Agree with the sentiments here. The game has come a LONG ways and is nearly solid, and I've been following it for a LONG time, checking on it every day for the past 3 years. The reason I do is because with Stardock games, there's so much potential- potential for fun, potential my comments/ideas will be implemented, potential for listening/discussing. Truly great.

There are some rather significant UI things that need improving that would make the game 100% complete and more fun to play:

*Better inventory/build queue viewing. It's too small and difficult to re-order and show enough meaningful info.

*The UI size generally is quite small and could/should be allowed to scale up with a larger monitor.

*Pioneers need to display the ZoC they would use when settling/outposting an area.

*When leveling up, traits need similar tooltips as spells so you can see what options you'll get when choosing a trait.

*After finishing a battle, the cursor should be a pointer instead of the last pointer it was (attack, move, etc.).

*ZoC needs some visuals around it so you can understand how it works and how to improve it if needed.

In a TBS game, you spend tons of time looking at the UI. I'd love to see it improve a bit more for aesthetics and usability. Do that, and you've got my 100%, A+ vote.

I think the concept (traditional fantasy RPG meets strategy game, Age of Wonders style) is solid. The customization of units, sovereigns, and kingdoms is great. The setting (post-apocalyptic high fantasy) gets me all excited. I enjoy seeing characters I've created pop up as AI factions. Magic is fun, collecting items and building champions is fun.  These things will keep me coming back to the game because I like watching my sovereign progress from wearing fancy clothes and wielding a stick to being capable of some impressive things. I think the idea behind the game is great and could use more elaboration and innovation to really strike it home.

For those reasons I think it's tolerable and I'll continue to play it. However..

I think the lack of a testable multiplayer component means a lot of balance issues in gameplay won't surface during the 'beat down the AI' phase, because it's not seriously competitive and optimal synergies aren't as important to calculate.

Combat is something I mostly auto-resolve unless I need it for some specific reason (cyndrum demons have that obnoxious kill mechanic to raise their numbers, which gets harder as the game goes on and every unit stack has 70+ HP, for example). Sometimes key fights between factions merit actually playing the combat out, but for the most part the game is already so long that I'm willing to take a few sub-optimal casualties to avoid wasting 5 minutes on a fight. It's not very interesting, especially in mid-game when there's an emphasis on lots of units with tons of HP and defense being able to mostly negate all available attack options except for certain random nukes like Coal Stones (Staff of the Furnace), high level summoners with multiple summons or enchanted champion weapons.

City defense is frustratingly hard without a garrison. Garrisons take forever to train and the opportunity cost in economy is huge. Losing cities randomly to monsters early game is upsetting, especially because they can't be rebuilt. That 'scorched earth' mechanic has caused me to restart games several times because the loss of my industrial base to wandering spiders a mere 40 turns in is intolerable. It becomes less relevant (though still obnoxious) the more settlements you have, but losing a city (and more importantly a place to settle) before you have a level 3 settlement anywhere on the map is crippling.

Quest text requires a lot of editing. The writing is sub-par for how much work has been put into the game, there's a ton of typos in even small chunks of text and it was obviously written in a word processor without spell-check. Cleaning it up would add a lot of polish.The names and titles  are cool. I think the quests are predictable, linear, and studded with genre tropes. Eh, whatever, it never claimed to be a story-driven RPG. But if they were cooler (triggered later quests/game events, had larger consequences, changed the landscape of the game either literally or figuratively) it would make the game a lot more memorable. It's a powerful opportunity.

Building things takes forever, takes forever to get going, and there's always more stuff to build as more technologies get researched. Slotting up 50+ turns worth of construction in an economy town just feels silly. Same with research. This can be mitigated by taking enchantments in Water and Earth, which I normally do, but starting in an area with no Essence for settlements foils that strategy and happens about 35% of the time.

There's a lot of balance issues rooted in (what seem to me) early game design decisions. Some synergies are obviously more powerful than others, and this is exacerbated by the customization factor. While the game doesn't have a multiplayer component in the beta (I assume one is going to be in the final release but I haven't exhaustively combed the literature on the game), I can see a lot of issues arising from it.

For example: I assume most competitive multiplayer games will ban custom factions for the super-synergy potential. Things like mixing Betrayers and Natural Leader are by themselves pretty powerful: a faction-sovereign combination designed to take advantage of Tarth's all-terrain movement perk (whatever it's called), Water's research buff, Betrayers, Natural Leader, an early acquisition of Heroes, and a couple exploring units + sovereign could easily bag a lot of early champions more quickly than other factions could produce a similar amount of military units, subject to the randomness of the map of course. Since champion acquisitions are permanent this strategy is near optimal in a competitive game, I think. If there's no multiplayer I'm going to be sad, but this will also be less of an issue because competition won't really exist against the AI.

