Re: Metacritic

1. Temple of Elemental Evil - after the CO8 patch - remains one of my favorite RPG games with its MGYG tactical battles.

FE: At this stage its good, not excellent - and the tactical battles are much better than WOM with the enemy casting magic and using bows, and the magic branch has been really improved.

1. The tactical battle all fell the the same. Take spiders - web, web, web then attack. Why not some spiders that just charge.
2. Air Elemental - Titans Breath, Titans Breath, Titans Breath - then attack. The casting of three Titan's breath spells when there is only one elemental on the board makes not sense. The characters get knocked down and stand up. If facing two air elementals - then one should cast Titan's breath while the other attacks.
3. I would like to see more spells, more creatures with different combat tactics, and more research branches.
1. More healing spells
2. Research: Healing - allows one to build hospital that increases heal rate by +1/turn in that city
3. Research: Surgergy - allows one to build a teaching hospital that increases heal rate by +1/turn in that city
4. Maze (Earth) - renders 25% of unoccupied battlefield titles impassible.
4. The continual stream of peon armies attacking a strong city have to go.
5. Agreed that the AI races need to be more differentiated in strategy.
6. I would really like to see more unit specific combat tactics (like defense) and more tactical spells that would make the tactical battles less cookie cutter and more exciting. 
7. Tactical battles need intuitive way for champions to change weapons - i.e. change from bow to mac - during a battle.
8. Need intuitive way to talk to enemy fractions during a war - to seek/offer peace - aka Civilization.
1. Also, need a way to offer enemy AI items besides gold - i.e. Magical Longbow, Magical Armor, Plate Mail, etc, an outpost, etc.
9. New units should appear in the city they are built in, not outside the city walls.
10. I would like to see a larger range of city improvements available to choose from.

Forget what I said a couple posts up.  I'd rather see level rate increased from what it is now, with the potency of gained levels reduced (fewer HP, less potent bonuses, at least at lower levels).

Leveling up and feeling yourself progress is fun. Getting a constant stream of rewards, even small ones, is fun.

Getting less levels is less fun.  The more you diminish that stream of rewards,  the more you erode one of the strongest hooks the game has at present.

But I still wish more of the level up bonuses each time were related to career path selection, for creating different feeling Champions.

This is an option under gameplay options.  I think it should probably default to auto garrison, rather than having the units pop out of the city on creation.  

Overall I voted good largely due to the reasons Brad already posted a few post back.  

Two UI screens I think we need that are hopefully included in Brad's list:  

An army management screen that lets me perma-group units into armies that cause the armies to be handled as a single unit for the purposes of selection and whatnot.  

A hero management screen that lets me see a good overview of all heroes affiliated with my kingdom.  The overview should include obvious stats, level, and an icon list for all traits.  The scenario that made me consider this a necessity was an attempt to use Steal Spirit late game.  I had ~15 heroes spread throughout my kingdom.  Some leading wars, some guarding cities near contested territory, and some in cities in the rear waiting for me to have a need for them.  It was a royal pain to find the one I wanted to kill to get my Sovereign access to Air spells.  

Because it's very stable:P

I voted Good but I'm afraid it's still far behind HoMMV or KB or CiV4 in terms of art assets.

Well, I voted good, because even with all the issues, I have a bad case of 1-more-turn-itis when I play it.

However, don't want to rain on your crash parade Frogboy, but my game crashes on a routine basis. Not all the time, but perhaps once or twice an hour when I play it. It either just suddenly stalls when on the global map and then "Fallen Enchantress has stopped working" OR suddenly on the tactical battle map the animations get REALLY slow and after a minute or so of fighting out a battle like this it crashes. It would seem that I should submit/do something but I'm not sure how. My rig is probably much more high end than most people's - it's an 8 core machine - so perhaps this may be why you haven't seen it any.

What would you like for me to do? New here at the beta table.

This beta seems much less pollished than the previous one; there are lots of text errors, such as discriptions of faction bonuses and technologies saying that stuff is provided when it isnt, and hero recruitment tooltips not knowing the heroes level.

Also discriptions saying that drakes of various sorts are intelligent, when they have an inteligence of 1.

Hero vs unit balance seems a bit better, and unit upkeep now changing with unit value seems an improvement.

Mage staves for doing ranged attacks are buggy when combined with horses; the looping animation stops the attack from happening for ages. There was a similar bug in wom with mounted archers, so this should be fixable in a simliar way.

Other basic engine problems continue, such as holding shift to multi select units to move them together resulting in the mouse curser jittering. That has been the case for a very long time all through wom, and it is still anoying and needs fixing.

Very large improvement but due to high number of crashes im getting i gave it a fair, but for a beta minus the crashes i woulda given it and good instead of fair. 

