First of all I just bought the game and started playing it yesterday and I loved it (already have 11 hours logged in steam in one day). Anyways...



Airships

I read that ships are being made and added that can cross the water, but (my personal opinion that) almost any good fantasy game has to have airships. One example is to look at every single Final Fantasy game, they all have airships (although different looks in every game). I've played Civilization 5 where the air units are separate from land and sea units. I don't want them like that at all.

I imagine an airship looking like a regular ship that sails across the ocean but instead of sails have a giant balloon keeping it in the skies. As far as gameplay goes: they would probably act similar to the ships being designed now (just guessing) except they could travel across the land and water and they would ignore all terrain movements and cliffs. There could be transport airships and war airships that could bomb enemy cities.



New Faction idea

Have a mechanical/technological faction that can build robots. Don't make them look modern or anything. I'm thinking they should look more modern industrial. Basically modern industrial is a fantasy age where they have modern conveniences but they look like they haven't moved out of the industrial era so everything is bulky and ran by steam (very similar to the Smoky Skies Scenario in Civ5).



City Sieges and Attacking Cities

Unless I'm missing something what good is sieging cities? Wouldn't it be more beneficial to just attack the cities? I won one game because all the troops of one AI was sieging cities of mine while I was capturing one city after another of theirs without seiging any of their cities (eventually I destroyed them which lead to my score being boosted way ahead of the other AIs). I read that sieging cities hurts the city by decreasing the FIDS, but it also decreases the defense by 1 per turn, do cities provide extra defense to units inside, if so where do you find this number? Also why can't the cities defend themselves? Most cities (I assume) would have at least catapults even though they may not repel all the enemies they would at least do damage to them. I would suggest either adding a city improvement or a city expansion to add catapults to help defend the cities. Basically I want attacking cities to be harder without sieging the city first and possibly give the city catapults. Catapults could also be used to defend against sea ships and airships (if added). I personally think you should add a military district expansion which is where the catapult will spawn during battle. The military district will also increase the XP for units garrisoned per turn and produced in the city as well as added defense to the city, but no FIDS production on that tile as the penalty.



Tech Tree

I love how the tech tree is styled, but even with the 2 other eras that aren't yet added, it seems kinda short. In one game I made it all the way through all the current tech eras before the time limit was reached just researching the 10 most useful techs per era to get through them faster (and was barely keeping up with the AI). I assume once diplomacy is fixed (so the AI does more than just declare war) that you'd trade for all the techs you didn't research in previous eras or trade for some you want in the current era to advance faster. I suggest increasing the number of techs required to advance to the next era each time or adding more tech eras (which I'm assuming you probably don't want to do the 2nd one).



Edited: I'd like to add a new idea I had, stairs or some kind of transportation between multi-level city districts.

I've build cities near cliffs and had districts on top of them sometimes. An AI player was recently sieging one of my cities and I usually try to attack them with the army inside the city before they attack me to stop the siege faster. My army was trapped inside the city districts (as usual), but they couldn't get to enemy army because they were on the cliff at a different level than the city center. I'd suggest adding a way for (friendly) armies to travel to any city district regardless of cliff levels. One a similar subject when roads are added I think districts should have the same movement rate as roads.

1. Airships are not part of all fantasy games ever. Final Fantasy games are not hallmarks of fantasy and are, in fact, genre subverters. Most Final Fantasy games are some form of Schizo Tech or Magitech universe where guns and swords exist side-by-side.



2. Robots? You mean like Vaulter Titans? Or perhaps you mean something akin to the Broken Lords? Or are you just wanting to see something like Girl Genius's Clanks?



3. Sieges currently are one of the things they say they are working on improving.



4. The tech tree needs work.

Griffon wrote:
Have a mechanical/technological faction that can build robots

Open the "G2G Votes" page

Kyeudo wrote:
1. Airships are not part of all fantasy games ever. Final Fantasy games are not hallmarks of fantasy and are, in fact, genre subverters. Most Final Fantasy games are some form of Schizo Tech or Magitech universe where guns and swords exist side-by-side.



2. Robots? You mean like Vaulter Titans? Or perhaps you mean something akin to the Broken Lords? Or are you just wanting to see something like Girl Genius's Clanks?



3. Sieges currently are one of the things they say they are working on improving.



4. The tech tree needs work.

I never said airships are in every single fantasy game (but you're probably still right). Dragons are also in a lot of fantasy games too, but dragons are typically in fantasy games with castles and knights. I felt like airships would fit in better with this type of game. I think I also said something about Smoky Skies Scenario from Civ5, that's more what I was thinking for airships.



And ok robots may not have been the correct word, but some kind of mechanical culture where they power everything with steam power. I'm kinda thinking more like the dwarven mechanical things off Skyrim, like this:

Have to agree with the idea of airships. A really neat idea for a game like this; however, I think they should be rather powerful sort of "super-units" (The term is being applied lightly here, but the idea is similar) That are expensive to build, but because of this gain their extreme mobility and power/transport capacity.

I have found two uses for Siege, for what it's worth:



The most common reasoning for it is if you're up against an enemy you might not win against, you can bait them out of their city, denying them their defensive cap bonus. Unfortunately, this typically doesn't work against the computer (Who for some reason are content to have you sit there and slowly kill their city), but it can be used against human opponents.



The second, and rarer advantage I unfortunately found from the computer using it on me: On cities near a large cliff, an enemy on a different level can siege the base without fear of retaliation. This is because units on the ground cannot initiate combat against it, nor can they leave the base during a siege. This happened to me on the opening rounds of one of my games yesterday, making for a rather pathetic loss. lol







As for the other points:



I agree with the individual above who suggested air units would be a sweet "Super Unit". Hell, I'm surprised there isn't any super units in game yet, would be cool to have an incredibly powerful unit you could only have one of.



Funny, as soon as you mentioned steampunk/dieselpunk robots my mind instantly went to the Dwemner automatons from the Elder Scrolls as well (Great minds think alike). I wouldn't mind it, would be cool. Heck, I just want more races period. I love the game so far, but I want to be able to throw an eight player match where no one is the same race!



As for the tech tree, you can certainly tell it's still a WIP. One of the branches at level two has exactly one item, making it rather anaemic. I've actually found the tree to be too hard to nab everything on in the short games the game is currently dictating (My highest researched amount has only been 41, and that was on a match I was utterly DOMINATING). Will be hard to suggest which way it needs to be tweaked until we actually get our hands on the game. As each tier takes longer and longer to research, those final two could take eons for all we know.