Ongoing list of remaining serious issues

If you haven't played the latest version, how could you make a list?

You should play the latest version first.

I have played 0.981 extensively and made a list of about 80 issues of various sizes. I have also read the 0.982 and 0.983 release notes which don't mention fixes to any of the above issues so I expect the problems still exist.

Anyway the point isn't what I think needs to be fixed, the point is that there are a number of fairly serious issues which make the game seem unpolished. I'm quite happy for someone else who is currently playing 0.983 to make a list instead, I would expect the contents to be fairly similar. I'm just trying to kick the process off and offering to maintain the list in the apparent absence of anyone else doing this.

These points are all still valid

#8 is a still a definitive problem. I wish there was a way for me to control the AI in this respect.

see my playthrough notes. They're full of little tidbits...

Hi GFireflyE, yes I had a look at your playthrough notes and think there are many good points there. However by and large I think they were smaller bugs and suggestions. These DO matter but there are many of them, Stardock are making steady progress on them, and eventually there is going to be reducing returns on the smaller issues (tho I think we are still some distance from there because of the sheer number of small/medium bugs which still exist).

My concern is that there are some larger, more serious, issues (such as the ones currently in the list) which I'm not sure Stardock regard as important. My evidence for this is limited and I'll be happy if I'm wrong but so far the recent patches seem to have focused on small bug fixes and tweaks rather than addressing the remaining bigger items. Its almost like they have decided that these bigger issues are too hard or not worth fixing in which case I think they are wrong. Hence the post .

I'm still interested to hear if anyone else can think of other big issues?

The 'return' is going to be the difference between a good game and a great game...possibly even an epic game.

I've written down, what I thought to be, serveral large issues with the game on several threads as well.  Stardock is currently in 'polish' mode, which means no large changes anymore. That's why I've been focusing on tidbits. Large things just won't be dealt with before release (as I understand). It's a bit of a shame, but it's like you said: All about return. As is, they do have a game that can sell....once the small bugs are out of it. Some of the larger additions will probably come out in the next expansion.

If it were released today, pending the small things being polished, it would be a good game. Hopefully good enough that enough is made for Stardock that they'll continue to pursue expansions to improve upon some of the larger items.

Agreed on pretty much all counts, except I think all of the 8 items currently in the list are both serious issues AND within scope for fixing as part of the final beta. All of them are bug fixes or polishing IMO, just bigger or more important issues than the norm.

BTW, I forgot but the Ctrl-N issue was included mainly from your threads (plus the fact that I was able to reproduce it fairly easily).

Are there any other particular issues from your lists which you think stand out from the the rest?

freeze on screen saver/windows logon screen

@Mistwraithe:

