Agreed on 19.5 points.  First half of 9 is pretty minor...

Three's company 

I know this has been a labor of love for the dev team, but here are couple of points i would like to mention.

1. Keep goodie huts, just cut down the amount of them, or lower the rewards.

2. Video performance could be better, although the lastest build is much improved.

3. Combat. It's just really blah, almost sleep inducing, i am not trying to be rude but please tell me it's going to be more interactive, also the spell effects are just fugly.

4. Over-all polish, the game feels lifeless and dull.

I don't mean to be so brutally honest, i am just worried about the finished product. I still have high hopes, please prove me wrong.

Major Concerns:

There isn't any sense of scale or connection with the gameworld and the entire world feels lifeless and dull.  A large part of this is that there isn't any continuity between the world itself and the units/features.  It takes multiple turns for a unit to walk across a span of space.  But then a single city eventually covers an entire continent...and while it might take 20 turns for my unit to walk along the side of the city...a unit can walk through one and cover the same distance within a turn.  The world doesn't even feel that large...because cities are so huge and span massive distances across the map.  Units are also the size of mountains. 

-->Add an option not to scale units up to partially fix this.  Units right now take up 1/2 of the size of a valley, if you zoomed and saw a tiny little guy walking across the wastes...that gives you a sense of scale and distance.  Right now, I see a huge guy walking along and it seems like the past few turns have represented him moving a few metres. 

-The environment looks and feels completely lifeless, there isn't any movement or sense of adventure, the 'wastes' are tedious desert but don't actually have any impact on your city.  Unlike a game with a better design layout, it doesn't really matter where you put your cities as long as you can connect them to 'fertile ground'...which means that city planning and layout (one of the more strategic aspects of CIV) is worthless. 

-A big component of the 'lore' is the return if civilization from the wastes...but there isn't really any interaction with this at all in the game.  Right now, you just press and button and the stupid desert tile turns green or black, but this has no effect on the game.  As a player, I don't care if the 'living land' has come from my Sov, it doesn't actually do anything, or seem to even cost me anything.

-Because cities span massive amounts of land and units move so slowly, cities are placed relatively close together.  This means that cities eventually fuse together over the course of most games into massive, boring courbanization.  The cities don't feel distinct, nor do they look distinct.  This is a major negative element of the game.

-Graphics are currently rather poor, looking at some tiles, the stems of the wasteland trees do not even attempt to connect with the 'leaves (?)'.

-Tactical battles are incredibly simplistic and boring.  They have been dumbed down to the point of being completely tedious.  This is a game that is supposed to play out at this level and be interesting to watch.  I can remember Brad telling us how the end game battles between hordes of poorly trained troops against plate armored elites would be 'epic' and 'something to watch'...and how SOVs would be like Sauron throwing units left and right.  As it stands right now tactical battles aren't tactical at all.   You basically have two teams that start within spitting distance of each other....they move one or two tiles and whack at the other guy (or cast a spell/shoot) who prompty whacks back or falls down.  It's incredibly simplistic and boring.  The core element of this game is combat, but right now it sucks...and without this core element, there isn't really any point to playing this game...I know I'm not playing the game to level up my SOV and role play tea parties with the AI.

IN SUMMARY:

A major problem is that there isn't any feeling of connection with the world.  Many other posters have commented on this already. 

-Part of the problem is the cliched lore, which is an awful combination of attempted cliche fantasy recycling, self-seriousness with a touch of tongue in cheek 'The endless quest to find a seeing eye glass' tedium that results in the worst possible combination.  If you're going to try to make a serious setting...ditch the crap, it brings everything down.

-The other problems are harder to fix, the lack of a sense of scale that is created by GIANT cities, HUGE individual units but tiny terrain/continent sizes needs to be fixed.  The lack of strategic decisions that result from terrain also needs to be fixed, every tile should be worth something and contribute to a city and to combat, as it stands right now large sections of the world are pointless filler.

-Combat, which is the core element that the rest of the game builds upon is currently awful and not even worth playing.  The simplistic, one unit whacks another until everyone dies really, REALLY needs to change.  As it stands right now, you spend all this time building up a civilization and then the core element of combat is completely tedious, it is a major let down.

Before I comment, I would just say toTorynn; please moderate how you give your criticism. You're obviously passionate about the game, but having been a game developer myself, feedback given in a negative tone is very detrimental: it drives developers not only to ignore your posts, but to leave the forums altogether. I hope you will take this gentle critique as intended as i am not trying to turn this thread into a flame war.

