This is a good post, OP, and I think deserves more specific elaboration (besides just UI stuff).

Let me get this right, you just played warlock and you found it fun, that's great news. But didn't you have fun when you first played FE too? It sounded liked you did. What's letting you down seems to be it's missing some replayability, not that there's some huge design thing that you are trying to blame in on. That's where all the faction differentiation that they are working on now comes in.

Or put it another way, what's to say that a few weeks from now you won't feel the same way about Warlock that you are feeling now to FE? It's called boredom, it happens when you play something too much. That's why you have multiple games to play.

To be honest, I don't get these kind of threads, trying to compare one game to another. It's like with EWOM and CIV5, and then you find out that everyone got both regardless. Go figure.

There's still a good deal of murkiness in Warlock. Quests, even in the patched beta of a week before release, aren't associated with specific gods--though you're told that if you refuse a quest, a god (which?) will get angry with you; and that if you succeed, it's opposite will be angry with you.  What gods?  What do they stand for?  They're supposed to have specific benefits, and hand out specific types of punishments to those who displease them.  What are each?  During the Twitch TV demo and Q&A, one of the Warlock development team admitted the feature wasn't fully in place, yet.  It sounds great, but as of now, you just get a "god quest" without knowing anything else, and you do suffer from various gods' anger over time.

Will there be multiple conditions of victory possible?  The developers have refused to answer this question for quite some time, even though people will find out in a few days.  Even one of the moderators of the forum is displeased with the way this has been left deliberately unknown.

Will there be extra diplomatic conditions?  Possibly, we're told.  Possibly more quest types, too.  What conditions?  What quest types?  No answers.  Will there be actual tech trees to see how buildings chain up from beginning to end?  Oh...maybe.  And this kind of secrecy was a hallmark of the company's development in a couple of earlier titles, too.

My remarks aren't meant to invalidate your enjoyment of Warlock, and as I remarked above, it is fun to play.  But then, these questions (and others) should be clear as day on a game coming out in 48 hours.  I'd expect FE to still have a lot in the air; and it does.  But while some things like city building are still bland, there are great areas of the game that are very distinctive.  The factions are beginning to shape out, and the spellbooks are excellent.  Champions are starting to differentiate, and combat is great.  I'm not sure why the two games need to be compared as you've done with this thread, not when they're so unlike and also at very different points in their development cycles, but with due respect for your obvious knowledge of both titles, I think you're doing a bit of injustice by measuring FE's focus and slickness by the same qualioties in Warlock.  Wait a few months, then check FE out for those.

I understand your critics, and I agree with you, when you are criticising some aspect of FE.

But you really think Warlock to be a good game???

To be honest I waited for Warlock as well. But when I played the demo I was very disappointed. Its complexity is far from CivV, and after some gameplay you will find it boring. They made a very plane game. At the first few game can be interesting, but later . . .

Anyone who buys Warlock after falling asleep at the demo, deserves a medal.  It is so,so, been done a thousand times to death.

Imho, Warlock has good graphics and plays fun. It's a must-buy at 20 bucks for any 4x fantasy player. But I am personally going to be spending more of my time on FE, because 1) I'm a fanboy and 2) FE has mods and I am a modder.

Hey guys, we're getting a little off topic here. I'm not saying Warlock is better than FE. I'm saying there's something to the CORE PLAY of Warlock where at every turn, every step I feel like I'm making an important decision and I can immediately see if that decision was smart or not. I brought it up simply because it throws FE in contrast.

Yes, there are TONS of decisions in FE, but my problem is that they all seem very similar and the consequences of any single decision seem very very hard to pin down. Not only does it feel like every decision is a tiny adjustment in a super-complicated large machine, it also feels like the consequence of any give decision might manifest two hours from the decision, or might push one variable a tiny bit in a certain direction. It feels very unsatisfying. It's the opposite of what I felt in the Warlock demo: every decision felt monumental and I could immediately tell what impact it had.

Again, not saying one game's better than the other. They're both in beta and I've only played the demo of Warlock through to its time limit. I'm trying to focus on this one aspect: the *feeling* of decision-making and impact.

This is something I've seen Derek aggressive dealing with, so I think as much as it's possible, it will be done.

To me, the real issues with FE are mostly balance/AI/variety at this point.  The problem is those areas tend to be mutually competitive in terms of design.

Having played both betas, I think there are some tidbits that can be pulled from Warlock to help FE.  They are completely different games and debating which is better is personal preference and adds no value.

City differentiation is very sound in Warlock.  FE still has to find its way.  I think city upgrades are too reliant on technology and size constraints and buildings build too fast.  Most my cities can build everything available. Having one building queue for units and buildings contributes to this issue.  If you increase the cost of buildings, it will be too hard to make units unless they come from a different city.  It just doesn't flow very well in FE.

The way units can be upgraded in Warlock made me realize that unit customization in FE is missing the mark.  Maybe some of the buildings should provide unit upgrades rather than everything tied to the tech tree.  I find that I rarely get new unit upgrades and it takes a long time to get them.  Thus I rarely upgrade units or design new units.  I thirst to create unique units game to game, but It feels like an uphill battle with the current implementation.

To me, these are the two major issues left with the game.  Otherwise, I was really having fun with the challenge of the game.

I found Warlock very boring and slightly confusing, but I just played the demo.  So for all I know, the game is good and has plenty of help, information, explanations, and story; while the demo does not.

"I slowly fall behind the AI, but it's not clear why. Many turns I skip waiting for armies to heal up or units to be built and it just feels dumb: I'm not doing anything, but it's not clear what I could be doing."

This is still my number one design issue of FE, and I have felt this way since WoM.

These are analogues to other 4x games that have build queue items like "trade goods" which if you build it, it never completes, but just turns your production into gold, or "housing" which turns your unused production into population.

In FE, the tax collector increases your gold production by 20% if you leave the build queue empty. Something like that might be useful when you need to support a large number of armies, and cannot do so on your base city income. If this is the case, you would turn 1/2 of your cities to pumping out units and the other 1/2 to tax (meaning you empty their queues and probably jack their taxes up, since you have no need for production), which would allow you to field more units at a time at the cost of the lost production and research. I like the idea, but I am not sure a 20% bump is worth it most of the time.

It is only natual and heatlthy to compare like games. The game most compare this game to is MOM but others have been compared to. I think we want may of the features in those other game but made modern and better.

And, from Keithburgun's thread:

"There are simply too many "tiny" choices that players get to make in Elemental. Once a decision gets beyond a certain threshold of impact, a better game design would simply streamline (remove) it. Don't make me make 10,000 "tiny" decisions in a playthrough of Elemental. A design that makes me make 1000 more significant ones is better."

I feel like these two quotes help to illustrate the tension stemming from ambiguity/inconsistancy surrounding the scale of the game. How much detail are the devs going for and how can this level of detail be made to be consistant throughout the game. You can design units, so why not cities (even though the former could be described as useful while the later merely the flush of creativity)? You can only travel a couple tiles every few months, but can 'teleport' through multi-tile cities in an instant. I can enchant the hammers of my people to imperceptively increase production, but there's nothing I can do to breed more than 0.8 of a horse every year. What's useful, what's not? There's inconsistancy.

It's like trying to find the right lightswitch when there's 5 seemingly-identical switches in a row in a booth around the corner.

^^ This is essential for effective design, be it a new office telephone system (did I put the other person on hold or hang up?) or the mechanics for a cutting-edge 4X Fantasy strategy game (How many units did I select to move out of my stack?).