Here are my comments for the closed beta.  Anything marked with a + below is an improvement over Victor, and anything marked with = is an unchanged opinion from Victor.  No marker means that this is a new issue that I noticed.


Bugs:

  • + This bug from my Victor feedback has been fixed: If you hover over a unit that's hidden in the Fog of War, you can still see a battle preview. This can help you locate enemy units that you aren't supposed to see due to the FoW. I told one of my units to attack that "invisible" army. They would arrive at the enemy's position in 3 turns and attack. However, I guess the enemy army moved when the turn ended. So the following turn my army still showed the waypoints to move/attack, but it did not move and was shown as an idle army despite there being waypoints defined for it. Issuing a new command fixed the idle status, but it was sort of awkward/weird.
  • + This bug from my Victor feedback has been fixed: It looks like I cannot declare war and in the same turn attack an enemy unit for the opponent that I just declared war on. (I declared a Surprise War on a vassal.) After declaring war, an attack cursor would appear on the enemy unit, and my units would say "To battle!" or whatever. No battle would start though.
  • + I had no issues with the pathfinding cursor disappearing this time around.
  • = The loading times are still really long. My computer can run most anything on high settings, but it takes 2 minutes or more to load a Humankind save.
  • = If I hover over the meters in the Ideologies section of the Society window, I see purple text placeholders in the tooltips that says things like "Tag_Empire_Ideology_Social_Conservative".
  • = The pathfinding is still weird. Units would still wildly change course when trying to traverse unexplored sections of the map. They didn't try to circumnavigate anymore though. It is still sometimes difficult to determine how to best get to high ground.
  • = I still noticed graphical glitches in the avatar movements. Poe would jitter from side to side.

Battle:

  • = I still do not like the Capture the Flag mechanic at all. Not going to rant about it again because I already did that during the previous OpenDevs. See my previous threads for comments. I mostly just used auto-resolve.

Overall Gameplay:

  • = I still hate the all-in-one Turn End button. Previous comments on this are as follows:
    • = It would be nice if there was a "Force Turn End" button which would end the turn even if there are idle armies. It's tedious to have to manually skip movements for each army. A single warning about idle armies is sufficient (like in the Endless games).
    • = I still don't like that the "Complete Movements" button is hidden in the all-in-one turn advancement button. It needs to be a separate button. For example, I had two armies at the start of a turn: Army 1 was an idle one whose last action was Skip and Army 2 was going to finish a movement during the current turn. The Turn button first displayed the idle icon because of my idle Army 1 so I had to deal with that first. Then I could click the button to make Army 2 finish its Move operation. Once that was done, then the button changed back to Idle because Army 2 was then idle. So then I had to deal with that. What was so bad about the Endless games having a separate button to finish army movements so you could deal with all idle armies at the same time?
  • = How to unlock Civics options is still very hard to understand. They just seem to unlock randomly even if the magenta Civics circle meter is full. It looks like Civics Points are no longer a thing which is OK I guess.
  • = The War Support mechanic is still a little unclear. The tooltips describing "support above/below equilibrium during peace" were hard to interpret.
  • = It would be nice if there was more emphasis on how to gain Fame. My Fame sort of bounced around, and I didn't really understand why other than getting Stars, building Wonders, and completing World Events. Maybe a notification saying "You gained [amount] Fame from [action/event]" would be a good way to help people figure out where their Fame is coming from?
  • = I feel like the Infrastructure improvements are sort of less useful than in Endless Legend because of the stars earned for building districts, researching, and making money. I tended to cheese Money and Science districts to try to rush to the next era before my opponents so I had more cultures to choose from.
  • = The Cultural Conversion mechanic was still unclear. This time I converted some cultures, but it was unclear what this meant. It looked like I was maybe gaining influence from the converted regions and maybe getting Civics perks from them, but if that was the case there was no summary of what was going on.

UI:

  • + The Help Layer is a great idea. Not sure if it's new or if I just missed it last OpenDevs, but it's very helpful.
  • + The expand/collapse state of the culture selection cards is now remembered. So there is no need to expand the card again when scrolling left/right. Major improvement.
  • + It looks like waypoint markers can no longer cover FIMSI tooltip icons when placing an outpost.
  • + The Placement Details pop-up now shows up no matter the zoom level.
  • + The game now seems to remembered your Item Mode/List Mode preference across game sessions.
  • + There appears to no longer be a Culture Change - Transcend tooltip that almost completely covers the Cancel/Confirm buttons.
  • + I didn't notice the color of the Faith icon blending in with any white dialog backgrounds.
  • = It looks like there is still visual glitch where the Infrastructures panel automatically collapses and reopens when adding a new infrastructure in Compact Mode.
  • = The "Expert", "Advanced", etc. labels on the tooltips was a little confusing initially because I didn't really know what "Expert" was referring to. I initially thought it was the game difficulty, but after digging around in the settings a little I am now assuming that this label has to do with the tooltip level in the settings. If so, saying something like "Expert Tip" instead would be clearer.
  • = I still hate the layout of the Technology Screen. It is spread out way too far across the screen, and it makes it hard to plan out research paths through the tree. It really needs a Compact Mode or the ability to zoom out like in Endless Space.
  • = The number of tooltips that can be dismissed is better now, but there were still some of them that I could not find a way to dismiss without clicking on menu items. IMO, all tooltips should have an Understood button.
  • = It would be nice if you could see the health of a ransacked enemy outpost in the menu that pops up when you click on it. Right now you can only see the health if you hover over the outpost.
  • = The menu used to unlock Wonders was still hard to find because it's a button that's buried in the (mostly unrelated) All Cities and Outposts menu. I completely forgot to unlock my first Wonder because of this.
  • = It would be nice if the Cultural Transcendence menu listed details on the Fame bonus granted by the Legacy Trait. I had to transcend and then go back and look at my Empire Menu afterward to find out what the bonus did.
  • = I got a tooltip that said that I discovered the Nile River (last time I got one for the Amazon River). There were no apparent gameplay bonuses from that river compared to other rivers so I don't get the significance of named rivers in this game.  The actual location of the Nile was also very hard to identify.
  • Sometimes the Placement Details pop-up would cover the tile that I was going to place my new district on.
  • Reordering research items in the queue is nearly impossible. The newest item clicked on gets pushed to the front of the queue which makes queuing up multiple items difficult.
  • I was trying to attach an outpost, but the game would not let me. All it displayed was "this action is prohibited" without any further explanation. I eventually remembered it was because I was playing as the Huns, but the warning message that was supposed to remind me of that detail was very unhelpful.