Laundry List/Wish List so far

This is not meant as a rant. I am creating this becuase I have HIGH hopes for this game, and future games such as this, and am posting what I see as an average game consumer. Listed are things which would prevent me from recomending the game to others, or if I didn't know about this game would turn me off if I read it in Game reviews.

 

I had bought WOM and tried my hardest to tough it through, but gave up like so many others. I have been waiting for this game for a while, and see a lot of potential.

However, a few of the frustrations which were in WOM are present in FE. I am a casual gamer, not hard-core. I like ease of use, simplicity of design etc. I am a HUGE fan of Civilization, and play it a lot. I am a fan games like Skyrim as well. I currently play Dota 2. That's about it for games actually atm. I want to add this to my regular play-list but a few things are keeping me from it.

 

Start of game:

You cannot select text when making your backstory, editing, deleting sections is all a PAIN IN THE ASS! hold the delete key etc. It was so frustrating I wrote my back-story in Word, and copy pasted it into FE. Then I accidently hit the ctrl V key twice, and removing the doubled up text was annoying spamming the Delete key...

 

I also noticed that the "Light" clothes in the game appear DARKER than the normal, and the "Dark" clothes are LIGHT!

 

I would love to be able to rotate my character around to see the clothes how they look all around. Also the poses you can choose for a character are rather pathetic. With the exception of 4 poses I would never consider the majority of them for my Sovergn or any unit.

 

Getting into the game:

1) Janusk is far away and not in many games I've played

2) I cannot rename cities when I make them. If I can it's not the way it should be (click details, press "rename City" button")

3) The starting place of your Soverign is PATHETIC usually - This is a HUGE pet peve with the game, and one of the reasons, that if present upon release, will stop me from playing the game.  I will explain.

     - I choose Temperate, Dense Resources, Dense Magic nodes - My expectation. is Dense and good starting land from temperate.

          - What I get: 1-2 resources near me. This is very similar to Moderate, they are spread out by quite a distance (usually) and the terrain I can set up a city on usually is a 2/3, 3/3, 2/2, 4/2, somtimes 4/3. etc.

 

     What I'd expect:

          - 2-3 resource items within my city area (expandable towards or close), at least one food or ore, rest random.

             (dense 2-3/ Moderate 1-2/ Sparse 0-1)

          - Magic nodes which are not the OPPOSITE to my faction. I play Kingdom, and more often than not have 1-2 Death nodes right next to me.

               (1-3 Dense/ 1 -2 Moderate / 0 -1 Sparse)

          - Terrain!!! I get TIRED of restarting the game over and over and over to get a 5/3 terrain. I mean comeon! It's your starting city and capital City!!If I chose temperate I'd want to see a good chance of a few 5/3's and lower land quality depending on the setting I choose. I mean seriously!!!! When you settle your capital it says this is the moment that you have been preparing for for years and years, with traveling, training etc... and you get 1 resource, and options which are crap for your food/production!?

I'd like to see Temperate provide a few 5/3, 5/2 tiles around your starting point which you have to balance with their closeness with the resource nodes. Swamp your looking at 5's being pretty rare in the starting point but a bunch of 3's, Balanced = 5's are somewhat rare, and you have a lot more 4's, Deserts and ravaged you're looking at 2's and 3's.

BUG:

As I said I start new games looking for a good starting point probably for 45 mins solid... Talk about fun! If I was playing desert, ravaged, or swamp.. sure I capitulate, but not on Temperate or Balanced! Anyways, if I do this enough almost always one one of the "new games" my sovergein shows up unclothed and missing his head and limbs. If you start the game, he enters the game in such a state and that's how he looks, so you have to quit the game, and re-load to fix it in a new game.

Playing the game:

 

Rarely I get Severe Combat lag. Game is fine, then when combat starts, BAM lag. happens rarely, but it does. I Have a quad core, I7, 2 GTX550's, 12 Gigs of DDR3 Ram, solid state drive etc. so it's not my machine. Once combat ends, lag is gone, but during combat. it's prohibitive, and you have to auto the whole thing to get out of it.

