I agree totally with OP and have in the past made a very similar post myself. At least it is much improved over how it used to be (you used to be unable to settle the entire countryside around the city again if it was destroyed!) but it is still a fairly excessive penalty.
Not sure if I like the idea of pioneers costing population. Maybe it could work. However I do know that the change would make building outposts with pioneers very expensive. You can't afford 30 pop for an outpost until late game. So if you are making this change you need a cheaper unit which can build outposts (much like settlers vs workers in Civilization to be honest, except I would be happy with the worker disappearing when it makes an outpost).
[quote who="Kongdej" reply="7" id="3307361"]1: Path-finding: 2: User Interface: 3: Movement Points: 4: Information boxes: 5: Auto Resolve, and Auto Combat:[/quote] Kongdej's list is a very good starting point which I agree with entirely. My own list is only slightly different: 1. Pathfinding is unreliable. Exiting cities will often take the wrong exiting square (eg not exiting onto the road), rivers confuse it and there are some areas of maps where path
Elemental Forums
Good point Sanati. Just confirms the overall opinion though which is the auto-resolve needs major, major work.
[quote who="nDervish" reply="14" id="3306789"]Granted, you are the dev, Frogboy, and also granted, I love the design of FE so far, but the one thing that really kills most Civ-style games for me is that they inevitably devolve into spending all your time trying (and usually failing) to manage unrest, which I find to be intensely un-fun. The lack of any "You have a lot of cities? Punish you with unrest! Cities are far from your capital? Punish you with unrest!" mechanic
I agree that pathing can be worked around but it slows gameplay down significantly to do it. The same goes for another of other similar bugs where you can't trust the shortcut behaviour (eg auto resolve for a start). This makes playing FE more of a chore than it should be, you spend too much time babysitting everything. FE is already a fairly slow paced game, it needs to have lots of reliable streamlining of such things.
You mean there is a choice beyond Low, or None if you can afford it? The tax slider is currently broken because Low is by far the most efficient tax rate. You gain 40% taxes for just 12% unrest by going from None to Low. Going up any further steps only delivers a small amount of extra tax (eg 10% extra?) while the unrest starts to ramp up even faster. It used to make a bit more sense when the tax scale was none = 0%, low = 10%, medium = 20%, etc. But when they redid the econom
I'm in the too many bugs and UI issues camp too. Not to mention the AI could still do with a significant amount of work so that it is playing by vaguely the same rules and presents a good challenge.
Elemental Forums
Agreed with all posts. Auto-resolve needs work to use free abilities whenever possible (assuming beneficial) and there needs to be an option for the player whether to allow spell casting or not. Usually if I'm auto-resolving I don't want my side to cast any spells... if spells are required to get a comfortable win then I'm usually going to play it out myself.
Wow, some long posts. In general I agree that Civ 4 completely nailed the trade off between expansion and current power. Expanding has a short term cost as the cost of supporting the new city significantly outweighs the benefits gained from it (plus of course the time spent building the settler). This means less military, economic and research power in the short term. But if the player can manage to avoid being wiped out and can avoid completely nose-diving their economy in the long t
Elemental Forums
In general I agree too, good list.
Elemental Forums
Pretty epic, did you pull out a win anyway? ;-)
You need a Civics technology to get roads. It is in the second tier I think, read the descriptions it should tell you.
Elemental Forums
By design according to Frogboy, ogres have extra essence around them, perhaps it is something in the lore.
Agreed.
[quote who="Rhaegor" reply="19" id="3303863"]And progress is painfully slow at this point. I am wondering if Stardock feels they do not owe anyone a perfect game as quickly as possible because they gave it away to so many people. The problem is that many of us did pay for the game and it is not nearly as finished as I had hoped when I bought it. I didn't even get it on sale as I really wanted a game like this. [/quote] It has taken a bit longer than I expec
Broadly speaking I agree (although it isn't the buggiest game I have played, just too buggy). I've said this quite a few times, FE needed/needs much more polishing and bug fixing before it is anywhere near its true potential. However it appears Stardock, or at least Frogboy, disagree on the degree of the problem, based on several comments from them and the fact they released FE at a point which I think was way too early.
Elemental Forums
I agree, I play big games in short sessions and really don't like the idea of the AI majorly cheating everytime I load the game! I'm an empire builder, I like to win by building up my empire to be stronger than the AI's then conquering them, it rather disruptive if the AI always has way more buildings in its cities than I do no matter how well I play!
Elemental Forums
[quote who="immanuel1" reply="5" id="3286712"]Mistwraithe, how did it change in the most recent patch? The land is still getting salted, no? When did Stardock actually comment on this? It's good to hear, because I've become convinced that not only is this working as intended (that is to say, retardedly), but that it's so insurmountably hardcoded that Stardock is no longer capable of changing it.[/quote] I can't remember the details but in the bet
Mmmm, I would categorise this as a fairly serious bug. My suspicion is that it happens moderately often but isn't reported much because it isn't easy to observe. I haven't observed it directly in 1.02 but I have felt it was probably happening when I have found AI cities with way more buildings in them than I could possibly achieve in my capital. I quite often only play 5-10 turns in a session so I possibly reload more than most.
[quote who="taltamir" reply="38" id="3286575"]Why would you do that? Its a waste of moves that could be used to convert the monsters into delicious XP.[/quote] Now I think you are missing the point of the thread. The easiest way to handle late game monsters guarding settle spots you want is to settle then try to kite them away with weak units. It doesn't work very reliably but is viable. By definition we're talking about situations where you can't defeat the monster in a s
Thanks for posting this, my feeling was it was still happening too but I haven't been playing much recently. Stardock are really starting to stumble with FE, these bugs needed to be fixed well before release. It feels to me like there isn't a dedicated testing team at Stardock, or if there is they just play the game superficially and don't actually analyse in depth what is going on.
One of my peeves with the game and one reason why I don't find FE has nearly as much strategic depth as Civilization 4 (which really nailed this aspect). Rapid expansion should make you weaker short term but strong long term if you can survive that long. Right now there is very little downside to it. Would be great if Stardock could fix it in a nice way. It has been asked before tho with little response so Stardock might be happy with how it is. Rapid expansion being the best stra
Elemental Forums
Not at all convinced it is working as intended. It used to salt all the earth in an area around the destroyed city, people complained loudly and someone from Stardock replied saying they agreed but there were technical issues with fixing it. The next patch we got what we have now which is better but still not ideal. I think none of the land should be damaged, particularly as the AI quite often just griefs the player by settling right beside dragons and the like, basically deliberately
Regarding balance I agree entirely. In a perfect world all choices would be picked at least occasionally by good players who know the game well and are trying to win. That doesn't mean they have to all be equal or be equally picked. Right now if I'm trying to win then there are quite a few choices in the game which I would never take. Stardock are never going to achieve perfection here but there is currently a lot of room to get closer to it [e digicons]>_>[/e]