Natasin

Join Date 08/2011

5.3 Feedback

The good:

I played on normal and found the game challenging especially the last battle.

The new art layout for the last battle looks sweet

The wizard tree is a lot better (I wished there was better mana generation)

Happy to not see my administrator when the mauling panther visited my front gates

Happy to see checkbox for autofinish overwhelming victories

Rival races quests and general feel are pretty good. They didn't settle any cities though.

The bad: non-bugs

There's got to be a way to setup a tactical battle so that my squishees aren't on the front line. I fought at least two battles where a pioneer or wimpy mage got splated because they in the front line at the start of battle. There really should be a tactical formation.

XP giveout feels really screwy. I'd kill one darkling and get 1-4 xp for tanis and company but then I'd kill the 600 exp juggernaut battle group and I'd get 1-2 xp. Suffice it to say that Iwas not motivated to kill anything but darklings.

There still is no easy way to know when a city is going to grow. I know it's located in the bottom left hand corner of the strategic map but it's small. Please add something a bar to the city on the strategic map or in the tooltip under food in city view.

I'm not going to exaggerate on this next point, at a certain point in the game where building towers, defense and getting around by tower road is almost imperative, I'm ready to give up the game. I absolutely hate having to spam pioneers. It's dreadfully unfun. First, there is no build queue; so, every turn you have to double click on the city and add another pioneer. There is no easy way to add another pioneer or queue up one. Sure one or two times is ok but I'm talking about doing this for 10 turns in a row because the road spell is still too expensive and towers are the best defense midgame. If you could upgrade by clicking on the tower and sending it to the production queue of the closest city then that would be awesome. This is an absolutely fun-breaking design issue for me.

I know this is supposed to change but watching my backline mage get wasted by an archer 10 squares away with Tanis standing right next to the enemy archer is the height of absurdity. A person in front of another person should provide cover or standing behind a rock.

The ugly: seem like bugs to me

Enemy units especially darklings like to roost in my towers and prevent me from upgrading my towers.

The panther maul is still too powerful and is still basically an instant kill for any early unit and sometimes even later units. I never played out my battles after one of my tough soldiers got mauled. Auto-resolve is always the best option with them.

Scout was continually getting attacked. I stopped making them after I lost a few.

I played on normal, arena, plentiful shards and slow doom and SK never did his normally dialogue tree where he'd try to convince me to give some energy for troops or dialogue to be my friend. The first he talked to me is when I had 5 shards and then when I destroyed a city. He really got excited with the Tower of Mastery; otherwise, no dialogue and I've played each edition since alpha.

SK settled every single available buildable settlement spot by like turn 50. I thought SK didn't settle as many towns as quick. It made for tougher game because you don't want to destory his cities due to threat and his cities were everywhere.

So to build leather armor early on as Galor required metal and hide. Not sure why metal is required. Seemed like a bug.

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Overall I had a lot of fun with this patch. The art looks great and I enjoy the races more. It's that pioneer/tower issue that seriously bugs me. It's bad enough for me that if it stays the same then I'd have to consider just not playing the game. It's that unfun for me. I can't be the only person that this bothers. Otherwise, I was having a good time with the game.

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XWerewolfX

Join Date 02/2006

+27

I, too, dislike the pioneer spam, but not to the point you do. I'd much rather make outpost improvement something that you queue up in production at a city or something...but your suggestion is similar to how constructors work in GC3 and that will work as well.

I agree with your criticisms. The pioneer issue isn't bad enough for me that I'd stop playing, but the way it's currently implemented does feel very clunky.

I've now starter three separate games and the SK hasn't said a word to me in any of them. I haven't started assaulting his strongholds yet, though...

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Good points. I mainly miss the build queue, really don't know why it isn't in the game.

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XWerewolfX

Join Date 02/2006

+27

Yeah, the more I play, the more I don't understand why there isn't a build queue. It's annoying once you have a few cities to have to manually choose the next item to build everu few turns.

I I forgot the exact reasoning, but Brad made it sound like a queue will never happen...

That's a shame.

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abiessener

Join Date 01/2006

+46

Do you guys build an "outpost perimeter" around your empire to guard against attacks? I don't take issue with pioneer spam, but more or less the only outposts I build most games are around shards.

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With 26(on average) shards there will be a lot of pioneers.

And on higher difficulty one needs additional strong outposts in choke points.

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Quoting abiessener,

reply 4

Do you guys build an "outpost perimeter" around your empire to guard against attacks? I don't take issue with pioneer spam, but more or less the only outposts I build most games are around shards.

I certainly build towers for shards early on but I do build an outpost perimeter as you say. There's normally, on an arena map, about 3 shards fairly close by to the beginning city. Building a tower around that shard will also build a road. So after those first few then it becomes an issue of road logistics. Right now, you first have to research the road spell and it cost 5 mana to cast the road spell. It cost me 12 mana to summon a pioneer in my city that can build a tower and make a longer road. The road spell is simply too expensive to considering using the spell that often; so, the better option is using towers. This issue of using towers for road support is considerably more important on larger maps. It also me to get around that much quicker and also once you figure out where the SK is located then you can use towers for defense in depth.

So there are basically four directions from your starting city - north, west, east, and south to defend. So I do use my towers for defense and normally this setup is based on where the first shards are located. The difficulty increases when you need those towers to take down the stronger SK units. After mid-game those tower setups are very important to protecting your city against those juggarnaut infused units. The only way to make an effective defense is to upgrade those towers and that requires at least 3 pioneers a piece. If you only have to protect 3 basic directions then that's nine pioneers. I know that you don't have to upgrade the towers but it makes exploring that much safer because you're not worried about your city getting destroyed by some mauling panther quite as much.

So again, I use towers for shards but I mainly use them to get to places more quickly and also for defense. The use of towers to expand and move quickly cannot be understated.

I thought one thing you guys could do is give the ability to build roads to either the scout or pioneer that takes one turn to build.

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