Greetings. I'm just dropping in to say this game was the best pleasant surprise of 2014 and I'm quite taken with it. Best 4X to come out in a long time. The genre has stagnated a bit and it's nice to see some forward progress. I think regions are the most elegant way of stopping ICS I've seen yet; I can't live without them in future games.



That being said, I had some suggestions and ideas for what could be in the expansion. Which I hope there will be; as good as the game is, it needs more. Forgive me if I've missed a designated suggestion thread.



Anyway...



SIMPLE IDEAS



-Improvements that wouldn't do anything shouldn't show up in the build menu. Lumber mills on cities without forests, etc. Helps reduce menu clutter and since the map gets a little hard to read, especially once a bunch of districts are up, this saves on checking district tiles to remember if there was a river or a forest there before.



-I should be able to liberate and return allied cities; I was playing a peaceful Drakken game and had to go to war to rescue my allies from a runaway Necrophage invasion. And then I ended up with half the map.



-If you respond to the notification (you go and spend a hero's points, etc) it should auto dismiss the notice.



-The "don't show me these notices" anymore button should actually work. Is this a bug? I have told it to stop telling me about unit promotions a lot.



-There should be a "restart game" or "rebuild map" option on Turn 1 in case I don't like my starting position.



-Some of the notices, especially the "more information" version, are less than optimal; more information could be presented. Like instead of "City Population Increased!" it could just be "[Cityname] +1."



-The unit upgrade screen needs some kind of "compare" function, and it would be nice if the available items had more sorting options, like "disable lower tiers" from showing up, that sort of thing.



-In Diplomacy, when I'm offering Dust to sweeten the pot, there should be a button that automatically goes to the minimum amount of Dust required for a green bar. I'm going to find it eventually, there's no reason to make me hunt for it.



-New game settings should stay or be lockable or something. I like to set eight factions to be one of each of them, with the same color for each (I have a system that allows me to remember which color goes to whom) and I hate having to reset it off of "random" each time.



LESS SIMPLE IDEAS



-The "Founder's Memorial" is boring. Each faction should have its own unique starting building; give them the same stats as the Founder's Memorial, plus some special additional power.



-Some of the technologies seem a little under powered or could use merging or at least some other effect. I would merge "Shipyard" with "Cargo Docks", for example. A few other techs probably do too much at once. Just some tweaking here and there, I'd say. Also, I think too many basic mechanics are gated by technology; I'm looking at you, Language Square.



-I feel like I should be able to build something on ruins. Call it "Archaeological Dig Site" or something. Maybe it produces a new strategic/luxury resource called "Relics" or just some science and dust, I don't know.



-Trade routes and how they work is a little obscure. I like automatic trade routes (I've played enough Beyond Earth not to want to micromanage them) but it's hard to tell who your major trading partner is and so forth without going deep into a menu you have no reason to check otherwise.



-I should be able to build a "Native District" on an actual minor faction village if my city is close enough. Maybe this gives me access to a unique Minor Faction building? That would be neat.



-I dislike the turn-to-turn micromanagement of worker allocation. I wish the decision was permanent; unallocated workers went to a general labor pool and I could set them to a particular FIDSI once and only once. I know it diminishes the complexity of the strategy and it's often super useful to reallocate, but I have a general preference for single-time major decisions. Maybe the general work force provided +1/1/1/1/1 (so they weren't purely idle while waiting) and the permanent allocation was the standard bonus. Or keep things the way they are, but allow "locking" a worker, which increases the bonus by one or two points, but you can never move him after that.



EXPANSION IDEAS



-Combat needs some more spice. I want a little more control over movement and actions, maybe more special abilities...and it's definitely tedious to micromanage major battles. Maybe keep army sizes lower?



-I dislike how unit upgrading works. It's too fiddly, too micromanagement focused, and there are really only a few meaningful decisions (two hand versus one hand) as opposed to mathematical/resource use optimization. Instead, I propose importing the upgrade system from Beyond Earth. As you increase in tech, you get unit promotions that have, say, three possible routes down a promotion tree. Condense the meaningful decisions down to, well, a good binary meaningful decision. Helps keep each unit type feeling nice and unique. I only keep one track of units anyway, and shudder to think about how deep down the rabbit hole I'd have to get to use multiple "builds" of the same unit, at the moment. There's no affinity analog, so it'd be easiest just to gate promotions by era.



-As a rule, I hate any mechanic in strategy games that is important but also easily forgotten about, and making sure my units upgrade with tech is one of them. Just make sure an alert comes up forcing me through that gate and condense the decision down to something simple but meaningful.



