Post by bananadine on Mar 26, 2012 3:23:44 GMT -5
I've now played for several hours. These are the things that were especially bothersome to me:
I didn't find any sufficiently friendly way to assign units to commanders. I was able to assign them very slowly with one click per unit, and very quickly and clumsily by pressing the 'a' key. Ah, and now I see I can double-click to select units by type, that's good. Still, all of that together is not quite enough. In Dominions 3, shift-click selects several consecutive units; maybe I'm missing it, but I don't see anything like that here. In this game, it would seem very natural to draw boxes around sets of units with the mouse, with maybe Ctrl or Shift modifying whether the boxed units join or replace the current selection, or something like that. I was surprised when I couldn't draw boxes.
Another thing about unit assignment: The X and diamond symbols that show the assignments make it difficult to see the type of each unit. For a new player, this is quite bad. You can hardly tell your X-ed crossbowmen from your X-ed spearmen! I think a symbol or frame drawn around or behind each unit sprite, rather than atop it, would work much better.
I know that 'f' toggles fast-forwarding in the battle scenes. But is there a key that toggles the extra-fast fast-forwarding? If not, there should be one. It's an important function!
Even at normal speed, I had trouble keeping track of which mages were casting which spells on which targets. I'm used to Dominions 3, in which the mage often throws a magic projectile at the target... maybe that kind of graphical flair is outside the scope of this game's design, but I think that, at least, the textual log of the battle could pick up a lot of the slack. I don't want to see a dozen lines saying "Spearman attacks with Spear"--the important stuff gets lost in that noise! If nothing else, it would be nice, and perhaps simple on the programming side, to just add a second log display box that'd be the same as the existing one, except it'd only show the lines of the form "Mage casts Spell" and filter out all the others. Like in Dominions. The display Dominions 3 gives you in the upper-left corner of the window, showing the last four spell events, is VERY useful. And I don't want it for micromanagement or anything; I just want to be able to maintain a basic understanding of what's happening!
Failing all of that, it'd at least be nice to be able to pause a battle and scroll upward through the log to see what spell it was that killed your expensive commander.
Is there a way to make commanders do things "monthly"? I did not see one, and it was very annoying to be without it. I had commanders that could hunt slaves, and I wanted some of them to do it every turn; it was too boring to keep telling them to do it. Similarly, I wanted to be able to tell a goblin shaman to create one of those tree things every turn; I had enough resources for it. This game is generally fast-paced, so it feels like things like that shouldn't be allowed to be so boring!
Sometimes I put commanders in groups, and then I was annoyed over and over when the 'n' key would step me through the commanders and not through the groups. If I put commanders in a group, I mostly don't want to think of them as individuals anymore. Of course one of them might need to summon a creature or something, but when they're just moving around the map for several successive turns, an 'n' function that would step through groups would be much more convenient and much less annoying. A subtlety: If one of the commanders in a group is out of action points and another can still move, then I'd want that whole group to be left out of this type of cycling.
It was sometimes difficult for me to tell which of my recruitment sites I was recruiting units at. I was aware that I could right-click on one in the recruitment window to center the map on it, and that helped a lot, but it wasn't enough. The trouble is that centering the map doesn't work well when a big popup window is already covering the center of the map. It'd make much more sense to center, say, the visible area to the right of the popup on the recruitment site whose icon was clicked. Basically the site on the map should be visible after the view is centered on it. (Specially highlighting it somehow would also help, since sometimes two identical-looking castles, say, are close together on the map.)
Of course some of these suggestions could be totally wrong; I'm not well accustomed to the game yet. But, you know, ask for free advice and you get what you pay for.
I didn't find any sufficiently friendly way to assign units to commanders. I was able to assign them very slowly with one click per unit, and very quickly and clumsily by pressing the 'a' key. Ah, and now I see I can double-click to select units by type, that's good. Still, all of that together is not quite enough. In Dominions 3, shift-click selects several consecutive units; maybe I'm missing it, but I don't see anything like that here. In this game, it would seem very natural to draw boxes around sets of units with the mouse, with maybe Ctrl or Shift modifying whether the boxed units join or replace the current selection, or something like that. I was surprised when I couldn't draw boxes.
Another thing about unit assignment: The X and diamond symbols that show the assignments make it difficult to see the type of each unit. For a new player, this is quite bad. You can hardly tell your X-ed crossbowmen from your X-ed spearmen! I think a symbol or frame drawn around or behind each unit sprite, rather than atop it, would work much better.
I know that 'f' toggles fast-forwarding in the battle scenes. But is there a key that toggles the extra-fast fast-forwarding? If not, there should be one. It's an important function!
Even at normal speed, I had trouble keeping track of which mages were casting which spells on which targets. I'm used to Dominions 3, in which the mage often throws a magic projectile at the target... maybe that kind of graphical flair is outside the scope of this game's design, but I think that, at least, the textual log of the battle could pick up a lot of the slack. I don't want to see a dozen lines saying "Spearman attacks with Spear"--the important stuff gets lost in that noise! If nothing else, it would be nice, and perhaps simple on the programming side, to just add a second log display box that'd be the same as the existing one, except it'd only show the lines of the form "Mage casts Spell" and filter out all the others. Like in Dominions. The display Dominions 3 gives you in the upper-left corner of the window, showing the last four spell events, is VERY useful. And I don't want it for micromanagement or anything; I just want to be able to maintain a basic understanding of what's happening!
Failing all of that, it'd at least be nice to be able to pause a battle and scroll upward through the log to see what spell it was that killed your expensive commander.
Is there a way to make commanders do things "monthly"? I did not see one, and it was very annoying to be without it. I had commanders that could hunt slaves, and I wanted some of them to do it every turn; it was too boring to keep telling them to do it. Similarly, I wanted to be able to tell a goblin shaman to create one of those tree things every turn; I had enough resources for it. This game is generally fast-paced, so it feels like things like that shouldn't be allowed to be so boring!
Sometimes I put commanders in groups, and then I was annoyed over and over when the 'n' key would step me through the commanders and not through the groups. If I put commanders in a group, I mostly don't want to think of them as individuals anymore. Of course one of them might need to summon a creature or something, but when they're just moving around the map for several successive turns, an 'n' function that would step through groups would be much more convenient and much less annoying. A subtlety: If one of the commanders in a group is out of action points and another can still move, then I'd want that whole group to be left out of this type of cycling.
It was sometimes difficult for me to tell which of my recruitment sites I was recruiting units at. I was aware that I could right-click on one in the recruitment window to center the map on it, and that helped a lot, but it wasn't enough. The trouble is that centering the map doesn't work well when a big popup window is already covering the center of the map. It'd make much more sense to center, say, the visible area to the right of the popup on the recruitment site whose icon was clicked. Basically the site on the map should be visible after the view is centered on it. (Specially highlighting it somehow would also help, since sometimes two identical-looking castles, say, are close together on the map.)
Of course some of these suggestions could be totally wrong; I'm not well accustomed to the game yet. But, you know, ask for free advice and you get what you pay for.