My take of the game in its current state

Ooh, I *really* like your quest ideas! They sound fun and the rewards couldn't be TOO hard to program! Nice work! Also like your idea with research. There really should be more consequence in each decision. 

Why not pull a page from Fall from Heaven and randomly generate very strong boss-monsters that begin wreaking havoc on the countryside and the brave player to destroy him gets and awesome item? I liked hearing about how "Kearog the Bold" was destroying everything in his path, etc. But something tells me that this has probably been suggested a hundred times over. 

Anyway, +1 Karma for you, good sir!

---> This one is near and dear to my heart.  

---> We have short term disables we can cast on enemy units (Freeze, Tremor).  How about short-term buffs?  Some army-wide thing that gives everyone stoneskin for 2 turns?  For that matter how about removing the tedium of casting buffs on an army - right now if I want to cast a spell I have to open the spellbook, click on the selected spell, attempt to cast it, choose a spellcaster (which centers on the spellcaster away from the unit, PITA!!!!!), click on the designated army stack and then click on the unit I want.  Repeat this five times to cast on five units (admittedly it will autoselect the last one in the army stack as the only possible option) and it gets pretty tedious.  Most of the time what you really want is to buff the heck out of everybody before trying to kill Vetrar or something, then cancel it shortly thereafter.  So!  How about short term buffs for the whole army?

Terrain.  Currently the only thing Terrain seems to impact is movement speed, and that only in the strategic map.  How about bonuses and penalties to unit types?  One example might be archers suffering long range penalties in the woods.  Another could be having roads show up on the tactical map, something I remember from MOM back in the past.

More weapons, armor, unit choices during construction.  Let's see AoE mages vs. single target mages.  

More summoning spells.  Right now if I want to design a summoner mage I want Fire/Earth.  Water is inconsequential because Ice Elementals are incredibly weak.  How about some more diversity by applying multiple spell schools, leading to Acid Elementals?  You need Water and Earth to get them and they show up in a pack of three or more depending on a combination of your summoning skill and captured shards?  I'd like to see that exact same mechanic attached to the Water Elementals.  GDI they're weak right now.

Dispel Magic.  Need to have something.  It should either be 1). Cheaper than the City Destroyers but take multiple turns to cast or 2). Cost some multiple (x1.5?) of whatever the target spell cost to cast.  Perhaps Spell Mastery of the casting mage impacts this, since spell mastery is supposed to be all about beating the target's resistance lets use it for dispel magic proficiency too?  A message stating that such spells have been cast is also desperately needed.

---> Early game summoned Sand Golems and Dogs are incredibly fragile, yet worth a ton of money.  The idea behind them is great, I REALLY like the concept .  However in the vanilla game I haven't summoned one of them in ages because they die way too easy.  Why summon a small weak mob when selling it can fund your economy for 100 turns or more?  Fooling around I installed Seanw3's mod pack and I discovered that he not only lowered the value of them when sold (like 12g instead of 240g) he also beefed up their HP enough (x2?) that they don't immediately die.  Wow, they became useful.  I suggest following this path (less $$, more useful) in the core systems because the CONCEPT of the summoned critters is very good, but the actuality is lacking due to fragility.  Important note - I only installed the mod pack to try and fix some of the malignant bugs and typos that are infesting 0.86, since the delay for 0.90 or whatever it is has been extended out so long.  When the new build shows up, mods go away.

Sovereign Warlord Trait:  Start with Training I.

Sovereign Bandit Lord Trait:  Start with two bandits and the Mercenaries technology.  Recruit more bandits and take over the countryside!

More randomness in dropped loot.  I shouldn't find multiple green skullcaps of +5 INT in my first five items.

Thank you. I am shamed to admit that I love CIV IV, but havent played Fall from Heaven. My bad.

There are so many cool things that can be added, and I have a hope that this will be a great game in the end. It just needs a lot of more "meat on its bones" The options are unlimited.

They could have alchemy shops where you could make stuff from things you find in the wild. Make a cloak out of 5 spider silks, three dragon teeth will give you a dragon spear, hide of a troll and bones of an ogre and you have a tough shield.

We could also steal from Heroes and use sets with bonuses. Collect the hat,cloak and sword of the wind and get +5 initiative to the wearer of the set.

@manii

It would be great if you could capture some early camp and spam cheap units on the map. It would be fun to try and overwhelm monsters with numbers. If you win and are careful, maybe some of them would level and get a bit stronger as well. Maybe you could use food as a resource for upkeep instead of gildars for these monsters. Food is plentiful early game. The camp would then be connected to one city and take food from it.

Awesome feedback, all of it!

+1 karma from me as well

This is one concept from MoM they seemed to have overlooked.  If you remember, you had to choose a sovereign that had 10 spell books and they were either 10 fire spell books or 5 earth / 5 life spell books or something like that.  I'm not suggesting we do that, but you're suggestion to have part of the tech tree get disabled if you go down a certain path is a great idea and kind of reminds of that aforementioned mechanic in MoM.

There were also abilities could be bought. The number of spellbooks chosen determined not only the totall number of spells you had access to during the game, but the number of spells you would get PER LEVEL (randomly selected). Thus There were three levels of mutual exclusivity in sovereign creation alone.

