The why of fun is a pretty tough thing to nail down. It's very hard to say why you're having fun (or not). What is much easier, then, is to say whether or not you are having fun. And I'm not really having a lot of fun with FE right now. But I had to play the Warlock: Master of the Arcane demo to realize this.
I had a lot of fun discovering what kind of game FE was at first. I was dazzled at every turn by the complexity of its systems and the amount of stuff there was to discover. But a few games in that's slowed down. I'm now starting new games, playing a little, then getting really frustrated or bored and abandoning the game. I thought the 0.9xx series should make things better because it introduced a lot of variety, but if anything it's worse now. I had no idea why that was until I played the Warlock: Master of the Arcane demo, and I think I have a good idea now.
In Warlock, every turn seemed to have a tough, interesting choice in it. Building stuff in cities is a rare opportunity, there's always a few things you feel you HAVE to have, and when you do make a call it's 2-3 rounds and bam the building's there and you feel its impact. Something about the game changed. Spells are super expensive to use but when you do, they have a really big impact that you can feel as well. It's rare that you cast something, but when you do, the game changed.
In Fallen Enchantress, I'm always doing something, but I'm never sure if it's a good idea, if I need to do it, what the effect was, etc. In a word, the game's mechanically muddy. There's a whole lot of buildings I can make from a city, and clearly one is going to be better than another, but I don't really know what I need. I usually have another money, but even if I don't it's not clear what big game-changing thing I could do with money. The best use I discovered is to Rush stuff, but again: stuff doesn't feel impactful. I slowly fall behind the AI, but it's not clear why. Many turns I skip waiting for armies to heal up or units to be built and it just feels dumb: I'm not doing anything, but it's not clear what I could be doing.
And yes of course the UI being very very frustrating doesn't help (and I do appreciate the irony of comparing a game to a Paradox game and saying that basically the Paradox game has the better UI. That's like saying a Michael Bay film has the better plot. Unfortunately it's true.) I wonder if it would help Derek and the devs if we catalogued our misgivings about the UX? Let me try a quick best of list:
* Cities happily idle without warning you.
* Moving multiple units out of a city is retardedly hard.
* Exclamation marks over things you can build improvements on are super inconsistent (sometimes they're there, sometimes they're not)
* Rounds just auto-end with no confirmation
* Map is really hard to read, with lots of "peculiarities" (like monster lairs that extend way beyond the tile they're on, but you can't click on them beyond the actual tile they're meant to be on)
* Adding buildings to a city's queue is really confusing (you have to double click the building, click and place, or click and build. Often I'd click out of the city not having placed the building)
I'm sure there's more, but that's the first ones that come to my mind.
So, TL;DR: while Fallen Enchantress has a lot of decisions for you to make, it's never at all clear what the best decision is, the impact of your decisions is either massively delayed or not detectable at all, and it often feels like there are no viable options on a given round. Everything feels muddy and slow.
It certainly makes sense to compare games at the same point in their development cycle. But the current beta for Warlock is a week old, extremely late beta, and the game releases tomorrow. The current state of FE is mid-beta. Comparisons under those conditions are likely to appear bad for FE, and less than useful. Now, if FE had a beta at this point which was a week old, and the game was due out tomorrow...
I liked the Warlock demo. But then I played it a couple more times and then I realized how little there is to it. It is easy to give a good first impression when the maps are hand crafted. What do you do when you get tired of the hand crafted maps? Half the fun of these games is exploring a new world.
You do know it primarily uses a random map generator?
So many people don't seem to truly understand what the words "demo" or "beta" mean or what the purpose of these things is. Sorry foe being off-topic.
Apples and Oranges. Other than a fantasy backdrop the two games are very different. I wonder if this is a proxy post sent by the paradox marketing firm...
"blah blah blah look at our game!"
[quote who="Jean=A=Luc" reply="28" id="3147787"]Quoting Xan, reply 27It is easy to give a good first impression when the maps are hand crafted. What do you do when you get tired of the hand crafted maps? Half the fun of these games is exploring a new world.You do know it primarily uses a random map generator?Reduced 29%Original 1920 x 1080So many people don't seem to truly understand what the words "demo" or "beta" mean or what the purpose of these things is. Sorry foe being off-topic. [/quote]
You do know it simply chooses a hand crafted map based on those selections don't you?
