So, I'm a mage, supported by my spawn and some archer groups, playing on Windoze 7 32bit with a largish CPU and no lack of processing power in the graphics card, either.

Here are some buglets I've found:

1. Order an archer to shoot, zoom into the target: the target gets hit, animations and sound display, but we don't see the arrows - those only show up if zoomed out rather far. Seems strange, and showing then just before impact would definitively help.

2. Okay, maybe I'm just clumsy. But my archers have this tendency to walk instead of shoot, because (especially on an uneven ground) I give the command to walk next to the distant target, instead of shooting at it. A simple query would be nice, along the lines of "Are you sure you want archers to stand right next to a distant target? Or were you thinking of ordering them to shoot?".

3. The archers miss their target, but the targets animates and sounds as if it was hit. Or is this supposed to be an avoidance animation, coupled with an "Ugh, effort" sound?

4. Why do I have to wait until the end of the target animation before being allowed to do anything else, such as telling the other archers to shoot? Why doesn't the animation simply proceed in the background?

5. Shoot at somebody, and don't look at the archers getting ready - look at the bottom right, where you can already see that the target will die, since their HP loss has been updated much to early. It does break the suspension quite a bit.

And some questions and improvement comments:

1. Combat: why take turns like this? Perhaps we should tell each unit in turn what we want it to do, and then it all happens at the same time. Okay, perhaps it has to be limited to one side (all units from one side attack first, for some reason), but it would make direct warfare a lot more interesting. Thus: no RTS (eeek, horror!), but first one side shows what it wishes to do, then the other side does. Then we see how the combat turns out.

2. I'd like to see more statistics, graphs, the works. Most important (especially in the beginning of the game) is the available food - can we afford to increase our army right now or not?

3. I very very much agree with the post number 394037, where the players talk about Master Of Magic. Yes, I know: it's not supposed to be MOM. And you couldn't get license rights because the owners are, hm, let's call them sub-optimal. But man, MOM is still being played a very long time after it came out, and very many of us are fans (if you, dear reader, don't know this game, do a google on it and check the GoG website, where you can buy it cheaply). Using more of their truly good ideas would be very nice indeed...

4. Truly random maps which we can explore - please! I really don't want to hear "It's too difficult, thus we'll design the continents, and make most of the rest random" - that's not random enough. Yes, there will be loads of designs by other players, but since we can usually see the layout beforehand... please. A truly random map. I know it's not all that easy (I've been programming since 1981 - yeah, okay, I'm an Old Fart), but it certainly can be done.

5. Yes, the game is unbalanced and still has quite a few bugs. Yes, this was definitively a premature release, which smells like a manager-decision (where did managers learn how to make decisions? Not at the University, certainly, and definitively not at work).

However, I am enjoying myself a lot with this. In fact - curse you guys! I'm wasting such a lot of time playing this. Not just to serve as a late version beta tester, but simply because I enjoy it 

Thanks. A lot.

Ciao,

Klaus