Hi,
I'am around since beta 1 of "War of Magic" but I turned away shortly after the release. Now I played "Fallen Empress" for the first time and I found some things that I find confusing and others I just do not like.
Version played: v0.915
Things that I find confusing:
1. How do I get more Mana? Is building Shards the only way?
2. How do I get new Spells? Where is the Spell research?
3. All the numbers without any tool-tip explanation on how to affect them like city growth. Even the Hiergamenon does not explain how growth works.
4. Gardens provide 10 food per grain? What? Where comes that grain from?
5. Where do the bonuses go that champions give like "+1 Research"?
6. East should be on the right side of the map like anyone who is not in this game would expect and not on the top right corner.
7. "Max texture Atlas Size", what???
8. Softness "Advanced Lighting", what??? Did you mean stylized lighting?
9. When leveling up it is difficult to choose what is the right thing to do for my specific hero class. For example Strength, is it really just giving my hero more carrying capacity? I would have expected he would also make more damage.
10. Character stats.
Things I just don't like:
1. My hero had lots of spells that did not really help much even so he was a spell caster.
2. One can't see from the unit icon if a unit still has movement points left or not.
3. Spells and Govern buttons under the mini-map. I would have expected these buttons on the left in the city and hero menu.
4. Stylized lighting looks way to much washed out and kind of dark by default.
5. Spawning of Quest locations. Yesterday there was just an open field and at once after one took a quest there is a farm or even a whole town. And after one did the quest, "poof" everything gone. Why not have locations on the map that are just without function until one has a fitting quest?
6. The Hiergamenon is not searchable.
7. Icons, bars and names displayed over a city are missing any sharpness and especially the icons are frayed at the borders.
Hope that helps.
Great feedback, thank you.
The main way to get mana is from Shards (some units, items, spells and improvements also give mana).
The main way to get spells is to level up your champions and sovereign. If you select spell skills for them you will be able to use more spells. You can also get access to new spells by completing quests or learning some techs.
These two facts should have been clear from the tutorial, did you play it?
You are so right. We are goign through all the resources now and updating those tooltips to contains short, simple descriptions of what they are.
Grain and Materials (and Essence in Beta4) are the yields in the tile when you found a city (you can see them on the city info screen). If you found on a place with 5 Grain thats an awesome place for getting lots of food, if you found on a place with 2 grain that city will never get very large. Things can change the amount of food per grain so both of those cities can get larger, but your 5 grain city is always gonna grow larger than your 2 grain one.
They aren't applied o cities, they are applied to the player research total (so an improvement that gives +25% research wouldnt effect research form a unit).
I don't understand why you think East in in the top right corner, we don't indicate direction. But we are switching from the 45 degree view in Beta 3 to something closer to a 15 to 30 degree angle. It makes the minimap less skewed, makes "north" appear north and keeps you from seeing so much shadow ont he units (so they appear brighter).
The options screen has been redone in Beta4 and brokwn into 2 screens, basic options and advanced options. All options have tooltips so you can see what they do and some have been removed entirely because they dont do anything anymore.
Yeap, strength just increases carrying capacity.
Which stats do you find confusing? We have tooltips on all of these though Im happy to update them if they are unclear.
Which spells aren't useful for you?
Yeah, we have talked about changing the hp bar on the unit icon to a movement bar (so you can glance at your empire tree and see who has movement left). I think thats probably more handy then looking and seeing how damaged your units are.
That area on the bottom left is a context area, it switches data pretty significantly (for example if you are picking things to build in a city) and it would look weird if there was something to the left side of it. I understand the critique of the buttons, hotkeys are always a good option for accessing them.
This is all changed in Beta4.
I understand what you are saying and it is weird that it all goes away. But we also dont like to clutter up map. If there is nothing to do there we want to get rid of it so the player can concentrate on the stuff that is important.
I love seeing these posts, helps give clarity about how new players feel about the game, and also pokes me in what is lacking from the UI and the tutorial.
speaking of which
I think the tutorial needs a rehaul atm. and probably gonna need one when the game goes retail, do you guys want help/advice, or a detailed list of what I think the tutorial should include? cause right now... its silly .
