I voted Fair. Here's why:
- Essence is a huge improvement over per-turn mana upkeep and unlimited city spells
- Outpost upgrades are a great idea
- Re-arranging the build queue and saving the progress on items was sorely lacking! Thank you!
Unfortunately:
- You cannot rearrange items in the build-queue which require flipping between pages. So, if you have an item on page 2 or 3 of the queue, you cannot move it to page 1 or page 2, etc.
- Units stationed in outposts should auto-defend anything in the outposts zone of control, otherwise you have to spend way too much time building massive armies of units to protect your stuff, and you have basically no chance of protecting against high level mobs until late game
- Outposts should be able to build better defensive structures so there is some hope of defending against high level mobs in the early game
- Even with warden, some high level mobs still "accidentally" walk over your outpost and destroy it or attack your units stationed at the outpost. Oddly, if you move the units out of the outpost, this happens far less.
- High level mobs wandering around in the early game SUCK. It makes the scout trait far too overpowered as it is a HUGE advantage to not have to worry about those high level mobs while everyone else does. There is simply no way to defend against them until mid to late game and there are too many of them and they attack too frequently.
- Pioneer spam is still crazy.
- Battles still slow down making the game nearly unplayable.
- Have had several CTDs in each game.
- Magic is useless early game except for city enchantments, then overpowered late game.
- Level 5 towns can select a 1% interest on treasury balance, but it doesn't work right. It seems to act more like a 10% interest or so. This basically means that the person who first hits a level 5 city basically wins if they stop buying things until they hit 20k balance or so. I was making 700+ gildar per turn at that point.
- Money in the game comes in too slowly until you get a level 5 city, then it's suddenly way too quickly. I had 27 settlements (2 fortresses, 3 conclaves, the rest were towns). I simply couldn't save enough money to upgrade units or heroes at a reasonable pace even with that many settlements until I got my first city to level 5.
- Something is wacked with studies; I had 1 research in a city, built a study, and still had 1 research. Then I upgraded to a school, and still had 1 research.
- Unit wages cost too much. You just can't build enough troops given the income level of cities to even reasonably defend your territory until very late game. You pretty much HAVE to get the warlord ability to cut unit costs in half to even have a chance at defending yourself.
- As others have noted, arrows still come in from the side.
- AI is still stupid. If it's attacking a regenerating unit which is fleeing, it still stupidly tries to get first attack constantly, which just lets me regen all my health and re-engage. At least it stopped chasing the most hurt unit to the exclusion of all others!
- Mana shield doesn't work at all on quick resolved battles, only tactical ones (even if you auto-play it in tactical mode).
- Adding a lumber mill to the build queue then removing it wipes out the forest and if there is no other adjacent forest, you can now never build the lumber mill again.
- It takes way too long to upgrade from leather armor to something useful so you can hold off the high level mobs wandering around.
- Auto-play tactical wastes mana and combat turns doing things like casting fire / cold resists when no units in the battle can do fire / cold damage.
- Lots of other stuff is still broken.
So, while things have definitely improved, you still have a LOT of work ahead of you before it is release ready. I would say at least another 6 months or a year of polishing if you want a good release. Probably 1.5 - 2 years if you want an excellent release. An excellent release would be one where all of the bugs which are currently known as of today are fixed; the game can be played for 72 hours or more without crashing to the desktop; the game doesn't slow to a crawl as you progress; melee and magic are balanced with respect to each other in combat; you have more spells; you address the defensibility of resources in the ZoC of the outposts; you fix income vs upgrade costs vs maintenance on units; you fix the stupid AI in battle and make the outcome of quick-resolve battle at least count the spells and things cast on the units; you make the AI in auto-play tactical not waste resources and time; etc.