* Skills that impacted a specific aspect of the game, and were powerful and VERY rare to find during game play.

* A finite number of picks which limited the amount of overall magic you have access to on any given playthrough. you can only have so many books.

* A finite number of spells within each school that could only be gained by having enough books of the school, and even then there were high level spells that you only saw every few playthroughs (Crusade, for instance).

This is the aspect of MoM that has had me so enchanted for nearly 20 years.

In the current vein of FE, if they were to do that, they would need sovereign stats which added certain techs sprinkled throughout the tree, and then certain benefits from trees "turned off" as you tech up other trees.

HOWEVER, if the game is balanced properly, it would be moot because you wouldn't really need to go up other trees and spreading your focus too wide would be a detriment anyhow.

To the OP, very good observations.

Damn Orthus! He has brought my early game crashing down more than once in Fall from Heaven!

Love your post joasoze, some really great points and ideas.

If you still have Civ IV installed, you need to give FfH2 a try immediately if not sooner. Hurry!

Great feedback.

Derek (lead designer) has very similar views to this as well.

So far, we've had Beta 1 and Beta 2.  Beta 1 was just the initial beta to test the "new engine".  In WOM, we waited way too late to do that and that resulted in a lot of launch problems.

Beta 2 had been our general gameplay feedback beta. That is, get the AI playing the game, get the raw mechanics going, etc.

Next up is Beta 3.  That beta will take awhile to complete. By that I mean there will be a Beta 3A, Beta 3B...Beta 3X.  That's because Beta 3 is about faction differentiation where we start to make every faction feel and play differently. I won't give away too much here but it'll probably be in beta 3 that the third resource gets added (right now there's only food and material).

After that is Beta 4. That beta revolves around the technology tree and the cities where we have pretty dramatic changes coming. I've been asked not to  give too much away but I will say that the plan here is to change the way cities are currently constructed and how they interact with the world.  The tech tree will likely dramatically change during this period.

AFTER Beta 4, we will decide if we need a Beta 5 or not.  I am pressing for a Beta 5 but it won't be my call. 

The reason I'm posting this as a comment is that your post helps illustrate precisely why we're rolling out the major features of FE rather than putting them out all at once in a single "big" beta.  Player feedback helps the team think about implementation details that might have gone unnoticed otherwise.

Thanks for the post.

Prediction: The Third Resource is going to be Beer. Food/Material/Beer... They already have the graphics afterall. 

/ /

The problem is that everyone will want the 2/2/5 cities. 

What about 1/1/6 cities?  After all, some people hardly eat anything worth mentioning and don't do much work, but drink loads of beer.

Anyway Brad, sounds like one of the most comprehensive beta processes for a game ever!

Frogboy, do I read this correctly:

In that you guys think you are DONE with the engine and AI? Because there are defnitely still a few issues with both these things, for example

He said get it going, not complete the feature.

You are, of course, quite right.  For this game is about the revival of civilization, and no civilization can rise without solving the problem of polluting its own water supply.  The invention of beer, wine, and brewed tea all provided ways to kill bacteria in water, and allowed sizable population centers to grow.  All hail beer!

My question for Frogboy is,"What does it matter if you give too much away?" It's a game. It's not like it's nuclear secrets.

Because then we'll get endless speculation that always ends up with people jumping to negative conclusions.  Look at response 14 for an example.

I hear what you're saying but you can't let that matter. Also that person isn't keeping up the form, if he was he'd know that you are still working on the AI. Thank you for the reply! I can't wait for Beta 3 I just wish it was coming out sooner!

Sure I can.

It's known as 'managing expectations'. As someone who oversees software development for a nationwide data collection system, I absolutely understand what Brad is saying. You have to manage user expectations because a whole lot can still change between 'now' and 'then'.

I think that the few things Brad felt he could safely mention are reassuring, exciting, and intriguing. I look forward to hearing more and playing around with Beta 3A when it's ready.

Joasze's ideas and comments are very well done.      I would add the following commnents to the10 items that he suggested should be worked on the most:

1. agree as is.

2. In addition to better quests we need more quests.   They seem to be a bit too few at the moment and so are mostly important during the early parts of the game.

3. Agree as is.

4. The key reason the ai does not win now.  Agree as is.

5. In addition to more variance in the tech tree it needs to be a good bit larger.    It should be large enouigh that if you commit to one branch it should be hard to have enough time to do the others as well.

6. In addition to his ideas mercenaries should show up from time to time at one of your cities and offer to be hired.    Whether they show up or not should be governed by your faction's total prestige and it's relative prestige vs other factions.

7.Agree as it.

8./9. Agree as is.

10. Event frequency and their relative significance should be an option to be determined when the player is first setting up the game.   Some people like events and others do not.

Other things that it would be nice to add (all have been mentioned in the forums before this):

a. ability to upgrade the size of an experienced unit when you learn the technology (for a cost in money and time as well as a loss in average unit experience).

b. more variation in random items (weapons, armor, rings, etc) found.

Brad's comment makes very clear how much we're going to enjoy Beta3. It's got my heart racing already.

Frogboy, thanks for letting in on that city building is going to change dramatically. That's the first time I heard this and I have been hoping to read it for a long time.

Me too!