I know, I know. It's been ages since the Lucy opendev happened. And I wouldn't have made this post if the devs hadn't postponed the release date. I figured if the devs are willing to put in the extra effort to listen to the players and improve the game, why shouldn't I help them out any way I could? Better late than never, right?  

Anyway, so the following points are from my two campaigns through the opendev (more like one and a half because I dropped the first one halfway). I tried to keep my cultures as diverse as possible so as to get a feel for them while also trying to maximize my city planning and adjacency bonuses.

Moreover most of my feedback is about the UI/UX because for me, it often makes or breaks a game. And while what we had was much better than say Endless Legend, it could do with a bit more love in my opinion. So here goes:  

• UI Colours: While the artwork of the game is gorgeous. I did find some odd choices with some of the colours used, specifically for the player badges. For example, gold on green/yellow. This made the player symbols (I'm not sure what they are called) not very legible.

• Battle UI: This is mostly good. My main issue here was the difficulty seeing the type of terrain during battles. I appreciated the reason for making the battle map a uniform colour and removing the environmental artwork as it helps focus on the strategic aspect of it but it was hard to tell where the forests were, for example, on first glance. Better symbols/visualisation of terrain features here would really help. Another thing was that I couldn't see how many movement points each of my units had left/used up while in battles. This would seem like a bit of a design oversight.

• Map Scroll Speed: I found this really slow. But I'm sure there will be slider to change the speed on release.

• Territories: One of the coolest features in Endless Legend for me was how when you zoomed out, the different territories would be the colour of the empire they were under, with their names on it. This really helped in knowing on first glance where, and how big, everyone was. And this feature would be even better suited here. For example, on zooming out, all the territories of the empire would be the colour of the empire with the name of the empire/culture/player across these territories, instead of the individual territory names. You could have varying zoom levels on this. So on zooming out a little the territories have the same colour but you can see the different city names and city borders. On zooming out further, all that fades and is replaced by the name of your empire across your territories. Something like in Paradox games, like EU4. This would look so beautiful.

• Unexplained Icons/Terms: I saw some of these during my playtime and I couldn't figure out what these meant. For example, there was one like a triangle with a curved arrow within it. I couldn't understand what this was. Or what a Coreligionist state meant or how it affected me. And this also ties into my next point.

• Hover Tooltips: Or the general lack of these. Granted the game was still in development back then, but I often found myself struggling to understand what all the littles icons and sliders and whatnot meant. For example, tooltips on civic axes for further information would really help. I often forgot what the symbols on these axes meant. Some tooltips were incomplete, like the district tooltips not showing the terrain adjacency they get. A great example of how this can be done is how these were implemented in Crusader Kings 3. Any word, any technical term that you couldn't understand you could just hover over it and it shows you. The system there is very intuitive and streamlines a lot of the clutter.

• Unit Movement Path: This one I found a weird design choice. You could only see the path or how many turns it would take a unit to reach somewhere by selecting it, holding the RMB, and dragging the mouse pointer across the tiles. Civilization 6 does it much better where there is no need for holding the RMB, as I'm sure you're aware. Hovering over the tiles with the unit selected easily tells you how many turns it'll take. Saves clicks and is a smoother experience.

• Science/Faith Generation: The fact that to see how much science or faith I was generating per turn, I had to open the respective window/view was weird. Information like this should be readily available on the main screen, like the gold output.

• Tutorial : This wasn't satisfactory. But I'll let this slide because it was early in development and usually most strategy games fail at this. But I'd like to see something much better on release. Maybe take a cue from CK3?

• Notifications: A lot of these were very vague. I couldn't tell what or how I earned a particular era star or a world deed. This needs to be better or else it'll just seem like useless clutter filling up the screen. Tying into this, automated regiment/unit names would really help when events related to these happen to let the player know where these happened or who/what triggered it. A generally clarity with notifications basically.  

• City UI: This was good for the most part except that the icons being so big for each improvement, I had to scroll a lot to get to important stuff. I realise that smaller icons were an option but I do want to see the glorious artwork of this game too. A possible solution would be to have different tabs within the city UI for different buildable things. So a tab for improvements, one for quarters, one for units and so on.  

• Science Hoarding: Ok so this just seemed stupid to me. Whenever I could progress to the new era and chose to wait to collect the era stars, the science just kept being hoarded. So now when I did go into the next era I had a whole lot of collected science sitting there to instantly unlock all the technologies of the next era. This didn't feel right to me as I had assumed that not going into the next era would risk my empire's scientific progress but it didn't matter. I could easily collect the era stars and just instantly unlock all techs in the next era, no worries. It was a win-win. Instantly unlocking everything also had the problem of having too much to build in your cities all at once. The game and empire building thus happened in bursts, with unlocking and building everything at once then sitting and waiting for the next era, instead of it being slow and gradual throughout the era. I would suggest instead of this science hoarding, perhaps make it so that any extra science is converted to food/industry/money. Or maybe one fourth or half of your science to not make it OP. This would add a very real choice of whether or not a player is willing to rush to the next era and lose the era stars, or collect the era stars and risk being scientifically behind. The culture choice alone wasn't a good enough reason for me to rush into the next era.  

• Cities and Outposts: Need different icons/markers to distinguish between them easily.  

• Tacks: This one is essential. In a game that requires you to think about adjacency bonuses a lot of the time, better city planning tools would really help. And a simple solution is having different tacks that can be added to tiles on the map, like in Civ6. This is a no brainer for me.  

• Miscellaneous: The district visualisation was not great. Hard to tell the districts apart. Also a bland grey fog of war was quite boring honestly. I get that it goes with the whole silver/steel theme of the game but I think it was much better in Endless Legend. The brown paper like map was really nice. Or how it is in civ6. It adds that additional sense of wonder to the whole thing and gives the game some character.  

That is it. There are a lot of things I love about this game but I believe the time to appreciate them will come later. Right now I just wanted to give my feedback on the things I found not upto the mark to make this game the best it can be. Just some tough love.  

Having said that, I'm incredibly excited for this game. It's something amazing already with so, so much more potential still. I know Amplitude studios have the talent and vision for making this one of the greatest 4x of all time, if not the best. My best wishes to the whole team. Stay safe and take as long as you need with this one.  

Cheers.