 

Spell research: why can't I control this? I start the game without raise/lower terrain, the spells I learn seem to be random, I get useless ones as time passes. I loved having the two tech trees in WOM, and watching the AI lower terrain and build a city when I couldn't at the start of the game... pisses me off! Also the spell tombs you get for levling up never show up but are listed as "common" when you do finally see one...

 

9,672 views 19 replies
Reply #1 Top

Also. Why can I build buildings which give bonuses to metals/grain when they are not present around my city!? Do they work on Clay and Orchards,  or bees? It isn't said. I'm still vexed as to why I can build these buildings when there is no food or material resource around my city...

Reply #2 Top

death nodes turn into life nodes if you are kingdom or use life magic, exact meachanic im not sure about but you zone of control changes that magic.

Reply #3 Top

I still get wargs etc near by. My point is, resources are a purely randomly applied to the map with no rhyme or reason, and when your leader has been wandering, searching, training and looking for the perfect spot to start his first city... kinda makes you think your Sovergein is kind of a loser/dolt.

Reply #4 Top

One last thing:

 

Terrain productivity and fertility... It's COMPLETELY RANDOMLY attributed to the land type. There is no graphical way I can see to represent what is fertile 4/5 and what isn't 2/3 or produtivity... a 5/3 plot of land looks completely identicle to a 3/2...

 

Purple starting land... I'm guessing rocky? 5/3. Green lush grass with a bushy beautiful tree on it... 3/2... This has had me confused.. I under stand the land has been devastated and you change, but some indication of foliage or closeness to a river. something to show why one arbitrary square is better than another please!

Reply #5 Top


You can use wargs as kingdom, so no issue there. I honestly have not had any trouble with maps and starting positions. Also, you are talking about bonuses to grain, well you DO have grain all around you, that is the food number when you start your city. Those tiles have grain, the grain is one of the numbers shown when starting your city.

Reply #6 Top

That's my point. the explaination is POOR. And when an improvement says +10 for each grain.. Am I to believe I am getting +50 from the one building.. Or +10 when I have a food resource? or just +10 when the resource is actually "grain" and not "bees".  This game, like the previous one, so far assumes you are a seasoned Elemental player when you look at the descriptions of resources etc. Also the loot is a tad too random as well when killing monsters. I've received a Titanic Maul from a Cave Bear, and a monk staff from a Death Deamon...I'm afraid this game will be ripped apart by the reviews if these things stand upon release.

 

Also, Screen savers mess up the game. Force the game to go into a black screen that I cannot get out of without CTRL+ALT+Delete the game, then reload to an auto save.

Reply #7 Top

I agree with the tooltips. If they are going to say something like +10 food / grain... can't they also say + 10 food / grain (40) so you don't have to do the math. 

Reply #8 Top

Look, the game is still in BETA. I am sure that they will clean up stuff, keep asking and letting them know what will be helpful so that they can implement it. I think a lot of those things may be fleshed out during the beta process though. There are many things that need to be fixed, I have seen plenty of errors in descriptions and such for various things.

Reply #9 Top

And that's why I am posting this here. Kind of pointing out the obvious now aren't you?

Reply #10 Top

Quoting EvilSalmon, reply 4
Terrain productivity and fertility... It's COMPLETELY RANDOMLY attributed to the land type. There is no graphical way I can see to represent what is fertile 4/5 and what isn't 2/3 or produtivity... a 5/3 plot of land looks completely identicle to a 3/2...

