Hello,

First off, I just wanted to say how much I'm enjoying the beta for Fallen Enchantress.  I've been playing it off and on since the open beta started and there's certainly been much improvement over the original game and I'm glad that many things seem to be heading in the right direction as we get closer to release.

I've been considering posting my thoughts on the beta for a while, but these forums see so much activity that most of my observations and/or concerns usually are brought up by others.  But there are two issues that continue to play on my mind that I'd like to bring notice toward:

- Maps (randomly generated & static)

- Navies (or lack thereof)

The map issue is somewhat inconsistent and are improved over the ones in the original Elemental in terms of random generation.  Previously, it seemed in War of Magic that many generated maps, regardless of size, were a hodgeposh mess that more often than not resulted in spaghetti continents that were ropey landmasses interwoven with patches of sheer-cliff walled seas, lakes, and ponds.  Needless to say, this left a lot to be desired in terms of believable geography.  Fallen Enchantress has improved on this in some ways, but I find I am still occasionally experiencing the 'spaghetti continent' syndrome in map generation.  To add to this the map generator seems to either really work or really not in making widely varying continent types that you only discover hundreds of turns into the game as you explore.

My suggestion for the map generator is to obviously make the spaghetti continents less prevailant and to add another map generator option like that in the Civilization series, which defines what type of continent (or continents) are created.  For example, in Civ, you can chose multi-continents, pangea super continents, island worlds, ect.  Whereas in both Elementals, you just roll the dice and find out far too late in the game what type of world you have.

Also, I'm not sure if it's possible, but it would also be nice (if this already exists, forgive my ignorance) to save worlds you have generated.  Last night I had a gem of a generated world and I was disappointed that I had to stop playing it due to not placing enough AI in the game and it all being over before mid-game.  I then had to spend an hour or two generating worlds in hopes of getting something similar.  It'd be really nice to be able to save randomly generated worlds once you explore enough and enjoy the world so much you wish to play again in another playthrough.

The other issue on the subject of maps is more of a question.  Will there be pre-set maps in the retail game like there were in War of Magic?  I've noticed in the beta there's only two so far and it'd also be nice if there were a wide selection of pre-set maps so you know what you're getting ahead of time unlike the random generator.

Lastly, this is less lengthy, but will navies being making a return?  I've noticed several times while playing that the lack of navies has really hurt my strategic planning.  This also goes hand-in-hand with maps in that certain world types won't be workable without navies (multi-continents, islands, ect).  They don't have to be exceedingly deep (although that'd be nice), but just present enough to present alternatives to all land-based strategy.  In War of Magic, there were transports, and while that was a bit on the shallow end, it at least presented options to marching overland.  It'd be nice to see a little more attention given to navies as that would help open the world up and add more believablity to the world as a whole. 

That about does it for now.  Again, great job on Fallen Enchantress so far, it's a vast improvement over War of Magic and with more polish and feature additions, I have no doubts it'll become a modern classic of 4X gaming.