On to the problem - I was able to steamroll the AI easily without making a single unit, just from recruiting heroes, quests and taming a couple of beasts. There is just no balance between units you can recruit - already leveled up and units you can build and have to research many techs to build - I am on turn 88 and The AI while having built up its cities with everything available had very poor units that were no match for mine.

This is one of the biggest problems with the game I think.  In almost all of my games, simply focusing on a small party of superheroes is enough to never need to research, build cities, get magic, or build an army.  It just feels like too big of a cop-out to go all in with a party of heroes to mop the enemy up with.  I love that we have options to do different things, but the champions feel too strong to me.

*City buildings are very "stat-oriented" rather than flavor oriented - you just have 5 buildings all doing the same thing for one of the stats with different names to them !?

Agreed.  I honestly don't feel like I'm making many meaningful decisions at the city level.  Each city feels cookie-cutter to me, even with the city-types.  Sure, you can specialize a settlement to be a Fortress, City or Conclave, but there's still nothing stopping me from constructing buildings that deviates from my specialization. When I have a fortress settlement and there is nothing left to build, but gardens, farms, and inns, that fortress either becomes a jack of all trade or sits idle.

What the game needs is the ability to upgrade or repeat-build existing buildings AND limit you on slots. This way, I can build 7 barracks in my fortress and get my troops uber-trained and uber-specialized. When I have 1 barracks to my 1 garden, it means the city is not specialized, it's the same as the one down the road.

*if some of these are because I was playing Tarth - their bonus should be taken out of the game.

Kind of agree with this.  It's BORING playing Tarth because there is no fear of ever being attacked by anything in the wild.  This goes beyond being a cool ability and just becomes a bore to play.

*Also, whats up with all the useless artifacts and why you never get gold as victory spoils? its totally useless having all those 100032 items non of which feels special - wolf/bear pelts to sell?! come on, why make it more complicated.

Disagree.  You DO get gold as victory spoils, quite often.  And the more items and artifacts the better IMO.

Fun settings? Sure. Large landmass, 10+ opponents. Difficulty level -- Ridiculous, both for the World and the competition.

Race? Doesn't matter. 

This should be fun.

Now if you're not looking for fun, but rather to gimp your gameplay, then I suggest the following:

Insane Difiiculty for both the World and the opponents. Never settle more than one city, do not recruit any heroes and do not cast any spells. Oh, and play as the Kingdom of Paridan.

I guess my point is that the game is what you make of it. It won't force you to have fun if you don't intend to have fun.

I did not know what Tarth meant when i chose it - (btw, if the developer cares - to balance this race just make the attack fail %50 of the time with the attacker pushed back 4-5 tiles or frozen for a number of turns). But even so - I killed most of what was there when I saw it, other than the guardians which from what I understand dont go after you. The rest are pushovers, and only start to randomly appear around turn 30-40.

I do care otherwise i would not post. I dont want to start another game and be disappointed - I will keep playing if its fun.

Its a shame this game was so long in development  so well tested with the betas the alfas, etc (I actually think this is part of the problem - too many people asking too many things and contributing too many ideas) - you need good QA/Gameplayer testers. I used to be a top ranked age of empires player and was invited to work for ensemble studios that was making the game - knowing some QA testers I know that good QA testers make games especially when it comes to balance but often design - a game is not the sum of it parts - its what works and whats fun. 

Keep in mind that I think you could easily make this game into one of the best x4 games - you just need a bit of vision and qualified people testing/balancing it. I am not sure the designers of this game are suitable though, clearly many simple design choices dont work as well in practice as they should in theory - I think this is both due to general lack of polish as well as some deeper game play design faults - some of which I outlined.

To conclude it feels like this game is like butter spread over a piece of bread too large, with some pieces of sand in the butter

Certainly. And I have fun doing it.

Not in my experience

That's just not true. There's no need to cheat in order to win.

Also, most games can be exploited in one way or another: for example, Jagged Alliance 2 (a great game) can be beaten in about 10 minutes using completely legitimate means. If you play it that way every time, then yeah, it's no fun. The question is, WHY play it that way?

Some background: I've never played the beta, but have played elemental for a few hours around release (before I immediately uninstalled), and also is a veteran civ player that still occasionally plays civ4 (because civ5 ai is terribad) on emperor/immortal.  I'm a staunch believer in never reloading the game barring crashes and what not, as I believe living with your choices adds an additional element to the game. 

I've got this game for 2 days so far, and played basically 2 full games (almost) of it.  First one on normal with Oracle on the default map, 2 AI enemies, Second one on Challenging with Relias and 3 AI enemies on a slightly larger map.