On to suggestions:

1 - agree

2-5 - I agree that the building cap is opaque at the moment. I can't work out if it is in beta 4 or not either. I'm not certain removing it is the answer though - the building cap does add something of an agony of choice, which is missing at the moment. Currently I build everything, I'm just slowed down by lack of gold or materials. The only choice I make is not to grow all of my cities.

6-8 & 10 - agree these would be good improvements. Watchtowers have a role to play in other ways too which I'll cover in a second.

11 - I haven't really got far enough to suffer this, or perhaps playing on large maps with a lot of opponents helps to cap this. I think there should be an element of increased wages, but only for those things that have a real sense of upkeep (e.g. horses), and not an ever increasing scale for all improvements. I like the simplicity on wages of the current system, and would like to maintain as much of that as possible, rather than having to work out the affordability ongoing of every unit. So, as I said, a few key upgrades could increase upkeep, but most would have no effect.

12 - 14 - never really bothered me. When I exit a city I just click on a square I want to go to, so I don't notice where they exit from.

15 - Cleaning up the buying and selling interface in general would be helpful. I would prefer a more list-type interface with a left = shop, right=inventory kind of approach, and use the same interface for switching items between characters. You shouldn't be able to buy items outside cities, but selling them at a poor price could be an interesting addition.

16 - I see groups of bandits and spiders, so assume final will have more groups.

17 - Agree completely. I posted some other thoughts on tactical combat improvement here: https://forums.elementalgame.com/389683/page/1/#2699729

18 - Nice to have

19 - They should be a limit on how many packs you can have (say 1-3, and no 2 the same), then the tech trees can yield more powerful versions of the same thing. Walking around with 20 medical packs to get the health improvement sounds like an unintended flaw.

20 - Agree

On to Torynn's points:

LORE - Not really with you on this. I think it could use a bit of spicing up from a game mechanic point of view, but doesn't require a wholesale overhaul. Where I agree is the enlivening of the land aspect has really disappeared from the game mechanics vs a background piece of lore. Much more important is the fact that shards have become so irrelevant: what I think really concerns me on this one is that I currently feel no real incentive to go to war, unless I am unlucky enough in my starting position to have no food after the first city. Shards should be this reason, so they need to do more. I would suggest:

ON SHARDS

i - Go back to limiting more spells to requiring shards

ii - differentiating the elemental spellbooks more and allowing you to find the missing ones. Currently I can get by with one spellbook as they all have much the same spells. If direct damage spells cost a lot more for earth (as an example) than fire, then this would help differentiate, but obviously spell themeing would be a stronger way to do this.

iii - limit spell effectiveness based on shards. Many spells have a variable based on intelligence. I would combine this with shards. As an example, if an Ice ray deals 1-INT damage, then as a base, you can add 5 INT per Water Shard you have. e.g I have intelligence 10 and 2 water shards, my Ice Ray deals 1-20 damage. Alternatively, shards could up the minimum in the same way, so Ice Ray now deals 11-20 damage. This makes shards a lot more interesting to possess.

iv - with iii in place, it would then make a lot more sense if you can only increase level by spellbook, rather than the curent method of increasing knowledge across all spellbooks. Forcing choices always makes a game more interesting anyway, and this would mean you truly specialise in spells that use the shards you posess; and your opponenent would invest in the spellbooks that resist them.

ON INTERESTING UNITS

The other thing I still miss, is the ability to raise interesting units. One thing I liked about MoM is that each race had some interesting and different units, usually not that easy to raise. I would love to be able to get elephant riders, trolls or what-have-you via city recruitment, but that this would be something really special to achieve; a combination therefore of rare resource, rare technology or certain quest conditions completed. An example could be to get Black Wolves ( a superior warg mount which adds to attack and health of rider), you need to get some young wolves from a specific quest and place them in a city with a warg resource. Only that city would be able to build the Black Wolves.

TERRAIN - again, not 100% with Torynn here. The comparison with CIV is a good one. I totally agree the initial placement of cities in CIV felt a lot stronger, but after the first 4-5 cities, it simply became a case of filling all space available. I like the wasteland/areas that are not of use to building cities, but I do agree that we should look at ways to make them more interesting. This is where towers come in for example: a manned tower on a road could have the benefit of protecting caravans in a 3 radius by preventing neutral creatures from entering it's watch radius. Wasteland could also be hard for armies to cross by having some sort of exhaustion penaly that is applied after a few turns. This might force your sovereign to upgrade the land in order to have a staging post halfway across a desert or wasteland. The key here is how to make these areas have a strategic value or interesting, without making them become areas to build cities in.

COMBAT - 100% agree. If I were the developer, this is where I would be putting my last remaining hours before release, by implementing the suggestions in the link above and by making the UI, smoothness and speed of movement & animations much quicker.

