Things we can all agree on (a list of things that should never happen)

For the last bullet I believe the mouseover on map size does tell the user the recommended numbers of players.

I like the idea of this post, but can't agree with everything here.  I've only had the beta a few days now, and my first few attempts did include some  of the struggles you've listed.  My last two games, however, have been fairly easy once building up a few experienced (possibly overpowered) champions to lead my forces.  I've never even needed to move up to the third group size for my armies, since my champions are so powerful.  Money has not been an issue, and I've cleared the maps.

Admittedly, a good start makes all the difference, and if you start out without nearby champions to recruit then getting things rolling is much more difficult.  If you pace yourself and get a couple of champions leveled up with powerful upgrade traits, then fairly quickly there is nothing that can stand against them.  Even demonlords with 1000+ hitpoints go down quickly.

Things I agree with: 

• Having 'strong' or above rated monsters simply lurking about, within easy striking distance of weak, small hamlets does indeed seem silly.  They should either wipe out the village stay out in the hinterlands where real monsters lie.
• The NPC log-jam is irritating.  They are too easy to exploit for experience.

Things that irritate me:

• Maul weapons - this trait, whether it be on an animal or weapon, is overpowered at times.  A single bear cub should be able to maul through an entire army squad and I've killed far too many difficult mobs with a maul-endowed weapon.
• Initiative.  This seems the key to winning in combat- if you focus on upgrading initiative on powerful units you can get in 5 or more attacks for every attack single attack by the enemy.
• Magic.  Difficult to pinpoint exactly why, but magic just seems lacking somehow.  I'll give this more thought.

All in all, FE is a significant improvement over WOM, but it is a long way from epic, or even great at this stage.  Hopefully this will be a long beta period with lots of changes and improvement before release.

I actually like have strong rated monsters near my start.  It makes the land that much more dangerous.  And it provides a barrier of sorts from other players.   It provides the early game danger, rather than it becoming a go fetch this or that, level up, etc. 

Magic users should be stronger early game IMO.

I need to see the effects my race has on my game.  I absolutely agree that we need to be able to see this at sovereign creation and during the game.  Instead of making the player say:  "So what benefits do I get as the wraiths?  It should show them.

Show how you get the research points.  We have a nice tooltip that breaks down almost everything except the total research point breakdown.  I'd love to see where I am getting these points.

I agree with all except for your 3rd issue.  Personally I am usally prepared when the strong ones hit and quite frankly I like the fact that I could be wiped at any moment if I'm not carefull. For me a good game is not one where I always win. I like a hard challanging game. And if I die by 10th turn then so be it. 

"A new city should be able to afford to maintain a unit of militia to defend itself and one or two buildings, without going into the red. Why give me the option to build stuff when there's no way I can afford it?"

Don't agree with this. It is pretty easy to keep the city and empire going with money if you do it right. Don't just spam build the buildings, watch what you are building and how much maintenance cost will be. You don't want to over spend. 

Now I do wish we had two ques. And unit que and a building que.

Likewise. I'm not anti-monsters. I don't think they need generally to be weakened. It's good to have barriers to expansion, and something different to do in the midgame besides bashing other factions. If I build a city near a monster lair i should expect to be attacked.

But surely we can agree that a player who minds his own business, should not be attacked by monsters that he can't possibly defeat, even if he focused his entire economy of pumping out spearmen as quickly as possible (which is, given maintenance, not that easy to do). That these tough monsters "dither" around your territory is a red herring: they will eventually attack you. The "when" is just a matter of luck. And unless they are going to to dither around my territory for the 200 turns it will take me to develop archers, knights, and the economy i need to support them, they might as well go in for the kill in the first place, otherwise the designers are just prolonging the inevitable and using this as a means of ignoring the fact that the game DOES throw undefeatable monsters at you in the early game, and there's nothing you can do about it except start again and hope for better luck next time.

