good ideas!

Age of Wonders did the idling mechanic very well. If you happened to forget to select anything it produced 'Merchandise' by default which gave a slight gold boost. But you could also select 'Housing' which increased your growth. I'm thinking that selecting one of the idling mechanics in FE would boost that area by 20% - which is not a lot for most cities (I think that FE uses floating numbers rather than using the integers it displays). So as an example if your city had a total growth of 1.6 per turn, if you chose Growth it would be 1.92, etc. The other boosts from buildings would still apply as well.

With regards troop placement, I agree that a pre-arranged layout per stack would work. I had suggested in the past using the 3x3 army view in the  strategic map to position troops in rear, mid, and front ranks when they are placed in tactical battles. This would be a really easy way for players to manage where troops are going to be placed.

I don't think so, I just think a better UI is needed for multiple stacks.
Like rendering 2-3 small armies on the square instead of just the top army.

The wolf-head doesn't do much for me, because sometimes it doesn't show up, sometimes it doesn't go away....
There is plenty of reason to research larger groups, since you can bring more units to a battle.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

My issue with most games is that instead of so many "stacks of doom" there should be things like warbands, warparty, etc.  Call it what you will, but fighting stack after stack is very annoying and generally not fun for me.  But that's just my opinion.

Another UI issue - but not all that important.

* Change the colour selection from RGB to HSV (much more intuitive for people who don't know how RGB works).

Regarding the need to be able to select Goods, Growth, Research as options in the build queue, the game really needs to not punish players for overlooking cities that have stopped production. Now the next beta is going to have the game not auto-turn until cities are producing but this doesn't go far enough - and it forces players to use auto-turn if the city production is a bigger problem than not having the option to use unit actions at the end of the turn (recruiting, building settlements/outposts etc). My preference is to not auto-turn but deciding to use it or not should be about personal preferences rather than game mechanic annoyances. The game needs to have an obtrusive pop-up appear when production is finished but if you don't want the specific city building, then the game will also need an option to queue Goods, Growth or Research so the pop-up doesn't keep firing for that specific city.

This would have to be an option, because I don't like this idea.  At all.

Awwwww yeh! Shouldn't stuff like that be in the changelog?

Can you elaborate on this^?

And since I haven't yet, thank you Derek.  Excellent work

You know I think the core of the issue isn't that we don't have manual control it's that the automatic setup from the AI sometime screws us over. If the automatic setup was a little smarter everyone could be happy.

Some general rules.

• Ranged units should always be in the back.
• High initiative/move units should always be in front.
• Higher health units should generally be in front if no other rules apply.

I think if those three simple rules were applied most everyone would stop complaining about the inability to setup their formations. 

Thanks Derek for responding.

Sorry, I don't think I was very clear about this one. I didn't mean generating random sovereigns on the fly - I just meant being able to select X number of players at the start and have it randomly choose from the existing sovereigns. At the moment when you start the game it appears random but then seems to remember your settings for each subsequent game. It would be great to be able to have three extra choices per AI player above selecting a specific sovereign: 1. Random would just select a random sovereign from the list; 2. Random Kingdom would pick a random kingdom sovereign from the list; and 3. Random Empire would pick a random empire sovereign. Most strategy games have this at game start and it always surprised me that WOM and FE didn't. Battle for Wesnoth does this very nicely if you load in the Grafted Units mod as an example.

My suggestion with this would be to allow the 3x3 grid on the strategic screen to drag and drop untis into positions if you want. 3 front rank, 3 mid rank (ends up in either front or rear) and 3 rear rank. This would very simply allow the player to place the critical units in the desired ranks. If a unit wasn't specifically placed in a rank the AI would auto-place into the rank it thought best. No micromanagement unless you want to and you can then ensure that the few critical placements are made. An indication of initiative would round this out perfectly.

I checked on this and it's already on the list.  The dev already has code for it but it won't be in in time for Beta 5.

This is coming.

i'm with you das...hopefully derek will give those two another look