimes stick when showing two units of the same name and picture.  For instance, two different groups of Spearmen, but each has a different level (and thus, HP amount).  It'll sometimes display the card of the first one highlighted on the second (despite the fact that the second group has a different hitpoint pool), until you select something else, then reselect the second unit, as if the card generator thinks they're the same thing.

-I had a drake talk to me, much like the wolves used to.   I don't know if this is intentional, but it didn't like me lording about the wilds as if I owned them.

-There is a music bug I encounter sometimes where the music gets 'stuck' in a saved game.  It starts off with the title screen, but if you switch to combat, the combat theme keeps playing.  If you go to the shop, the shop theme keeps playing, and this goes on for quite some time before it wises up and rights itself.  I like Elemental's music (the fact it layers various tracks to make its music is something I find remarkable, as I can't think of another game that does so), but this becomes intensely annoying after awhile.

-I often have races begging me to attack other races that they have not, in fact, met yet according to the diplomacy screen.   In my last game, Tarth and Capitar were at one another's throats, asking me to go to war with the other for the entire game, despite the fact that they never once made contact.

-In the faction editor, the last box to the right, on the bottom, is for the colour the race uses to represent their territory.  However, it displays as being the current skintone of whatever race you have decided upon, despite the fact that it very obviously still works as I just described.   This needs fixing.  I'd go so far as to recommend to simply give us separate boxes to choose skintone and hair colour for our custom factions.

-In the faction editor, it'd help if the technology perks had listed in their descriptions whether they're Kingdom or Empire techs.  Weird things happen if you select the wrong one for the wrong side, such as having the equipment available for a given technology but not the technology to do so.

-The new menus look great, but the old ones sometimes appear sort of strange right next to them.  The best example I can provide is the brilliant gold of the construction menu in cities, contrasted with the old look of the unit training menu.   I'm sure this is an ongoing effort to update the UI, but it's simply something I mentally point out to myself sometimes.

-The little bar for production of units and construction of buildings has a different design than the settlement leveling bar.  At the end of the settlement leveling bar is a little rounded bit of darker pixels that shows, without a doubt, exactly where that bar ends.   The production bars lack this feature, and so sometimes colours that are very similar to the background blend in too much to demarcate exactly at what point the bar is at.  While we have a text description too, right on both bars, it'd look a bit more polished if they had a uniform design on the HUD.

-The City HUD shows vastly higher settlement power ratings than the actual HUD when clicking on the settlement.   The numbers, in fact, seem to have nothing to do with each other.

-The stuck turn with Auto-Explore thing seems to still exist.  It confounded me for awhile when I had a stuck turn, until I remembered this bug from the older versions and fiddled with an exploration unit's auto-explore to repair it.

-Faction borders look strange over water, with a rather sandy tone to their inside borders.

-There should be some place in the UI that states exactly how many caravan slots left each settlement has; perhaps in its local resource production pane.

-The Charge/attack/moves issue mentioned in some other threads.  While I think the idea of units--at their maximum traveling distance--being able to make a single attack upon arrival is a great idea (as it encourages advancing forward opposed to forming a defensive line and waiting for your opponents to exhaust their movement points, instead of advancing solely for the purpose of getting smacked in the face), the odd behavior it exhibits when doing this at less than maximum range needs to be addressed.

-Giving units multi-turn pathing in tactical combat needs to go.   There is nothing that enrages me more than a misclick where a unit goes bounding off to the middle of nowhere on the tactical battle map at the start of my turn.   As combat only lasts a few rounds, and units can move a fair proportion of the map each turn, there is no use for this functionality here.

-In my 1.09q game, while the whole middle-of-shadows-under-characters-being-messed-up issue is repaired, I'm experiencing some graphical oddities in regards to the inner corners of cliffsides (where the tiles link to actual land) and settlement ground effects at extreme angles.  They tend to flicker when the camera's panned too low.  This might be endemic to this specific game, but I really have no clue.

-Snowy areas are replaced with verdant temperate forest for Kingdoms despite the fact that deserts and swamps are not.  Because I like the snowy areas, I think they, like the deserts and swamps (which I also like, because they add character) should retain their aesthetic even when under the influence of a Kingdom, and that only the "wasteland" portions should be revitalized into greenery unless otherwise affected by a spell.  As we have those new Terraforming spells, anybody who wants their greenery can cast it in manually and have their verdant paradise in the northern reaches if they so choose.

-The "mana" metric on the empire-wide charts on the HUD does not work at all.  It just displays a series of perfectly level lines for all the various empires without any indication of what those mean.

And finally,

-Relias, in my games, is always a jerk.  Like, such a jerk that I begin to suspect that Altar isn't merely a kingdom, but a jerkdom.  Really, it's like he knows he's the protagonist in the campaign and wishes to flaunt that sense of entitlement.  It's sort of entertaining, and I have no idea why I'm bringing it up.  He is several orders of jerkitude above any of the Empires I meet, with perhaps the exception of the empire of Magnar, which displays a similar level jerkocity.

I'll add things to this list when and if I find more points to bring up as I play, but I do hope that this is at least somewhat useful to the developers, as it's the culmination of several weeks' worth of observation and testing.

If anybody else has some feedback along these lines to bring up (Things that can be realistically adjusted before 1.1's release), this thread could turn into a useful place to consolidate it.   Broader critiquing is likely deserving of another thread.