Purple starting land... I'm guessing rocky? 5/3. Green lush grass with a bushy beautiful tree on it... 3/2... This has had me confused.. I under stand the land has been devastated and you change, but some indication of foliage or closeness to a river. something to show why one arbitrary square is better than another please!
End of EvilSalmon's quote

Not saying it was  the right way to do it, but try looking at the terrain besides the plot your looking at, think I read somewhere that amount of found corn and hammers on a certain tile is dependant on the tile itself, plus its 8 neighbors.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Reply #11 Top

Spell research: why can't I control this? I start the game without raise/lower terrain, the spells I learn seem to be random, I get useless ones as time passes. I loved having the two tech trees in WOM, and watching the AI lower terrain and build a city when I couldn't at the start of the game... pisses me off! Also the spell tombs you get for levling up never show up but are listed as "common" when you do finally see one...
End of quote

Most of your spells, and 95% of your starting spells are dependant on the spell levels your heroes and sovereign possess
I will give you a few examples:
Raise and Lower land is Earth magic lvl 1
Enchanted Hammers are Earth Magic level 1
Meditation is Water Magic level 1
Gentle rain requires water AND air magic both level 2
Inspiration everyone have (I think :S)
Aura of Grace is Air Magic level 2
Aura of Constitution (Is that right?) is Life Magic level 2
Pillar of flame is Fire Magic level 1
Wither is Death Magic level 1

some of the spells are gained from research in the MAGIC tab, you can see which and what from the research itself.
If you want to know a specific magick's level and book, feel free to ask and I will investigate :)

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Reply #12 Top

I gathered that from playing, the spells. But having them appear automatically seems rather cheap. I liked researching the spells in the previous game. So few are on the magic tree... ohh well I guess it's a lost feature.

 

As for the terrain, I've seen 5/3's and 4/3's in terrain which only has 3-4 valid tiles for settlement, and I've seen a huge spam of 3/3's 3/2's 2/2's next to rivers, grain, bees etc. It just seems highly unlikely that the mass consumer of videogames will care enough to decode how land works versus just restarting their game over and over and over again until they get something that actually is worth playing.

Reply #13 Top

Well starting areas are rubbish, Meaby I should take a few screenshots when I decide to restart (I usually have to see some pretty crappy start locations before I hand in the towel...

Was just telling you to help you decode it, as I said, I wasn't trying to imply it was "The right way" to do things :)

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Reply #14 Top

I agree with a lot here. The game logic is being broken over and over again at present. This is one of the biggest "no-no's" in game design. A player can go along with a lot, as long as it makes sense. But there are just to many times I as a player go "why did this happen?".

Also the memory leakage after a while when you enter combat is very annoying. It is fixed by just restarting the game, but should not be like that.

Reply #15 Top

Quoting EvilSalmon, reply 1
Also. Why can I build buildings which give bonuses to metals/grain when they are not present around my city!? Do they work on Clay and Orchards,  or bees? It isn't said. I'm still vexed as to why I can build these buildings when there is no food or material resource around my city...
End of EvilSalmon's quote

 

I really do not understand food resrouce thing at all, I thought that tiles now like in civ make food resrouces so forth but when ever i try to settle a new city it says that needs to be built on a tile that produces food so i am guessing there are not more pastures and things like that in game that tiles them selfs make food but if thats case id like to see what tiles make on my screen id like to see stats for all tiles even ones out of my realm zone of influnce, I am starting to think that you have to do alot of city tech to get your zone influnce to spread so that land turns what ever and then you can place new settlers on that area but to be able to do that your influnce have to spread way out beyound 5 tiles of your city, which is pain in ass senes tiles i use keep spreading making city larger, so seems to be unbeatable race, iv played 5 games have yet to make more then one city.

I just do not understand food thing, I would think that if each land tile around your influnce makes food when turns green or what ever if your empire i mean, then that should be shipped to my main city incressing amount of food they get, if thats case be neat to have tech to make farms that you can put on these tiles around your influnce in green areas that can transport food back to there cloeses towns.

instead of just relying on the one tile if thats case that your city is built on and then just getting bounces as your level city up.

to me food thing and tiles and influnce spread is just makes no senes at all and is more erratation then anything elese.