First game, I really didn't know what I was doing.  I knew the basics of the basics from the 2-3 hours i played Elemental, kinda had an idea what the skill trees were (or at least the directions and what type of stuff are in them), but I was completely oblivious to a lot of stuff.  I totally forgot about city enchantment and global spells (didn't cast a single one until I was nearly at the end), forgot about the tax slider thingy, built like maybe 2 basic city units that were terrible, didn't build a single city or outpost of my own (other than the first one, did take a bunch though), and basically just ran around conquering everything with my squad of heroes + a few elementals.  Researching stuff provided minimal benefits, because they were largely unnecessary due to how overpowering my 1 squad was.  

Second game, playing Relias on challenging, this more or less ran in a similar vein except I did pay more attention to city building stuff & global spells in general.  Directing researching a bit more, but I'd say 80% of the game was still me running around with 1 squad cleaning up everything (including wildlands) with all recruited units/heroes.  I did eventually started making some units I designed that proved to be useful (mounted spearmen, seemed like the most logical choice based on the stats), and can see that I would probably need this in the later difficulties.  Still, the difficulty was painfully easy, and provided a little challenge. Couple of things attributing to this might be:

1) Relias' trait - free hero recruiting, are you serious? Free is ridiculous, lets you run at no tax forever since you really don't need any money for a looong time.  This is by far the single most overpowering trait between the 2 leaders I've played so far, nothing else comes remotely close to this. I can just beeline for hero recruiting in the research tree and go take all the cities I want for free, how silly is that.  They really should fix this trait by making it at least 50% recruiting cost, and combined that with delaying some of the hero techs to a bit later in the tree. lvl 5/7/9 heroes should not be where they are in that tree.

2) Kitty quest - uh, that kitty is completely unbalanced for how early you can get it.  I think it came as lvl 7? lvl 8? I forget, but it has a HUGE movement/initiative + a rather beefy attack for how early you can get it (without really any danger in the quest either).  That kitty basically ran around killing all the mobs for me for my first few lvls.    The kitty should scale properly (maybe it scales, but definitely not properly) with the # of turns or the lvl of your hero, not, oh, here's a free high lvl monster for you now go kill everything in sight. 

While I agree that the easier difficulties should be there (for people that have never played the 4x genre before), it does still need to be slightly more difficult than its current stage.  You should not be able to beat the game on "normal" settings while ignoring a large majority of the tools like I did.  Challenging, same thing, I think even without those 2 unbalance i pointed out, the game would have still been very much a walk in the park. At least in civ, when I first get a new civ game, the prince lvl was at least a decent test at first.  

That said, I do look forward to this game on the next couple of difficulties level, i think I'll find the right difficulty to play in eventually... hopefully it's not another civ5 for me  

Please do some faction/trait balancing in the next patch! I really don't want to have to limit myself to playing certain factions as that really hurts the replayability factor of games like this.  

I think heroes are WAY too cheap for what you get - building units/buildings costs a lot more WHY?! make heroes expensive then people will start building units. DOH. 

Also, for flavor, make other requirements for recruiting heroes, such as techs of building some building or only can be recruited by a hero of a certain kind of certain level

I was drawn to this thread because it showed up in the list right next to one about the game being too hard on challenging. I also saw a post the other day about it being too hard on easy...

A few perspectives I think are worth adding:

1) The more complicated a game, the harder it is to have the "defaults" fit a player. I believe your desciption showed a great deal of experience in games like this, you may not be the average player. Many other players find it too hard. Having a game provide a good tutorial to teach you the game is a reasonable expectation, but predicting what difficulty will be appropiate for a player is a bit much to ask. I can figure out where I stand in a couple playthroughs, so the burden being on me to self-assign difficulty doesn't seem unreasonable.

2) Why worry about balance? The game is easier with "Stealth" than with say "slave lords", however it is also easier if you set the difficulty on "easy" than "expert". I think it's neat to have "stealth" and "slave lords" as though they are unbalanced they change your playstyle. Some things are inherently unbalanced or exceedingly difficulty to balance, which usually results in them being removed, and playstyles being baselined and losing diversity. You have the power to know how much easier "stealth" is and change other difficulty levers to accomodate that or makes something more thematic than powerful and reduce difficulty. Also, inbalance of factions tends to help difficulty. Equally balanced factions will stalemate more, weakening each other and making it easier for the player to win. Overpowered factions will tend to gobble other factions, giving you a stronger leader of the pack to contend with. 

3) Worry about the engine not the paint color. I hear the mod "Master's Affliction" is pretty tough, been meaning to see it myself. Yes, you had to use a mod rather than vanilla, but if the end result is something fun, then everyone wins. This game blends RPG and Strategy, if that appeals to you then it's a matter of finding the mod, or tweaking it yourself till it's how you like it. That is my intention (specifically changing cities to add more depth to them and creating a tradeoff between few powerful cites or many weaker cities). I don't see how Stardock could create the perfect blend for people since we all have different tastes.

