Yes, it's true, it's hard to distinguish them right now. That's something we wanted to fix recently so that will surely be changed. While interface won't be reworked completely from scratch you'll see some fixes and additions to it. We also really want to make a "quarters tree" with possibility to show and hide full list of buildings. Could you please mention any other problems with the game that you noticed? That really helps :)
Hi Imperium! Thanks for dropping by. In my estimation, Eador: Genesis is the best fantasy strategy game since Master of Magic. I have been playing it non-stop since it was released on GOG. All other games have fallen by the wayside. Alexy Bokulev is some kind of genius, as far as I'm concerned. I really, really love Genesis and wish Snowbird the greatest success with Masters of the Broken World. That being said, here are some interface suggestions (from most important to least) after playing the beta for MotBW: * Location occupant estimates should ALWAYS be available after a Location is initially scouted. Having to re-scout a location if I forget the occupant estimate is simply a waste of a valuable action. I'm assuming the AI doesn't "forget" and need to re-scout, which gives the AI a big advantage. * I should be able to check my Hero's equipment and retinue before making a choice on the attack/retreat dialog. There's a handy button in Genesis that lets me do this, not sure why it's not in MotBW. * The Health and Experience bars in the unit portraits are too thin. They are hard to read. And I want to be able to mouseover those bars to get their current numerical values, instead of having to click through into the unit info screen. * Terrain types need to be more clear on both the strategic and tactical maps. Pushing color differences and contrast between terrain types might help. * The fastest tactical animation needs to be even faster! In a game that can entail of hundreds if not thousands of tactical fights, we need the option to make them go by quickly. The fastest setting in Genesis is great. * Clicking a hero's circle portrait on the strategic view should take me right to that Hero's character screen. Having to mouseover and then click the "Info" button is an unnecessary step. * I should not have to click "Cancel" on the mouseover menu to change a Hero's assigned action. The other available actions should just be available on the mouseover menu. Clicking "Cancel" to change a Hero's action is an unnecessary step. * Heroes level up way too fast! I assume this is something still being tweaked in the beta. Thanks, and best of luck with the game.
I've put up 4-5 bug reports over the past days in your beta forum, but I haven't been certain what the best approach is for things that are not bugs perse but simply feel clunky, and it's hard for me to tell whether they're just due to unfinished aspects of a beta build. I agree with everything in Jason's list above for one thing, so I won't repeat what he's already said but will add a few more comments. I really strongly like the design of this game - it's quite excellent in so many ways. Which is why I want to see this be the success it deserves to be. There's a lack of hotkeys in the game which may color my impressions a bit, because right now you are forced to go through the radial menus to accomplish even the most common of actions. Right now the game assumes that if you have a hero out then any clicks you make on the strategic map are attempts for you to issue an order to that hero. This goes against the ingrained behavior that I should be able to click on a province on the screen to get informational details about that province so I can plan my strategy without overriding the orders on my Hero. If I do have my Hero selected and am issuing orders, I should be able to click on the province he's already standing in and either have it assume I want him to explore that province or bring up the list of known locations for him to enter. If I have my Hero selected and click on him, it should bring up his hero screen. I also can no longer tell anything about the disposition of conquered province from the strategic map. This information is only available, as far as I can tell, from the Province screen, which while an awesome tool doesn't give me a sense of the relative locations of the provinces that might be rebelling sometime soon. It is not a reasonable assumption that players are going to memorize the random names of provinces and their locations and go back and forth between these screens to access information that should be readily available. Speaking of the Province screen, I should be able to construct buildings and hire guards from this screen without having to zoom back to the strategic map and click through the radial interface. Basically, like Genesis this is going to be a long game. It's not some MMO in need of a timesink to pad out the hours. I need to feel like the game isn't wasting my time. A surprising number of orders in MotBW simply take longer to issue than they did in Genesis - for accomplishing the exact same thing. This is to me a textbook case of the game wasting my time, because I know I could be playing the same strategies and same tactics and get done in half the time - I've seen it and felt it and it's called Genesis and it's a glorious thing. I would be willing to bet that if you set up identical scenarios between Genesis and MotBW and had someone play both the exact same way, doing the exact same actions, the guy playing Genesis would finish the map in less than half the time. The guy playing MotBW would have spent the difference in time navigating menus, waiting on animations, clicking and moving the mouse three times as much, and waiting for hover-pop-ups to appear. SImply put, if the UI design of MotBW is supposed to be an improvement over Genesis's rather rudimentary approach, it's failing at the most basic test of being an efficient tool for controlling the game.
