TheBirthdayParty

Join Date 03/2006

+18

My First Impressions

Problems:

Gloves seem to stick through the sleeves of hooded robes.
I had a game where my sovereign died in the first 3 turns to a spider. I think this is a bit much, yes?
The introduction tells me there is fertile land near by, but it wasn't visually on the map, not could I mouse over a square with a tooltip indicating fertile land.
Turning on "show tile yield" only seems to work when using my sovereign before founding a city. Otherwise it does not display.
Units just trained appear outside of the city, which has caused some to be attacked by neutral armies. They die quickly and the city has thus wasted its production. Why force units to appear outside of the city?(Especially when the city is not at capacity)
Sometimes the killing blow causes the game to pause while loading the graphic, maybe about 20 seconds.
Loading the game and creating new maps takes quite a long time. Luckily alt-tabbing doesn't seem to cause any problems so I can do other things while the game loads.
The neutral enemies that are around your sovereign at the start are too powerful. The only successful strategy i've found so far is to immediately found a city, keep my sovereign inside and research up to leatherworking. Then I have to wait until I can build enough units to clear things out a bit. Thus exploring a bit before founding a city is never an option and exploring a little bit after founding a city is not as well. This restricts possible strategies only one. That is not fun.

Things I've liked:

The combat system is simple, but not too simple. It works very well. Things so far do not seem incredibly over powered or under powered.
The main menu wallpaper is quite lovely.
The music played during character creation is not intrusive, a very good background choice.
The trait system is simple and easily understood. So far it gives the impression there are a lot of traits to discover and they are variable enough to make leveling champions interesting.
Tooltips seem for the most part effective and easy to understand. The same for why cities production/income/etc are what they are. Though terrain involvement is an exception to this.

Things I would like to see improved:

Explanations of how terrain affects city production.
Lessening the amount of non-faction enemies and they're spawn locations near you in the beginning. Or at least much less powerful. And/or the ability to give your sovereign more armour/weapon options at the start so she can fend them off with some smart choices.
The ability to run away, at least for units that are designed for exploration. Or a way to avoid combat for them.

In summary, basically, i haven't been able to explore much or found more than a second city because my play time is taken up trying to produce units to keep me from being overwhelmed by the starting amount of non-faction enemies. I'd like to have more options for a starting strategy and be able to explore a lot more in the beginning. I've been playing with all the basic settings except the word sized is set to...medium I think was the term?

For reference to long load times I am not running many things while running FE and my computer speccs(drivers updated) are:
Comp Specs:
Intel i5 750 2.67ghz x2(processor)
8GB RAM
ATI Radeon HD 4670(Graphics card)
Windows 7 64bit

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To keep the monsters from overrunning you early just turn down the monsstor "difficulty level" before you start the game. Each game can be diffierent.

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I played for about 2 hours last night and enjoyed it. It was similar enough to Elemental that I knew what I was doing, but definite signs of improvement. I especially like the changes to equipment and research. I'm not sold on the champion leveling up system, but it looks interesting so far. I'm also loving not having to build houses. I used to get cities stuck at X level because I'd forget to build a house, and then have to tear things down. Glad to see that gone.

One thing that greatly annoys me (and annoyed me in Elemental) is moving units out of a city/group. I'd like to see a way to do a mass move all at once instead of click,click,click,click. If the UI can't support it while viewing the map, have an area on the city details page that shows all units in the city. Let me just right-click them or something to kick them out of the city (don't use the tiny arrow icon if it can be helped). Or even better, on the map UI, just let me right click them to move them out of the group.

Also, how do you generate more mana per turn? Is it based on cities? In Elemental you could build buildings to increase it, but that doesn't seem to be the case in FE. It looks like it's based on city count or something else. Perhaps a stat I'm not seeing?

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Quoting xaltotun,

reply 1

To keep the monsters from overrunning you early just turn down the monsstor "difficulty level" before you start the game. Each game can be diffierent.

This is true, however i'm playing the the basic settings so I think its still too much. I want lots of monsters to fight, just not right at the start. So toning down the amount of monsters overall doesn't solve the problem.

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Hi everyone,

Just a couple of suggestions from playing only the tutorial!

1. Can we have a compass please?

2. Can we zoom in further please?

3. Typo: on the "Recruit a champion" text, "of" has been omitted.

Seems quite stable for me, Combat feels a bit bland (click, click, click,) I would imagine it gets a lot more interesting with more units. Game generally feels "better" than WoM.

Thanks

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I played a bit last night and my first impressions of the game were, on the whole, pretty good.

My first game ended in grisly spider-death at the hands hairy legs of some arachnid general who stormed my capital city. I was also beaten repeatedly by a corpse spider who showed up during a rat quest.

My next game was more successful as I managed to have a little hero army that could take on most enemy stacks I ran across. I was unable to successfully eliminate the faction I was at war with before I turned in for the night, but I would have given a bit more time.