 

only other thing bugs me is that i actully found it fun in other game having family and family memebers, I kinda of wish they would expanded apon this and made it better then taking it out of game completly, it was something in other game where if i couldnt get heros i knew i could depend on at least having 3 kids to become heros.

 

now i get very few heros and i dont get money to really hire heros often and i lost the sure bet of having at least 3 due to family sucks for me i guess.

like i said i would just thought they would improved feature little added more depth to it then just ripping it out completly.

but i sure would like to know what land tiles are for food only time i get to see them is at start of game when i click build frist city.

 

after that no abilty that i know of to see what land tiles stats are.

 

only other thing i hope they fix is how one empire or kingdom always steam rolls every one elese, for example in my last regual war of magic game not this one but diff one i played to end every player ai and my self was in the 200 point range pretty even sometimes 50 more or less which I presonal dont think should mean auto war, but anyways one AI player had 999 points it was only 100 turns into the game really almost 1k points and with in 25 turns they pretty much steam rolled every one.

 

One thing out of this that i will say I never liked mana pool idea I liked how in war of magic frist one in frist few betas when each char had there own mana based off of there int higher int more mana they got also action points based ou could raise so you could cast more spells so if you had 4 action points you could cast 4 spells.

I just feel mana pool thats shared is kinda silly being able to store up mana making it a resrouce just seems on RPG ish to me might as well just call it spell points i have 1k spell points money that i can spend to cast magic feels more like gold collecting to me then rpg thing.

 

I dont know if things dont change I may just get, warlock masters of arcane thats comming out pretty same style game but I think might be little better done with magic and rpg and civlization stuff senes it more based around civ for civlization stuff, and I think might have better RPG setting for magic and leveling up.

Reply #16 Top

Should be a bit more variation in the fertility possibly some 6s and 7s if you pick fertile.  Balanced, the number of tiles like that may be single digit in total (but they're out there somewhere )  

Production, why not have some 5s ?  

 

 

Some games I'm lucky to get a 4/2 on balanced..   I settled for a 3/3 once,  it seems kind of petty all for 1 digit but thats probably the first and most important choice since your starter city goes on to make units and the like to keep your empire going

Reply #17 Top

Personally? I want that turn limit uncapped, at least as an option... That's just me though.

Reply #18 Top

Start of game:

You cannot select text when making your backstory, editing, deleting sections is all a PAIN IN THE ASS! hold the delete key etc. It was so frustrating I wrote my back-story in Word, and copy pasted it into FE. Then I accidently hit the ctrl V key twice, and removing the doubled up text was annoying spamming the Delete key...
End of quote

They need to get rid of the horrible default backstory as well.  It's actually the first thing I mod out of the game when there's a new build.  I don't want to play a character who crawled out of some cave or whatever.

Also the poses you can choose for a character are rather pathetic. With the exception of 4 poses I would never consider the majority of them for my Sovergn or any unit.
End of quote

Thank you for pointing this out!  The poses are just plain awful (I'll make an exception for the one in my avatar ;) ).  Whoever thinks they look majestic or heroic or whatever they were thinking should be sacked.

 

Reply #19 Top

Quoting Stuie_, reply 18




quoting post
Start of game:

You cannot select text when making your backstory, editing, deleting sections is all a PAIN IN THE ASS! hold the delete key etc. It was so frustrating I wrote my back-story in Word, and copy pasted it into FE. Then I accidently hit the ctrl V key twice, and removing the doubled up text was annoying spamming the Delete key...


They need to get rid of the horrible default backstory as well.  It's actually the first thing I mod out of the game when there's a new build.  I don't want to play a character who crawled out of some cave or whatever.


Also the poses you can choose for a character are rather pathetic. With the exception of 4 poses I would never consider the majority of them for my Sovergn or any unit.


Thank you for pointing this out!  The poses are just plain awful.  Whoever thinks they look majestic or heroic or whatever they were thinking should be sacked.

 
End of Stuie_'s quote

Have to agree here the poses are well really bad. The backgounds are good however.