0.981c Bugs, UI Issues and Suggestions
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Elemental Forums
Elemental Forums
I've played one game now and have two main things to say:
1. The game is becoming both great fun and rather addictive.
2. The game is a long way from being stable, polished and balanced.
Unfortunately I'm really under the gun this week and don't have time to tidy up this list of problems so I'll just regurgitate them in the order I wrote them down. My impression here is that some of the UI issues I have pointed out may not have been mentioned to Stardock yet (or maybe I've just missed the threads, I only browse). I've deleted a couple of my problems which are well known problems (eg not meeting AI even after walking all around their capital).
- Create Sovereign screen still doesn't tell what the factions REALLY offer in terms of bonuses/weaknesses. This is such a major problem, particularly for new players, that I just can't believe it hasn't been fixed yet!
- Create Faction screen still doesn't tell you what bonuses/weaknesses the race will give you. Perhaps not quite as bad as the lack of Faction info but almost!
- I still find Enchanters (or whatever it is that gives access to Tomes and Scrying Pools) the best trait (alongside the scouting one). Maybe just because I like magic. And combining Betrayers with Great Leader (or whatever gives free hero recruitment) is a little broken, although at least it is limited by available experience.
- Cast Enchanted Hammers on capital while it is selected, the production doesn't go up/build time go down until I resellect - should refresh display immediately.
- Is there a problem with the random treasure generator? 3 of my first 5 treasures were hate stones.
- Save game screen, hitting enter key should save and close.
- There is weird stuff going on with loading auto saves, units start with no movement in places they shouldn't be unless they have movement, etc.
- Furthermore if you do a few loads in a row you can usually crash the game to desktop. Basically I've got no confidence in the save/load mechanics, it seems to me like it is often saving a snapshot half way between this turn and the next. This is obviously a serious problem which is likely to get mentioned in game reviews!
- Poison doesn't seem to proc properly - when is it meant to happen? I had two poisoned ruffians on 1 HP both take their turn and attack me without dying.
- Getting fed up with sharp daggers too. I now have 4 sharp daggers and 4 hate stones out of about 14 pick ups.
- It doesn't appear that any construction overflows. This is annoying and rewards micromanagement of tax rates etc to avoid wasted production. Most strategy games are doing overflow these days and it avoids silly micro. I suggest allow up to one single turn's worth of production to overflow.
- The unit hover summary in the Train menu needs to have the unit maintenance listed. (actually I guess you can click on the unit and then get it in the bottom summary but still a little annoying).
- Why would anyone buy scouts? Give them an extra movement point perhaps, or the ability to build outposts.
- Borders fairly commonly stuff up and drawing weird lines joining up cities which are not actually close to adjacent.
- Monsters pretty much never seem to destroy AI outposts or towns. Or pioneers for that matter. I'm watching Altar here btw, they don't have the scout ability do they? Further more I've also noticed that the two dragons that Altar has disturbed with outposts always beeline to me whenever one of my heroes is in sight, completely ignoring Altar's sov and two outposts. Yay, I finally saw a monster take out an AI, a group of scouts got owned by a forest drake. But even so the overall behaviour is extremely annoying, the AI settles or outposts beside monsters which starts them roaming free then they virtually always seem to chase after the player!
- Why do the conclave/town/fortress options rearrange themselves in the city upgrade UI? Seems to be trying to catch the user out. Make them alphabetical if you don't have any other way of ordering them.
- Why does the AI settle a 4/2/0 when there is a 4/2/1 just two squares away and plainly visible? (what was particularly insulting is that it was also right beside a big ogre which of course then wandered off to attack me rather than attacking the town built adjacent to it. I tried the same 10 turns earlier beside a bear and spiders which instanatly both attacked next turn (fortunately I had my sov there to defend)).
- Army summaries should not total armour of all units in the army. Either use the average or the maximum value.
- After reloading can't see any of the shrines etc that you have discovered that are in fog of war. This is really annoying.
- Blindness is a somewhat ridiculous spell, because low accuracy can easily cause perma misses. Make it a straight 50% chance of miss maybe. BTW is it meant to also make you lose your counter attack with a sword? Seemed to to me.
- When the I declare war button is greyed out there is no explanation of why, would be nice to have a hint (in this case was due to non aggression pact I think which I could at least see on governer screen, but couldn't see from diplomacy).
- Hitting the space bar should just mark the unit as not wanting to move further it shouldn't actually take away its moves and make it unable to move!
- When an item is picked up the screen doesn't show the unit picking it up, it can show anything else, in fact it will often deliberately scroll away from the item picking things up. The same applies to the quest popup.
