My experience with 0.77 so far

Hi all.

First of all I want to say I like FE much more then E:WoM although at one time Brad told me that if I hated E:WoM I will hate FE as well. I am glad he as wrong about that as he was about us getting a disease by playing FE (actually he was kind of right about that, as my first game made me go to bed too late and I slept less then 6h that night and next day at work felt like I was sick ).

So lets get down to my experiences with the beta. I played 3 games total.I will focus more on bad stuff as at this point in the beta it is much more important to fix those. They can polish stuff once their beta comes to 0.9+ versions.

Game 1: I will describe my first impressions here. I would say this part is most important as problems I ran into I am sure many more will. I need to note I didn't play tutorial as I don't with 95% of games I play. I played random large world with everything on normal/balanced except AI that was on Challenging (as I read on the forums that AI only gets best AI code and none of ingame resource benefits)

- When I appeared with my sovereign I was first a bit confused about where should I put my city as I am used to E:WoM way where you get a food special resource close to your starting position. Option to see what certain tiles gave in food/materials is not on by default and I didn't bother with mousing over Settle because you don't have a realistic reason to do that if you don't want to settle anything. My suggestion about this is to either put food special resource close to starting positions so we know "OK this is where we should settle" or/and do it like Civ5 and when you got a pioneer/sovereign (before settling first city with sovereign) selected little icons appear on the map that suggest best places to settle in immediate surroundings (and this should also take into account things like water and special resources and not just that tile stats although tile stats are probably most important)

- Anyways as I didn't know where I should settle I decided to go around and look for that food special resource to put my 1st city there. After about 30 turns I figured out there is none and that I probably done something wrong and decided to see how long I can survive with no city The results were kind of good. I had 3 heroes about lvl 5-6 and killed any weaker monsters I ran into. But figured out I cannot do anything long term (I noticed my research was almost nonexistant and I would always only have 2 mana per day) so decided to call it a day. This is the game that cost me less then 6h of sleep that night although I planned to stop playing so I get at least 7h sleep. I don't have any suggestion about this that I will not cover with experiences from later games.

Game 2: This game gave me the worst gameplay experience and almost made me quit playing. Let me explain. Game settings were same like Game 1.

- I knew now that I need to settle on first good tile and I did. I played with Pariden faction. Everything started OK. I built buildings, I researched and spent as much time as possible taking my heroes around the map killing creatures and getting levels and items. Then at around turn 70 a group of 3 of those fire snakes decided to attack my city. I defended it with my 3 heroes and those 1 guards and died without even killing 2 of them. You can kind of understand how I am pissed by playing at least OK and dieing with having a chance to do anything. It is not like I fucked up and ran into them and died. I just played normal and died without a choice. Even on Balanced/Normal for world aggression. My suggestion would be to not let powerful creatures spawn close to players at the start. The world needs to be a bit less random. Powerful creatures should be a threat to adventuring parties or new towns that are settled close to them without clearing them first. Also this behavior is soo random and stupid as I will show with my Game 3. The way it is now just invites people to go new game until they get better starting positions (something that I almost never did in Civ games and that I only did in Birth of the Federation only when I played on Impossible and got a position in the middle of the galaxy)

Game 3: This game I am still playing, on turn 268 atm. Same world/difficulty settings as first two games. In game 2 before I got destroyed by random monsters I kind of had problems with food and at times had to wait for new tech for my city to continue growing. So this time I restarted the game until I got a 5 food starting position (was hoping for food special resource but that one didn't show up). I think the game should give all factions a starting position with best possible tile and/or food special resource so to not promote restarting the game until we get a good starting position. Since we have this one city and we depend on it for a long time all factions should start with same conditions as far as food/productions goes.

- played with Pariden again. Like in last game I put any buffs I could on my sovereign (as they cost 0 mana per turn on her) and went out adventuring. Got a couple of good heroes and kicked any monster butt that I could. At one point an Obsidian Golem was looking like he was going to attack my city but he didn't. If he did I would have had the same experience like Game 2. I don't consider this good, these kind of overpowered monsters for a starting game should not be so close to our starting positions. On the other hand a Dragon group was moving one square next to my empty Outpost and would not attack it. This is wrong again, Outposts should be fair targets for any level of monsters.

- since I managed to play this game 3 for a long time I ran into many problems and bugs. Let me try to write down any that I can remember:

1. Spellcasting is pretty weak in the start and pretty overpowered later. At the start my sovereign would kind of buff here and there but 3 fighter characters would kill everything. At about lvl 15 chars my mages took over (now I got 3 mages and 3 fighters in party). Combinations of Mage level up perks, and Mantle of Oceans spell that reduces cost of tactical spells makes mana cost non-existant. Actually my sovereign casts most spells for free in tactical combat although she got only -75% mana cost reduction. At the moment only immune to Magic enemies get to the first line of my troops.

