My Fallen Enchantress thoughts

I know I'm pretty late to the party, but I thought I'd post my thoughts on Fallen Enchantress, as a huge fan of Elemental.  Yes, Elemental did have issues, but I can't deny that I had fun playing it.  I think I beat 2 or 3 maps, and that equates to at least 30-40 hours or so of gameplay.  Elemental didn't dethrone Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic or Heroes of Might and Magic 3 like I'd hoped it would, but it was playable.

Other games and hobbies and life basically kept me from giving Fallen Enchantress a good go when it launched, but I keep reading the update emails from Stardock, and every time a new version came out, I'd download it and think "I need to get around to giving this game a good shake" but then Shogun 2 or something else would distract me.

ANYWAYS long story short I've played a couple games of Fallen Enchantress now, and just thought I'd post my thoughts on the game.

Both my games have been on "Small" maps and I started out with "Challenging" for all the settings.

First of all, wow is this game pretty.  Even more gorgeous than Elemental, which I thought did a great job in the art department on most counts.  One thing Elemental fell really short on was special effects for Spells in tactical combat, and wow does Fallen Enchantress fix that.

One thing I'm puzzled about is the "Autoturn" option and why it's on by default.  I've tried playing with it turned on and as a strategy gamer it just confuses the heck out of me.  I'm surprised this wasn't just removed for Fallen Enchantress.  Also, can we do something to "pretty" up the lower right corner of the GUI?  Everything else is so stylized, but in the lower right corner I just have this big black box for the minimap, and three really non-descript buttons for "Spells", "Govern" and "Turn".  Not even a spellbook icon, or a govern hammer, or some pretty green vines, or alternatively nasty viney thorns around the "Turn" button?  The rest of the game screen is so pretty!

I didn't read the manual to the game, I just jumped in based on what I knew about Elemental and other strategy games.  This game is SO much more intuitive than previously.  No mysterious hidden numbers anywhere.  No more building tons of housing elements in your city.  Tooltips are everywhere, and they (mostly) tell you all the information you need to know.

For example, when I started Fallen Enchantress I had no idea what "Unrest" was.  First time I floated the cursor over my "Production" and saw that Unrest was a negative factor, it didn't take me long to then go look at what "Unrest" was, what was causing it, and how I could get rid of it, since it was obviously BAD.  In Elemental information like this was so hidden!  In my very first game after not too long most of my towns were in the single digits for Unrest.  Building Outposts to extend my domain between towns was the only thing I didn't figure out on my own.  I had to run into an Outpost built by an AI before I realized I could extend my domain with Outposts.

City Building is a lot more fun without the monotonous upkeep tasks.  Pick your upgrades, and build.  It's very cool balancing between upgrading tiles such as Clay Pits or Shards, building or upgrading the town itself, training new units, and concentrating on growing the town itself.  Town Enchantments add a whole new level here as well, and I was having fun with them.  There did pop up one thing that frustrated me, which is the Town Upgrade screen.  When a town levels up, you get a pop-up window asking you to upgrade the town, and you can't do anything until you choose.  I had quite a few cities, and it was hard to tell what city had upgraded, and I couldn't look at my empire as a whole before I made my decision.  I'm somewhat dismayed as to why the Town Upgrade screen can't be cancelled, with a button on the town to decide your upgrade path later.

I love the Hero system in Fallen Enchantress.  I really can't say too many nice things about it.  I actually like the roulette of skills that Champions get when they level up.  The positive and negative abilities are very cool, and it's fun to see you can use some of these on units that you design.  About the only thing that would make it better would be the ability to recruit new Champions from a building in a town.  In both of my games I was pretty much stuck with my Sovereign and one Champion throughout the game.  I finally found a third in my first game but the game was practically over by then, I was already dominating the map.

Research is a bit strange to me, and maybe it's because I was on a small map.  At the beginning, it's slow going, and each item researched it really important.  I was a little puzzled by the research pacing though.  By mid-game I already didn't really care that much about anything that I was researching.  There were several times when I finished researching something, and I really didn't know what to pick next, because I didn't really need anything on the tech tree.  I was winning, but the two other powers on the map still had about 2/3 of my Power rating, so they weren't completely conquered yet.  I deliberately didn't want to go for the Spell of Making victory, since this was a small map I wanted the thrill of conquering my opponents.  On bigger maps with more opponents perhaps research is a bit more of an arms race, and is a more important factor.  At the same time though, by the time I'd finished my first Small game, I'd researched the entire military tree, and 4/5 of the other two trees.  This makes me think that on a larger map, you'd have all three research trees completed before the game was anywhere close to being completed.

Tactical Combat was similarly a lot more intuitive and a lot more streamlined.  It was relatively easy to tell how difficult my opponents were before starting combat, and during tactical combat.  Tactical combat is very very fun now.  Spells are more interesting as well, with a lot of tactical options.  Even my largest combats seem to go by so quickly that only the largest and most powerful spells get cast, though.  Generally in a large combat, my Sovereign might get to go 3 or 4 times.  So "Slow" only gets cast on the most powerful unit.  "Haste" only gets cast on my most damaging unit.  Area effect spells are given much more priority over single-attack spells, even if they do less damage, simply because you may only get to cast one per combat.  A lot of spells simply aren't used.  For example, I had a spell that would infect other units with negative spells cast on that unit.  I never really cast this spell, because first I'd have to cast a negative effect on that unit to begin with, then cast the "infect" spell, and then it would take multiple turns to infect everyone on the field.  By the time all that had happened, chances are the battle is over.  It's more effective to simply fireball instead.  Again, maybe on larger maps with more powerful armies, this changes.

For me, tactical combat became the most fun around mid-late game.  I had my Sovereign, a Warhammer unit I'd designed as my "grunts", a more elite unit with magic weapons I'd designed as heavy hitters, a few stacks of archers, an Ogre from an Ogre camp, and a unit I'd designed with a ranged magical attack.  I had a really diverse army with lots of different units.  However, previously to that all my combats could have mostly been won with my Sovereign and a few stacks of archers.  Not really all that interesting.  It'd be nice if players had more variety earlier in the game.  I did have spiders I could train from the beginning which was nice, but that was all.  I also feel that Archers are a little too powerful.  As soon as I got Archers, tactical combats lost any sense of risk.

I'm looking forward to starting even a harder game, on a larger map with some more opponents.  I'm really looking forward to the next expansion, too, although amusingly other than a building to recruit Champions from, I already really like the Champion system as it is now.  If there were anything that I'd be improving in the game, it would be the different types of units you could recruit and more special abilities for them, and making tactical combat a little more tactical.

Any other thoughts?  Stuff I got wrong or things I should look into exploring more?