- Weird things happen with movement. I have clicked on a troll I want to attack but don't have enough move to get there. So I hit turn. Immediately it says I am under attack from the troll. I auto resolve and my guy is now standing where the troll was with 2/4 movement but can't move at all! (which is definitely a bug) Surely I should be where I was at the end of the last turn with 4/4 anyway?
- If I click the explore button with no movement points then my hero shows ... for where he plans to move next turn. I don't really want him to explore so I right click to give him new orders and they go away. But then next turn he starts exploring where he originally wanted to go anyway! Then he keeps deciding to go exploring again regardless of what orders I give him. OK a few turns later I worked this out, Explore mode is a toggle, but the button caption and state doesn't change so no way of knowing. The button needs to push down and stay down while in Explore mode, and it also needs to be cancelled whenever the unit gets manual orders.
- I think buildings are taking too long to complete now, it shouldn't be easy to build everything but right now I'm struggling to even build the bare essentials.
- The interface is way too subtle with some things such as selecting units. I've played numerous RTS games and all the FE betas but I still sometimes end up moving only one unit when I wanted to move the whole stack. Most recently this happened because I selected a stack containing two heroes, cast a spell buffing one of them, then immediately I moved, and only the buffed hero moved. At no point did I say I only wanted to select one of them, I presume the action of casting the buff spell did that? I've had similar things happen when trading items between heroes etc.
- I have one hero capable of casting burning blade, it seems he can cast it multiple times per turn? (Strategic map). I thought each hero could only cast once per turn?
- Make it cost 20% extra to buy an item at another players shop (perhaps no penalty if allied). Currently there is little reason to research horses since a friend usually will.
- Is it deliberate that when you kill an ogre on an ogre lair the squares around it get 3 essence? Don't get me wrong it is very cool for builder types like me and I very much like being able to build cities that actually have decent essence, but it doesn't make much sense to me (perhaps I just don't know the lore about Ogres being magical creatures?).
- Monument is both a building giving +1 zoc and an improvement on a place of influence.
- Can't interupt movement of current unit, attempting to do so by giving new orders while moving will just give those orders to the next unit!
- Building an offer in the diplomacy screen, added 1 warfare to their offer, then 7 magic tech from mine, then 5 civ tech from theirs, then wanted to remove the 1 warfare tech from the deal but couldn't work out how to. Had to restart the whole deal.
- I attacked a horde of darklings, auto resolved and the darklings moved to a different adjacent square before all falling over dead.
- If you go into the shop screen and click the sell button without thinking it immediately sells a weapon. This can really suck if you only have one weapon and quite liked it. Not cool.
- One of my cities with two clay quarries going to it only showed 1 on the materials hint, but I think it did get the benefit of both.
- Had an outpost swap hands a few times, at the end I had it and it showed an air altar as not finished (6 turns to go) but it didn't show in queue of the city. There doesn't seem to be anyway of cancelling it either, it is stuck in limbo. This is incredibly annoying as you can imagine
- Close battle against enemy heroes, right down to the wire, then their sovereign backs off one square in last round of battle and does nothing (no spells), making an easy kill. Both my last two heroes were one hit from death!
- Ash Dragon did fear on me but on none of my heroes could I see what the effect of fear actually was (I tried selecting and going into the detail screen which showed my buff spells on them but not fear)
- AI built an outpost on top of a quest location (refugee camp). Surely that shouldn't be possible? It made it impossible to do the quest.
- 20 gold for killing an ashwake dragon is a bit underwhelming!
- Think I had two city level ups happen on the same turn. I remember being rather puzzled because it was focusing a different part of the map, but the city name listed was definitely the one I wanted to be a fortress so I did that. However a few turns later I realised another city which I wanted to be a conclave was also a fortress. Either it took the same answer for both cities OR I just thought the first click didn't work and clicked again (in which case the map focus didn't change, but I wouldn't have expected it to because it was already pointing at the second city).
- The new tax system needs more work, it seems like Low tax is now mandatory and anything above Low has severely diminishing returns and should be avoided. If the goal was to make the question of where to set the tax slider more interesting then it was a complete failure, but possibly with more balancing and tweaking the numbers it could work.
- Heroes are leveling a little bit too slow now I think, it was taking a great deal of effort to get past level 9. However I realise this is tied into key balance issues so just giving my feedback, heroes are a bit less fun right now.
- Most outpost upgrades are pointless. Only High Tower and Consulate are useful (and Consulate seems a bit cheesy).
Thanks!
I personally love designing my enemies as much as myself.
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