Hey Stardock and any interested forumites,
So I didn't really participate in the Alphas and Beta, despite pre-ordering expressly for the purpose, but here are my thoughts on the design of this game. Not the technical aspects, mind, but purely the design.
The thing of it is, is that this game has a major, overarching problem that is plaguing it,s design: cohesion. There are a lot of features which, conceptually, are very good ideas. But, they are not well thought-out, in that there doesn't seem to be any idea of how they tie together, either within the aspect or in the context of the game as a whole.
For example, let us take the Character system. Conceptually, this is a great idea: you hire adventurers who aide you in your path to greatness. You equip them just like in a fully blown rpg, you level them and they become more powerful, they add to the storyline and you can even marry these adventurers to produce offspring. This is a great outline for how they should work, and is a good pitch to your boss.
But how do they fit in reality at the moment? They aren't much more effective in combat than normal units, they die easily and there is no way to recover them, they are expensive to recruit relative to their usefulness and at least early on equipment is too expensive to really deck them out, especially with how fast the rest of the game moves relative to their rate of leveling. The best uses for them is early on, since they are faster than training, and then later as breeders of offspring or imbuing them so that you can get more enchantment slots (enchantment slots are anther feature I could complain about for hours, especially since summons are so powerful, but I won't) to boost the size of your army.
In other words, this feature is not cohesive. It's as if it were designed in isolation from the rest of the game, and then slapped in just before release.
How would this be made cohesive? Well, for one, either leveling would be faster so character power increases more quickly, or the rest of the game needs to be slower and the land needs to be unclaimed for longer so they can grind properly (I favor the second, though leveling should be more frequent anyways to increase character power. The style of the game recommends a more dangerous world that should not be civilized fully until very late in the game, if ever. I was so surprised that there is no money or food maintenance cost for additional cities, considering how questing is so important to the game and there needs to be a lot of unclaimed land that all the heroes can move through freely).
In other words, the developers need to ask how this fits into the game, i.e. how it plays out when the game is in progress and how this contributes to player victory. Presently, a hero is just a unit you don't need to maintain who can be abused to get up to five powerful additional units who also do not need to be maintained. You can spend money and time making them tanks if you want, but they cannot get the HP or defense of a large group of normal units, and if you use them in combat you run the risk of losing them, and thus your massive investment in them.
The cohesiveness is also affected by the randomness of the game, which makes the game very unstable (and right now, ironically, is the only thing that makes it interesting). Taking the above example, heroes spawn randomly everywhere, and this is your main method of recruitment for the entire game besides children. Of course, since getting children is also dependent on this method of recruitment, and since child production appears to be random, that is also random. This means you cannot really build a strategy based on the heroes, since you cannot guarantee you will get good or well-equipped ones. Now since heroes are already so ancillary, this is mostly fine, but it's hell on the dynasty system: First you need to find a hero, then you need one of the opposite sex, then you need to have enough money lying around when you encounter one to hire them, then you need to grind until your reputation is higher, teleport to the same city, and marry them. And since the dynasty system is nearly game-breakingly useful, this means your acquisition of this tool is randomly determined.
This would be hellish if heroes were not abundant, especially with the high death rate, and so the developers made sure they were plentiful. But, of course, now there are too many, so you get tons early on to level in the hopes one or two survive long enough to serve some purpose, or alternatively for the bonus to research or resource production they provide. This is a mess, and completely undercuts the look and feel of the game, which is supposed to emphasize resource scarcity.
A good solution here would be to make heroes an exploitable resource. Have a building produce or grant access to them, or make permanent resource features (like inns or shops) where you can always hire them. Maybe even mix this with wandering heroes for earlier on, but make the wanderers stronger and cheaper than the ones back home so searching for them is worthwhile. Heck, quests should be treated like this too, as they are also a resource and one of the potentially most compelling parts of the game.
A simple inn improvement or resource, allowing heroes to be hired and quests to be undertaken, would not only make this feature more reliable, it would also make the game feel more fantasy-like. City inns are the traditional rpg source of both quests and heroes, and it makes perfect sense to hire them there. Add in a maintenance cost for heroes that limits the amount you can have, make them more powerful, maybe allow them to gain some more special abilities, and either allow them to be built from scratch in-game (via the sovereign builder, but with money costs instead of points) or add a hero editor to the workshop, and not only do you have a more useful feature that adds the game-play, but now you can further emphasize the rpg elements and add a more d&d adventurer feel to everything.
And how is this done? By integrating the questing and rpg elements into the city building aspect. By improving cohesiveness, so that actions in one area affect actions in the others.
It's really sad because, honestly, with a lot of improvements like this, this game could rival the tbs grand-master, civilization. You could have more routes to victory, more involving and subtle mechanics, and accommodate a much wider variety of play styles. This game really COULD please everybody, just by making everything useful, but non-essential as it is now. This game could be so much fun.
But all these pieces need to contribute, and as they are now they do not. Think about how pursing the disparate paths in this game is supposed to help the player down the other paths, think about what trade-offs and decisions the player should have to make when deciding which ones to follow, think about how the player can win by focusing on these paths, and think about how all these elements contribute to the look and feel of the game as a whole.
