I’ve started several games using the beta, but I’ve finally managed to finish one.  Was playing a small map (Karrazan’s Fist) with only 3 other factions.

Impressions

This game plays a LOT more slowly.  Adding corruption & pop requirements for pioneers slows down the early game something fierce.  Tech research is slower.  Expansion is slower.  Adding new cities & outposts is slower.  That has a carry over for the late game too.  I essentially “wasted” about 20 seasons or so waiting for my empire’s mana pool to increase to the point where I could handle one of the epic fights near the end (would have been shorter but I blew 500 on cure plague right in the middle of that).  Still I essentially did nothing but end my turn for 20 turns doing nothing in that time.  That’s not something that ever happened to me in FE & it was super boring.  It strikes me as essentially the opposite of what you’ve done to combat.  Combat is fast and furious & fun as a result.  Building is slow and laborious and is far more boring now.  I also got really nailed by corruption after an early game war netted me two cities.  That really slowed me down & I felt it was too much of an early penalty just because I had a war.

Suggestions – Give more options for growth oriented strategies.  Your sovereign’s choice of specialization could give you a 100 point tech bonus in a tree that matches (General = Civilization, Assassin/Defender/Warrior = Warfare, Mage = Magic).  This one time early boost would help set the tone for the empire’s growth & really make the specialization choice super meaningful.  There also needs to be other ways to combat unrest, my suggestion is that troop units stationed in a city reduce unrest by a small amount as well, say 2%.  The more troops you have in a city the better behaved it is.  Unrest per City in the empire also needs some tweaking.  The effect is too pronounced per City.  I would like for there to be a floor, based on map size.  No corruption for the first 3 cities on small.  4 on medium, etc.  That would give room for some early game growth.

Leveling up is more difficult now, it’s more difficult to get the champions you want, & units have special abilities.  This does several things, but the major effect is to skew the balance of the game in favor of leveled units over champions.  You are much better of parking many of your champions in cities and just getting XP on units.  I found myself just using champions to heal units in battle at some point as that was the optimal strategy … but it makes the champions seem pretty unheroic.  The “slow start” was a factor here too.  Tech tree never got to the point where I could buy really good weapons for my heroes until REALLY late in the game and by that point it was more cost effective to upgrade units than champions.

Suggestions – units need to be tweaked down in power.  Group Size of the units seems to be the major factor & if that were limited to 3 (or maybe 4) then I think some of these issues would go away … but I’m aware of the side effect as enemy units would need to be limited like this as well and that would have a huge impact on the challenge rating of a large number of quests, random monsters, and more.  The other potential solution is to give better access to gear for champions at all stages of the game.

Balance is really off in terms of melee vs magic especially in the mid to late game.  You can get a fair amount of offensive magic “firepower” just by leveling up a little and selecting the right schools (Death or Fire).  However melee effectiveness is hugely dependent on getting the right gear and happens pretty randomly or super late game.

Suggestion – There needs to be a special gear option outside of goodie huts, encounters, and the stores.  My suggestion is a magic forge building (1 per empire) that that pumps out goodie hut items periodically that you can give to any champion.  This should not require the champion to be in the city to get it.  My initial suggestion is to make this “spell like” – i.e. pick the unit menu.  The other option could be to have the item appear in the empire store (free cost) and vanish after being “bought.”

It’s actually MORE difficult to get the champions you want in LH than it was in FE.  In FE, even as a non-adventurer, I could “scout” most of the champions on the board and then recruit the ones that I wanted.  I usually made sure to get all schools of magic for instance.  With the LH Fame system I find that my choice of champions is actually far reduced.  Combined with slowing the game down this became the first game I’ve ever played where NO ONE in my empire had Earth Mage 3 for Raise and Lower land.  It’s just strange.  I feel constrained by LH in ways that FE never did champion wise.

Suggestion – give a choice between 3 or 4 champions at each fame level rather than 2.

Monsters difficulty was very high early game.  Mentioned this elsewhere, but one of the reasons I didn’t finish a game sooner was that I had monster situations that were untenable.  Wandering strong/epic statues next to my capital city.  Sovereign or champions cut off by huge bands of powerful critters they can’t battle.  Unable to expand empire because of bands of monsters that none of my guys can take on.  This is made worse by the fact that the enemy AI seems to have so much less trouble with critters.  I didn’t have this issue as much in FE.

Suggestion – more weak / moderate foes early in the game.  This would also help with level up.

Opponent IA & City placement – I had an opposing faction build a city literally in the middle of my empire (right next to my first city no less) that was completely encircled by my own cities within a few turns just to get access to a single shard.  The reason I didn’t build a City there is that the tiles were poor (3/3, etc. at best).  It was silly and there were much better locations elsewhere on the map still free and closer to him.  Later in the game, after I cleared out the old empire area and built 2 cities and multiple outposts there the AI was determined to send settlers there even though there was no land that was possible to build a City on.  Turn after turn after turn I kept telling him get out of my land (super tedious by the way – we need better options here) but he eventually got through mostly due to my inattention while dealing with a time of fire and he built a City where it was literally impossible for me to build one.  After I declared war on the AI (mostly for that one city mind you) I razed it.  Afterwards there were tiles indicating cities could be built that had not existed previously.

Suggestion – First I’m suspecting that there is a coding issue regarding available tiles.  This needs to get looked at.  The AI shouldn’t be able to build I City where I can’t and tile availability for me shouldn’t change the way it did.  Second we really do need better options for keeping the AI out of our territory.  The Get out or War should block for several turns not just kick them out one time.  Also the AI’s evaluation of what desirable tiles are could use a little improvement.  The City in the middle of my empire was silly from my human perspective, but obviously the AI thought it was a great idea for some reason.

bugs  Overall I want to stress that I had very few “bugs” and none that were game breaking.  Two that come to mind:

Portrait vanished – went into “equip” screen, quickly cycled through army and all of the people and critters vanished.  Background art & stats were all working but couldn’t see the people portraits.  Closed screen and went back in & issue seemed to be resolved.

Summoning Air Elemental – If the forced movement from summoning the air elemental put a critter in the square he was supposed to appear in the forced movement would occur but no elemental would appear in some cases.