Guess im one of the few who are getting the crashes by the shitloads, very nice system specs to so not my pc. And running a nearly new install of windows zero virus etc, and did a fresh install of the game usining full installer not update.

But thats what crash log submissions are for , guess ill get on that hopefully beta 3 will run better for me 

also i was wondering if some examples from maybe spiderwebsoftware games for tactical might help wiht tactical battles, mainly on the movement points system i always liked the way that game worked with the movement system, exile/avernum, the tactical battles in this series has always been fun for me at least

I voted fair because the game has some potential, but I am unsure it will get there :

My main problem with the game is the pacing : 

The techs are way too generic and uncool. You have to unlock a ton of techs before being able to do anything. MoM and AoW had you research spells only and it worked better for me (I don't really like having to unlock pre medieval tech, it feels more like caveman fantasy than medieval fantasy when armies of clubmen supported by magic have to duck it out, which would be cool if the game had dinosaurs too, but it doesn't). I wish we started with all the mundane techs, and the warfare and civic trees were about using magic to enhance these (mostly with new unit traits to unlock, and magical weapons for the warfare tree, and enchanted roads, "terraformation" techs for the civic tree). I think it would work better to be able to start with whatever mundane army you feel like, and have them get upgraded to legendary magically equiped mageslayers than to start with cavemen and have them upgraded to men at arms by the end of the game.

Most of the game is determined by your first spearmen vs spearmen encounters, which is somewhat sily. 

The cities are too far apart, and too generic, and we don't have enough of them. I don't like the multi tiles cities either (it makes movement really weird IMO) : it makes warfare less about choosing where to attack or defend (because there are many less potential targets), and too focused on one single battle where you annihilate the stack of the opponent (MoM had many more cities, so it took less time going from one point to another one, even though most units had 1 Move/turn). You end up spending too many turns just moving towards your destination, until you get stupid movement upgrades that allow you to suddenly zip through the map like mad. Teleportation would not be such an issue is normal movement was not that horrible IMO.

Even the hero levels are mostly generic (I really don't like the traits that only give 2 points to an attribute : I'd rather have an attribute point pool that would increase each level, and traits that really feel like they add something new, like feats in D20). At least, the attribute increase should have a greater impact on the abilities of the character. Having to chose between 4 +2 to an attribute is horribly boring.

There is so much room in the Path system for improvement. Now that I think about it, I am a little worried that no new content was added in .86 to this part of the game. The endgame should be all about turning those basic Paths into proper classes. Trained units are far superior in the endgame. The balance should be by making the Paths more diverse and powerful. There should be at least 12 Paths branching off of those main three. 

I think the thing that people find...unappealing...is that no matter what path you choose, the options are basically the same. There's some variation but it's all due to the results of a random number generator, not your actual choice. Personally I think that L1 heroes should start off with basically no bonuses at all, at at L2 the first thing you do is select a path, and your first "power". If you choose path of the mage for instance, you'll only get magic abilities past that - spell levels, intelligence, spell mastery, etc. Conversely fighter would be power attack, stun attack, extra strength, etc. There's also a lot more potential traits that could be added in to flesh out stuff - like mounted traits (ride by attack, etc).

Really the choices should mean something other than what they do now. Also something needs to be done about execution of path of the governor as if you stay in a city using your skills, you never gain levels (other than perhaps with the adventurer's guild bonus, and it's horrible). Personally I'd make it so that if you did path of the governor you no longer can gain XP from combat, but instead gain it at a fixed rate per turn based on the population of the city you're in. Or something similar, as it doesn't work now.  

Very well-said. I think too many people are comparing FE to WOM, and are thus very excited. There's been some significant improvments, for sure. It's a dramatically better game than WOM. But this is only relatively speaking.

My biggest fear is that we'll only see incremental changes from here on out. I like your D&D RPG suggestions, and the tech and building trees definitely still need some dramatic makeovers to be acceptable. Even just FFH2's level would be something (which FE is not close to yet).

I just hope the FE team has not gotten so caught up in the details and incremental improvements that they've stopped going back to the drawing board, having brainstorming meetings, and thinking up new ideas (as well as listening to the community). This game has so much potential, but it also spells the doom of the genre if it flops. We need an innovative game, to carry the genre forward, and there's no reason why we can't have that while pulling from other successes. And while the game is okay, it's not going to be the huge success if we don't see these kinds of improvements implemented soon.

Brad mentioned that he thought WOM flopped due to listening to the community too much. I'm in marketing, so perhaps I'm biased, but there's no danger of listening to the community too much at this point. We want the game to succeed, and while we're definitely not hating the game at this point, we can see the true potential.