I guess you mean sandbox game. And yepp, seems to be, by the looks of that mapgenerator. Coincidantally, i just finished my first few missions with Elven Legacy. Bought it a couple of days ago for almost nothing... Without steam! Entertaining game indeed.
...
Öhm... Are you sure about the handcrafted-thingy, Xan? With that amount of possible combinations... Something like 4x4x2x6x8= a freaking lot
If it actually works this way, that is.
Brad did a Let's Play of Warlock - on YouTube under his handle Draginol. Watched it the other day.
At least Elemental uses the left-click select, right-click command convention and not Warlock's left-click select, left-click command nonsense.
For me, each technology tree and building/training choice seems rather obvious, but then they do not produce a radical difference in contrast to other kingdoms and empires. Most empire NPCs I encounter do the same thing with every game: build few buildings, but have researched one totally kick-ass unit that they use to hose me in battles. So then I tried an all military-approach, and the same thing happened.
I would really like to see more AI variety in style approaches: some mostly-civic approaches, some mostly-magic approaches (but with a weak military), some turtle-ing, etc.
I think this is a very important discussion (probably the most important one) because it looks at the underlying game mechanics that give games a long replay value.
I think that the start of replayability issues for these sort of games is the need to provide strategic choice that dramatically shifts the focus on one hand, and the need to balance the game on the other hand. The simpler the mechanic the easier the task. That is why I feel games like Warlock have the inside running over games like Fallen Enchantress - the underlying mechanics are much simpler so it is easier to make big changes AND balance them.
I love the direction Fallen Enchantress is heading but the issues listed in this thread are the shadows that are hard to nail down.
Yea I don't like the Inactive buildings thing as well. Seems like they are trying to encorage you not to build things. These buildings should just give you the bonuses anyway since you built them reguardless of if you have something in your que or not.
I would just to echo the sentiment expressed in this thread. I'm not a particularly experienced 4x/strategy game player compared to many of you but I feel the same concerning many Fallen Enchantress mechanics.
Each game I have played through on Fallen Enchantress so far seems to follow one of two themes 1) My initial champion gets killed in the first few turns and restart immediately, haha, OR, 2) I play the early game well, slowly kill off some monsters, expand, manage my resources, everything is dandy. I'll often find myself ahead of an NPC or two and behind an NPC or two when I discover them all but I am rarely attacked. Eventually I have expanded to a point that my border cities are settled nicely against NPC cities and obviously it is time for me to become aggressive in order to expand further. At this point multiple things are consistently highlighted:
1) My enemy will have masses of units, where I have a maximum of two groups kitted out with a couple of champions at high level.
2) All of these enemy units are cannon fodder simply helping my own units to become stronger.
3) The only challenges are "Epic" threat city defences and rampaging unique monsters, the buggers.
4) The enemy leader (I've totally mind blanked the word used to refer to our starting champ lol) is typically half the level of my own, why is he not used like ours, as a beat stick?
5) All this while, I have not offered a single thought to my cities except to keep their build queues full and spam growth/research buildings whenever possible.
TL;DR The game strikes me as pretty fun turn based RPG, with some cities/outposts making me money, mana and research points.
I also realise now that my post is probably not entirely on topic, sorry for that!
Yes, I think there are lot of good points expressed in this thread. Hopefully the devs can fix some or most of them to make the game better.
Well I bought the pre-order to Warlock. Hope it is as good as it sounds. I think it comes out for download (bought it from Steam - I know Steam is suppose to be some evil Entity but I have never had problems with them)
(changed the name of the thread to reflect where it's going / distract y'all from the off-topic comparison game )
So there seems to be consensus! Players of different skill levels feel the same thing: the decisions they take don't feel impactful. Great, we've identified a problem, now maybe we can help the devs by thinking up ways to move the game design away from that problem.
One of the first thing I'd attack is buildings in cities. There seems to be consensus about two troublesome trends:
1) Players feel it doesn't really matter what they build in cities and simply spam buildings that seem useful to make sure the building queue is never empty.
2) Players feel the "empty production queue" buildings aren't satisfying and thus avoid them. Having your queue empty feels wrong.