My impressions:

The GOOD

Hero traits are fun. Add more, they are awesome
Hero negative traits are also fun. After losing several battles, one of my heroes had gangrene, a chipped, tooth, one ear and amnesia. You know, I think it gave him more character.
City "level-ups" were cool, I don't know if there are "chains" to follow to get to some super-specialized rare buildings, but if there are, then that's awesome.
The quick bar for abilities and spells in tactical battles. Awesome. So much better, it can not be overstated.
The difficulty level, even on normal, seemed pretty hard. GOOD! Make easy for people who want to lighten it up.
Tool tips on everything is excellent. Loved that.
The UI is very good.
The Hiergamenon is very good.
Quests were good.
The tutorial was good. The videos were nice. The voice-over was very well done.
Stability. Excellent. I had zero issues with installing or playing. No crashes in over 3 hours.
Speed. Excellent. "End Turn" processing was blazing fast in comparison to E:WOM. Hardly any slow downs even while live streaming the game.
Sovereign creation is still good, but a bit buggy.

The OKAY (with some suggestions to improve):

City resources. These are new to FE and I don't really understand them I guess. In both games, I simply placed my starting city where my sovereign started. I didn't notice much of a difference in the city-building aspect from E:WOM. It seems like no matter what, I am just building the same buildings in each city. It's not terrible, but it's not particularly compelling. I think it would be better if cities were more like heroes that level up in certain unique ways. And it seems like you were heading that way with the little bonuses, but that they don't seem to influence the overall city outcome much as yet.
City build queue and management. It's okay. I don't really understand if the position of buildings matter. Probably not.
Color palette. I was the empire and there were big swaths of purple trees throughout the land which was interesting. Also, it would be cool if your buildings would incorporate some of your nation's (primary / secondary) colors in their appearance, like your troops do. Unless they do this and I just didn't notice... **Edit This is in, I just didn't notice
Tactical battles are okay. I can't put my finger on exactly why this just feels a bit flat. I like casting spells and I love the new abilities. But for some reason it feels like I am fighting in a shoe box and the "tactics" are kind of limited. It's not awful, but I found myself thinking I'd just auto-resolve combat if it looked like I could get away with it and get the win.
Diplomacy options. I didn't really explore this very much, but what I did see was roughly the equivalent of E:WOM and I have never really found the diplomacy in Elemental that great. Diplomacy in most of these 4x games isn't very good though, more or less an afterthought, so again it goes in as "Okay."
Tactical AI. Seemed solid, but not impressive. I did an auto-turn on a battle and found that the computer would use spells and abilities, but would also treat my ranged unit as if it were melee.
Strategic AI. Seemed somewhat uneven. General Carrodus kept coming at me all by himself to simply be killed over and over. But then again, since sovereigns don't die easily, maybe that was the plan to try to grind down my forces?
Lack of death for sovereigns / heroes is okay. When I first heard of this, I was a fan. But after playing, it seems like heroes should have a chance of dying every time they are struck down and if not killed nearly always get a negative trait, battle won or not. Once I found out that as long as I won the battle, nothing would happen to my heroes. I started just throwing them in the fray with abandon. I like the idea of having tough heroes, but then again if they can't die, then you don't need cannon fodder to soak up damage. Not only that, but I had to keep killing Carrodus and Svedd over and over and over. Maybe one could be captured and ransomed back in the diplomacy screen. Or executed for a city boost. Or transformed into a zombie knight. Or remain behind the battle and haunt the area as a ghost. Something. Oh and your sovereign should also get negative traits when felled...

The SHOULD PROBABLY BE CHANGED or IMPROVED:

Event timing. For example, sometimes I would complete a quest, but then get attacked and I would get one message, then immediately have a new message and the map would scroll to a new location. It's turn based... can I finish one thing at a time?
Maul ability. Turn 1. Maul, maul, maul... Turn 2. (not dead yet?) Maul, maul, maul... yeah, no need for turn 3. Might be a bit OP
The threat level on mob groups should see some kind of adjustment. It's good to have a ballpark estimate, but the estimate seems to be if not completely random at least not very in tune with the combat metrics of a tactical battle.
Hero power. Heroes seem to get disproportionately powerful disproportionately fast. One uber weapon early and they become capable of destroying an empire nearly single-handedly. I got level 5 chain mail and a level 5 shield and could use both before my faction even discovered leather armor
Units being created outside of the city. Any time my cities would produce a unit, it would show up and hang around outside my city. Can we have some kind of waypoint option for production? When a unit is produced it goes somewhere? Like defends this city, or goes to some other specific square?
Click positioning. Maybe I just suck at using a mouse, but I was having the hardest time moving my units places. Like, when I wanted to move my army that had just been created into my city as a garrison it would take me several clicks to finally get that to work. Many times when I was trying to attack other stacks on the strategic map, I would somehow miss and wind up in the space next to them. And sometimes I would need to click several times on my unit stack or city to select them / it. Like I said, might be me. but I was much better on the tactical map as far as click location success.

Okay that's good for a start. This game is already a good effort from Stardock, the pros outweigh the cons. I am impressed with the beta so far.

Thanks for all the time, sweat and tears. Brad, Derek and team, you're on a good road here!

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