-But, I like the weapon/armor/item stuff for Heroes. That can stay, though it would be neat if there were more Governor-focused items.



-Speaking of heroes, I don't think the skill trees work well the way they are presently constructed. Why not just two trees, "Army Leadership" and "City Management" (or "Commander" and "Governor") but have each tree be faction unique? No crossover between the trees; condense down to a nice, binary focus decision that takes real investment if you want a leader who can do double duty. Each tree could have real trade-offs within it; the decisions can be harder (and therefore more interesting) with a more streamlined skill system.



-Speaking of leaders, the faction leader should be a starting hero. I like the idea of starting with two, one automatically assigned to your capital, one as a commander (unless you send him or her to your second city, of course). First, allocating your starting hero as governor is a good decision that is boring compared to having at least one army have a leader in it for the early game, which is fun.



Second, the faction leader could have a unique skill set - "City" and "Faction." The Faction tree has universal bonuses. This started as an idea for some kind of "government type/social policy" system, but then I figured...why not make the faction leaders more distinctive by having them be present in actual gameplay? You customize your government by customizing the skill and preferences of your actual leader. Even without a Faction tree, though, I really like the idea of starting with two heroes, one as a governor, one as a commander.



Third, I kinda wish there were more faction-specific heroes; maybe you could be limited to your own faction in hero selection. I think it'd a bit weird I end up hiring nothing but Cultists. In every game, there's an epidemic of out-of-work cultists willing to govern cities for food. I could be mortal enemies with their faction but still be hiring defectors to govern my own people. It's all a bit strange. Are they heretics? Freethinkers? Do skeleton robots have heresy?



-Some more faction-specific buildings and technologies would be neat. Maybe a 4th unique unit, as well (with BE-style upgrading, a little more variety couldn't hurt).



-Navies! The water! Each faction gets their own ship class. Resources and anomalies available only by going to the sea! I think adding a meaningful naval game is a really obvious route to go for an expansion, especially if coupled with a new water-based faction.



-Espionage! Maybe some more meat on the Diplomacy-system's bones. Also obvious expansion fodder, along with navies.



-A fair number of Quests are kind of dull; a lot of the time they are "stuff you would do anyway" or "stuff you can easily forget about." They could be retooled to feel more like actual quests; I'm talking full fantasy genre nonsense stuff. Rescue princesses. Slay dragons. Rescue dragons. Slay princesses. They could have various meaningful choices. Do you keep the Djinn's bottle for its power or liberate it to gain favor with the free Djinn? Stuff like that. Could involve roving monsters and such that aren't minor faction units.



Anyway, loving the game, these are just some thoughts I've had while playing it.

I just want to add my two cents on this:



Simple Ideas:

* God, I also wish upgrades a city cannot use did not show up. The clutter can be frustrating.

* You can return a city: go to Diplomacy and gift that city. The Faction will surely REALLY like this and it will help improve your influence with them in future.

* Agreed on the hero skill points: that is a meaningless extra click. I also wish I could permanently disable certain notification, or at least for the rest of the game (eg by turn 250 I do not care that my city has increased in population)

* Rather than a reset map button, perhaps the map generation/starting location algorithm could be improved a little. This seems to be a common complaint, so addressing the source would be more productive than bandaiding it.



Less simple ideas:

* I like your idea, but I consider the Founder's Memorial the same as the Civ5 Monument: one building everyone starts with that has a simple, good benefit.

* I also think the tech tree needs a bit of a shake around, though I want to play more games before I commit to my opinions

* Trade Routes definitely need an improvement. They are not clear enough for new players at all, and even experienced players have too much messing around to get information on them.



Expansion:

* I also find combat too cluttered. A lot of units in a very small that typically has a choke point results in very dull battles where ranged units dominate. Larger fields of battle, less choke points, or less units would go a long way to improving this.

* I also find unit upgrading tedious. There is rarely a meaningful option and you repeatedly have to apply incremental upgrades on the same concept as you advance through the game. Purely incremental upgrades could be automatic, while choices would be more interesting if they were more meaningful.

* Personally, I do not mind the current skill trees at a conceptual level, but I feel they could use a rework. Some of the connections between trees are terrible (eg Drakken tree into General tree), some of the techs are plain terrible (eg searching Ruins in the General tree) and some are kind of oddly located (eg Necrophage improved hero damage in the middle of a bunch of city-oriented techs).

* I also like the idea of your faction leader being a unique governor of the capital. I was surprised when the faction leader was not a hero, and it would make the early game more interesting to have a governor and an army leader.

