Andrew Meronek

I would go so far as to say that if I end up levelling a hero very quickly at the beginning, Path Of The Governor is the best path to take for your sovereign and your pick-me-up second hero. Get it while you're still small, and those little merchant bonuses that the heros pick up after getting the Gov path are extremely nice. Nice as in making gold for a significant while on zero tax rate. Wait until you have a big empire to try it out, and those Gov traits aren't nearly as valuable.<

In my play, I have found that scouts are extremely useful, not just for scouting, but to station them so they keep an eye on my borders. Getting a couple of extra turns of warning time to try to get troops (if avaiable) to help defend against a rampaging spider army is golden. But, a possibile game mechanic occurs to me: In addition to the warning for hostile creatures in my ZOC, I think that there should be a separate warning for seeing moving hostiles that are outside my ZOC bu

Path Of The Governor plus Adventurer's Guild stack pretty well. But if I don't have that, the thing about this particular path is that I still want to level it up and that takes battles, which governors aren't quite as good at as other classes. In a way, that's an interesting tradeoff, because this may result in a minor slowdown of creature killing to gain an economic edge.

I had the same thing happen, too, being attacked by 3 wolves before turn 1, and I also was able to summon a warg to survive. Does this happen to the AI, too? If an AI sov gets killed by a wolf pack before turn 1, would we even be able to tell what happened?

[quote who="Austinvn" reply="27" id="3144310"]The civilization tree is, perhaps, a little too essential for everything - it's necessary to get .. well, every single resource in the game except mana. [/quote] and crystal and mounts.

There are a couple of suggestions here to reduce the mana obtained from shards in the early game and include abilities in the magic tech tree which increase mana gained. I also think that this is a good idea. It seems like the magic tree is best suited to research for people who want to make powerful heroes. Yes, there are some spells that help civilization building, too, and this is a nice element of the tree, but heroes are really helped by having good spells and enough

As an aside but related, a couple of games ago I had the pleasure to start a game right next to the entrance to the swamp quest area - I forget it's name right now. I actually didn't get city-razed by patrolling ogres and such, but they did quickly wreck havoc on any outposts and mines that I tried to build too close. That was fun. :) And a neat, unique challenge to start out a game with. Is the AI between different types of roving monsters different? Wher

When I loot goodie huts that are in forests, the tile remains a 'forest' tile if I put the cursor over it but the tile looks like a plain, and as far as I can tell, this doesn't refresh to the correct display either. Except for the appearance, it will still behave like a forest tile, too, impeding movement. Also, at one point I tried moving one of my units to a square and was unable to do so. A turn later, up popped on the display an AI outpost where I had tried to move. T

I agree that in terms of gameplay, it's an unfair mechanic. If anything, the ability to destroy terrain via razing a city should be balanced by the ability to undo it - at similar levels of spellcasting/research levels. Thus, the land revive Earth spell Birth Of Summer would be the counterpart to something like a level 5 Fire spell called Armageddon which torches the friendly city, all the units, and turns the terrain into desert. Quite simply, being able to scorch ear

I agree that there should be tough monsters to deal with - initally by avoiding them. But I've gotten waylaid by some assassin demons lately, and it seems like for some reason they are better able than other tough monsters to seek out my cities earlier. It's not a case of stupidly building a city next to a lair, it is a case of them appearing out of nowhere, presumably somewhere unexplored, and finding my city anyway. Speaking of cities next to lairs, I definitely cannot do th

[quote who="DsRaider" reply="8" id="3122901"]Currently city spam is the way to play because of how easy it is to get growth buildings like inns that make prestige splitting irrelevant. However the devs have said they are aware of the problem and are making them harder to get. That said I don't think that will be enough. I would like to see a unrest penalty that increases as you build cities. You would be able to reduce this penalty through tech and improvements. This would prev

There is a population growth penalty for building lots of cities, but I do anyway because inns and such that add growth make up for it by enough, in my opinion.

I like either city design in the game, but the sprawling city could be redesigned a bit so that things in the game make more sense: Eliminate the city radius for putting units 'inside' it. Each tile that a city takes up must be separately defended. Razing happens with each city tile, not the whole city at once, unless the city is only 1 tile anyway. Snaking cities thus become easy pickings for invaders. And this gets rid of the 'teleport' ability of defending units. To

That's great to see that the AI has to deal with avoiding monsters. It was highly annoying when playing with dense monsters that the AI could march armies all over the place and I couldn't until I cleared out space.

The way that the heroes hang around on the map isn't necessarily bad, either. They're mercenaries. It sounds more like it might be nice to have heroes as quest rewards in addition to being able to hire mercenaries.

Don't forget that heroes sitting around on the map have to be able to defend themselves from the hostile faction, and this means that they will need those skills that many of you want to be able to designate yourselves after you hire them.

Concerning trading with the AI (slightly different from just the economic concept of trade) am I the only one who thinks that it would be a neat function of caravans to be the mechanic through which I trade resoirces with the AI? Essentailly, the negotiation screen would be where we come to agreements, then each party sends caravans from their closest cities to the enemy closest city. Or, if the AI can handle it, the parties also negotiate the trade route. When the caravans finish the

I think that the length of tactical combat is about right. Especially when multiplayer gets really rumbling, people won't want to wait that long in-between turns while two people duke it out on some battlefield. That said, tieing battlefield terrain to the terrain of the world map would be neat, and would allow some tactical usage of terrain. I'd much rather meet an enemy with my army of archers on a river tile, then, where they would have to reaverse it to get to my archers,

I think that trade and the resulting income should be separated from road-building. Roads can be either for trading or for war, as stated. And I also much prefer the civilization tile-by-tile road building, and the possibility for me, monsters or enemy nations to destroy them if I need to. With road-building separated into a separate 'construction' research branch of some kind, and given more tactical control, it makes it a bit more feasible to also incorporate into that branch t

Ah, then in that case, the bonuses for monster strength should also be separated from monster AI upon setup, for the same reasons.

Fireball isn't meant to be useful in every battle. Use it in bigger battles with a lot of 2-move-per-turn enemy units, and preferrably with units of your own that can surround your casters while they cast. Obviously it isn't meant to be useful against panthers. I think that the 3-turn wait after casting is fine. It's a damn powerful spell. And there is, as already noted, more than one way to counter it: Fast-moving units, especially fast, high initiative units

If we were to allow reshuffling of the build cue, I think that there needs to be a penalty for doing so. Something like losing a percentage of the resources invested into building something 'pushed back' per turn, so that if I end up building a Garden and end up repeatedly shuffling it back in the queue to make a whole bunch of units, I should lose all progress on it, and when I do eventually get around to letting my city work on the Garden again, they have to essentially start over.

[quote who="Vallu751" reply="2" id="3109783"]In the current build, "challenging" is full AI with no bonuses.[/quote] According to the game, 'challenging' is: "Challenging AI has slightly buffed units and economic rates along with an increased level of intelligence."

Forgive me if this has already been suggested, but I think that it would be an excellent idea, especially because this game has a little while to go as a beta, to separate the computer production bonuses from the computer intelligence. I know that the AI settings are a bit cooky right now, but it would greatly facilitate us testing whether or not the AI does really smart or really stupid things without having to deal with hordes of enemy units - or with, if we want to test balance issues with

What makes choices interesting is having a shortage of resources, and being forced to make a decision about how to spend what you have available. I think that being able to split production to both buildings and troops at the same time is bad simply because it takes away a way to force important choices.