In Response to B G P Hughes comment about "interesting units":

The other thing I still miss, is the ability to raise interesting units. One thing I liked about MoM is that each race had some interesting and different units, usually not that easy to raise. I would love to be able to get elephant riders, trolls or what-have-you via city recruitment, but that this would be something really special to achieve; a combination therefore of rare resource, rare technology or certain quest conditions completed. An example could be to get Black Wolves ( a superior warg mount which adds to attack and health of rider), you need to get some young wolves from a specific quest and place them in a city with a warg resource. Only that city would be able to build the Black Wolves.

I agree. It would be cool to have say, fire shards and horses in one village and that village could produce Nightmares or some appropriately flaming mounted unit. Or Ice shards and wargs to make actual ice wargs. Earth shards and old growth forest to produce Ents or Entish type creatures.  The possibilities are endless.  On a related note, I think races should have more specific units then simply different mounts. Just by default. 

As for spells being tied to race, Heroes had a nice spell system that gave certain races spells out of a reasonably related groups (e.g. demons got fire spells, plague spells, and summoning spells). again, just ideas. Still love the game the way it is to be honest. 

Sara

General Comments:

1. We're going to have the AI take over the respawning of NPCs. Right now, all the NPCs that will ever come into the world are reserved at the very start with a very specific location. The idea was to let there be "rumors" of various high level people. The problem is, during the course of the game, many of these locations become occupied by cities and what not and thus they don't spawn. So we'll switch this to the NPC AI manager spawning them instead.
2. Sovereign equipment at start is something some people buy, some people don't. Depends on how quickly they want to get out there and kill stuff.
3. In the final version, you will not be able to build on resources from a settlement. If a resource becomes adjacent to your settlement, it will automaticlaly be protected by the city walls.
4. A party should be 4. Not sure what we were thinking.
5. Watchtowers will be back.
6. Hit G to put a unit on guard (we'll be adding this to the new unit UI)
7. Agree on expenses, almost deserves its own topic.
8. Don't agree on the shop UI. We like it. Not changing.
9. Monsters will have parties. There's a few already but they are uncommon. The AI is biased towards picking individuals which will change.
10. Unit Wages will be partially based on the cost of production
11. You're not supposed to be able to equip multiple packs. Bug that was added literally hours before the beta went up.
12. The goodie huts in the game are going away to be replaced by the ones we've been carefully balancing.
13. Video performance is about where it's going to be on release. 
14. We like the spell effects, if someone finds them "fugly" Sorry. They ain't changing. 
15. If someone finds beta 4 "lifeless and dull" then they probably won't like the final game. We're pretty happy with how the game is coming along.
16. Cities are getting too large. Agreed.
17. We already have an option not to scale units. It's in the options screen.
18. Don't agree that city placement doesn't matter (I mean seriously, it's hard for me not to just discount someone who makes that argument).
19. Spellcasters will only be able to cast 1 spell per turn.
20. Tactical battles will continue to get more interesting. But our inspiration is heavily MOM based as we've said since day 1. If you don't like them at all now, I'm afraid you're out of luck.  We like the direction they're going. Special Abilities will liven things up and they will continue to get polished.
21. We very much like the Lore of the game. If a player doesn't like our lore, they can either mod their own or find a different game. 
22. In the release version, a settlement defaults to getting 20 tiles. When it levels up, one option is for it to purchase 5 additional tiles.
23. Shards will magnify the power of your spells (i.e. if you control a fire shard, your fire spells will be much more potent).
24. The Minor Factions have a special trainable unit if you capture them (Ogres, Trolls, Sand Brutes, etc.). This is in the current beta. We will be building on this over time to have a lot more interesting stuff like this.

Cheers!

Hi Das.

13. Talking FPS indeed.  We will continually optimize it but it's pretty close to where we expect it to be.

19. I think I agree with this. What do others think? Seems to me that operating a bow should be quite a bit slower. On the other hand, we might be able to just lower the combat speed of the weapon a lot and that would have the same affect. We do want to support a Legolas type unit if the player focuses on this.

I agree with the above comments. Additionally:

S1: Creatures/units should have specific elemental resistances/weaknesses. Why should I cast the 3 magic point Ice Shard spell when I can cast the 2 point fireball spell?

S2: In addition to damage, the elements should have special effects: Fire burns for a number of turns; ice has a chance of freezing an opponent; lightning does double damage to foes in metal armor, and has a chance to paralyze them, etc.

S3: Please separate the spell schools into different sections of the spell book, and within that separate them into strategic and combat; within that, separate into unit enchantment, land/city enchantment, and combat offensive spells and combat defensive spells.

