Firstly I must say I am enjoying FE. It plays like a game, and a strategy game at that which was one of my criticisms of previous builds where city management was too anemic for me to enjoy it as a 4X game.
FE still doesn't quite have the compulsive feel for me yet but it is close, close enough that polishing, balancing and bug fixing alone could get it there. Hard to say.
I have however found a lot of bugs and issues so polishing, balancing and bug fixing are certainly required.
Bugs:
- First turn put merchant in queue but then removed to add water shrine. Added merchant back then added clay pit and removed merchant again before adding it a third time (I couldn't make up my mind!). So the build queue now showed water shrine, clay pit, merchant. However after I ended turn at the start of the next turn it was showing merchant, water shrine, clay pit.
- Mana page of retire screen showed massive peaks for one faction (86 million I think) in a few places which scaled everyone else down to invisible.
- Why when a trade treaty is going to give me 0.6 gildar per season and the other person 2.5 gildar per season do they insist in me also paying them 294 gildar to sign up? They should be perfectly happy to create the treaty! I guess it is possible that all the other factions really hated me and this is by design but if so it should be clearer on the diplomacy screen that they hate me so much they would rather cut off their own nose than trade with me to their benefit.
- Apothecary says provides 3 research per material, pretty sure it doesn't! Various other textual descriptions of buildings don't match the actual bonuses. Eg Oracle
- Tactical heal spell says it will heal target by 36 but only heals 16. Appears that the hint is multiplying by any damage bonuses the caster has, except of course damage bonuses don't apply to healing.
- The empire summary has several columns for saying what your production rate bonuses are BUT appears to be missing a column for actual production? Surely that is more important, in fact one of the MOST important things?
- When I built the Oracle none of the cities essence driven enchantments improved in value (Essence was now 4, 2 base + 1 for scrying pool, +1 for oracle, but bonuses on inspiration etc were still 3 even after several more turns had passed). When I cast a new enchantment it correctly used the 4 essence but the others remained on 3.
- There was a very confusing treaty proposal from Gilden which says 'we would would like to offer you tribute' and includes them paying a lump sum on the spot. I said yes and then found that I was paying THEM tribute! With no apparent way of cancelling it either (yet anyway). The text needs to be urgently fixed for this! (NOTE: the word would is also typed twice in a row).
- Healing Nectar doesn't say how many hp it will heal in combat.
- Enemy slag which can move 3 but advance 1 square at a time while being attacked with range attacks are stupid. Of course this might be by design, play them as dumb animals, but once they start taking damage they should start charging otherwise they really are very, very dumb!
Important Suggestions:
- It is essential that the user can inspect all the stats of a city before picking which type of settlement it becomes or which level up building it gets.
- It would be really good if friendly units of different factions could move through each other so long as they can reach an empty square on their current move. Currently it is very easy to get gridlocked at a narrow pass and have the AI block it for multiple turns. This may seem a minor point but it is an extremely serious problem on some maps, it can literally force you to go to war with your ally just so you can get past them!
- I like the injury/wound system, it is a good compromise between heroes dying permanently (likely provoking reloads because heroes are so important) and hero death having no penalties. However I think there should be several difficult, but feasible, ways of healing injuries. For example a hero who has had Regeneration constantly active could heal one injury every 100+ turns, there could be a high level life spell which costs several hundred mana which heals one injury (apologies if there already is!), death magic could have an expensive spell which converts live heroes to undead, immediately healing all injuries plus increasing that heroes carry capacity by 10 but halving their natural healing with subsequent casts on an already undead hero still healing injuries but causing -2 HP or some other stacking penalty to reflect increased wear and tear on their undead body. Just suggestions and all numbers would need tweaking but I think it would be good if each school of magic had a difficult way to remove hero injuries.
Suggestions:
- It would be nice if the find item window had an examine button which opened the equipment window (I know there is an equip button but I often don't know what the item is or if I want to equip it, eg how does it compare to my current item).
- I find it really frustrating having to continually scroll down in the shop interface to see the miscellaneous items my hero wants to sell when my screen is more than big enough to fit several more rows of items. Can we have the window size bigger on a decent resolution screen?.
- Would be nice if typing a key in the help would scroll to items starting with that letter
- Very frustrating that there isn't a hint popup for items in the build queue so you can easily see what they are. Currently I have to either remove the building from the queue so I can read the hint in the build window, then re-add it to queue or go to the help system and find the building there.
- Retire screen needs hint tooltips over the pictures so can see who each faction is (sorry, but I don't remember them all off by heart)
- Needs to be a confirmation dialog on confirm war, too easy to click on it by mistake.
- It appears that outpost upgrades cost different amounts (specifically consulate takes ages to build). The upgrade screen should indicate this in hints or something. Would also be nice if there was some indication that it would be added to the queue of the linked city (I know it will now but didn't first time, perhaps a hint on the build button).
- The unit details screen for heroes (or any unit?) doesn't seem to show how much experience they need to get to the next level (ie the experience bar is only shown on the hero summary, not the details screen).
- It would be really nice to be able to press M (or another key) and then hover the mouse over a square to see which path your unit will take to get there (like Civ 5 does). I get caught out quite often with an unexpected route.
- When you have a resource at an outpost you don't know which city will be responsible for building the resource until you click build. Guess it doesn't matter too much but would be nice to be able to tell (unless I am missing something?).
- I find it difficult to work out whose turn it is to move in tactical combat by looking at the battle board (OK there is the picture in the bottom left but that is out of the way and sometimes you have multiple units with the same picture). I think the active unit needs to be highlighted better.
- When you click on the right hand notification about a city having finished building something it goes away and nothing on the now selected city indicates what it was it just finished, would be nice to still be able to see when you have the city selected (or at least in the popup or something).
- I agree that the on idle bonuses are a bit frustrating, particularly when that is the ONLY bonus, such as Conclave or Tax Office (the difference between Tax Office and Market being only +30% gildar on idle).
- It is a too easy to click through the city level up popup window without thinking and without making an active choice of what bonus you want, which is particularly annoying when a city reaches level 2. I think this is a fairly important decision and when the popup opens none of the options should be selected so the user has to select one before continuing.
- Level 4 town bonuses seem fairly weak, as do level 3 fortress bonuses if the fortress isn't on the front line.
- It would be nice to be able to cancel city enchantments on the city screen.
- It would be nice if spells in the spell book showed their magic school requirements, would help with knowing how to level heroes so they can cast them.
Questions and Comments:
- Ebring built the market wonder on turn 30. Is that even possible? Then the Tower wonder was built around turn 60 or so. This was on hard so maybe it is fine but I had a high production settle spot and got an early research bonus (can't remember which one) and the earliest I could have built the market wonder with beelining straight to it was about turn 35 I think by my maths.
- How do you group up units standing in the same square once they are in two groups? (small groups, should be no reason I can't group them).
- Are you meant to be allowed two towers of dominion if you capture an enemy town with one? Or should it disappear on capture? (likewise with other 1 per faction buildings).
- I really like the quest leading to the Theatre of the Wind building, that sort of quest is awesome because it has such a cool reward and just shows how great this game could be (and it is already pretty decent). Although having said that it looks like I can build it in every one of my cities, not just one? If so that is probably overpowered as it is an awesome building.