Overall I think this game is freaking amazing! I love it so much and I don’t want the Open Dev to end in December! I’m also gonna be making a Steam Controller config that I’ll share online soon since my set up is in my living room. I prefer to play on my TV from my recliner with a dog in my lap. (:

Below you’re going to see a lot of bugs and suggestions I have for the game. Note that these are out of love and not hate for the game. I love this type of game and I really want to see this one succeed. I think it is absolutely beautiful and has a lot of new game concepts. I have also filled out the survey at the end of the game. 

I did not win my first game, ha ha. The first game is not for winning. The first game is for experimenting. I made a lot of decisions that were just based out of gut instinct for wanting to see something cool and not really for winning the game. A good example of that is I went with the Poles for the last era because they had the Winged Hussar. They are my favorite unit from the old Age of Empires games and wanted to see them in this game as well even though there were better cultures I could have picked for my current game situation. 

Bugs:

The biggest bug I ran into is that about halfway through the game it started to glitch pretty badly. Three times I had to save and then completely exit the game out to my desktop in order to fix it. Opening it back up from the desktop fixed it for about 20 minutes or so before it started to glitch out again.

You’ll notice in the screenshots that I had a butt ton of money. One thing that was really frustrating was that when you turn on the buyout button it does not stay on. It turns off after each buyout and you have to turn it back on. Near the end of the game this is pretty frustrating because I was buying 5 to 10 districts per city just to get some extra error score.

I was unable to figure out how to sell my resources to the AI. At the beginning I did a lot of settling based on where resources were both luxury and industrial. I think I had a monopoly on the horses and saffron in the game but I could not sell them. I had alliances with some of the empires and I could buy from them but I could not sell to them. Is that an automatic thing that happens in the background? Or is it just not add to the game yet? If there’s something that I needed to do in order to enable that the game did not tell me.

Suggestions 

This first one isn’t really a suggestion so much is an observation. I can do this in Civ 6 as well, you can see in the screenshot that I broke the money. I was getting thousands of gold per turn. I’m not sure this can be fixed I just wanted to point out that it’s as broken as Civ 6. 

It would be nice to have science, culture, and religion in the top right hand info bar as well. It be nice to know how much religion, culture, and science I’m making per turn. Not sure how well it will fit up there, might have to move some stuff around. 

It would be great for the stability drop down to show what the total stability is per turn. It gives you an overview of what’s affecting stability, but it is hard to tell how much you were gaining or losing per turn. Example: -10/turn, 0/turn, +10/turn

While the soft colors in the game are very beautiful, it makes it really hard for visually impaired people to read it. While I myself am not visually impaired, I do have several friends who are. The colors would make it very hard for them to play this game with the current visual settings.

Near the end of the game I had bought all the districts I needed as well as all the infrastructure (ALL of it). So I was just doing the repeatable ceremonies over and over and over again. It would be really awesome if you could set it to repeat the ceremony X amount of times so you didn’t have to reset it every 1 to 2 turns. At the end of the game those go by really fast.

One thing that I ran into mid game was that I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t turn outposts into cities or give outposts to cities. I had admins in the cities but it still wouldn’t let me attach them. I’m not sure why I couldn’t for a while and then all of a sudden I could. Would be good to have some tool tips telling you more info on why you can’t link outposts to cities or create cities from outposts.

At one point I decided I was going to remove an empire that was bugging me from the game. I tried to murder him as best I could but when I got to his capital I couldn’t take it. I defeated his armies three times at the capital and he just kept respawning. After that I tried to force him to surrender. There were a lot of checkboxes on things I could make him give me. I didn’t understand what the threshold was of what I could get from him. It seems that it was around 200? If I kept beating up on his capital would I have been able to request more stuff from him?

Two suggestions I have about the notifications in the bottom right hand corner: An option to permanently hide population notifications as well as telling you what the attitude changes are in the notification. Near the end I was constantly getting the population growth notification which was interfering with the next turn shortcut using the enter button. I also didn’t care at that point, ha ha. I also didn’t really like having to go into the diplomacy UI in order to see that somebody’s change from friendly to suspicious. It would be nice for the notification just to just say empire four is now suspicious of you. It would also be cool to have a keyboard shortcut to click knowledge so you can get through it faster.

When in the diplomacy UI, would be nice to be able to cycle through the empires you are aware of so you don’t have to back all the way out to go to the next one. 

Another thing I noticed near the end of the game is that I was way over populated in several of my cities. There should be some sort of punishment for being over populated. I didn’t feel encumbered by it at all though, so I didn’t even try to fix it. If there is going to be a punishment for it there should be a way to solve it as well, like neighborhoods and Civ 6.

There are a lot of really good tool tips at the beginning to kind of guide you through the first few turns. One thing that I think is missing though is the notification that luxury resources will combat the loss of stability that you get early on from creating districts. I had a really hard time with beginning trying to figure out how to combat the stability loss.

When working with the diplomacy and grievances, I had a lot of trouble figuring out who “my” was. Was that my empire or is that the other empire saying my for them? It’s really confusing. It would be good to just say each empire instead of the word “my”.