Well I will start with the negative first. The game really seems like the War of Elemental Magic in a lot of ways. Its obvious the same engine has been used. And a lot of the same artwork has obviously been used. Additionally I see some of the same unfinished weirdness that WOM had like when creating a custom faction all the custom faction colors not making any sense or updating. The robes still remove the hair when you take them off creating a custom sovereign. I was a little disheartening to see this because these were bugs a little things that made it through WOM beta and into he live version and they are still here in another iteration of a game beta...and more than likely they will be in the live version.
The HP bars not updating in tactical combat....I remember this being a problem way back in WOM as well. Its just crazy that some of these things never get fixed. But if I have to say my main complaint about this game is the performance. Its really bad, just like WOM was really bad. The difference beeing is it looks like they fixed the memory leak that plagued WOM. Still though this game gets so laggy its unbearable. I have a pretty rocking gaming computer too. The bad performance is what makes me quit games when I play them. I have tried it on all map sizes, it seems like its something with the AI code if you ask me.
If I had to say what bugs me the most about game play is the way its nigh impossible to keep your enemies from just wandering around your lands. Its like a game of leap frog where they take a city and I take it back, and this continues until I get so sick of it I just hunt them down till the sovereign is dead. And this is part of the problem, the sovereigns can become nigh unkillable rendering all but the most advanced armies useless against them. I can't tell you how many times I spent 30 turns or more fortifying a city to only have a NPC sovereign come and practically solo kill my whole army. The only counter is to attack with my sovereign.
Of course there is a lot of good in the game, the concept of heroes and your soverign growing and getting more powerful is fun even if it is game breaking later on. But that does not bother me that much. The game seems a little more complex or CIV like by comparison to WOM. That was a bonus, the weapons and armor have had a lot more thought put into them, with different defenses against various types of damage on the different armor. The quests are always nice, of course and it seems you can make vassals out of the enemy which is nice.
The really big game killer is performance, the game engine needs to be made more efficient, I still wonder if it was wise to create an in house game engine our not. Because this one has always been a real beast, it had performance problems and OOM errors in WOM and it still has very bad performance in FE. If you could manage to get the performance better, so much of this other stuff could be overlooked Its a great genre and the gaming community really needs a title like this. But its really gonna catch hell if the performance stays like this...I mean if you release this on steam or something.
Anyways that is all for now, I realize this is a beta version, but if you ask me WOM never made it out of beta really. So I just don't want to see the same thing happen here. I just see no posts about game performance, and its hard to believe I am the only one. I run everything else more than fine.
