Since Beta 5 is the polish/bug fix/balance beta I thought it might be useful to put together a list of small, potentially non-obvious, bugs that detract from the game. I don't care about the major bugs in this post, because they are obvious problems that get their own threads and will be fixed (the save game issue some people are experiencing, the tactical combat slow down, etc). What I want to point out are the minor annoyances (which many games ship with) that, while they do not ruin the game, they do prevent it from meeting its full potential. The bugs that make a game an 82 instead of a 92. I'm sure SD has a list of these already, but if the community builds its own list of these minor annoyances, we stand a better chance of making sure they all get squashed in Beta 5.
Many of the ones I have noticed thus far in Beta 4 have been pointed out in previous betas and I expect have been purposefully ignored until the major development work was done. Still, hopefully they're on the list to get squashed and if not, this should call them to SD's attention. None of the bugs I've listed would ever prevent me from playing and enjoying the game. But they are at times irksome and detract from my enjoyment. That's the standard I tried to go with.
- The inability to declare war if that faction doesn't want to talk to you.
- Auto-roads are still pretty dumb at times. See picture & explanation below.
- Non-hostile units are able to block your passage in one-tile wide areas without fortification and regardless of who owns the territory they are standing on.
- The lack of a "time to arrival" on paths/units with multi-turn orders.
- The lack of a description of the blood traits on the character creation screen.
- The fact that the gold/black borders around units don't update to signify which units have movement remaining during a given turn (which I think is the intended design).
- It's way too easy to accidentally build things when you have a city selected.
- Health bars still don't update accurately during combat. They're just all around screwy really.
- There are lingering tooltip issues throughout the UI. Many times tooltips will cease to display for a short while until a major transition occurs (into/out of tactical battle or to the cloth map and back).
- Accept a quest or lose it forever....
Anyone else have any small things in this same vein?
Road Issue:
I built the city of Denelor (top left) first, the city of Herdila (right) second, and Tanaejaatr (try saying that!) last. The fact that a road did not organically develop to finish the triangle is annoying as hell. If auto-placed roads are set in stone, this system needs to improve. Any society in history would have built a third road between cities #1 and #3. Especially since, on the larger map, Herdila is at the edge of a barren peninsula at the edge of the map. I would almost never send anyone there. They'd go from the city in the top left to the one in the bottom left.