FWIW I strongly feel this too. I basically like the Eador interface; I would like it to be a bit more informative and for the fast battles to be faster, but not at all interested in getting pretty pictures at the price of speed. I terms of the interface, I wonder if it would be possible for the individual unit's icons on the tactical map to display more info about level, number of medals. etc? if that gets too clutterred nevermind, but it would be nice. And could we see more about a unit's current specials and medals when deciding what to give it on level-up? Sometimes I treat the troops as disposable, but their level-up system suggests it can make sense to try to build them up;t he Eador interface doesn't really support that.
I'm not in the beta yet -- although I sent in my e-mail yesterday, so here's hoping :-) -- so maybe this is already in the new game. But my one request for what would really make Eador a better game is: A Way to Tell Which Provinces Need Building -- Basically I would like an at a glance way to see (1) which provinces don't yet have all three buildings built and (2) which provinces already have all three buildings but one of the buildings has an un-built upgrade which I already have the technology unlocked for. I find the Province management to be the one area that can get rather tedious in what is otherwise a really terrific game. I think adding those two features would really make a big difference for me. What I'd like is to be able to toggle some switch each turn and instantly be able to see where I need to build. Right now I'm constantly hunting around checking various provinces on their status and it's a big pain.
I think Province list menu can get this job done decent enough right now. Would be great if we had some sort of minimap indicator for provinces on the list though.
That's actually one major improvement in MotBW - the Province screen shows a list of all the Provinces you control and has a column with 3 icons that represent the up-to-three buildings you could have in each Province. You can very easily see which Provinces don't have all 3 icons filled in. (Although in my perfect world you would just click on this area in this screen and it would pop up the "construct building" dialog for that province. The current approach is to click the Zoom-To-Province button which centers the map on that province, then mouse-over the center of the province until the radial menu comes up, then click the construct button, and afterwards move your view back to where you had it before.)
Yikes, I just had a rough shard. Nary a swamp to be found, nasty neutrals everywhere. Mandrake keeps climbing in price to where my shamans were approaching an appropriate cost for their awesomeness. And I grow, and I grow, and still I find no rivals after getting up to maybe a dozen provinces. The hell? Eh, it's all centaurs and lizards and those asshole Inquisitors everywhere anyway. Dr. Awesome the Brigand leaves his four medals next to his corpse in a ruin formerly haunted by a particularly huge group of adventurers, but our glorious People's Economy was humming along nicely enough to recruit some asshole wizard who left his specialization in dying like an idiot off his application. So that was a great investment. ANYWAY Finally I find Oinor the Unready hanging out in the northwestern corner of the shard, his three-province "empire" woefully underexplored. I'm sure his lone scout hero with his four-healer retinue could have defended his homeland against, uh, rats? But then if a nasty group of Four Mighty Goblins showed up they probably would have demolished the six (six!) goddamned healers hanging out in his garrison. Seriously. Six healers. And him with no mandrake. Or wood. Or iron. Or, y'know, income. Nice work there, Oinor. Commence trolling the thread for six months about how the AI doesn't know how to play the game and it's not actually any fun and you're all deluding yourselves. Oh wait, wrong forum.
Brother, you ain't lying. Finally got the beta working this morning (tip: don't change the install directory; the code, it is not robust), and while it's quite pretty the interface is...well, bad. Reminds me of when some ambitious game director or UI lead or whatever at BioWare discovered radial menus and decided that EVERYTHING FOREVER in NWN 1 would be controlled thusly. Guh. I'll type up my own list of feedback for Snowbird at some point soon here, but I wholeheartedly agree with everything Reldan and Jason Lutes posted above.
Good news - got into the beta for the update. Bad news - the game doesn't work at all. Crashes on creation of a new shard, won't get past the world loading screen on the campaign. I posted my DxDiag,txt for them so they can fix their bug(s). I have 120 Steam games that work fine, so this one is on them.
