Good stuff but as others have stated the UI is still in need of work.

-Better indication of a city going idle

-Capitol indication, and the ability to move capitol hopefully

-Army management on tiles, ie separating and combining army buttons

Derek, I like what I'm seeing a lot, but there are seven crucial ommissions that imho need to be addressed either in this beta or in a subsequent version.

Specifically, these important issues are:

1. Fix bug with waterfalls at the end of rivers being shown floating above the ground

2. Fix issue with cities not being able to build logging camps, piers etc. unless their starting tile is adjascent to the resource

3. Make it so you can zoom to a destroyed resource from the relevant notification

4. Make it so that governor heroes assigned to cities gain experience and can level up

5. Give us a spell to teleport items, or alternatively an item vault we can build in our cities

6. Make open borders a separate diplomatic action and not part of a non-aggression treaty

7. Allow outposts to have defenders or else to fortify units

All of these are incremental improvements that, if not implemented, would (again imho) significantly cripple the game...

Please respond with specific replies concerning these 7 issues,

Best, bendiwolf

Again: Wow !  There are a striking number of improvements that you have identified in this Fallen Enchantress Changelog for v0.98 (Beta 5).  Thanks for your continuing hard work in making improvements to this game; as well as for the increasing number of Bug-Fixes that you folks have been tackling, of late.   Really, the work (of your whole team) continues to be downright impressive ! 

Unfortunately, I do notice one trend in your Balance Changes, which gives me some cause for concern.  The increased cost (which translates to increased building times) for several builds/improvements looks to me, to be a change in the wrong direction.   Examples:

     o     1st level Shard shrine costs increased from 48 to 100

     o     2nd level increased from 105 to 150

     o     Apiary cost increased from 40 to 100

     o     Cost of building mines/farms increased from 40 to 100

                                                                            ... and several more such increases.  I personally find the city building queues to already be painfully slow.  If, as a matter of balance, you wanted to change the  relative cost of some items, I think you would have done better to have  lowered  the cost of most of the other items in the city building queues.  Any balance-move that results in an increase of the times in city building queues slows the game, and makes it more tedious in my view.  And  "slow and tedious"  translates into less  *FUN* ...

Anyone else think that city building queues are already too slow ? 

     [ Edit: Several folks have already identified the "three-turn minimum building cap" as a major annoyance.  Thanks, Tuidjy, mqpiffle, Cogburn, et. al. ]

I don't have a decent argument, but I look at this extra time for set-up and teardown or drying of "concrete" or equivalent. The lack of product carry over is people have to start over from the beginning of the project. But I do understand your pain, but I'm unsure of the game mechanics that would change because of it.

In the elementaldef.xml you can find this line,

<MinTurnsToConstructOrTrain>3</MinTurnsToConstructOrTrain>

change that line and please give a report on how that changes the gameplay. I'm curious as I watched your posts about not building a city and basically from reading, destroying the computer on insane.

First thing you need to do is add -localdataonly at the end of the file path for your shortcut to make this change.

I do not think that this could be said better, or loud enough, for that matter.

Actually, in .952, I rush probably 80% of my buildings in one turn after turn 30 or so.

Of course with the new rush penalty and the increased costs, this strategy is 100% D.E.A.D.

The game became even slower. Units also requires a lot of products? A group of five mages with the most basic staffs require a 30 crystals and 400+ prod(example)? No, I was wrong. This RPG.

I'm trying to build each game at least 4-5 full squad of units. And it takes so much time ... Now the game looks very slow. Maybe some people like it. can make an option for production speed when creating a game, as for the speed of learning? Such a norm. Fast -30% for the product and very fast -50%.

For the record, I don't have any issue with 3-turn building minimums.  And some of the resource improvements were being built too fast so I welcome the changes.  Having said that, there are still some buildings that cost too much.  We tend to make our 2 material cities into conclaves.  Unfortunately, the research buildings are very labor intensive so it takes way too long for 2 material conclaves to build them.  FIX IT!

If they're being built too fast why not ya know increase the cost? Isn't that what the cost is there for? To determine how long it takes to build?? The three turn build minimum is somewhat crippling to strategy. When you ask yourself should I spam weak troops or concentrate on strong troops it becomes something of a non starter when you can't build them any faster than 3 turns. When you ask yourself should I spam cities or should I focus on one mega city the question become kinda pointless when you realize that one mega city is going to be limited by the 3 turn build minimum. I don't understand what the three turn build minimum is there for. What problem does it solve that can't be solved in a more intuitive less arbitrary way?

