My feedback after ~5 hours of playing

I'll add lists of "what would be nice" and glitches I encountered as replies to this post.

First thing I have to say - the game is great! After finishing this post I will start a new game, and will probably play all night long. It has that hook games like Master of Magic or Master of Orion had!

Wandering strong monsters - great! No more spawning of auto-levelled annoying horrors.
Balanced tactical combat - awesome! Even with current dumb tactical AI outcome of battle actually depends on battlefield decisions and units' abilities!
Quests marks on maps - finally! And quests are now really what player would pursuit, like exploration in MoM.

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Glitches and bugs. I'm playing it on Windows Server 2008 system, so probably my bug reports are not very useful, but still:

- Disappearing Lairs after you Build recruiting hut on them. Gone from map and black square on parchment map. Also no drakes in list of trainable units. Same for those snaky things (forgot name), but they eventually appeared in units list and were trained.

- After reload of saved game, got all my caravans in Units list. All of them were on routes and were not controllable, but they stayed in the list after one reload and didn't go away after that.

- Quest for spider nests doesn't work - stepping on a nest makes it disappear, and quest giver doesn't react

- Notable locations block units from passing them - I had to put a champion in the army to walk over a Camp that blocked bottleneck (doesn't always happen, in like 70% of cases of "go to" command and seems like always for pathfinding)

- Very bad mapping of click-to-terrain, I click one tile, and the green square of destination is set like 2 or 3 tiles away (happens often)

- Crashing to desktop - every 10-15 turns, do you need dumps or some log files maybe?

- In combat - line of icons in left part of screen - what is it? Initiative queue? Because units are multiplied there.

- In combat - after "Breath of Titan" when units are knocked down, they sometimes stand up to defend from an attack, then fall back again to stand up for next attacker etc.

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What I would be glad to see in final version:

1. Food. What does it do, where does it come from, etc.? Current mechanics stimulate city spamming, I liked idea with houses, food and population in Elemental. In FE, I see buildings that add +N per grain, but where are numbers for food, grain? Also, production on tiles. What does it affect? Where can I see what tiles does a city utilize, what production potential it has?
Those icons of grain and hammers put me into a happy drooling state when I saw them.
2. AI nations are too friendly towards each other. Hope to see forces shifting, with different AI behaviors like in GalCiv2
3. Attack and damage are same stat again? Maybe shifting to ToHit/Damage would be better? Because Dodge and Defense seem to do different things.
4. Attacks of opportunity, blocking archers by closing up to them, retaliation and negate-retaliation, first strike - please add more of such things, see Heroes of MM or MoM. Current abilities like Maul and Backswing are wonderful! Please add at least points of extension for mods scripters (like BeforeAttack, AfterAttack etc.)
Archers should me more vulnerable and easier to block, to encourage protecting them.
5. Tactical AI. Is it there?
6. Global spells. They are evidently in the game, but I didn't find them in UI.
7. City production - add a normal queue where you can reorder things!!!
8. City production - add "autobuild" for common improvements like barracks, mills, inns etc.
9. Caravan guard - I saw it in one of last builds of Elemental I played, enemy could assign units to escort caravans, player could not. Please add
10. Also, population growth. Seems to be +1/turn, not restricted by anything.

All in all, I have to say again, the path you are going with this game seems very right. You have me back in ranks of your fanatical supporters.

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By the way, is it by design that I don't have FE in Impulse client?

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Quoting Zard0z,

reply 2

What I would be glad to see in final version:

1. Food. What does it do, where does it come from, etc.? Current mechanics stimulate city spamming, I liked idea with houses, food and population in Elemental. In FE, I see buildings that add +N per grain, but where are numbers for food, grain? Also, production on tiles. What does it affect? Where can I see what tiles does a city utilize, what production potential it has?
Those icons of grain and hammers put me into a happy drooling state when I saw them.
3. Attack and damage are same stat again? Maybe shifting to ToHit/Damage would be better? Because Dodge and Defense seem to do different things.
7. City production - add a normal queue where you can reorder things!!!

1. Hover your mouse over all those stats, you should get a tooltip to see where everything is coming from.

3. The Attack stat has nothing to do with hit chance. Accuracy is the stat that determines to-hit. Attack is purely damage potential.

7. Strongly agree!

Quoting Zard0z,

reply 3

By the way, is it by design that I don't have FE in Impulse client?

Beta is only available directly from Stardock. I believe it may show up on Impulse at release.

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