FE Pre-Beta: Today’s Screenshots

Glad to hear this... this was gearing up to be my first complaint post based on the blah palette I've been seeing in the screenshots.

Looks good, I am really interested in tweaking the colors. I hope I can get somehow rid of that blurry picture or washed out as you have mentioned.

Also, did you think about hiding History part under the tab, rather then having it together with spells and stats? It would give you a lot of space there to have everything sorted out nicely. You can sort out spells and even include other info, like special attack which hero has?

>the tactical map shows surrounding tiles

I approve. It looks like one strategic tile is five strategic tiles, which means that when you get seiges working, whether that's in FE or a further expansion, the natural setup will be for buildings that take a quarter of a map tile to take up one tactical square, and those that take a whole map square to take nine map squares, leaving alleys to fight and move in. Walls of course would be an exception, filling an unbroken (save for gates) line of single tactical tiles. Seems quite good to me.

It's good to have the limits for people with 32-bit systems, but for those of us with more it would be cool if you included the fancier textures and let us opt to use them in the menu. I suppose it's not really necessary, though.

Everything looks great!  I'm especially liking the look of that tactical scene.  Better than 'the brown' we've been getting.

Looks good and positively virulent.

The UI for the character is much improved. I also like the tactical battle one.

It's nice to hear that the modders will be able to go hog wild and that the game is 64 bit aware.

Preparing for the upcoming plague.

 Seems like a good random event/spell now that I think of it. Heh heh.

that picture is a riot we should have a frog plague spell in the game, and if its not in there then someone had better mod it 

Let's not jump the gun here. While tactical maps that resemble the strategic world would be marvellous, it's a big feature that they haven't talked about at all. It is probably just a pre-built map.

Indeed. However if that is a pre-built map it's a bloody oddly specific one.

Could we see a few examples of the same scene with various palettes?

Will you have access to config files of beta players? 

EDIT: Two remarks about the second screenshot:

1. I like his face. (This guy's face is on the other hand repulsive. Why he has so weird lips? And I hate his freakish yellow eyes! Please fix this. Ugly things should look aesthetically too, if you know what I mean.)

2. Why he is hiding behind a huge shield? Shouldn't he be, like, posing? It's his official FE photograph after all! If he's shy he should act like those guys. 

I'm really looking forward to playing FE! Sadly no beta for me...

Sorry to write an opposing opinion Omnax1, but please don't hide the history behind the tab. I know that I will not read the histories if they are behind a tab, even though I really like the lore aspect of the game. If it is easily displayable in the character sheet I will get more attached to the game world.

VERY cool feature if the tactical battle surroundings take *any* information from the surrounding tiles. The exact replica Cruxador talked about isn't necessarily even desirable in my opinion. Just having a landmark placed somewhere on the edge of the battlefield if there is one in the next tile on the strategic map is more than enough for me.

In the future this gives hope for allowing special kinds of battles. At least I know I would buy the expansion that brought that along.

EDIT:
I would also buy an expansion that only brought water based gameplay into FE.
And I would also buy an expansion that only brought the dynasty system into FE.

So please do work on expansions after release.

Awesome, seeing the town in the background of the fight!

Have you ever played Age of Wonders? One of my favorite parts were the unit discriptions. They were all in another tab from the unit's stats and abilities, but that didn't stop me from reading every single one of them.

Yes, Age of Wonders had wonderful unit descriptions.  AoW2 didn't have them and the game felt more like a "game" and less of a "world" because of that.

But you are not me. I don't spend time to click a "Lore" button separately to pause playing. If the text is readily available, I will read it every now and then though.

I think if the lore stuff is currently in general view, then it should stay in general view.  It would only require more work to shuffle it to a back seat anyway.

So you do prefer to have lore on front page, instead of having more useful informations for actual gameplay there? And the reason for it is, that you just do not want to click once more, to read it? Even thought, that lore is something which you will read once maybe twice and do not look at it again, so it just wasting space instead of showing something more important for actual gameplay?

And the way its now, it looks like if the text do not fit in, you have to scroll it anyway, which means moving cursor there and scrolling down. Which will slow you down anyway. If there would be seperate tab for it, you could have it all in one window and instead of it have more informations which are needed for playing.

And all you people saying how much important lore is. Maybe for some hardcore players, or veterans. Most of the people appreciate gameplay over the story. And you can not do anything with it. Its nice to have and I do have some great memories because of it, but gameplay and usability is more important. And in long term, its gameplay mechanics and fun which will keep you playing, and not that you can read descriptions.

Ok Stardock, you do the incredibly hard thing - divide attributes and combat stats! But, you have another, more dangerous mission - show us dependence of the stats of attributes. Come on guys, you have no ui designer at all? Imagine that you see this game for the first time, and you need to answer the question: what does each attribute do? If Strength affects the Attack, then why Attack stat is under Dexterity? Why is the history window is in the middle of the screen? History is such an important thing? (NO, its unimportant, player will read history maximum 1 time (and most of the players will read it 0 times)) If this character have more then 9 spells, then why we have big empty space under the spells instead of next row?

Dont listen to the fanboys, ui still needs significant improvements.

Aow, AOW 2 and shadow magic had descriptions as I remember.

That is exactly what I have thought. They should be in collums, and under str should be stats which are affected by it. Now it still looks like a chaos even if its divided. 

Omnax1, I just would prefer if the lore wouldn't be hidden too far away in the whole game. Then again in the long run perhaps I would change my mind about the character window, maybe it wouldn't be that big of a deal as long as the atmosphere was good enough otherwise. Maybe you're right.

One more thing: initiative. As far as I know more initiative means more frequent moves in tactical combat. What is real life (i.e. real time) equivalent of initiative? Speed (unit with high initiative can go further in the same time then units with low initiative) and reflex+awareness (unit with high initiative can attack more targets in the same time) I guess. So initiative stat should relate to dexterity attribute and moves stat somehow, shouldn't it? Does it? (Or I just don't get the idea of initiative?)

Oh, well there was something in AoW that wasn't in AoW2.  If it wasn't unit descriptions, then I don't know what it was.

Seeing how tool tips have been implemented thus far, one would imagine that if one were to mouse over a combat stat, one would see exactly how that value is calculated.