It was on December 26th that Fallen Enchantress reached a place where I wanted to play it (over playing SWTOR) rather than having to play it.  This is something that never occurred for me in War of Magic (it was always “must work on this”). And in fact, the last time I got to that point was with Dark Avatar (Galactic Civilizations II series).

I must admit, one of the things I’m enjoying the most is how easy it is to mod and tweak things.  You think having access to the source code means you have full control. That’s nonsense. Pouring through millions of lines of code to find out what determines say how fast a unit swings in tactical battles is non trivial.  By contrast, in FE, all that kind of stuff is in XML so I could speed up everything to suit my preferences (which I hope will become the default because I prefer fun speed animations over “realistic” speed animation).

Another area of fun has been tactical battles. Because they were so terrible to start with (imo) I get to see big improvements with relatively little effort.  For example, units would get focused on their initial target no matter what. I fixed that with 1 line of code.  The AI not using spells in combat was caused by a rand()% design rather than a calculation on what the best move would be. I’m a very lazy person so I prefer to hand things off to the machines to tell me what should be done rather than trying to hard code it (i.e. feed a function all the conditions you think are relevant, have it crunch it and come back with what it should do).  As a result, tactical battles are much better already even if they still need a ton of work AI-wise.

That said, for NON-Brads of the world, assume this game will suck and make you get a horrible disease rand()%DiseaseTypes.size();