I'm about halfway through my first game of 0.991, and I'm a little worried about whether the game is ready for release next week. I found (well, largely re-confirmed the existance of old ones) 9 bugs, and I'm sure I'll be able to find more as I get to the least tested part, the end game.
Before I go on - I love the game. It's a lot of fun, and it's steadily gotten better since the first beta came out. Two things that struck me as awesome this recent go-around:
Awesome (just a couple examples, there are more):
Revelation - upgrades to the enchants later in the magic tree are awesome, all of the basic ones should have an upgrade somewhere.
Edit: just saw Arcane Forge - even more AWESOME!!
AI - at Expert, the AI is definitely better and is really providing a decent challenge. Still some improvements to be made to stop stupid things from being done, but it's majorly improved from the early Betas
Bugs:
Humble Inn not Starting Quest
Monsters Attacking AI Several Squares Away
Squares Next to Rivers With River Type
Clicking on Fog of War Talks to AI
Frost Wildland Cleared by Turn 50?
ZoC Streaks Still Present
1 Consumable Shown as 2
Quest Maps Still Create Unusable Quests
Wildland ZoC Release Delayed
Things that were there in 0.990 that I hadn't heard were fixed:
Factions that suicide leave units / sovereign on the map
Kurgen's Volcano still leaves outposts alive
Axes vs diamondskin get a second attack
AI doesn't upgrade shards
Some things just don't work - like Grip of Winter and probably some other things that haven't been found yet.
Giant form adds more than x2 damage
Many of those are small fries and you expect in a beta, but, if they were in a final product, I'd be annoyed. But some, like spells not working (Grip of Winter) or not working right (Giant Form, Kurgen's Volcano) are really bad.
edit: Grip of Winter was removed
And there were a whole bunch of things that I'd call "Annoyances" that just make the game less fun.
Annoying things, in order of annoyance
- Holding shift while selecting multiple units in a city, the mouse doesn't move smoothly
- Moving things around in the build queue is still clunky and is sometimes impossible, especially when there's only one item on a "page"
- Road building - anyone who plays this for the first time is going to see these terrible, winding, annoying roads between cities. Suggestion - add a load-screen-info about path of the governor and road building.
- Pathing out of cities is still poor and frustrating
- Loot needs to be revisited - I got leather vambraces from killing Torax. Really? A dog collar from an Ashwake Dragon?
- Allow units to separate when they have 0 move, so they start the next turn with their full move
- Trained units without fill hp can, when gaining levels, actually lose people because the current hp value doesn't grow when they level. It should stay at the correct percent.
- Zone of control doesn't immediately update on building a monument or town hall, but you can improve the resources in the new area, and that updates the ZoC
- The new thing where Kingdoms and Empires stick together is very cool, and the first time it happened I got my butt handed to me by 3 factions at once. Awesome. But, in other games, it very quickly devolves into a world war that never ends because factions don't make peace and they all end up taking their side.
- When trading with the AI, sometimes you can't remove things offered (like magic) once they're offered, and need to end the trade to reset
- Double strike with bows appears to have a range of 6 - it should say that
- Random events are still too rare. The few I've seen have all been really tame, like gain one unit or something.
Sorry to sound negative - there are several positives for each of those, but I'm focusing on the problems because that's what needs to be fixed this week.
Thanks for all the hard work creating an amazing game!
Poko