* The game definitely needs naval warfare. I doubt many people would disagree with you on that

* Espionage I am less certain about. I never found it interesting in Civ, but I seem to be alone on that opinion.

Of the Lumber Mill idea: how about a small number on the building icon, which tells you how many "suitable" hexes you currently have got for exploiting the building? I agree it is annoying to browse hexes manually and looking for the tooltips, when the city has got districts that hide the forests.



I don't like auto-dismiss notice. Sometimes when governor levels-up I want to check in which town the governor currently is and which trait would be giving the best edge for me before decision. There is a dismiss-button for that. Not to mention when you get several cities building completion notice, I only dismiss it manually after I have set all the buildings. You can ask for an option in game-menus for auto-dismission, though.



I completely agree the negotiation thing on diplomacy-menu. Good stuff!



About the technologies and Founder's Memorial. This is supposed to think as an option, not mandatory. If you decide to play like Necrophrages you don't waste your time in languages, you research tier 1 titanium weapons instead. Some starting locations are good enough without Founder's Memorial. You can save it on for your second city. It's an option. Sometimes you don't need shipyards, but someone else does. So, you can choose the short-cut and focus on your strengths.



Again, worker allocation proposal must be an option in game menus, not forcing it to everyone who like to get the very best advantage over the AI and other players. Some solid allocation would ruin the food production sduring the winters, for example.



I love different builds for the same base unit. Sometimes it is due to available resources at hand, sometimes it is strategical choice. Let's take an example of infantry units. Sometimes they don't need to be fast, having high initiative, but also have firepower to do the kills. On some other army, however, they need to "use up" enemies' attack and thus withstand a lot -- because there are great archers, who are slow. The infantry units therefore need to have high initiative. Flexibility.



There are not that many techs that can improve your troops. So, when one of them is researched, browse up your units and choose the upgrades. When your troops on field are on your land you can easily press retrofit button to hand over your troops the latest designs. Shouldn't be too complicated? It would if there were loads of equipment-improving technologies.



Once again, choosing governor or troop leader in the beginning and cementing the choice because via trait tree is limiting flexibility.



Espionage and spying would be good addition though, thumbs up for that.



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Overall, many of these ideas would limit the flexibility of the game and it would end-up for me as an another simplified wannabe-strategy game. Basically these limitations would pass me back to Elemental: Fallen Enchantress.

Drauglir wrote:
Of the Lumber Mill idea: how about a small number on the building icon, which tells you how many "suitable" hexes you currently have got for exploiting the building? I agree it is annoying to browse hexes manually and looking for the tooltips, when the city has got districts that hide the forests.

That would be good! Then you can decide if it's worth building then. It could apply to any improvement that varies based on applicable tiles, too, showing you how much bang for your buck you get.

I don't like auto-dismiss notice. Sometimes when governor levels-up I want to check in which town the governor currently is and which trait would be giving the best edge for me before decision. There is a dismiss-button for that. Not to mention when you get several cities building completion notice, I only dismiss it manually after I have set all the buildings. You can ask for an option in game-menus for auto-dismission, though.

No no, I mean when you get the notice, I click "inspect" and allocate the point to the leader, then I exit the leader screen...and the original notice is still there. I then have to dismiss it. Leaving the leader screen should dismiss the notice.

Again, worker allocation proposal must be an option in game menus, not forcing it to everyone who like to get the very best advantage over the AI and other players. Some solid allocation would ruin the food production sduring the winters, for example.

It is the suggestion I'm most on the fence about. It adds a ton of flexibility at the cost of some micromanagement at the moment, and it's probably fine.

I love different builds for the same base unit. Sometimes it is due to available resources at hand, sometimes it is strategical choice. Let's take an example of infantry units. Sometimes they don't need to be fast, having high initiative, but also have firepower to do the kills. On some other army, however, they need to "use up" enemies' attack and thus withstand a lot -- because there are great archers, who are slow. The infantry units therefore need to have high initiative. Flexibility.

This I'm not so sure about. Unit customization is important, but I feel like you could get easier results from a Civ 5 style promotion customization system or a Beyond Earth style upgrade system (or both!) than the current system, which is a lot of micromanagement to not that much result. And worst, it's too flexible; decisions aren't really meaningful if they don't have an opportunity cost. For a similar reason, artifact weapons shouldn't repeat themselves between heroes; if I assign a legendary weapon to one guy, it's because he's my most important dude and he gets the one and only Thingamajig of Legend.