So one way to attack that would be to increase the cost and impact of buildings while decreasing either the frequency or the total slots (or both!). Also the empty queue functionality could be rolled into certain big early buildings. Just off the top of my head, say:
* There's a separate building and unit queue
* While building queue is empty, baseline production/gold/research per population is doubled
* The research building then would not just give +xx% research but also the passive effect of "when building queue empty, city generates 4 times baseline research per pop" (instead of 2 times as it would normally be)
* You can only build the research, production, OR gold building. One of the three.
* Each city level unlocks two building slots.
* The building you select when leveling up a city is built instantly.
* Buildings don't require production but rather build in 3 rounds flat. Production is used for units (and wonders?)
The goals around this set of changes are to make building decisions a lot more meaningful, restrict options (two slots per level) and encourage specialization (to stop every city from doing everything) and quick strong, quick feedback.
The next area I would attack is inflation in resources. In Fallen Enchantress, one of two things seem to be the case about your resources (gold, iron, crystal, mana etc): either you have so little of them that you can't even seriously consider utilizing the resource or you have so much the resource may as well be infinite.
Anyone got an idea how to tackle that one? (Or disagree that it's the case?)
You tricked ME!
Sincerely~ Kongdej
Just for curiosity's sake -- those who feel the game is "muddy", have you played Europa Universalis III? How do you feel that game's choices compare with FE's in terms of feeling meaningful and getting instant feedback?
I think that is an interesting comparison because, in terms of economy and empire-building, I feel a lot of the choices in EUIII are fairly subtle, yet they are meaningful in the long-term. I don't think that is a bad goal. I don't need instant feedback, but I do want to feel that ultimately, my decisions will become something cool.
Well played Warlock and it is very fun. In fact started playing and lost track of time which is a good sign. Have not had that happen since Shogun 2 and Star Wars Online before than.
Hopefully FE in the upcoming months will have this same effect, currently it does not but it is getting there.
Agree with the OP about the UI. It just simply seems that programmers in general underestimate the importance of UI, because they are used to work with all manners of debug information cluttered in a small space, so they think "I can read it just fine, so it's probably fine." That is a grave mistake - as someone observed asking a programmer to design an ergonomic UI is like asking a mason to draw plans for a building. It seems that the mason should know all about buildings, since it's him who lays the bricks, but that's simply not true. It takes completely different skillset.
And bad UIs do kill games. Just look at Conquest of Elysium 3 - that game is PAIN to play due to atrociously horrible UI.
Where these issues fixed by release?
To my experience, one or two was worked on, but not fixed.
Edit: only re-read the original post.
still sounds like valid criticism to me after release.
Yeah. What would improve things is, for example, if you have a Bell Tower selected, it shows you what your projected production and research values will be after it's built, not just how much unrest it reduces.
Smelters, Shard Shrines, and the like should indicate whether they're being built outside the city walls. I don't build any of those up unless I really need them and I can protect them, 'cause otherwise it's wasted production.
Gildar-producing buildings should flash a projected seasonal income for your whole empire after completion. Same dealio for research, mana. It would also be helpful to know if there are +Gildar, +Mana or +Research buildings under construction elsewhere before making the decision.
I know, some of this stuff is available by mousing over the bar at the top of the screen, but not while you have the improvement-building window up.
I don't really think this is really an issue anymore, in the sense that I don't think it impedes enjoyment of the game as much as some of the bigger bugs (like instant-build on load and AI tech-trading). There's a lot of info in FE and a lot going on, it can be overwhelming, but it's much better than when this post was written.
For one thing, city specialization between Cities/Conclave/Fortress is a new mechanic and directly addresses this criticism. Since how you specialize your city has a big impact in what buildings you can build.
As far as the OP and its "muddy feedback cycles", I think that's still an issue, but it most effects new players. There's a lot happening and it can be impossible to take it all in; it's hard to figure out what is important and FE does nothing to assist in this. FE could do much more in terms of reporting information and keeping track of historical data, but the omnipresent tooltips are very, very useful (and many of them did not exist in the beta).
As MarvinKosh points out the information on the build list could be better, but once you've kinda found your sea-legs there's enough there to make it clear what building that shrine/garden/market will do.
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