Derek already lightning quick answered your questions, if you have more feel free to ask
Sincerely~ Kongdej
Will the UI be moddable? Since SD is so mod-friendly, I'm hoping you'll make the UI moddable because I think people could do some really great things with it. It's probably been a mistake not having it moddable because you would have seen lots of great UI ideas coming forth from the community.
Good post, good replies.
I often times skip the tutorials in games because "I'm smart, I can figure this out" and then I get frustrated when I can't.
I've tried thinking of a way to convince people like myself to run through the tutorial and haven't come up with great ideas . . . any thoughts?
Could we call it something else? Offer a reward? Something else?
https://www.stardock.com/products/desktopx/index.asp
Re: #5
A single game tile is actually hundreds of square miles. Within that land there are no doubt dozens of points of interest. When you do a quest, the tile merely marks the specific point of interest that is relevant to your quest. This is the best way to think about tiles and the game interface. It is more a representational medium, as is any map.
A solution taken from some other games I played is to make part of the tutorial pop up during the first game, so if you open the game for the first time and start a game, it will explain "this is your sovereign, dont lose him, look for a good city spot, grain = food, hammers = production". and whatever.
Half of a tutorial either is in the interface or probably could be put into the interface, what I am talking about here is to make the interface of the game explain the game mechanics. This does not work with all the mechanics but can help through some mechanics,an example of this is in CIV 5, when you have selected a settler or a worker, the tileyields would automatically be shown for each tile, also when you select either, the game have some "recommendations" as to where you could build a city, or construct an improvement.
If anything else, come up with a popup box telling that the tutorial goes through some of the intricate mechanics of this game, and it is rather recommended to go through it, but I do not think a reward system is a good idea, I said this before, I would like to be able to enjoy the full game without bringing a saved game with me at all times.That said, you CAN reward some concept art, etc.
Speaking of rewards, I did like that in "Batman, Arkham City", during the credits there would be played custom made songs with lyrics matching the story... that is one of the few incentives that makes me watch credits
And remember, yes your city is actually that big!
Why skew it ANY degrees? As a result of this unnecessarily-added confusion, this removes all usefulness of the mini-map for me. Other game types (fps, rpg) don't skew like this. Is it a custom to do this in 4x games?
Hi All
Just downloaded game on Tuesday the 10th and have gotten about 100 turns in for 2 games. My first I started as Paradin-normal, large map, and just fiddled with everything until Altar declared war and showed up with these armies with very high hitpoints. They declared war and took my first city on the first turn. Left with only my main city against a widely superior foe I figured I'd restart yesterday. It also taught me what the number rankings in the top right signified. I encountered one fatal error but as it was my first play through so I'm not sure what mix of actions caused the seeming memory leak that eventually crashed me.
My second game I started as the Archer chick faction... not sure of the name.
So now with contrast here are my thoughts on the Tutorial.
First with Paradin it seemed I had a much larger amount of mana with just 2 cities. I'm not sure if this was because I captured more of teh needed resources or if I had trained more Heroes with mana generating abilities or if this was the bug that eventually crashed me as I had as much as 7-10 thousand mana at some point. With this Archer faction I seem not to have much mana at all.. never over a few hundred, but then again I've discovered enchantments this time around so perhaps I'm just using more of it.
Also when I chose the Archer chick faction the item that interested me was that I wouldnt be attacked by wandering monsters. Though it seems to me I have been attacked once. Not sure as I dont have enough play experiance to know if I attacked by mistake or was attacked. If I encounter it again I will try to record what led up to it.
Another thing is I started the faction thinking I'd be able to send out scouts to auto-explore and this advanatage of not being attacked would keep them from being killed. Though this faction doesnt allow me to recruit Scouts. Maybe I need to build a certain building or train a research? I've tried to build military buildings and research military tech this game so I'm not destroyed by the AI. Regardless no scout recruiting option as of yet,
Second, tutorial wise, it was not till around turn 80 that I started wondering if my Soveirgn was broken. No matter what I trained her the the damage seemed low, so she mostly would cast the heal spell on Heroes. Also her initiative seemed much lower than my accompaning Heroes. I finally realised I need to buy her a new bow which are available because of all the military research I've done. I'm curious if it will make much of a difference.
