After playing a whole bunch of games...
problems I've noticed
Elemental Forums
Unit pathfinding doesn't have the proper weight to shun non-road forest tiles. My units will try to go through the forest rather than walk slightly around it, even though the path around would be faster. They also don't always seek road when they should, but usually are good about that.
Even on large maps with few opponents, starting locations tend (in my experience anyway) to be clustered together, with a lot of empty wasteland at the edges of the map. Contact happens too early in the game in general. There should be some kind of minimum traversable distance rule for start locations, and there doesn't seem to be. Wasteland ought to be mainly between opponents, not outside of them. Otherwise it's literally wasted space.
My sovereign currently can't cast spells unless he exits the city he's in. Even spells like Alchemy that don't involve him moving anywhere and that have infinite (or no) range.
I've seen Teleport fail and yet still go through the animation, sound effect, and deduct the mana. Or rather, the spell "succeeds" but actually teleports the sovereign to the same square he's on, rather than where the target square was.
It seems that clicking on the research spell icon on the bottom bar when nothing else is selected, and casting spells from there, doesn't always work the same way as manually selecting the sovereign and clicking "cast a spell" in that menu. Specifically, manually selecting the sovereign seems to lead to less spell failures and weirdness.
If units are in an army together, there's no real way to select which of them will be the target of a spell. With a spell like Arcane Weapon or Greater Mobility, the spell can't be cast on the same army twice, even though only one member of the army gets the benefit of it. The army has to be disbanded, and each unit has to be spelled individually on its own tile, and then they can rejoin the army. Just make a small menu so we can pick who gets the spell, and remove the "can't cast it twice on the same group" restriction, since it's not working right anyway.
Similarly, there's no way to cast spells on units in cities. The hypothetical menu mentioned above would also fix that.
The Terraforming spells are a cute idea, but for the time being they should probably be removed. The AI can't possibly use them intelligently, even in the best case scenario, and the player will abuse them. I know because I do. They'll be even more disruptive if the AI ever starts using navies, since it's trivial to landlock any open area of water.
If an enemy unit is adjacent to a city (as in can't get any closer without attacking it), and you send a unit to attack it, and your unit has to go through the city (in and out) to reach it, then your unit will exit the city on the same tile as the enemy without attacking them. This is because units must attack "from" a square "to" a square, and in a case like that there is no "from" square, as units can't attack directly out of a city.
When a city is founded, any units on the same tile (besides the pioneer that is founding the city) are displaced off the tile at no movement cost. They ought instead to be placed inside the city, since 99% of the time that's what the player will intend by having them there.
When a unit steps onto some quest tiles, their view radius drops to 1 until they move again.
In cloth map view, city names should rotate along with the view, so it's useful in more than one orientation and I don't have to crook my neck to read things. I realize real cloth maps don't do this, but then real cloth maps also don't have a fog of war, so it's not really a question of purism.
My sovereign just ran from a fight with a bear, and the battle results screen is from the last game I played before this one, except with my sovereign and the bear added to the list! Might want to look into that.
If you cast a spell with your sovereign in cloth map mode, the next time you go back into regular map mode he'll do the animation for it. Even if this is turns later. Similarly, the particle effect when founding a city will be delayed until the next time you go back into regular map mode. These animations shouldn't wait to be seen. They should just not happen in a case like that.
Once when I "went into" a shop, it offered to sell me midnight stones. They weren't an item in the list or anything, but that's what was visible in the portion of the screen where what you have highlighted is supposed to be. I clicked on another item before I realized what happened, and of course I couldn't get it to happen again. I wonder what would have happened if I had clicked "Purchase", though.
