Hi All,

Played from 12-4 am last night. The game is really good, I have to say, particularly on a strategic level. Here are some first impressions. I would love it if anyone has any ideas on how I can resolve the annoyances.

The Good:

1. The strategic game is extremely solid. In terms of the "mid game", where most of the fun happens, the gradual escalation in random mob strength, combined with large and well garrisoned AI cities, results in very fun strategic game play. You are constantly dealing with tradeoffs, some form of standing army is necessary even if you are peaceful (hold off the bandits, clear areas for your new cities), and all of the technology trees can be used for various types of expansion. One-more-turn-itis is in full effect.

2. Designing units is very fun, and I love the resource elements. In my current game, my cities are happily surrounded by metals, and as such, I have nicely armed troops.

3. The tech tree rocks. I'm glad at how much it has improved since beta 4. I can't wait to see more of it (about level 13 on average right now). I'm a little handicapped, as my opponents seem to be able to create larger units. That being said, my guys are better equipped, and tend to make mince meat of them.

The Bad:

Tactical combat is pretty rough.

1. The tactical combat camera for ranged weapons and spells. Given that the camera refocuses on your "next available" unit once you exhaust the current units action points, on is constantly reoriented the camera. Particularly when using archers; often times, the refocused camera prevents you from seeing the enemy units, which is a really big pain the butt. I'm all for cinematic animations, but there needs to be an option that once the camera has stopped following the special effect it should return to where the player put it.

2. Tactical combat is loaded with visual bugs. It can be difficult to select a given square, and particularly with archers and the screwy camera motion, I often times end up ordering my archers to move to a square next to the enemy unit, rather than fire. This is particularly annoying, as you can fix it by adjusting the camera to a top down perspective, but as soon as you use a ranged action it ends up at a funny angle again.

2 . Large units randomly loose (and gain) figures. The HP counter seems accurate, but I've seen a unit loose 10 hp, and gain a figure. This doesn't make much sense. I've also seen units with 3 or 4 figures, but only 6 HP.

3. Strategically, the AI is really bad at sending out decent armies. In my current game, the AI often hits my town with multiple armies, and thus, multiple tactical battles. Unfortunately, each and every one of these armies is comprised of one unit, either a squad or a company, equipped with an Oak Spear, and nothing else. Although the stats on this company are great, except for the 0 defense, they get slaughtered by my team of archers, as they only attack one unit at a time.

4. The tactical battle AI isn't any good either. Aside from the above, strategic, "attack with one unit at a time business", the tactical AI doesn't chase the right units. Also, its pathing algorithms are bad. Given the AI's one super-company above, and me with 2 parties, one ranged, one melee, I can get the AI to chase my melee party indefinitely, while the ranged party slowly whittles the super-company down. This is worsened, because the AI is not good at cutting your units off when you try and stay away. It is extremely easy to run away, and one can easily prevent any melee from occurring, even in simple situations where a human could easily cut off a running unit and at least get one or two potshots in.

The Ugly:

Lots of minor, annoying bugs:

1. Selecting multiple units; when you hold down ctrl to select multiple units, the mouse cursor "resets" back to the first unit you select. You have to press and release ctrl once per click, and not hold ctrl when you move the cursor over.

2. I'm at war with the Kraxis Empire in my game, and they have -13100 gold. This doesn't make any sense, particularly because they keep throwing (large companies one at a time) units at me.

3. If you auto-resolve a battle including pioneers, even when the battle is grossly biased in your favor (one of my parties of a top melee unit, 2 archers, one pioneer, versus a lone level 1 bandit), your pioneers often die. There is virtually no chance of them dying in tactical battle. This is worsened because some of these small enemy parties force an auto resolve.

4. The game crashes when loading a game while there is an active game. This is a fairly regular occurrence.

5. The game is slow when viewing even medium sized cities. I've got a Core Duo 2, a Radeon 3850 with 512MB ram, 4 GB of ram, and a clean windows install. Just what kind of system do you need in order for the game to play smoothly? None of the settings changes I tried seem to help.

6. As I said above, I can't *stand* the automatically moving tactical battle camera. It's horrible. Take it out, or at least put a toggle on it.

All that being said, the game is really, really fun. I can live with most of the other problems, if I can figure out a way to fix the tactical battle camera. Great job, Stardock! You guys really do deliver!