Dear Derek or Frogboy, please have a look on these comments about Beta 4 and try to implement them if they sound reasonable to you as well
I play Difficulty Expert, Size Medium, Monsters Dense. I'm very impressed by amount of work done for Beta 4. Lots of lots of pleasure to play. Special thanks for a deep atmosphere and feeling of epic events going on inside the game world. However:
- Too much micromanagement. Not a nice feeling to always think about and micromanage tens of resources, their upgrades, outposts, three times as much buildings and their upgrades as well.
- Essence is not balanced. Affects based on essence quantity scatter too much. Second, I wish to be able to add more than 1-2 enchantments (+1 conclave) on my largest cities, especially with new nice added spells. I was always using inspiration, ench. hammers, empower and gentle rain in Beta 3 in all my big cities. Its frustrating to have saved mana and not being able to spend it on cities economy.
- After lvls 8-9 new levels progress too slowly. To go from 9 to 10 I need around 1000 xp, its equivalent of killing two dragons. Sovereign stops advancing at lvl 10 by the moment when all medium map is cleared. Archmage spell ranking is almost unreachable unless you strongly focus on one spell school without taking any other talents. I think best would be the lvl progression somewhere in a middle between Beta 3 and 4.
- Cities still are too weak. My concentated army at Expert Difficulty can wipe out 4-5 enemies cities in 10-15 turns with no effort and game is over. Cities economy is much less important than what your champion or sovereign can do on a world map. I wish cities to be more important: stronger city defenders (!), more spells available to defend a city (like wall of fire), more possibilities to increase food and growth.
Bugs
- when amount of essence changes in the city, related spells don't update the strength of their effect.
- AI doest use its full movement when it can already reach opponent. It moves only 1 square/turn.
- spells panel sometimes disappears during first turn on tactical map (since Beta 3)
- eye of the eagle spell doesn't work. I wasn't able to see more with this spell (since Beta 3)
- shrink spell reduce attack of Juggernaut to zero. (since Beta 3)
Balance
- Destiny insight spell too expensive, 25xp per 250 mana. Noone uses it. It should be something like 25 xp per 25-50 mana.
- Avariance now gives 1 guildar per essence per 200 mana. Too expensive. Investment should pay off for 15-20 turns. It should cost 25-30 mana like enhanced hammers or.
- Berserk spell does more cons. than pros. It should be something like +4 attack -1 hp per turn instead of +2 atack -1 hp per turn
- Gentle rain now gives 25% food increase per essence. Its iverpowered. It should be 10-15% per esence.
- Death lash spell is +3 attack + 3 init nad unit is killed per 20 mana. It should be something like +5 +5 per 7 mana to be worth of killing a trained unit.
- Curse city 500 mana per 10% unrest is too expensive. In Beta 4 its easy to decrease unrest. It should cost something like 70-100 mana. I would personally never use this spell. There are much more valuable investments for such amount of mana.
- lvl 5 conclave improvements are useless compared to owerpovered +1% treasury interest (town) and -30% unrest all cities (fortress)
- please change a feat "quick" from +1 initiative to +2. since levels progress slower now +1 initiative is a total waste of a feat.
- feat +15% xp now does not pay off. Player needs to advance of at least 7 levels to get this investment back. Since levels progress slower this feet is not usefull compared to others.