I don't necessarily think production is slow overall, I just think high-production cities are being unnecessarily nerfed into nauseating un-fun-ness.

Thats quite a list.  Thanks for the update

Derek, Can you add the line

Select one Champion on the Path of Governor to be stationed at the Governor's Office for bonuses to take effect.  In addition, assigned Governor gains +1 experience point per turn.

I understand the logic of a 3 turn build minimum. Such a mechanic is there to make sure that production levels don't allow one city to ever outproduce 3 cities. It's a cap on the ability to power through several improvements and become too dominant through production. I don't think a hard cap is the way to deal with this problem, nor do I think the current implementation really solves anything. Gildar can always be used to to rush buy, which makes a highly efficient money maker more powerful than a highly efficient producer. Production only matters in as much as you reach the 3 turn build time. Beyond that, money matters more. The only place where production matters alot is when the player has several cities that can complete most things in 3 turns. You can afford to wait because you have a larger power base. A high production limit favors city spam. City spam is limited by fertile ground, which leads to extreme conquest for the highest number of cities. The design clearly points to high competition with little advantage for peace or neutrality, as both will end up with fewer cities and thus a less competitive empire. A player soon realizes this. It means that we are forced to war for good cities against would-be allies. It means we can be condemned, not by our strategic choices, but by the number of cities we can start with. It means the density of tiles yields is less important than the surface area. I would take 2 3/3/0's over an 8/8/0 any day of the week. Is that the intended design?

I prefer a fine tuned production scale over a hard limit on build times so that early game improvements and weak units have a place in the endgame. I shouldn't have a city with six times the production of my early game city constructing a workshop in the same 3 turns. It causes new cities in better locations with later technologies to take far too long to become competitive with other cities. You create a situation where a 3/3/0 city can vastly outperform a 5/4/2 simply because it was built sooner. That bothers my sense of game balance. A new city with better resources and better technology should be able to catch up rather quickly at the rate of its maximum production, not some arbitrary turn limit. Early game buildings should be very fast to build and newer ones should take increasingly long. The current balance and new proposed balance makes almost any and all buildings take about the same labor, only relying on the turn minimum to space out construction. I would rather there be a geometric scale of labor costs, so that newer cities can catch up, but the later improvements equalize that rate of ascension. The current system also potentially creates a situation where we have so much production from a high material city that production buildings are useless. We can already build as much as possible with our current production levels, so there is no need to get much more than the workshop. It means a high material city can ignore many production specializations. Since there is a limit on how efficient a city can be, many cities will ignore a very worthwhile portion of gameplay. Opportunity cost is lost to the 3 turn limit. The value of a weakling early game building is valued equal to endgame buildings and troops. This is a bad scale.

The scale I use in my own balance has a one turn minimum. Early game buildings will take 3-12 turns to complete from the get-go. As you learn to build new buildings, the construction costs go up, but so do the benefits. The costs of infrastructure go up so that later options are well balanced by the time it will take to construct them. Technology makes the core materials yield more production, allowing for new cities to catch up to older ones in production, but not in city level, which matters much more. How good a city is depends on its specialization coming from city levels. The available infrastructure can be rushed, but higher levels offer more infrastructure and thus city efficiency. Troops can be trained extremely fast, but their strength is mostly determined by the military infrastructure of the city. So, a Town can train a powerful knight in 3 turns late game, but the knight will be slower, take 35% longer, have fewer moves and be generally less shiny than if it had been trained in a Fortress. That is a choice the player has to make about whether they want a city that can train lots of strong units quickly, or one that excels at supplying them with wages. This is the kind of design that leads to strong strategic gameplay.

Now, I am happy to make my own balance to my own tastes. I can even release a mod to let other people play the game how I think it should go. I realize that I am perhaps more thoughtful in my play, but the fact that I and light users like Orion are seeing eye-to-eye about this issue should be a red flag for developers. When the advanced and the novice are complaining about the same game mechanics for different reasons, it should be an easy decision. There looks to be be some good balance in this new version, but many core balance problems remain. I will of course test out the new version before judging the update as a whole.