1. The auto-road mechanic is very sloppy and uncontrolled. Cities should have the ability to build road segments into a building queue as if it were an improvement and, while not being able to determine the exact route of the road, can determine between two sites that a road should exist.
• In addition, the Road Building trait from the Path of the Govenor should be given to the Govenor at his level 4 level-up. In addition to building roads within your borders, the trait should also include the ability to raze roads within your borders.
• If roads were linked together into segments, the door opens up to upgrading and enchanting them as they become selectable, as if an outpost. I had many details to the development of this idea in other threads and I think it would work really really well. It is a new feature though...
2. Essence is still way to low and way too sparatic. The map generator needs to be able to allow for most cities being made to have access to at least 1 essence. However, since that would be somewhat warped that so much essence be made available at the beginning of the game, I have recommended that the Scrying Pool be given to all factions, but attached to a new deadend tech (now that the tech's have been redesigned) stemming off of Spellbooks tech. Could call it Advanced Enchantment. This way, all faction eventually gain at least +1 essence to their cities. Pariden would still receive Scrying Pool at the beginning of the game, but when Advanced Enchantment is obtained, the bonus to the Scrying Pool could be increased to +2 essence. This solution would allow the player to properly explore all the enchantment options available to him.
3. Champion and Troop balance is still a major concern. In my current game, I have 4 heroes and because of Tireless March, their defending my entire kingdom. I have almost ZERO need for troops. I try to fit some in the queue occasionally, but the truth is, there is rarely any available queue time to build troops because:
1. more important builds are needed that directly impact the growth of my empire
2. troop costs are way too high relative to their actual effectiveness. Any opponent hero just stomps them.
3. troops don't level on their own. They must be active to level. This is a major problem as heroes explore and level. Troops defend and maintain stability in your cities. (as a side notes, every troop stationed in a city SHOULD give a 2% unrest reduction to that city. Naturally some of the other unrest bonuses would have to be reduced to rebalance the mechanic, but would ultimately increase the need to have stationed troops within your city.)
4. Pioneer spamming still runs completely rampant, hogging 60%-80% of the early game queue time. Pariden (I don't think any other has access to the Arcane Monolith) is the ONLY faction that does not have to pioneer spam because of the Arcane Monolith and that beautiful enchantment called Meditation. Another mechanic has to be made for the construction of outposts for all the other factions so that the queue time can be used to advance the empire's growth, and more importantly: focus on building effective troops!
5. Scouts are still completely useless. Someone please prove me wrong. I've tried to build them and use them several times, but there are a multitude of flaws with the concept of scouts in this game:
1. Heroes do the scouting naturally because of the quests and loot to pick up.
2. Scouts cannot pick up loot and are too weak to battle.
3. In the end, scouts need to have more function to them so that players will want to build them. In addition, they have to be way cheaper to build in order to match their effectiveness. I recommended the idea for pioneers to lose the ability to build outposts, and instead have scouts perform that function. This way, a great deal of the queue time can be saved for more important things. Scouts have a usefulness. Pioneers don't have to be spammed. It's a win-win-win scenario.
6. City Razing is a major problem. Whether it be monsters overtaking, or AI conquering, or AI quitting, the result is always the same: The city is completely destroyed. This makes absolutely zero sense and is completely frustrating. Now, you are tasked with completely rebuilding that part of the civilized world. Waste of time. Waste of effort. Takes fun away from the game. All the infrustructure was already there. I shouldn't have to rebuild it again.
1. When monsters take a city: It should become a monster spawning point. Perhaps different monsters kill off population at different rates, and when the population reaches zero, then finally the city is destroyed and it becomes a lair. The ground should still be settlable have you retake that lair.
2. When AI takes over your city, they should have the right to raze it if they want to. (I think a 5 turn limit has been placed) This is a nice feature, and often the AI will want to expand their empire so it's only cities that they do not think they can keep, they'll sac.
3. When AI quit the game, a neutral race should take over. Self razing cities is very costly to the progression of the game. In fact, it would be really nice if neutral cities existed in the game already, in addition to the available factions. Naturally 'white' would be their cultural borders...so Yithral would need a change. There shoud no reason I have to rebuild 3-4 cities from the ground up just because the faction I was conquering 'quit' so that I could not add their cities to my distinctiveness.
7. Tactical Land in combat. I'll admit, with the inclusion of the new tactical maps to help limit the battlefield, this has been partially dealt with and I applause Stardock for the approach they've taken. Therefore, having tactical landscapes would be more of a feature now than a necessity. Nevertheless, it would be a really really cool feature. It doesn't have to be overly complex and I've listed some simple effects in previous threads.
8. The concept of Influence. With few exception, influence serves no purpose in the game other than to just hoard. You can't even trade it way for something decent anymore.
1. Imo, Heroes should cost influence when obtaining their services...not gildar.
2. An increasing amount of influence is needed for subsequent heroes. This provides balance of no faction getting all the heroes with no downside.
3. Imo, Heroes should be allowed to be bribed, obviously costing a lot more influence to accomplish, but also having a large strategic hit to accomplish aswell.
4. Treaties with AI should cost ONLY influence to help set up, depending on your relations with that faction. You should not be able to tade any item you want to balance the equation.
5. Prestiege should be dependant on the amount of influence you have. Thus if you have alot, you empire grows. However, since you need to spend it, your empire will slow in growth. These are important strategic decisions that would help propagate the game.

Anyways, these are the items on my list that I see needing to be done in order to turn FE from a good game into a great game. Many problems that currently exist would be fixed by adding in these elements. Clear things up for you Mistwraithe???

Thanks. I largely agree with the items you have listed but at the same time I think most of them could reasonably be design choices by Stardock. Design choices I disagree with perhaps but that is their choice.

Whereas my goal was to list items which couldn't reasonably be explained as design choices. I don't think it is likely that anyone has written into a specification somewhere that "the user shouldn't be able to see the bonuses/traits of factions and races when they create their own custom sovereign's and factions" or "weak units should start in front of strong units in combat" or "popup notifications should appear in random order".

These are clearly flaws which I have no compunction about pointing out and saying to Stardock that I don't think their job is done until they fix them.

Thanks. Do you or anyone else know if this is a common problem?

I've left FE running for hours while the screen turns off and it has been fine for me but I haven't been running a screensaver, nor do I have the logon screen come up on resume. I'll try both tonight.

That's a great list. I agree with most of it.  But calling them "serious" is, seriously, not credible. I think at this stage we need to make sure we use "serious" for things that need to be fixed before the game gets released. As a serial Ctrl-N'r, the game is very solid and ready I think.

Interesting. I feel these things should be fixed before the game is released, not necessarily because they stop people from playing and having fun with the game but because they are obtrusive and annoying enough to be noticed by reviewers and give an overall impression of a buggy game.

If your experience is with the latest patch then it sounds like Ctrl-N has already been fixed? It was pretty dodgy for me in 0.981.