I guess as a software consultant I spend too much time listening to clients talk about all the enhancements they want to make an application fit thier unique needs that its a sore spot for me to hear people expecting perfection out of the box. And before you say civ or other games did it, look at how long that game has been perfecting itself, and with how much resources.  

TLDR version

Be happy, between the settings and mods, you'll probably be able to find a challenge. "Balance" isn't the solution to replayability. Modern games are very complex, and unless you want the same huge studios making the same game for 20 year, have patience for the little dogs like stardock. Stardock has shown more interest in building a good relationship with their customers than most of the bigger studios have.

While most of what you said is true, I disagree with 2 points - 

1) Modern games are not more complex than older games.  Most of the modern games in the last couple of years tend to be more dumbed down to accomodate the "console crowd" and not increasing in complexity, this is why I applaud and support companies like stardock, paradox, etc. for continuing to make complex games for those of us that like complexity.  Some of the most complex games I've played in the past 20-25 years are from the 90s, not the 2000s.  

2) Balance is most definitely a factor in replayability.  In Civ4, I can play any random everytime, and get relatively similar difficulty in terms of challenge. A game with Persian today will usually be quite different than a game with Persians a week before.  There is also nothing that is so unbalancing in your starting traits that would dictate how you play the game.  The method of play in civ4 depends more on the rolled environment than anything else. Having completely unbalancing traits ruins this because there will be a dominant strategy for that particular faction.  Being able to make different combinations of different strategies and factions is a key to replayability.  Sure, I can handicap myself to not exploit the trait, but then I might as well be playing a race without that trait altogether.  I don't expect total balance, that is not achievable, even in civ4 there are some minor imbalance between the uniques and certain traits, but it is at least not to the point where it is so dominant that the AI cannot really counter without ridiculous amount of cheating.  

Just so this doesn't come off as a rant, I do like this game so far, and I'm trying to provide constructive criticism and hoping that it develops into a game that I can replay over and over again. While I understand no game is perfect from the game go, we should also not just take the stance of "accepting it for what it is" when changes could be made to improve it.  Cheers.

Ahem, sounds like some people need to check out a mod for advanced players.

The Master beckons...

Well, I have to agree with some of the posters here that your comments seem a little off while at the same time a little quick on claiming that the game is too easy. You demonstrate one specific game with one specific setting in order to deduce your opinion about the game as a whole. In the middle of the text and in the very last sentence you claim that you would be happy to learn about different settings that might increase the joy of playing the game. Several people gave you several ideas for that but you responded by saying that it should not be the case that you would have to change the settings accordingly.

The problem with your posts and with a lot of gamers in general is that they show a rather solipsistic view when it comes to the difficulty levels of games. They expect games to naturally fit their play styles and challenges and if it takes tweaking the settings on their part they think it is a sign of unbalance. No game can accomodate every individual challenge and play style, which is even more difficult when it comes to 4x sandbox games, but Fallen Enchantress still offers quite a lot of settings to choose from and to be experimenting with. So why don't you try experiementing a little bit more before forming a premature conclusion?

Don't even start on the idiotifcation of strategy games that is making the compatible for the console market.      Sooo Angry!!! To me that's an attempt to maximize cashing in on title, or just a bad idea that somebody needs a good smacking for. I haven't enjoyed any stragegy game on console since C&C Red Alert.

/End tangent

I conceed to your point about not all games getting more complex, but perhaps we can agree that *this* game is very complex, and in less tried and true ways than other games like Civ.

I think your point on "Balance being a factor in replayability" can be achieved with a Balanced faction rather than balancing all factions. If you create one or more fairly balanced factions, you end up with a more flexible playstyle that drives your replayability. Having unbalanced options allows some players (myself included) options that bring them out of their comfort playstyle, and drives their replayablity. Again though, I think unbalanced opponents *should* provide more variety in what you face, and thus drive replayability. That is dependant on the AI though. 

Ultimately though, I think we might need to man (or woman)  up and play Seanw3's mod... he's kinda calling us out, and its not really reasonable for us to complain about balance, difficulty and depth when he has put a lot of work into those things...but between his creepy dark jedi face and the playthrough logs I've read... I've got to admit I'm intimidated.

While I agree that most of you probably know the game better than I do as you have much more games under your belt, this whole attitude of "go play 20 games then come and comment on what needs work" is silly.  You do realize that the majority of the people buying a game like this may never get past the 5-10 game mark, let alone 20? The value of a criticism from someone that's played 2 games is as valuable as someone that has played 20 games for a game developer, at least for one that is interested in growing their fan base.  You can get a good enough grasp of the game after a few games to what can be improved in the game.