Even if it only happens 1/5 of the time, half the people who don't have the patience we have will just think "this sucks, i want my money back." And they'd be right to, because their PK had nothing to do with their own behaviour. A 10% chance of new players being killed through no fault of their own should be unnaceptable in a commercially released game and should not happen, otherwise the value of every other part of the game is diminished.

Agree with  this.  Mixed feelings about the other points in OP.

Perhaps a Monster aggrission level option should be added to the game. This should be seperate from the Overall Diffuculty rating of the game. Kinda like the Raging Barbarians optin in CIV but with more settings.

Surely though, the sheer IDEA that the king of your faction has worse equipment than your troops is pretty weird, isn't it? If that amounts to an intolerable power boost, then shouldn't that tell you champions are too powerful in the first place. Arguing that champions should have less equipment than troops so they're not overpowered is like tying usain bolt's laces together so he isn't too fast for the kids in the fun run.

So for pure damage, no one should ever play a magic user? There should be no combination of spells items and perks that can flatten a unit like a guy swinging an axe, even though i'm expending a resource to do so? If you disagree with this principle, then why would anyone use tactical damage spells, when they could just save the mana for utility and strategic spells? That doesn't sound like the heir to master of magic to me.

Come on though, there are bears in this game that can flatten whole units of spearmen in a single blow. Don't tell me that doesn't make the time and money I invested in them a joke.

I doubt it, given that the enemy factions move their units the same way. If the AI moved it's units straight from stronghold to enemy city when it knew it could win (like a player does) this game would be a hell of a lot harder.

We must play different games. If I could turn off all my production buildings and claw back the gold maintenance and use this to pay for my upgrades, the current situation would be viable. As it stands, upgrading my old units instead of building new ones essentially means i am paying for them twice: once for the upgrade cost and again for the production capacity i am not making use of. No prudent player would ever do that.

New players generally view any infrastructure as a benefit, build everything they can, and only consider maintenance when it comes to troops. Stardock clearly believe that the game should allow players to overbuild, otherwise there would be no building maintenance. Personally I don't enjoy sitting down with a calculator and working out how many turns my production queue will be empty, in order to find out if a building that gives me +10% income when the queue is empty but costs one gold will be profitable (especially in a game where there is so much more to do). But I have given up trying to win that argument.

Fine, make it possible to crippe your economy, but should it really be that easy? Rightly or wrongly, building everything is an instinct many player have and it's important to recognise that. Shouldn't they have to wait a little longer than their third building before they can shoot themselves in the foot?

Regarding tough monsters in the early game or actually monsters in general:

I think they should only be able to raze cities with low population - say 1 or 2.

As punishment for being uncareful.

Larger cities should be:

- raided by bandits etc., i.e. you lose gold, some population, all production and research for

the turn and have unrest for a given number of turns, because people are afraid, since you

cannot protect them

- ravaged by monsters, i.e. some people killed, a number of buildings destroyed depending

on strength of monsters. Unrest afterwards due to fear of further attacks.

No such neutral units should wipe your major cities off the map imho, however.

Thus I am in favor of leaving strong monsters roaming throughout the game - also in early

game - but with less fatal effects. Exploring troups should be able to fall prey to them, though.

@childofdark  I like that idea!  I would go a little further than you and suggest that a beast could come to inhabit your city and slowly over multiple turns reduce it to rubble (while the monster itself becomes increasingly powerful). 

That opens the door for so many awesome dynamics.  For example, if you liberate a city from one of these beasts, you can take over control of that city even if it wasn't yours to begin with.  Or a city becoming a hive which releases swarms of lower level monsters out into the wilderness.

You are not considering that the units you're upgrading are most likely a higher level - and therefore more valuable - than the units you're training.  If they're not, then disband the old unit and build a new one.  It's all about cost vs benefit.

  I think MoM offers a suitable example there. The monster lairs and the like in that spawned a random group of enemies every 100 turns or so according to the lair type who would rampage around the map and attack.

