...based on campaigns on easy & normal setting, large map and max number of
opponents, using Brad's Friday night special...
Balance:
Campaign is a lot easier in mid & late game than at the start. I wouldn't be surprised if higher levels turn out to be almost impossible at the start, but still pretty easy later if you somehow live thru the early stages.
Tech tree seems slow -- I can win without getting near the end of any branch. Am deliberately delaying winning in my current campaign to get a look at the high end stuff. And I run out of buildings for my cities to build long before I get the tech for any new buildings.
Details of the tech tree seem a bit quaint, and make it slower than it needs to be. Why should I have to learn entertainment (meaning theaters) and alliances before I can get literacy (which also means I have to learn bonding ceremony and buddy up up with presumably-uneducated wildings before I can get literacy). Why not just go from education to literacy? Or maybe have cooperation & construction also be pre-requisites. <rant> Who ever got a good education going to the theater? </rant>.
Cash is plentiful; but food is in short supply. Still have not gotten any cities up to level 5. I think they could use another food tech at about the same level & cost as alliances & craftsmanship.
Other:
Brad's friday build is more stable than the official 0.75. Not much reason for anyone to play the official version till the next update comes out.
I'm capturing so many cool weapons that there isn't much point in pushing weapons tech.
Almost all the heroes seem to have magic abilities and path-of-the-mage. I could use a few more melee-only and archer types.
Autoresolve works better than most other games I have seen. Biggest problem is that it drains mana like crazy. My workaround is to avoid imbueing extra heroes -- another reason to want more non-magic heroes.
If Brad were serious about having the game give us diseases, he should have put it in the terms & conditions. I checked, nothing there.
Would really like bigger maps for longer epic campaigns with less crowding early on. But mem usage is probably too high do to that with 32-bit.