Just discovered the diplomacy screen in my campaign. Is there a point to learning the intricacies (alliance or alternate wins)? It seems awfully robust for just a war declaration mechanism.
Did you install somewhere besides the default location? I had the same problem, fixed per solution here (have to log into your beta-enabled account to view).
I've had luck fixing the Access Violation error (which I assume is what you're running into as well) by manually deleting the Eador folder in your Documents/<user> folder. The next time you launch the game the config menu will come back up and you should be able to play until you close the program (after which you may have to delete the folder again to play some more).
In the middle of this thread someone mentioned slinger... One of the best tier 1 shooters(Elves sometimes better, sometimes worse). They can have Armor Piercing (20+ level) AND double shot.
Elves are pretty damned awesome. I had an alliance with them last game and by level 4 or 5, they'll have double shot and a bunch of piercing upgrades. They start with a high ranged attack, so at 30 it'd probably be much higher than 16. They also have a longer shot range. The big thing with Elves (and Slingers) is Stamina upgrades. Get them a decent Stamina so they can double shot a few times and nothing gets close. It's like having mini-Scouts along.
:( Hopefully they fix whatever's problematic for you soon. If it makes you feel better, Genesis is still a better game. In other news, lol Thugs. Just unlocked the building, and I swear they just melted everything that dared approach them. Just crazy, crazy strong. I like 'em way better than Guards, which are also pretty legit awesome. Second shard in a row with like zero mandrake and very few swamps (and therefore gems). Annoying. The answer, of course, was more barbarians. I hilariously got my Commander killed taking the only lumber in sight only to realize that I had 28 gems of the 62 required to resurrect him and in income of 7/turn. So that was fun. Of course, the forest province I'd previously taken (before the lumber) yielded its lumber to the second total explore I eventually embarked upon with my Scout. Good times, good times. Instrumental in conquering the shard was Captain Badass and his mighty spear. He has been appointed dictator-for-life as I turn my attention to the next shard to be conquered.
I don't usually award medals, but there are a few exceptions. Healers always get the Healer's Medal or Battlemage Medal, and Paladins always get the +2 Attack/+2 Counterattacks medals. If a lower unit unexpectedly kicks ass and takes names, I may also give them the medal because I am not a complete miserly jerkbag. Speaking of miserly jerkbags, I just entered a Dragon's Lair with my level 18 Holy Knight and his army of 4 Guardsmen, 4 Swordsmen, 1 Cleric, 2 Monks, and 2 Halflings. After coming off of a couple of games with maxed out superwarriors, I thought, how bad could it be? The answer was, "Hahahahahahahaha!" The dragon pretty much ignored me and methodically one-shot firebreathed first the Guardsmen and the Swordsmen, then he melee attacked the Monks and finally one of the Halflings. While this was all going on, my badass Holy Knight was plinking at the Dragon with his badass Master's Sword for like 15 Damage a hit, taking a 30 damage Counterattack every time. The Monks and Cleric kept him alive long enough to get the Dragon down to 16 Health, the remaining Halfling melee hit him (Agility) for 1 damage, and my Holy Knight finally took him down. So it ended with only a Halfling, the Cleric and Holy Knight surviving the fight, basically The Hobbit without the dwarves. I did get this out of it, so it was more or less worth it: Now to write condolence letters to the families about helpless butchery brave sacrifices.
Order of Winner. Kill at least 1 enemy in battle, where you lost 80% of army (hero and summons doesn't count). +5 hp, +3 morale + 2 attack +1 counterattack. This is why militia/goblins useful - let someone make a kill, then finish enemy with chaos spells :)
I finally got into a war in my 4 player game on Genesis. The guy I am fighting is fielding some mean heroes and armies, but I am holding him off for now. My heroes are like level 10, 19 and 21, but his two I have seen so far are 28 and 29 with his troops about double the level of mine. What surprised me was while I set the game at beginner, his troops don't get a penalty to health at all. They are full 100% health like mine, which makes this war really rough, albeit fair. It is almost the best of both worlds in a way, beginner for building up and expanding, but go to war against an AI and you are on pretty even footing. I understand how the rating works for fighting NPC, but I thought it would carry over to the enemy AI armies too. I will have to look up that table on skill levels again, but I am a little confused at how to set the enemy AI levels (I understand what setting my own does). I guess I am just missing something. Well, time to try to finish this war one way or another :).