Out of curiosity what would be on your list of things which need to be fixed before the game is released? It might be that this list contains the wrong items, I'm quite happy to update it.

I'm playing 983

1. Lack of information about bonuses/traits of factions and races when creating custom sovereign's and factions.
2. Auto-resolve of combat ignores magical abilities making it easy for the AI (or a knowledgeable player) to defeat any and all magic heavy challenges
3. Auto placement of units in combat is poor, often meaning fragile units in the front line and strong units behind and leading to fragile units dying immediately
4. When making a new game using Ctrl-N crashes the game after it has been done a few times in a row
5. Save and load is dodgy, after re-loading units can be in slightly different places or movement points than they were before loading. This includes the players units as well as AI/monsters. Furthermore autosave seems to be saving at a slightly random point between turns (in fact this might be the main problem here).
6. Popup windows appear in random order and at inappropriate times. This affects quests, level-ups and other popup windows
7. When a popup window appears map often scrolls to a different location from where the event that triggered the popup happened
8. AI is getting better but is still not very good at managing heroes, building killer stacks or casting magic.

What's missing from this list? Please also let me know if you think any of these have been fixed since 0.981 as I haven't played the latest release.

1. Is a personal preference imo. How much stuff should the user have to deal with? It's debatable but not something that i would expect the developers to worry about before release.

2. was fixed in 983

3. I agree here. This is borderline serious and if it doesn't get fixed the game might get tagged.

4. I spam on ctrl-n without a problem.

5. I don't experience this. 

6. This is personal preference. There aren't that many dialogs in this game.

7. I haven't run into this in 983. 

8. The AI can always be 'better'. But the AI in this game at challenging is very challenging for me and I think I'm pretty good at these kinds of games.

I think only 3 warrants attention but I wouldn't hold up a release for that.  I've tried to focus my alerts to things that I think are genuinely show stoppers. Things that would derail the game.

If the first item you list is not getting enough tool tips on the creation of a custom faction, something most people will never do,I think that's a sign that the game is ready for release even as far back as 981 let alone 983 or what comes out with 984.

"something most people will never do"?  A joke?

The authority with which you write does not correlate to the lack of professionalism in the content.  Quality assurance is best performed by passionate testers.  Releasing an unpolished game is worse than not releasing one at all, as any market data acquired will be based on faulty standards.

Thanks for the feedback Mmrnmhrm, I've updated my list based on your feedback. Regarding #5 the save/load issues you'll probably only notice it if you load fairly quickly after the save happens so you can recall exactly where everything was. So for example I found several discrepancies by setting autosave to every turn, finishing a turn then loading the autosave and seeing where all the units where and how many moves left they had. 

As for #1 and #6 being personal preference, I disagree and they are issues I've seen raised by multiple people so I think they deserve to be here.

#1 Making custom sovereign's (and in the case of FE, factions) has a long tradition back to MoM and right now the game doesn't tell you at all what the difference is between the races and the information on the factions is incomplete.

#6 Maybe it depends how big your empire is (ie how many cities and heroes you have because these are the main sources of popups) but I received popups out of order half a dozen times in my last game and it is very confusing. Perhaps its just me but it also give me a bad impression of the game - I know it is probably a result of their multi-threaded design but when random stuff like that happens ones instinctive reaction is buggy. I'm concerned reviewers may think the same.

repeated ctr+n still crashes the game (it takes more tries then it did in the last release but still crashes.)

just try to click Microsoft key + L or ctrl+alt+delete.

My company's policy is to autolock the computer after 5 minutes of non-use - freezing the game. closign the laptop cover has the same effect.

The issue also trigger on when you try to run anything above you current priviledges eg. execute the file that request administrator priviledges (there is a distinct screen change in that (flickers black for a second, the keyboard change is on top of the screen...) after each such event the game freezes

^ This.

The gaming industry is very senstive and very unforgiving. Once that %% is stamped onto the game by reviewers, that's as high as you go. Rarely does an expansion give you a second chance. Even a good expansion will be passed over by many who did not feel the core met their expectations.

Stardock knows this all too well from WoM.

I disagree.  That is not fixed.

I have not seen the pop-up thing, but I think I disabled the feature that was causing the problem.

List updated.

I also added the AI stacking buff spells like burning blade and tireless march on a single hero (usually the sovereign) half a dozen or more times to get ridiculous bonuses. Its possible this one has already been fixed in 0.983?

Repeated ctrl-n has always eventually crashed the game, maybe it works with a small map size but I verify thats still happening pretty much every release, make sure your using large maps.

 The whole ai not getting attacked by monsters is by far the largest issue, heck simultaneous movement as a whole is problematic , end turn move first, player vs ai-player interception, monster vs ai-player interception. Considering the ctrl-n is indicitive there are memory leaks in the engine itself I don't think until simulataneous movement and those memory leaks are fixed SD should release the game.