Overvations from a first time player

Us over in Aussieland (that's Australia for the uninitiated) just recently got our hands on the game. So I am playing from scratch on version 1.09. I skipped all the drama

Anyhow, seeing as I have a new perspective having only just started playing I thought that I would post my initial observations about the game while they are still fresh. Firstly, I have to say that I like the game and think that it has great potential. It just needs work on the interface. And here are my initial findings :

(Wall of text alert)

UI
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- City overview screen needs to be able to select production from a list for each city.
- Clicking on a city in the City overview should goto that city and temporarily close the overview screen.
- Cities need a City UI when selecting them that can be closed ALA Civilization. Closing this should return you
back to the City overview if previously opened.

- There needs to be a detailed economics screen showing all income sources, expenditures and trades.
- There needs to be a detailed war screen showing all units, armies, maintenance costs etc.
- Function keys need to be mapped. F1 - Hiergamenon, F2 - City overview, F9 - Graphs etc etc.

- I was playing in 1680x1050 and the bottom screen UI for the units and city production was too small. Some buttons were tiny. Needs to be scaled better for higher resolutions.
- Having the power graphs inside that tiny bottom UI is not good. You cannot really get anything useful from it as it is too small. Really need to make power graphs a full screen UI and give it a F9 hotkey ALA demographics in Civilization.

- Hiergamenon is too small and crowded. This needs to be a 3/4 screen. Also, it needs detailed listing for all technologies, spells, units etc. See civilopedia.

- The Shop screen needs to have a way that I can see at a glance what my current champion is wearing. And I need to be able to equip items while in the shop.
- I need to be able to trade items while in the shop.
- Default items that can't be sold need to be clearly marked as such by some other colour in the equipment screen.

- The spell learning selection screen needs tabs on the left for tactical vs strategic and earth/fire/air/water/life/death filters.

- In general, things that can be clicked on to get Hiergamenon pages need to be highlighted when moused over.

- Esc options screen in game needs to have a load button.
- Pressing Esc while in the option screen needs to exit the option screen. eg Esc brings it up, Esc again closes it.

- On the Kingdom Report "Main" tab, everything on that screen needs to have a mouseover and be right clickable to bring up a Hiergamenon article about it.
- "Main" tab - Mousing over the Enemy factions should show treaties and such, and clicking them bring up the diplomacy window.

Notifications
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- When first leveling up, I get a screen to give points to my Sovereign and champions, but I wondered why the same is not so for units. Took me a few level ups to realise that units automatically level up. Thus, there needs to be a detailed level up section in the Hiergamenon, stating the difference between units and champions. Also, it needs to explain the ins and outs of champion attributes like Strength, Int etc
- When a city levels up and it offers a choice for specialization, there needs to be a way to see what that city is currently producing so I can tell what I want to specialize it in.
- Upon subsequent city level ups, I need to be able to tell what I previously specialized that city in as well.

General
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- Unit movement on the Strategic map needs to show the maximum range that the unit can move by highlighting the ground. See Civ 5.

- Units that are given multi-turn movement orders need to show a path arrow showing where they are going. The manual states that there is an "Auto pilot lines" option but I cannot find it.
- In the options screen, Enable Auto Turn needs to be reworded to "Wait at End of Turn". The end of turn button should then glow when nothing else is doable.
- There needs to be a hotkey for the equipment screen for champions. I suggest "e".
- When quicksaving the game, there needs to be a popup telling me "Gamed saved - (Sovereign name) Turn 53".
- Have a consistent - Left click to select/activate and right click to bring up Hiergamenon entries.
- Have a way to merge 4 single units into a party, 2 Parties into a squad, a squad and 4 singles into a company etc. Allow splitting. When merging units, average out there stats. eg 3 level 1 units and one level 5 units = level 2 squad or something. ie Add up all there experience and divide by number of units. Then use that averaged experience to determine new squad level. Factor in experienced, veteran etc.

Bug
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- When changing the "Cloth color intensity" in the options, if the cloth map is on it will change to showing the underlying terrain. You then need to zoom in to the strategic view and then back out to the cloth map to see the color intensity changed.

Well, if you've read this far congratulations you do not have ADHD

Thanks Stardock for this great game and I trust it will only keep getting better and better.

elemental

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I read the whole thing, and while I agree with you on almost everything that's not what really struck me as interesting.

It's obvious you put a lot of thought into this and you came up with some really good points. But, well... the difference between the types of issues you bring up in this thread and the threads like this from previous patches (mostly pre-1.08+hotfixes) really shows the game has come a long way.

Basically this thread made me step back and think about how much Stardock has fixed the game in the last month. Kind of like watching a kid grow up, you don't really appreciate how much they've grown when you're around them all the time, but when someone points it out it hits you all at once.

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Quoting Dhraconus,

reply 1

Thanks for the reply. I have been watching the saga from the very beginning and I agree that the game has come a long way. I think with just a little more polish it really will be one of those classics that people fondly remember for years to come.

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10/2/10. I just finished my first game V1.08 (on normal level). About 20 hrs. Very nice. I have developed software and played games for 25 years. I MUST SAY this is the most fun I have had in quite some time. I'm a big CIV fan, and I like D&D so this is a GREAT melding of the two. Really kudos to the developers.

That said here a couple of my issues:

This game crashed my high end Win7 system many times. Zooming in and out of the cloth map caused some problems initially. I updated the graphics driver and that helped a lot but not entirely. Other problems remain. If you play for a while and leave the game running for a couple of days in the background it messes up list management. An example is that cities become misnamed on the map (but not on the sidebar). A reboot fixes this. Some tuning clearly remains.

The interface needs some polish to remove some tedious issues. For example, if I buy something cool, you might equip it automatically. I don't like heroes "disappearing" from the sidebar just because they enter a city. Maybe a separate heroes sidebar to the right...

It would be nice to have a tech tree in the system hierigamon (sp?). If it is there I missed it...

It took me a while to figure out how to marry. But that was true in real life also...

Creating a working harbor was a trick (needed 4 open tiles adjacent to water).

It would be nice if the AI generated random maps which featured a minor hidden island or two with some nice loot/quests to encourage sea exploration. Maybe some do, mine didn't appear to.

The AI is way too vulerable to an all out archer attack. The only archers I was ever threatend by where brigands. Otherwise I can usually sit back and pick off opposing melee units undisturbed. Are the other empires really this stupid?

This is critical: The campaign proceeds WAY too slowly. A nice training system approach. BUT most of the goodies are turned off and the settlments are starved for resources. I can't research spells or tech? And I am funnelled with too many scenarios where I must complete task X before moving to the next area of the map. Let me be and idiot and kill myself for crying out loud! I got to say I almost bailed on the game at that point, but I thought the freeplay model had promise. It really exceeded my expectations. The campaign has to be hurting your market penetration.

Thanks.

-andrew

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