TLR: Awesome game, concerns about city building/management during the mid-game, military expansion/city combat needs to be looked at. Implementation of wonder-like time/resource sink structures would help mid-game city management (always fun), as would allowing player to tweak boroughs a la planets from Endless Space (personal favorite; please reconsider over a coffee break). As for the second concern, needs to be some sort of penalty for capturing a city (meh), or allow population to fight back (whoop!), or make siege absolutely required (meh). Also, range needs to be a visible stat, as does city defense (or at least explained).



First off, I want to compliment the developers on what is shaping up to be an excellent game. For one, the region structure and the associated minor factions/resources is great new take on a stale old system. As a game mechanic I love that it offers a new challenge to city placement. Also, once I figured out that you could change the weapons and armor on your soldiers as well as your heroes, the strategic planning of combat really opened up. Lastly (to keep the intro short), it is refreshing that research is so fluid. While I appreciate the point of a tech tree when playing a quasi-historical game like Civ, I prefer the game mechanic of your system far more, specifically the dichotomy of flexibility (inner-era) and restriction (outer-era).



However, not all is roses, as I am sure you are aware. I also want to make it quite clear that I know this is an early-access beta; I know the AI will get better; and I know there will be features added. That said, there are two design issues that I feel must be raised.



With regards to empire building, the game has a noticeable problem with the “third act.” The first era is oodles of fun. You run around and quest, you colonize, you fight a few skirmishes. The second era is a nice steady climb from there. You are moving along with your faction quest, probably captured a city or two, advancing your research and solidifying your strongholds.



And then the third era rolls around and the city building side of the game just flatlines. City management is not remotely interactive. You’ve been able to build everything you need in your cities from the previous eras, and researching new buildings takes a while. Anything you haven’t built (either from old or new techs) you can buy with your gobs of money or use the industry stockpiles you should have been building up (I think these need to be nerfed even more). You can build a new city and have a population of 5 in few turns with a good combo of using food stockpiles and rebuilding a minor village through industry stockpiles. Leveling up your city is fun enough, but I constantly run into concerns with approval as there are limited tech options to mitigate expansion in the first three eras.



As I sat around thinking about it, I realized what made your game different from other 4X strategy games with regard to mid-game city management: the lack of uber-developments like wonders or secret projects. Quite often, in other games more than one of your cities is lagging behind developmentally because you wanted to build this super expensive [inserttitlehere] which set that city back upwards of 20 turns. Looking at this from a development point of view, this not only gives the player a great payoff but provided them with a city to manage mid-game.



If you have large-scale projects (especially for the different victory tracks) in place but haven’t yet rolled them out, great. If you don’t, based on my observations I would encourage you to at least (re)examine the possibility of including something large scale. I really think they will provide something to work towards during the mid-game. Another fix for the mid-game blues would be to unlock and allow the ability to specialize individual boroughs, much like you could planets in Endless Space. While it may seem small, providing the opportunity to tweak a city like that would provide non-military players a nice way to keep active during the later stages of the game. (As I was looking up where to post this I saw something that suggested you feel this idea is not compatible with your concept for the game. If that is correct, I politely request that you re-examine the idea, as that was truly one of the most unique aspects of Endless Space. It seems like it would be easy to implement here: change borough to X type, get relative increase based on terrain. Again, though small, this ability is oddly satisfying.)



If city management was the only problem, I might simply say “well, focus on military because that’s the way of this world.” But the other big problem I have noticed is the lack of difficulty (and subsequent lack of enjoyment) relative to military expansion (battles are a blast; conquering is not). The reason for my concern stems from the utter ease with which you can capture cities. As an example, I steamrolled through an entire Broken Lords faction because they had either one unit or no units guarding each of their cities. Chalk that up to poor planning on their part. However, the ease exposed a larger problem. Because of the design choice to leave a city’s population and buildings intact and have no revolt period, I had four fully functional, fully populated cities within (roughly) a 20 turn period. Within four turns relative to each city, I had a decent garrison.



I do like the design concept of city combat as it stands (limited spaces for the garrison to fight, etc.). It encourages you to have a mobile army and fight out of the city to ensure enemy armies don’t make it to you. But this also encourages an easy capture of the city itself, as your main army is not in your city and might not be able to make it back there. Coupled with the ability to immediately (emphasis on immediately) use the city, this ease of capture greatly decreases the chance of the original faction recapturing the city. Once you capture one city you immediately have a literal “factory on the frontlines;” you’re not going to be stopped. This reduces the challenge, and thus the thrill of subsequent victories.



The fixes for this problem range from brute-force easy to more complex. You could simply have a revolt period, or you could implement the often used destruction of buildings or population (perhaps only if there was a battle). More uniquely, you could opt to arm the population with basic weaponry and create temporary units of your base unit type to fight against invaders (for negative approval cost, perhaps). This would both thin their army and likely reduce the population. Heck, if your walls are strong enough you might even win. You could also increase the defense capability of walls without first laying siege to the town (ie, allowing a garrison of two or three units to win against six), thus allowing time for your mobile armies to sweep in or for other cities to send aid (though that would be getting back to the mechanic you had in E.S., something you appear to be moving away from). Or maybe this just gets chalked up to the AI not having the nuance yet to “salt the earth” and destroy buildings (though if you are blitzing, I doubt this would matter anyway).



A few final thoughts: Range needs to be included as a stat on ranged units. Similarly, defense ability needs to be included in the city screen. And if you don’t include some sort of popups explaining the different unit abilities and attributes, you better have a person writing a glossary.



Regardless of my concerns, I really enjoy your game. It has a ton of character, a great resource system, a fun tactical combat system, excellent RPG elements, a new and different map design that is actually colorful, and factions that are most definitely distinct. I hope my thoughts help in some way. Keep up the great work! I really look forward to seeing how the final product turns out!