I have put about 180 hours into this since I downloaded the Beta. I have played 7 full games. I started on the easiest difficulty level and have very slowly worked up the difficulty tree. I am currently playing my first "normal" difficulty game. Please read my comments with this in mind as the game mechanics may be dumbed down considerably by the lower difficulty levels I am playing at. I like to play random generated games with most things set to random, very long research times to give the games an epic feel, and medium or smaller maps.
Whatever faction I play I always seem to play the same game. I explore, build a city or two, turn out a couple of scouts and explore the whole map, expand to 4 or 5 cities, avoid combat with enemy AI, do whatever I can to keep the Ai happy, pretty much ignore unrest but minimise it as much as possible, until commander units and city improvements put my unrest to zero for the rest of the game, then expand and expand and expand. build and max out cities, CRITICALLY paralyse AI cities with curse and whatever spells add unrest to enemy cities. Then grow and grow and finish the tech tree, occupy all the land, do the special quests like pyre of man, pick off the ai one at a time, enjoy my gold income which may be thousands per turn, enjoy my mana income which may be hundreds per turn, enjoy my buffed champions and units which are maxed out.
Different faction just enable me to slightly alter the way I play each game. In my opinion a faction should force me to totally change my game plan.
Curse is too powerful, lasts too long and is too cheap. Earthquake allows a faction to be taken to pieces surgically and remotely and is too cheap and easy to use.
AI factions should resent having bad spells cast on their cities if they firgure out who did it. City detail screens should show bad spells placed on cities. Some kind of notification or grahic should result after an ai faction casts a bad city spell on me. Cureently so far as I can see the only way to identify a bad effect is to see indirect efects on individual items within the city detail screen or the enchantments screen showing something like 2/1 or 4/3.
However, the highest level I get my heroes to is about 10 to 15 which makes most of the trait trees irrelevant. There are just too many traits and not enough opportunities to level. There should be a way to view the trait trees in a very detailed and much more informative way.
All the little icons for traits and spell effects on a unit's portrait are hard to differentiate and often mousing over a portrait or the traits on it does not throw up a help tip to explain things.
Heroes are very underpowered for much of the game. Trained units become very overpowered ( if kept updated) towards endgame.
A beastmaster in an army with a couple of captured big nasty spiders or a couple of capured MAULing bears is awesome early on.
When my champions etc have purchased all the amulets etc it would be nice to be able to set configurations of gear to allow quick selection of fire resistance, physical combat, quick regen after combat, etc tec etc.
