penlin

I agree that morale is one of so many good ideas that haven't quite paid off yet.

I like the idea of making research paths (partly) mutually exclusive. This could be hard-coded or simply because you don't have enough time to research everything. On a related note, since the research costs increase with each subsequent advance, it feels like you get into an area of diminishing returns as you progress in a path. While I understand some of the motivations, I'm not sure it has the intended effect on gameplay. One of the results is that you're always tempted to spread y

Shameless bump for my current thoughts on what this game needs.

I find that resources and goodie huts are more easily visible on the cloth map. The zoomed in map has some "debris" in some squares that really doesn't have any game purpose, and I'm having a hard time distinguishing this from the broken caravans and other goodie huts.

A strategy game has to have interesting, almost painful, decisions to make. The opposite of interesting decisions is “false choice” - the illusion of a meaningful decision. A false choice is when you have to make a choice, but it makes no difference to the game or there is only one viable choice. False choices kill a game because they waste your time without being interesting. I heard this concept well discussed on a podcast that I wish I could credit, but I cannot

Yup, a Civ-like city management "spreadsheet" view would be a big help to the UI.

IMHO, the shacknews comments are well thought out. So much of the game feels superfluous when all that matters is building that big military stack. The game (so far) is a simple exercise in building a strong stack of units ... with a whole ton of other bells and whistles (e.g. questing) to tempt/distract you away from this single winning strategy and give you the illusion of choice.

Xadie's answers to #1 and #2 basically capture my feeling. The game is stable for me and the graphics are good enough. However, from my limited play and reading of the forums, it seems that there is mostly just one strategy: research strong units and military domination. Everything else seems to be a waste of time. There doesn't seem to be much opportunity to deviate from this - I tried a strategy of adventuring with champions, but this doesn't work. Since there seems to be only one viable st

When you create your sovereign, you don't know what shards you will have access to on the map. Wouldn't it make sense to let you modify the sovereign to take advantage of available shard resources?

There are a lot of useful comments about how to make champions effective while in an army with regular military units - that's fine. But I think something needs to be done so that you can send 1-2 adventurers out of your cities alone and know that they won't die. I don't expect that they will conquer enemy cities, but they should be able to survive in the wild.

What did everyone think of their first game? Was it challenging? What were the interesting decisions you had to make? What strategy did you pursue? How well did it work? Did you feel that there was some moment where you could have or should have changed strategies? I haven't finished a sandbox game yet, but I've invested several hours into one. I'm playing a small map on fastest mode, so maybe I'm well into the game? Not sure... Anyway, I've been focusing on the Adventure trac

It is frustrating to feel that it takes several tries before you even know how to play the game reasonably or somewhat correctly. I don't expect to be an expert player the first time, but there is a minimum threshold for something to be fun. You should be able to a) tell what is powerful and weak, b) figure out how to do basic things like cast spells, and c) have a little sense for the overall strategic situation to make some interesting decisions. Feeling your way through 4-5 games before yo

I agree that champions needs something extra to be interesting, useful, and memorable. I started a sandbox game and decided to focus on adventuring and building up strong champions. They feel ineffective and give the impression that this is not at all a viable strategy - basically killing the RPG side of the game. My advances in adventuring are opening up interesting quest locations, but my champions are afraid to explore them - not because of the quest location but because of the big stacks

The OP captures my feelings with the game. Yes, there are timelines and pressures, but there seems to be a long pattern here of releasing a pretty rough game and then polishing it during the first year of actual play. I am also very tempted to put the game down for several months...

Thanks for the constructive (almost flame free) and very encouraging responses - especially from Frogboy. The only thing that confuses me a bit is that the "pre-order" is billed as a chance to get into the game development process and have a say in what the final product looks like ... but the beta seems to lag too far behind the quickly advancing internal version, so the beta people only get a chance to comment on a very narrow range of pretty technical, detailed issues. Granted, I only boug

I realize that this post doesn’t conform to the very specific guidelines for very limited feedback ([Bug/Gameplay] etc), but I thought that some general comments might be welcome/interesting. I know this is still a beta, and I’m anxiously awaiting all the updates/improvements that will happen in the full version. Some of what follows may be fixed already, on schedule to be fixed, or simply not helpful at the current time, but just in case… I’ve only pla