Since I've spent the last 50+ posts (no, seriously: https://forums.elementalgame.com/posts/605627) doing nothing but reporting bugs or critiquing the game or the engine, I figured I'd throw out some stuff I do genuinely like about FE.

To be clear, I had zero intention of picking up FE after the Elemental mess, but Brad's insistence that they're going to do a real beta this time around, giving it the time that it needs, and giving the game free to people pre-ordered counts for something, so here I am, reporting away, as I was around Elemental's launch.

Their hiring of Derek and Jon (and a real writer) also had a lot to do with my renewed interest.

So, stuff that's cool:

Whoever did all the tooltips for the UI did a great job. Some are missing, and more are needed, but in general, everything I wanted to know I was quickly able to intuit from the tooltips, and they provide a clear and accurate mechanical picture of how the game is working under the hood. Good stuff. More please!

The new Wildlands. _Very_ cool. I love these. All of them are neat, themed wilderness areas with 'bosses' and unique rewards, plus unique biomes to explore. Great stuff. More please!

The new spells. There are lots of balance issues, but in general, almost every spell is unique in some way, and there are some cool, fun and powerful spells to play with.

The equipment system. The differentiation between strength % modifiers, armor piercing, handedness, and initiative bonuses or penalties for basic weapons is clean, simple, and elegant. Nicely done. I'd like to see more traits like Backswing and Maul on magic items, they're fun to play with. Definitely want to see more magic-affecting items, beyond simple spellpower staves.

The overall stats/unit balance. There's definitely lots of balancing work to be done here, but the interplay between heroes, monsters, and multi-figure units has lots of interesting design space to explore.

The hero and city trait leveling systems. Both cool. Cities need this feature expanded greatly, and heroes have some dud and some overpowered traits, but that's all expected. The core of the system is fun, and seeing a useful uncommon/rare trait or structure popup has shades of diablo loot joy. Hope to see this developed further.

The research trees. Research speed and a few other issues need some tinkering, but right now it feels like you have to make a real choice about which tree you're going to focus on - all civs need some of the bottom tier techs, but past those, you have to commit to one tree or another, and that's a good thing.

The writing. I'm still no fan of the setting, but in general, the flavor text and quest writing is much, much better than Elemental. Also there seem to be a lot more interesting creatures out in the wildlands, which is cool. More Shrills and Umberdroths, less spiders and bears please!

The quest system. It still needs a lot of fleshing out, but I'm seeing the roots of a system that can provide branching quests with different challenges and rewards, good stuff.

Some nice new graphics. The elemental lords and the tactical battles on their wildlands backgrounds actually look quite good - I mention this because I found almost nothing in Elemental to be visually appealing and these are (as an aside, I really think a major problem with the graphics in WoM and FE is their size. A lot of them look ok or fine up close, but if you zoom out even a little, all detail is lost, and you can't play the game comfortably zoomed all the way in. The big elemental lords, drakes, and dragons all look good because they scale well. I'm not sure if this can be tinkered with across the board, but its something to consider)

Tactical combat is greatly improved. There's still a lot of work to be done here, but again, the core is solid. More hero abilities! Tactical combat spells are nicely done and fairly broad, Zone of Control is cleanly implemented, monsters have lots of abilities, etc. Add more interesting battlefield terrain and mix up monster stack/city garrison compositions a bit and it'll be a lot more interesting.

Anyhow, back to bug reporting and griping about the UI