If you could upgrade individual units as they were promoted on the battlefield (the current level system is kind of dull; it's just a raw combat upgrade) Civ 5 style and you had upgrades applied to the unit class as you advanced in eras like in Beyond Earth, you might get the best of both worlds; individual unit specialization but also meaningfully tough decisions as to how to develop your armies over time. And all without the fiddly math optimization of the unit customization screen. It just feels less like a civilization-level decision and more like my faction leader is getting into the weeds telling the peasants how to farm like some kind of Fantasy Khruschev.



So, for example, instead of going into the unit customization screen to decide what kind of bows my archers use and what armor they wear, every era I decide on some kind of special ability or what-have-you, and every promotion through experience I also pick some kind of specialty. It would allow the system to be a bit more open-ended, as well, as they could do weird superpower as the eras advanced or you got deeper into the promotion trees.

And another thing! I would love to be able to set rally points for army construction. They just autogarrison and it can be annoying to search around for newly built units when you have a big empire churning out a big army.

The biggest one for me is changing the idle army button so it doesn't show armies that are moving. Currently I found the button fairly useless since it shows every army on the map. As such then I miss armies that are just ideally sitting there. My biggest annoyance.



I will fully echo trade being confusing...in that I still understand it at all.



Feature wise....I feel like a LOT of things affect vision in this game, but is vision really that important?



Finally, I agree with hero skill trees. I think half of the skills are worthless and very odd, I wouldn't mind a revamp.







I will say that I bought EL when it was in beta and played it again when it was first released. I could not get into the game back then, but the polishing that has done has finally gotten the game to a point I enjoy. So good job!

Hero skills definitely could be revamped.



But unlike everyone else here I like the unit upgrade system. Wouldn't be opposed to having the same system and adding more stuff to it (ie specializations at specific unit levels).

No no, I mean when you get the notice, I click "inspect" and allocate the point to the leader, then I exit the leader screen...and the original notice is still there. I then have to dismiss it. Leaving the leader screen should dismiss the notice

I would prefer it to stay how it is. When I choose a new skill for my hero when he levels up, that is usually a good time to upgrade him as well. But as soon as you "accept" a skill you go back to the main screen. If the tooltip closed I would have to then go find my hero to finish doing stuff to him. The most annoying one would be when you get the skill "another accessory slot" and as soon as you accept the skill you cant put on another ring.

The biggest one for me is changing the idle army button so it doesn't show armies that are moving. Currently I found the button fairly useless since it shows every army on the map. As such then I miss armies that are just ideally sitting there. My biggest annoyance.

This is huge. Units that are sieging should definitely show up. Someone should start a suggestion thread in the right place.

Improvements that wouldn't do anything shouldn't show up in the build menu. Lumber mills on cities without forests, etc. Helps reduce menu clutter and since the map gets a little hard to read, especially once a bunch of districts are up, this saves on checking district tiles to remember if there was a river or a forest there before.

Great idea. The one on forest tile counts is a good one too.

Stalker0 wrote:
The biggest one for me is changing the idle army button so it doesn't show armies that are moving. Currently I found the button fairly useless since it shows every army on the map. As such then I miss armies that are just ideally sitting there. My biggest annoyance.

Next to the "idle armies" -button is "move armies" -button. You can make the moves for the armies that are being ordered to move previous turn(s). I still browse every army, because there might be new enemies on sight since the last turn. It's very rough to move armies without taking a look. There could be new enemy army at your doorsteps a couple of hexes away. After you moved your armies none of them are close enough, and you'll get city under siege pop-up next turn.

Another simple suggestion:



-When playing as the Broken Lords, it would be neat if the "increase population" button was next to the population number on the main map screen.



Another less simple suggestion:



-I started with the Vaulters. I think strategic resources having a booster effect should be a universal core mechanic, with something else for the Vaulters. Otherwise they just don't have a really front-facing important gameplay effect, which is a shame.

Another small thing:



-The notifications could be a little more transparent. I was happily clicking next turn on my way to boredom-town when an army showed up at my doorstep. Totally missed the "at war" notification. I feel like a war declaration shouldn't have the same old diplomacy communication symbol at the notification tabs, but like a big one with red letters that say WAR DECLARED! with some kind of scary noise.



Bottom line: More scary noises.

Actually, on that line, I wish there were an easier way to track foreign units on your soil. For example, when you zoom out there could be a coloured symbol on the hex to indicate foreign unit (similar to the really obvious ones we already have for strategic resources). That way I could react to the invaders BEFORE they besiege my city!

Yes, some way of highlighting particular elements of the map layer would be great. I would like to be able to, say, elevate anomalies and resources for city placement visual aid, or cut out everything but military units for warfare.