I've written about these before but there remain for me three glaring issues with Fallen Enchantress that either add micromanagement unnecessarily or are just plain annoying:
1. Option to show popup when a city goes to sleep.
By the time the mid game rolls around your city list in the HUD has scrolled off the screen. It is annoying enough needing to look to the left of the screen each and every turn before you click the end-turn button on the right of the screen to see if any of your cities are sleeping; but this is doubly compounded when you need to look to the left, scroll through your cities looking for the 'Zzzz' indicator, then end your turn on the right. And this needs to be done each and every turn because forgetting to produce anything in your cities is a big opportunity loss in FE.
Now if a city finishes construction of a building or finishes training of a unit then there is also a small indicator on the right that something has happened so this helps a little (and I mean a little because this isn't an area of the screen you focus on much). But when you build on a resource away from your city you get no indicator at all. The city just goes to sleep.
This is a real problem and requires the player to micromanage the city list each turn. There has to be a better way of handling this annoying micromanagement.
2. Start units in Tactical Battles in defence mode
I feel this will help the AI some-what because a player can design troops that can close the gap with high initiative and get a lot of easy strikes in. Units should start in defensive posture when entering tactical battles. Perhaps there could be an assassin ambush mechanic added later where an army gets a negative modifier to first turn initiative and doesn't start in defensive posture but over-all I feel this would help the game.
3. Place the units that go first in the front rank in Tactical Battles
The game places the troops that move first in the rear of the army where they get blocked and the slow units at the front where they are in the way. If we can't manually place our units please fix this so the fast troops can move without hindrance. If the fast troops shouldn't be in the front then they still move fist and they can move out of the way. This is such a frustrating issue with the game.
This video highlights the tactical battle issues...
at 7minutes 7 seconds there is the extra damage done on first turn
at 17 minutes 5 seconds is the units stuck in the rear ranks