2. If you settle your city next to special resource and click on it to build (happened to me for a water shrine) it builds in your production queue and once it is built you cannot click on it anymore and see what it gives you.

3. UI in the right upwards corner does not update automatically when you got new resources. When you get new shards or metal or crystal resources it only starts showing it once you reload a saved game.

4. The game crashed on me during Save game (and didn't save the game). This is the worst possible crash and should be fixed ASAP.

5. Some tactical combats I didn't see all the spells my character can cast. I will try to take a screenshot next time it happens

6. it is impossible to get units together out of a city. While you can play with a mouse only for most of the game you need to use CTRL+click to get units to move out of the city together.

7. Double clicking a little portrait of a unit in a group and as a result that units moves to one random square away from the group I consider a bad design decision. That function is achieved by one left click and then right click where you want the unit to go. Game doing random movement should never happen. Same thing happens when you build a new unit, it is outside the city in square you might not want it to be.

8. Path of the Defender needs some skills that prevent movement from enemies or that force enemies to attack him. At the moment going path of the defender over path of the warrior is pointless. Tactical combat needs a wait option that moves your character to act after you next ally or letting character move through ally squares to reach squares (or at least let us set up how out units appear at the start of combat). As soon as you got 4 units in party it becomes irritating to move ranged units to the back a melee units to the front at start of each combat.

9. Autocombat should not use spells and mana if enemy is below certain threat level. I tried it once with my Strong army against Weak single enemy and I lost like 1/3 of mana

I got more stuff but lack time now, I will edit this post later with other stuff.

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OK, lets continue:

10. I got a big complaint about hero/units/techs balance. Heroes are the only thing that you need to win. Units/tech take way too long to build to be a viable way of playing. Yes, I could probably swarm other players with mass of low level units BUT a big part of this game is about clearing monsters and even those swarms are pointless to use against them. By the time you get better units through tech your heroes are a much bigger level and monsters are again immune to these basic units.

12. How do you upgrade existing units? Why don't predesigned units automatically redesign themselves to have better equipment as those become available?! Basic spearman design I needed to redesign manually. Personally I am not interested in customizing my sovereign and/or units. I am sure I am not alone. Please don't disregard us players that are used to 4x games like Civ where we just unlock better units and/or upgrade preexisting ones. I noticed units can be set to upgrade automatically but spearmen weren't. There is no reason for this. If players want to design units that never upgrade they got this options but us others should always be able to train the best and the most expensive units available as well as upgrade existing units (that got couple of levels in the meantime) to have better equipment and more members (as these options are unlocked) as well.

12a. I would love if these special faction units have traits that are not available to custom factions. It would make your premade factions even more special and unique. I loved special units of different countries in Civ games. I often played some nations just for those (like Chinese double shot Crossbowman in Civ5 where I based my whole tactic around them and won the map because of that).

13. There are so many turns where I got nothing to build in my city due to lack of needed city level, slow research or just because it is pointless to build useless troops. If at least we could build troops and then scrap them later to get a production boost it would be something. Food is a big reason for this, or better a lack of food. Many buildings need higher level city and lack of food stops this as well as make the game slow and boring. Lack of food should happen ONLY if player pretty much ignores Civic techs and food buildings or builds on a 2 food tile. As it is now I spend too many turns managing and researching food tech to do anything useful with my city.

14. Scout units are almost useless in this game. One of the more fun parts about Civ games was exploration with scouts. You could get a lot of goodies and discover minor factions and find great places to expand. In FE you only find places to expand. You cannot get any goodies or quests with them. Their best purpose is as early warning units if enemy factions decide to attack you which I haven't yet experienced. I would like some goodies that non-heroes can pick up (like those research points or some resources like gold or horses and such).

15. I ran into couple of quest bugs. I have two quests that I cannot complete. One I need to bring crystals to the quest giver. I killed two groups of some crystal snakes and when I return nothing happens. I had a similar problem with other quest where the guy wanted me to gather his horses. I went to two locations on the map and when I got back nothing again. One of these quests disappeared from the list of quests on the left.

Also I got a major quest to clear some area of the last empire and settle there. I cleared that area of all monsters and camps but I cannot build an outpost of settlement there because the area is under someone else control (not another AI faction). Also that major quest as well as another one both are not in the list of quests I got on the left.

As I don't know where I can see a list of all quests that await me to complete them I cannot give you names of these broken quests. Actually I know two: Cloak of the Stars asked me to bring him crystals and then nothing. When I click on it, it doesn't show me where to go next. The other one is Troupe of the Wind where I needed to gather horses.

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