Tons of other early-game synergies also exist, and a few inanities (the Regeneration effect healing 1 HP every few seconds in battle, but also only healing 1 HP every few months of overland play). I feel like the options presented in character, faction, and city customization are unbalanced - some are obviously way better than others (Adventurer: +10 XP on turn one. Armorer: All your units get +25% defense, presumably for the duration of the game. Contest? I don't think so). Race benefits are also unbalanced (Wraith sucks, Men are great.) Race benefit is important since it's the one character attribute that can't be totally customized, so there needs to be especial attention to balance there.

Warts and all, I think the game is fun. I believe its mechanics could use a lot of reworking and its writing and the plot of events and quests could use some major polish. The concept, the core of any game, is good. If you guys build on it with precision, attention to detail, and innovation I think you could have a classic. As it is, it's playable but I don't think it's really going to make the cut commercially.

Real talk, because I really would love to see a good post-apocalyptic, grim fantasy game and Fallen Enchantress has the most potential I've seen since Heroes of Might and Magic 3/Age of Wonders.

That could be a solution: https://forums.elementalgame.com/432414

Ok, I voted and I voted excellent, the game is amazing, lots of spells are awesome, the aI is challenging to me, the ui has received much love, the raves feels different and at last, they feel more magical and different from each other !!!

Loving the graphisms and the lands and it's creature ! For me FE is definitely a success even if the magics seems still a bit unballanced IMHO and we have to play them differently.

As an earth only player, I still would love to see more spells for tactical battle for elements, except fire ! :/ and especially earth !

The only thing that fe doesn't have and that I would love to see is more emphasis on city tactical battles with more interactions with the environment !

If fe got these in the future or with addons, then it will be perfect !

Anyway thank you star dock for listening to us so much, you've been great to go through our complaints and advises and that's why fe is now so awesome ! Maybe sometimes you listened too much and that gave even more complaints, lol, you had all a hard time with all of us and you must have been freaking out badly sometimes too (I remember some bad post and bad complaints... You built yourselves some steel nerve over the creation of the game thanks to us, lol) 

Thank you for all the fixes and all the things you added through this past year elemental evolved so much and in the right direction !

Stardock forever

tbh while i have a good feeling with FE in general im a bit disappointed by the last betas, imo they are way under what was the goal for this time,  and not enough improved in term of polish from the past ones, and balance/ai is still lacking

While I really wanted this game to meet the expectations of earlier fantasy strategy games, the current implementation, while vastly better than was the mess that was EWOM (but then, that wasn't fit for release), just leaves me cold in so many ways, which caused me to rate it poor. I fully expect the polishing over the last bit of the beta towards release to bump it up to the mediocre category, but that is all.

The problem is, while there are a lot of mechanics that I quite like (faction differentiation, while in need of some balancing, is pretty well done) or find at least adequate, there's nothing that really to me stands out in a positive way, while there are a lot of things that stick in my mind in a negative way after testing FE these last many iterations. Most of these are design decisions that I just plain disagree with rather than being bugs or poorly executed ideas, so it is hard to criticize the developers for it, but there you have it - it still forms my overall opinion of the game.

I'll list a few obvious ones from the top of my mind - and yes, I'm sure there are people who like the way these things work and I am not saying they are wrong to do so, but I don't like it, and we've all been asked to give our own impressions rather than trying to guess at what "most customers would like".

City locations:

1) Having the starting tile be so blasted important. This is practically always the case in 4X games, but FE takes it to extremes. Now, on some map settings (temperate/mountainous) you do have a realistic chance of a second starting area fairly nearby if the first one is too poor, but mostly, you don't really, as you lose too much time scouting around with your sovereign plus nearby companion. In its current state, FE is the 4X game that most invites the player to start a do a CTRL+N to rebuild the world of any I have played. And this is a) boring in SP and b ) a potential killer in MP.

2) Having essence so much more important than the other stats. Essence is essentially superlinear in some types of benefits (scaling linearly in both number and effect) and even a single essence allows you to increase the production of a city by 50% while killing its research (with a bit of earth magic) or doubling its initial population growth, which is huge - heck, if you've started building several cities bringing your average growth down below 1, it more than doubles growth! - and growing that very first level is a huge step. Now, Pariden is guaranteed at least one essence everywhere, but for everybody else, just about any city with at least 1 essence beats any other city without essence. Which means that the least the game should ensure (for MP balance reasons if nothing else) is that everybody gets a reasonable starting position with essence; If nothing else, then through the addition of a one-shot building with an essence bonus - the obvious solution here would be to let the Tower of Dominion grant +1 or +2 essence in addition to its current effects or to add a special one-per-faction building granting essence to the capital automatically when built a.k.a. the "This is where I deposit the heart of my power, around which I'll build a new civilization" scheme. [My preference would be for such a unique-capital building granting +1 grain, +1 materials, and +1 essence to make the capital something truly special, but that's just me]. (Earlier in the betas this would have been an awful idea due to so many enchants scaling by total city essence, but with most of the strongest enchants now granting a fixed bonus, it is less of a worry).