S4: Shards need to be way more powerful, and spread out so that they do not generate next to each other. I had one map recently with to plots nearby, one with four shards and one with three! We need a reason to go out and fight for control of an area.

    -Boost essence way more than they do now (is it like only .5 pts???).

    -Unlock magical weapons and artifacts that are very powerful (and expensive to create, for example: longsword+100 crystals+fire shard+50 mana over x turns+metal+gold= +5 flaming sword of doom).

S5: Make certain factions/sovereigns favor certain elements. For example, one might be a wizard of the secret fire, so they can learn all of the fire spells, but cannot learn any water/ice spells because they are opposite to fire. Meanwhile, they can still have access to air and earth because they are not opposing, however they cannot learn all of the spells, only lower-level spells. This would give each faction/sovereign a more unique feel, and make their struggle to battle halfway across the land to capture a specific shard a strategic necessity to enable them to reach their full potential.

ON CITY INTERFACE:

*Please make it so the build/training/city unit menus for each city can be accessed simply by clicking on the next city. As it now stands, I have to click some dirt to deselect the previous city in order to select the next city. It takes many more clicks than it could.

*There is a wierd delay when placing a building. I place it where I want, but when I click the button to place it and then move my mouse, it always ends up placing the building somewhere else. It's like there is a delay between the time that I click my mouse and the time that the building actually places.

I really like the city/shop interface!

ON COMBAT:

I do like the essential spirit of tactical battles (MoM style), but do agree that it needs more spice and tactics. Suggestions:

C1: Change the tiles in combat from squares to hexagons so that diagonal movement is not faster than horizontal/vertical movement.

C2: Make a set of random tiles for every terrain type, rather than pre-made maps. If it's in the desert, for example, then 80% of the tiles could be sand, 5% could have trees, 2% water, 10% ruins/rubble, etc. Each tile should have different ratings for movement, defense, visibility, etc. There could be defensive bonuses/penalties, magic elemental bonuses, movement penalties/bonuses, etc. Since stats are decimal-based, a faster/slower movement rate should be easy, for example. This would really add variability and tactics. You could hide in a tile with a cluster of trees until the enemy walks adjacent to that tile and then get an ambush attack, for example.

C3: How about weather effects to spice up battle? Archers would have a hard time if it was raining, and visibility could be cut, too, so that you couldn't see what was three or four tiles away in those conditions.

C4: The flow of combat feels a little sluggish and choppy. Is there any way to make it feel a bit more fluid? For example, the archers' arrows hit you AFTER the next turn is announced. My character dies on my turn!

You guys are doing a great job! Keep it up!

Could the community help to make things more colorful by making tiles, animations, sounds, etc?

Some excellent suggestions here already.  Just a few thoughts I have as well to contribute.  Since I've only been noodling around with the beta for a short while, please ignore any comments that might already be in the game and I just haven't realized it or come across it yet!

City 'Sprawl':

One thing that has been a concern of mine is in the way cities are built directly on the map, mainly in regards to the massive sized cities in comparison with the other terrain.  However...

This I like.  With a cap of 20, it will force you to make some serious decisions on how you want each city to develop, and it's choices like this that make these types of games interesting to me at least.  It also helps considerably to reduce the space the cities will occupy on the map.  The only other way around having cities create too much sprawl on the map would be to do the age old Civ/MoM method of just showing the city as a smaller icon on the main map and then have another screen open up once the city is selected to do your building etc.  Only thing that makes me want to resist that idea is that so many other games do use this method that it's nice to see something different.  However it might also make your strategic map a bit more system friendly for some folks, though just adding an option to turn off city animation might help with that.  Still, changing to a city building screen instead of on the map is likely moot at this point in your game development.  Well, at least for your initial launch anyhow.

On Spells:

I really would also like to see certain spells limited by shard possession as well, in addition to having the shards power up the spells more. Sounds like this was in the game earlier but was removed.

Might also be interesting to have certain spells in each spellbook have only a random chance of being available to research in any given game.  You could do this with all level of spells, or just the higher or highest level spells.  This random chance could also be set up to vary between players/AI and lead to another diplomatic item for trade between factions. Edit for clarity: What I mean by this last would be to trade the ability to research the spell, not to get the spell outright.

On the Tactical Battles:

Realizing that this is still beta and that you are quite busy working on tweaking this aspect of the game currently, I will limit myself to a couple of things you might want to consider in regards to ranged weapon fire.  Ranged weapon combat can be tricky and fiddly to balance I know, but if care is not taken it can easily dominate a battle to the exclusion of all other weapon systems.