So my opinion thus far is the tutorial needs to flush out that three offensive paths exists. Archery, Melee and Magic . Also it needs to spell out how one progresses their specific choice. Whether that means training for new spells as you level or buying new swords/bows as they come available. Finally, though I'm not certain if the project is up to such things, the Archery doesnt seem as powerful as Magic. Not sure if it's suppose to be.
Maybe it should spell out that only Heroes and not the Soveirgn take injuries as first game my Sovereign would take brunt of teh battle but now with an archer Soveirgn my Heroes do and as such are all ingured one way or an other. I have some heroes that are very wimpy now and didnt have this problem with Paradin where mostly my Soverign would die. Seems like a melee Soveirgn, because of this design has distinct advantage.
Things that I can't figure out so far are if there is a way to cure inguries on Heroes and if there is a way to bring up a big world map.
In game it's about turn 100 again and Altar has declared war but this time I have armies built in all my 5 cities so I plan to see the war through even though acoording to the top right ratings his military value is twice mine. Much better than 5 times mine as Paradin though.
In closing it does seem like it will be a great game! I will keep playing and post more impressions. I'll look into this Essence stuff as I havent come across it yet. I did run that beta update program Tuesday when I dowloaded so it must be there. See you all soon.
Hi Horsesfly,
If I recall correctly, Prosiphonie has 2 extra mana per turn (She has that as a trait). The monster that attacked you while playing Tarth (the green nation) was because of the random movement of the monsters. Tarth has the master-scouts trait, this is given to all there trained units. So monsters won't target you while they roam the lands, but random movement can bring them into a sqaure where you got a building or unit. Also using bows lowers your units initiative. Negative traits can be healed with a quest item (healing potion), there was another way, but I can't remember that one.
Essence is still not added. Essence is something of Beta 4, which isn't out yet.
First off thanks for all the helpful answers!
If I am not wrong in WoM you had buildings that produced mana. Why not in this game?
Yes I did but can't remember that it was mentioned anywhere at all or at least that clear.
So other tiles that are within the cities control radius do not play an element in this? Why not?
Where do I find the player research total? In the ledger under total is just the amount of research my city produces.
In the tutorial I was told to go east. At first I thought this was on the right of the mini map but it came out that east is when you head to the top right on the mini map.
10. Character stats.Which stats do you find confusing? We have tooltips on all of these though Im happy to update them if they are unclear.
I liked the old system more where you had stats like Intelligence and Dexterity. Maybe it just is because this is kind of burned into my brain over all these years playing RPG's.
What I meant was that my hero "Oracle Ceresa" had at the beginning just one spell to do damage (Burning Hands). For this character I had somehow expected more in this area. Further the other spells she had just felt as if they did not help much for winning battles. Sorry, I should have explained better what I meant in the first place.
Why not have both? For example a small badge like sign on the character icon that is only shown if the character has spent all his movement points would be enough for me. Or just display a second bar.
I would have expect the spells button attached to my characters and the govern button attached to my cities or something like this. Under the mini-map is just not the place I would have search for such functions in the first place. However, it is not that important.
I understand. Maybe you could paint these places on the map like they where just decorations and would blend into the overall look until they become activated by a quest. This way it would not feel awkward at all and the would not clutter up the map. But I understand that this would make the map a little bit less flexible.
I played the tutorial but may have overlooked the information. However an idea to make the tutorial something one can't overlook is by automatically starting it after the player has choosen his first character to play and let him play first through the tutorial with this particular character and maybe even give him a nice weapon as a reward for playing it through. After that let him continue to play the map or campaign he wanted to play in the first place.
The Grain/Material/Essence number is derived from the surrounding tiles. 9 tiles add together to give you the number for a given tile.