3) The decision to only allow cities to exploit resources that are next to the starting tile. As if the triple g/m/e yield wasn't annoying enough already for the choice of starting location, this decision both discourages player city-snaking and funny city-shapes in general, it also fails the test of "does this bloody make any sense whatsoever?" And the answer is no. If a city expands to be next to a forest but cannot employ woodcutters or a city expands to a river, but cannot build shore related infrastructure, while the city WOULD have been able to it if the city had been founded in a different tile right next to the same shore or wood, it fails the test. This is a game-balance decision regarding activities that are presented in game as being mundane and non-magical, and the expectation from players will be that they will work as they do in the real world. Where millenniums of civilization have told us that you damn well cut down trees if you've got them and take advantage of rivers if you are near them, not only if they are right next door. Natural resources are too valuable to waste just because they aren't optimally convenient to gather. (Which, funnily enough, is also the game's approach to all other resources - hence the outposts).

Cities:

1) The idea of having city specialties or level-upgrades that are active "only when the city is idle" such as the conclave bonus and some of the conclave upgrade options is atrocious. You've already done your level best to slow down production of buildings and troops - now you further want to give us a "bonus" for reaching higher levels with cities (something that requires more turns spent on building food buildings rather than other buildings, such as research or mana producing ones) that requires the city not to produce anything to be of worth? Are you bloody kidding us?

2) The minimum three turns to construct anything regardless of how simple it is and how productive the city. Pure and simple, I hate this decision. It goes against the entire production model (you can only produce one thing at a time, BUT you devote your entire productive capacity to the thing you choose to build) and I cannot find any way to justify it to myself. It has severely counter-intuitive consequences, such as making any player capable of elementary mathematics choose building orders to avoid wasted turns due rather than focusing on what he actually needs right at the moment or in the long run. This problem is not unique to the "three turn rule", but that rule exaggerates it. EDITED by Peter: This one is gone in the latest beta, thankfully.

3) City growth... Yeah, totalPrestige/nOfCities, set to zero in cities without growth potential. How fun. Here's an idea. How about making that totalPrestige/nOfCitiesWithGrowthPotential applies to cities with growth potential and 0 to the others? You know, if I have a prestige of 4 and have two cities, one that has a food surplus (and hence growth potential) and one that has no food surplus, why the hell are those 4 people who magically arrive each turn splitting up two going to the place that can feed them and the other two dying off? Why don't they all four go the city that has room for them? Now, neither the way I suggest nor the way it actually works makes much sense, but with my suggestion there is less "wasted population".

4) Towns. Let towns further faction-wide growth, not just faction-wide food (and own town growth). That's all.

Champions:

1) Having champions be so damned important while having a strictly limited supply of them all placed on the overland map and vulnerable to player interdiction has always struck me as really unfortunate. I try to think of it as a strategic challenge, but, really, I'd much prefer that some were available on the map at start and others appeared to players through random events offering their services throughout the game, such that somebody starting in a sucky starting position or in a world where the map heroes get killed off early, which happens occasionally, would still have a chance of getting some heroes throughout the game. This is mere preference, but it is my preference as I've always loved the "A hero has arrived at your gates, do you want to hire him?" events in 4X games that feature heroes. So there.

2) Bashing monsters with clubs > magic even for mages unless they are highlevel mages with a thriving civilization feeding them a huge amount of mana per turn. When the early and even mid-game game for a Warlock like Magnar consists of running around bashing skulls in with a war staff, you've got a game-balance problem if nothing else. Summoners can spend 30 mana once and minor upkeep to get a pet that'll crush most early-game challenges, and Procipinee of course wins in the "how many enchants can we stack on a bimbo who'll run around bashing monsters with clubs" category; Characters with combat magic paths spend dozens on mana on being overall less effective or doing less damage than they would bashing monsters with clubs or stabbing them with pointy sticks. This is bordering on silly for many characters, but it is way across the silly line and into what-the-hell territory where Warlocks are concerned. How about giving them an across the board magic cost discount of a significant magnitude (50%-75%) on top of the bonus damage - if it creates problems with stacking cost-reducing modifiers, then let those modifiers be multiplicative rather than additive in the first place. Or do something else, but don't, for the love of god, let this silly situation prevail.