I don't really mind the building time minimums I just wish units weren't subject to the same restriction, part of what turns me off of using units over heroes is the time it takes to train them

I do not understand why having 4 cities with average production 40, I can not build units! It takes 10 + turns in each. The very first units! Of course we will be spam city. How to play multiplayer? 2 hero and 1.5 units on 40 + turn.? Please pay attention to the basic cost of production units. This is not normal. I understand there are spells to produce. But this is one school of magic. Here many people write about the 100 products in the city. All take this school? This is the balance? This is a poorly balanced spell. I hope that the game will be good. = (

The unit has a upkeep. Already balance. Why a huge price in the product? = ( 

The thing is I think most folks would prefer 1 powerful city to out-produce 3 weak cities.

I'd like to see the minimum building time be level based, maybe level 3-4 cities cut it to 2 and level 5 cut it to 1?

I also think the minimum build times is the wrong approach - I assume this was done to devalue materials in relation to grain when choosing a city site but surely the solution is to make grain more appealing e.g. greater city level up bonuses for example.

This min build time approach really hurts unit training - I often train lightly armed pleb units precisely because they are quick to train - there is now no incentive to do that. Also, why build buildings that give training time discounts when the unit is still going to take at least 3 turns?

Devs, I suggest you take another look at this.

Nice to see a new update, most things going in the right direction, some things still worries me but I will see what it becomes, from what I see and the outcome I expect based on earlier experience I hope beta 5 will become a long and lasting beta before release...

Then again, you could just fix the UI, bugs and give me the ability to make production overflow, so I can get to do my own balancing

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

See my first bullet. Can't queue buildings if pioneers are always there. In addition, improvements always got the priority because of they're relative short build time (usually the 3 turn limit), so city improvements always seem to be put on hold. Also, still no chance at squeezing troops into that queue too. It's just too much for a handful of cities to handle.

Also is there a window for any more feature requests or are we now in feature lockdown mode?

If there is time to squeeze in extra spells I would suggest just 2 more.

A tactical life spell that removes all negative effects from a unit (call it 'cleanse' maybe) - give it a casting time, a relatively low cost, and a chance to fail (mastery vs resistance)

A tactical death spell which is the opposite and removes all positive effects (including enchantment buffs for the duration of the battle) from a unit. maybe call it 'scour'

I feel these two spells are needed both for flavour and balance - scour would provide an answer to the enchantment super tank for one thing and cleanse would allow a unit to recover from something like graveseal or blindness

I may be calling you up for that if FE continues in the direction it seem's to be going.

Stardock could be holding back though....makes all the recommended changes we've all suggested, but not implementing them because they know it's balanced any works....saving the surprise for the final release.

And exactly why shouldn't one city that has been located, planned, grown and upgraded as a production center for 10 years outproduce any number of conclaves that have just been settled?

It's realistic.  I am sure that in the 70s, Detroit could outproduce not three, but thirty Laguna Beaches.

It makes for strategy and player agency.  What kind of city do I need?  Should I go for the materials in the forest or the essence in the grain fields?

It gives cities personality.  This one's for producing troops, that one for expanding into enemy territory, and that one for research.

It makes for faster gameplay.  Look at Manufacturium developing that five resource outpost in about an year!

It makes for a feeling of satisfaction for the player.  Here's my 195 production city by turn 60!

Instead, the developers seem to be aiming to artificially slow down the pace of the game .  You may put down a city on a 3/5/2 tile in the forest, and have improved craftsmanship, you may have brought a 81 men stack to transplant in your new outpost, but it will still take nearly one year to build a freaking log camp.  And by the way, forget about that 81 men stack.  It would take decades to build.

The game pace is already too slow unless you play the game as an RPG and blitzkrieg your way through your neighbors with your first two heroes.  Is the  stated design goal to force the player to repeatedly click [Turn] because there is nothing to do? 

Regarding minimum build times, couldn't this be scaled by the amount of material available?  I.e. a 3/2 has a minimum of 4 turns,  3/3 mininum of 3 turns, a 3/4 minimum of 2 turns, etc.?

Edit: just realized Alstein suggested the same thing

I see all kinds of 'solutions' or 'modifications' possible to the minimum build time mechanic. The questions is why do we have such a powerful and yet obscure mechanic? What is the point of it? What is it supposed to accomplish?

I just realized this post was up today! derp... well its coming out soon so its all good. Wonderful improvements all around.

Seconded. Doesn't need to be a full player-rearrange ability. Just put the ranged units in the back and the melee units in front. The way it is now, my mage units always end up in front and get killed before they can act.