For the essence it will probably when we actually have it.
The posts by devs seem to indicate that essence works the same as grain and materials, but admittedly I am only guessing. Still, I am probably right.
I was wondering if it would be a better idea to have quests, once entered, on a map similar to the tactical maps. I realize some battles are on a tactical map but the searching for a hut or wolves could be done on a map like that as well. This would allow for more depth in the quests without sacrificing seasons to do a quest. The tuns in a quest could be some ratio of a season. Example, 3 movements could equal one season. This would allow more interaction within the quest without costing many seasons to accomplish.
Playing Ceresa is a little tricky; she can decimate entire armies with a single spell when she's higher level and has plenty of shards to back her up, but early game she's tragically incapable of actually hurting anything. Burning Hands doesn't hit much harder than a good archer/melee sovereign can, and will drain your entire mana pool in half a battle, you do not want to use it unless you're desperate. This is generally true of any caster sovereign, they're just not built to efficiently kill things at level 1, you have to rely on non-magic damage.
Instead, the first thing you should do as Ceresa is cast "Summon Shadow Warg", which gives you a pet much more dangerous than Ceresa herself is at that point. Make sure you don't cast it in battle (which will give you a warg only for the duration of the battle) - cast it on the strategic map and the warg will stay on as a permanent unit, at a cost of -1 mana/turn. In fact, there are few if any tactical spells that are cost effective early in the game, the useful spells are strategic buffs and pets that can last you through many quick battles.
Also cast "Meditation" on every city, each will provide you with +1 mana/turn. Also swap Ceresa's staff for a higher damage weapon as soon as you find one - you want to keep the staff on hand, it'll become much better later on when you have spells that can actually kill things, but until then you're best off with a melee weapon and a shield.
Save your mana to cast Corruption on every shard you gain control of, turning them into death shards. As Ceresa levels up, get path of the mage and evoker when you can, plus a couple levels of death magic when better traits aren't available - no hurry, the new spells won't be too useful to you until you have the shards/mana to support them. You may want to cast Curse and Blindness sparingly, for difficult battles. Once you have a few death shards, Wither starts to become surprisingly powerful, it's your best spell until you get Dirge of Ceresa (requires death magic IV). Dirge with a few death shards will destroy anything you come across with a single cast - and with that staff, the spell can generate more mana than it uses.
Thanks! Your post was very helpful.
I had expected that magic would have more weight even early on in the game. It's all about expectations.
I figured out how to open the big map.. just needed to mouse scroll out. The map is gorgeous btw.
I've progressed fine in game and I'm getting the hang of it.
The only problem I'm having now is, though it was working fine yesterday, today the game crashes on save. I've even loaded order saves and tried to save them and it crashes so something specific to saving.
At first I thought something I did somewhere was bugged but whatever it was the game was able to save yesterday. I started working backwards, removing enchantments, then disbanding armies, then demolishing cities. At no point will the game let me save without crashing. I'll try deleting equipement on Heroes next.
What I did find as I was bug searching was I had 4 towers of Dominion and 2 Adventurer's guilds between my 10 cities though the tooltip says you are allowed 1 per faction.
I suspect it may also have to do with Guard and Explore as at one point I have like 10 people on explore and I could notice some lag as well as they were making very bad decisions on what to explore.
Should I load the game file somewhere?
Update: I went back and tried starting a new game and saving and it works. So I guess from my games all three save files over those turns are currupt somehow and though could save yesterday, once loaded today, can not be saved. I'll start a new game and put up files if you guys want them.
More than likely the savegame is corrupted. See if you can start a new game and save that without any problems maybe?
Yea I just tried that and it works. I guess I'll start a new game as I can't figure out what is wrong with these save files. Its all good.
Yikes....I put myself under the impression that essence was only going to be available on select tiles (kinda like Nightshade in MoM) . From the desciption above it seems like every tile is going to have essence...and that your enchants will consume X of the total Y of essence your city has access to...
I suppose either is fine....just thought it was going to be different.
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