 3) Combat and questing being the only ways to gain XP for champions (outside the single building per faction). You know that you've got a poorly designed system, when the only way an GOVERNOR HERO can get better at GOVERNING CITIES, which is supposed to be his raison d'etre, is to run around in the wilds poking monsters with a pointy stick - or spend his time in the single faction-wide adventurer's guild every player is entitled to.

...ad 3) Heck, Fall From Heaven 2 got it exactly right - let every single champion and every single unit regardless of where it is in the world slowly gain experience every single turn, simply for being alive and training to be better at whatever it does. Cap it at some nice level if you feel the need. Trained units from fortresses are still better right out of the gate, but surviving in this world will make you better over time.

...ad 3) Then add bonus XP to any champion stationed in a city while anything is being constructed/trained or, perhaps, do so when construction/training finishes. Either works. Dividing the bonus XP amongst several champions in the same city, if more than one is present, the same way XP is divided for combat groups, of course. Perhaps give double bonus xp to governor champion as it is his specialty. Hey, presto, champions just gained a lot of versatility they are currently lacking and provide the player with more interesting tradeoffs in deploying them.

and more, and more, and more... Magic? Don't get me started. It is severely limited in scope, in short supply, and in ambition. [To be fair, though, ever since I started playing the Dominions fantasy strategy games, ALL other fantasy strategy games have seemed limited in ambition and scope with regards to magic]. And then there are the small annoyances, the "don't they know that players crave clear feedback?" issues... You know, the SMALL things, that don't make or break a game, but can in aggregate make a sub-average game mediocre and a good game great.

Small annoyances:

1) Why is there no mouseover tooltip for quest rewards? Sure, it is nice to know that I'll receive an Awesome Sword of Unforgettable Doom or, perhaps, an alchemy spell - but why not present its detailed information in a mouseover tooltip when the reward is presented in the quest popup? Given the effort in providing useful feedback in other areas of the game, this seems to be an oversight.

2) Why is the presentation of the perks a champion has picked up so untidily in a long scrollable list? Some sort of consistent sorting (blood type, <specialty>, <magic paths in specific order>, other bonuses in specific order depending on type) would make the presentation much clearer. As would grouping several related perks together (e.g. if a champion has 3 XP perks, then why not just show them overlapping horizontally by 3-4 pixels per perks taking up ONE slot in the vertical list with the total XP bonus from having them shown besides the stacked icons as a single number? Same with everything else that stacks.

3) Trade caravans, all going to the capital city and increasing income based on a percentage of the capital's income. Making a good case for the capital being a town. It is a simple game mechanic and it works, but I can't help feeling that it a) doesn't make any sense ("we'll only trade with your capital regardless of whether your capital is a rich trading town, a fortress city, or a conclave") and b ) would be so much better if - if only one city had to do all the trading in the first place, the player would be able to choose which of his cities it would be. (E.g. by adding a button to the city screen, "make this city my worldwide trading hub"). You know, let the player change his trading hub as the game progresses and his cities are built rather than, once again, tying YET ANOTHER restriction to the first city he founds.

4)....TRULY minor... Why hasn't the warhorse and all the other non-basic mounts not been updated yet? With the increased capabilities of the basic mounts, the special mounts have become a bit of a joke.

Okay, I could probably go on like a broken record, but you get the point. Despite the technically decent state of the game and its pretty good stability, it is, for me, just not all that fun at this point in time - the way games such as Age of Wonders I-II, Civilization: FFH2 mod, Dominions I-III, Heroes of Might and Magic I-III, Lords of Magic, Master of Magic, or Warlords I-III were, because they all presented me with a few things that I both liked and were memorable, whereas Fallen Enchantress is full of things that mostly work decently, are solid pieces of software engineering, and feel distinctly... mediocre.

There's lots of potential here for being a truly great game as many of the fundamentals are rock solid, but it just isn't realized.

Until I see the item I named in the game, it gets an F!

Kidding...

I almost clicked 'good', but my cursor ended up over 'fair'.

Don't get me wrong, it's a good game...but...the replayability just isn't there yet. Come turn 100, it's a boring world.

However, that said, I've been really impressed with the number of balance issues and bug fixes that have been dealt with over the past week. Therefore, I can definately see beta 5D getting a 'good' from me if trends continue. If the replayability in the mid and end game are taken care of as well, 'excellant' is on the horizon.

i cant vote because noscript says its dangerous to vote

They've spent two years remaking a game they already made.  I think they have spent long enough.  Couple more months at most.  

Well, I guess I was counting from when WoM came out.

I voted Good, which is down from my previous votes of Excellent. The previous betas were content and did much of that on the first update. If I am measuring this beta on what .981 did, it is not excellent from a polish and balance point of view. It was good, but not excellent. Too many slight improvements to sounds and graphics. Not enough balance on pace and UI. Keep working at it. It's getting there at a good pace.