I keep reading that scouts are the best heroes, especially for your first hero, but after playing around with them a lot, and trying (and trying, and trying) to make them work, I have to say: they just aren't. They're damn handy, they serve a very useful role as a secondary or tertiary hero, but as your primary hero, they kinda blow. I'd rather have a commander with his hordes of brigands (or barbarians, or anything, really), or a super powerful warrior, or a mage with his undead summoned army. I enjoy scouts for what they are, but I honestly can't figure out why people recommend them so highly for combat. They can't field a large enough army to deal with provinces in the third ring while using tier 1 troops, while any other hero type can. (With proper babying & army composition)
Start with scout on expert: https://dl.dropbox.com/s/am2o6xfo98czgr8/Gem.mp4?dl=1 First battle already show why scout is useful as first hero.
Useful, yes, but I've had much better luck with warrior (for instant conquests) or mage/commander (for slightly delayed conquesting goodness.) And those 3 hero types don't sputter out in the third ring of provinces. *shrug* BTW... I've been playing on Expert for some unknown masochistic reason, so I'm seeing the heroes as they operate on the higher levels. In any case, despite my dislike of the scout hero, please keep the tips/suggestions comin'. I do appreciate them, even when my experiences don't quite match what everyone says I should be experiencing. =)
Where scouts shine is that they can take out hard to hit utility classes that tear up a commander and warrior's army, while they can take a hit better than a wizard. Basically, scouts make it easier for your army to stay alive because they are taking out the shamans and monks and archers that kill your front line and healers. That plus all the extra utility that scouts bring make them pretty powerful.
Oh, definitely. They're not bad. But they're kind of crap when you have to deal with 3 or 4 heavy hitters coming at you. (e.g. barbarians) Every other hero class can handle the meat-and-potatoes units better than scouts. And the other classes can pick up some decent "kill the utility classes" power by just building a library (or whatever the beginning spell building is called), while there's nothing that scouts can pick up that will help against regular units... except raw levels. And, well, raw levels help all the classes, and they're not that easy to come by. (relatively speaking)
And, while I'm bitching, let me throw in one other complaint: the devs need to add some basic error checking to prevent bandit ambushes when exploring on the first turn. I've lost my hero on the first turn that way in the last 2 out of 5 games. It's... kinda bullshit. </vent>
My favorite game loss was on the third turn of a MotBW game. Had a second turn event where someone in my home province was speaking up, so I cast him in the dungeon. Turn 3 he breaks out and does an instant uprising that easily slaughters my level 0 hero and takes me out of the shard.
IMO the entire game is very start dependent. If you get a start with a lot of wide open plains with high gold production or maybe some nice resources, that's a big advantage. On the other hand, I've had starts surrounded by low gold producing forests or swamps which sometimes provide only +1 gold and no gems at all. I suppose it's not a huge problem in a single player game, you can argue it's a way of providing "intermediate" difficulties between the actual levels. Competent with a bad start provides a much bigger challenge than Competent with a good start.
I can't believe it took me this long to figure out that Gargoyles are the answer to taking early Spider and Slug sites.
You can recruit them at some Knowledge Stores, but I was talking about summoning them. Both my Wizard and Scout have had great results taking those sites using summoned Gargoyles as a distraction since they are immune to poison. Elemental, actually. Level 2.
You underestimate power of medals and diversions. Also, Scout have better army than warrior on levels before 10 and better spells than commander. Example of Scout dynamic: http://savepic.su/1812984.htm http://savepic.su/1801723.htm http://savepic.su/1784315.htm http://savepic.su/1806842.htm
Zombies are quite handy too. And dwarves get poison immunity with level 8 (easily best tier 1 fighter by the way).
Sure, but Gargoyles are both fast and flyers. You can make sure everything is occupied far away from where you're hurling spells or arrows and block terrain chokepoints so they can't get close. You can do it with the extended range of higher summoning skills, but by the time you're that experienced, you can decimate them in other ways. Maybe even drop Golems instead. I was specifically talking about the early game when Spiders and Slug sites can be a real problem.