 It'd be a nice mechanic to adopt for E:FE. You simply have the strongest monster sit on it's lair, and every X turns spawn a party of weaker monsters (perhaps tie them to the level of the big beastie, so that they can escalate as it gets stronger) which will roam the map and attack the player and their settlements.

 This would mitigate somewhat the monster issue, since initially you'd only have the weaker stuff to worry about. In fact, it'd probably make sense to buff the stronger monsters somewhat so that clearing out a lair, whether it's a bandit camp or a dragon lair, becomes something of an event. Kinda like a boss battle. If the level of the spawns is also tied to the level of the big gribbly then you also provide an incentive to clear the lair out sooner rather than ignoring it, after all you want to wipe out that dragon lair before it starts sending entire armies of dragons your way.

As far as I can tell in fact something similar to this already happens, it's just that the bigger beasties will also start roaming if they get disturbed by territorial expansion or you wandering too close.

Agree with the first two.  

Disagree with #3.  A dude with a club should get his ass kicked by a demon.  

Disagree with #4.  The tension of the first 100 turns on a difficult start is the best part of the game so far.  It's the only part I feel they've nailed their vision (that the world is hostile).  

Disagree with #5.  If you mean monsters, it makes perfect sense for them to wander the countryside.  Not all monsters should be rational.  If you mean other nations dithering, you're statement is too broad.  There may be perfectly valid reasons to wander the countryside sacking improvements while you wait, even if you have a decisive advantage.  You're waiting on a war to finish on another front.  You're waiting for reinforcements to make your victory that much more assured.  There can absolutely be reasons not to attack straight away and if the game systems interact right and diplomacy is fleshed out enough this should actually happen at times.  Forcing the enemy to sue for peace and offer concessions in the process for instance, but you don't want the hassle of holding another city.  That doesn't mean that this is what the AI is doing currently.  It may just be that they AI isn't aggressive for no good reason (or lack of polish).  Like I said, you're statement is just too broad as there are certainly times NOT to rush in.

Agree with #6.

Disagree with #7.  Why should they move?  What gameplay or immersion reason could there be?  

Disagree with #8.  Of course a new city can't afford everything right off the bat.  It makes perfect sense from an immersive perspective (expansion was a very costly undertaking throughout history that took patience and commitment before paying dividends).  It also makes sense from a gameplay perspective.  If every city is able to support itself right off the bat, why wouldn't I drop cities everywhere?

Agree with #9 & #10.  

For the third bullet, I think that figures should have individual HPs, and I think a single blow should only be able to kill a single figure. (considering regular attacks only, of course)

Single blow ofc being 1 figure attacking ... so a unit of 10 should be able to kill a maximum of 10 figures in a single unit (assuming each figure hits and 1 hit kills due to damage). However I suppose a single AOE spell, if strong enough, could kill a single unit.

possible melee Abilities to alter the 1 hit 1 figure affected status quo.

Cleave: 3 attacks for the price of one (requirements: Unit must have 3 or more figures.) (result: a single attack is multiplied by 3- each attack affects 1 figure only)

Spin attack: A single attack to each surrounding unit (requirements: more than 1 adjacent enemy unit) (result: 1 figure from each adj. enemy unit is affected)

Whirlwind: A single attack to each surrounding Figure, less accuracy and less damage (requirements, more than 1 adjacent enemy figure) (result: each "attack" is 1/2 damage and 2/3 accuracy. separate attack for every adjacent enemy figure)

Cleave and Spin attack are pretty straightforward ... while Whirlwind has good synergy with AOE spells. Or good for a champ with massively high damage. (so that 1/2 damage still kills all figures in the unit)

"Magic users should be doing comparable damage to fighters at all stages of the game, if not more, given that they are expending mana to do so"

On this I do not agree. Magic users can hit from range and hit with area spells. Magic users can summon, heal, haste, slow, shrink and do many more things than a fighter. Furthermore, I believe it's easier to dodge a sword than a firebolt (though I am not sure on this). So it is true the fighter does not require mana to use the sword. But overall, I am not sure that in order to improve balance we should allow magic users to do more damage...