There are some polish points that are somewhat lacking on the Sovereign Creation interfaces, even outside of the Backstory interface, which merited its own post (see here: https://forums.elementalgame.com/394157). It feels almost like any polish pass between beta and Day 0 has skipped Sovereign Creation entirely.
1) If the user exits out of the Sovereign Creation interface entirely, esp. by hitting the Back button, its state is not properly refreshed upon entering the interface again. Text in description fields will still be there, and so on, even though basic things like attributes are reset.
2) Speaking of the description fields, they start out blank when the game opens. Unfortunately, if nothing relevant is highlighted, the descriptions don't go away. If they're going to stay visible, they should mention the name of the ability being described, but better would be if the descriptions were only displayed when relevant. This is the main part of the post, so here's something for each section. There's some redundancy, but it's worth splitting by part:
+ The descriptions for base stats don't show up if the mouse is hovering over the number, or the -/+ boxes. Also, the user is left in the dark about how useful it is to have an attribute at any given level, but given the lack of space, I'd say that this could be put in the manual. Trouble is, I don't see any "crunch" about the abilities in the manual, either, so I have no way to determine the effect of any given attribute before seeing for myself in the game.
+ The descriptions for the types of spellbooks (Fire, Air, Earth, Fire, Enchantment) could do with more than a name and a point cost, too, especially the Enchantment spellbook. Is it Life for the Men and Death for the Fallen? Is it completely different? The selection options already tell us the names of the spellbooks, so "Enchantment - Cost: 5" only tells me that the spellbook is 3 picks, not what's in it.
+ The default sovereign template doesn't include a profession, but there's nothing to cue the user into the fact that picking one profession is a free bonus. There's no reason to avoid picking a profession (other than to add difficulty), since they cost no picks and are all mutually exclusive, but there's nothing to tell the user that. There is certainly no warning if the user hits next and happily goes on without knowing that a profession is free. Much like the Base Stats, there's a definite lack of "crunch" here. How much additional gildar or morale or damage? Does it scale with anything? Is there any synergy? Some of the professions, like thief, can get by without specific details, but what about merchant or miner?
+ Descriptions for Talents and Weaknesses share some of the same problems as Professions. Some abilities include numbers, like daring; some don't, like hardy; and some don't need any, like naturalist. Also, there's some formatting inconsistency: why is Tech Knowledge capitalized, when arcane knowledge is lowercase?
+ Descriptions for equipment and appearance use the same text field that is, by default, used to describe the color selectors to the right. Also, the description tends to spill out of its visual borders, and the color selectors are placed in awkward locations, possibly subject to screen resolution scaling to look decent. Further, clicking on a category of appearance (Body, Head, Clothes, Equipment) causes it to no longer highlight orange when the mouse hovers over it if the user then goes to another category. The icons for each category seem odd, too. The "Body" (animation/posture?) is a sword, the head is a shield, the clothes are a heart, and equipment gets no icon?
3) While it's all well and good that weapons, shields and so on have their own appearances, the "Appearance" interface is likely to be skipped over by many who would rather jump into the game. Those same people still might want to equip their sovereigns with weapons and armor, but they won't realize there's an option if that's buried in "Appearance." Plus, it seems that a lot of cosmetic changes are mutually exclusive with equipment. Want a sovereign with hair and a padded cap? Well, too bad, the hair is gone now.
4) In Appearance -> Body (animation/posture), female sovereigns can choose both the male and female sovereign postures, but male sovereigns can only use the male sovereign posture.