Limited number of ranged attacks per battle - One thing you may want to add in the case of archers or other ranged units would be ammo.  By giving these types of units a limit to the number of times they can fire in a given battle, it helps to offset some of their other advantages.  I'm not suggesting the addition of supply rules or something like that, just give the archers an ammo counter that's used up as they fire and then reset at the end of the battle.

Range - Setting different ranges in squares that various weapons can fire would both help to further differentiate between weapons as well as add more tactical depth to the battles.  Not knowing what actual scale you have in your minds for the actual size of the tactical battle squares I can't make any further suggestions regarding actual range numbers, but I would certainly suggest that archers should not be able to fire across the entire battlefield.

Move and Fire - The ability of ranged weapon units to fire and then move out of harms way only to repeat the process the next turn, also known as kiting, has been the bane of many otherwise sound tactical systems in games due to the OP effect it can have on a battle.  It can set up a situation that sees players never building or using any other types of units other than ranged units and can make whoever goes first in the battle the winner.  Therefore, I feel that this should only be allowed for mounted bow units, not foot archers, and I would be moved to suggest that it not be allowed for mounted bow units either unless researched as an offshoot of the Mounted Units tech.  A tech like Mounted Tactics could give mounted bow the 'Hit and Run' ability to move and shoot, as well as perhaps also adding a 'Charge' bonus ability to spear armed cavalry.  Having limited ammo would also help with this problem and is another reason why I would like to see that as well.

Return fire - Going first in a battle between ranged units can be decisive, often too much so.  Perhaps as a way to tone that down you could allow a return attack by ranged units if attacked by other ranged units, similar to the way you do with melee units.  May even want to go so far as to allow the return shot even if the targeted ranged unit is destroyed by the attack though that may not be as easily implemented.

Well, that's enough for now on suggestions.  I do like the way things are shaping up, and I realize that this is in fact a work in progress and the beta we are playing is not the fully featured end product.  It's also incredibly encouraging to see how the devs here have been talking back and forth with the community and taking feedback.

But in truth, the thing that really, I mean REALLY has me totally stoked is the stance you folks have obviously taken toward the modding community, as in a complete and total welcoming with arms wide!  As a person who has modded and struggled over the years with the Total War series and their progressively closed stance each release towards modding, it's very refreshing to see this.  I mean on release we are getting a map editor, an item editor, and code packed up in lovely XML files...truly a modder's paradise.  You get many kudos for this from me and it is easily one of the top reasons why I preordered and want to own this game.  I really do expect some great things to come out of this one aspect alone, let alone what further goodness you have planned for future updates and releases on this product.

I would like to see my equipment detail screen from within the shop. Alternatvely it would be necessary for the starting equipment to be real equipment, because it hppens all the time in the beginning that I go into the shop and don't know what my main weapon is. I then have to leave the shop, go into my detail, memeorize my starting-equipment, go back into the shop and decide what to buy. Also i would get rid of my old stuff or give it to another adventurer.

Thanks for taking the time to read our suggestions. Many of your answers are great to hear. I'm hoping also that though you haven't had the time to comment on everything, you may have absorbed some of the other ideas that are in this thread for later. Very encouraging.

These were the tactical combat suugestions in the link:

1. Don't start in striking range.

2. By default put sovereigns in the rear rank and implement line of sight for archers, or even better have some ability to set who goes in which rank, even if it isn't a full setup phase. For example designate troops as cavalry, infantry, archers, casters, and let the player set them to  prioritise first or second rank.

3. Initiative is a must - currently the attacker has a huge advantage. I would also favour the initiative style of Heroes of Might and Magic where high initiative units not only go first, but faster units also go more often than slower ones. If a unit could only counterattack once between moves, this would also ensure that slower units have less counterattacks.

4. Archers that fire can't move. This would stop the ability to fire once and move once, thus never getting caught by units with 1 move.

5. Implement limited ammo. Larger quivers could be an equipment type - I'd suggest ammo of 5 as base for archers or crossbows, 2 for spear throwing, 3 for breath attacks, etc.

6. Give the defender a 'pre-battle' buff chance so that casters can do something to protect themselves from first mover advantage. If the full initiaive system is in place this would be less necessary and instead could be offered to all casters.

7. Units with shields could be given the options to form shield walls which block line of missile attacks vs the units behind.

8. Bring in the resistances as propsed by the OP.

I also very much like the archery retaliation idea a couple of posts up, as that sounds like an elegant solution. One might even expand that to say that even if you shoot at a non archery unit, an archery unit may retaliate. This would however be also solved more elgantly by point 3 above...

I think part of why the battles aren't fun because of the limited unit movement. Smaller squares on the tactical map and your units being able to move more squares per turn would spice things up.