Tried it yesterday. I just played a sample game with the Dwarves at warlord level on a normal-size map with only 4 or 5 civs, so I could try out things with little or no pressure. I only played about 150 turns at normal speed, so I didn't get very far. I intend to start a new game at my usual difficulty settings so I can get a better experience of the mod, right now I'll just post "basic" feedback on my first impressions. Note that I'm a former WarHammer RPG player, but not a WarHammer wargame player, so my comments might be biaised towards the role-playing aspect of the background.
- The title screen is cool
I tested without the sounds package, but the intro music is great already. I also liked the various WH images when starting a new game. There's a lot of good art there.
- I've browsed a bit into the tech tree. It seems pretty good, the different branches look rather well-balanced, all promising to be useful and yet allowing for some specialization. Some techs look like they're currently only placeholders for stuff that's not in yet, and having "empty" techs isn't very good gameplay-wise, but I guess this will all fill up with time. Some documentation will of course be needed, for example so players can understand why some techs are not allowed to research (it makes sense for race-specific religion techs for example, but a little in-game indication of this would still be helpful), but so far it looks promising.
- I think the first part of the game doesn't give enough build options. Playing as the dwarves (can't remember the name, and I keep refraining from calling them Khazads
it's been damn too long since I last opened my good old WarHammer RPG sourcebook), I rushed to the dwarven gods tech and after a little time I had completed the few early wonders on that path and all my cities had built a granary, barracks and a forge so that there wasn't anything left to build except settlers, workers and military. It's not like I wouldn't have built some anyway, but you can't keep building cities forever right ? I guess just a few additional early buildings and wonders would help keeping cities busy.
- I noticed that there were separate techs allowing chaos civs to worship the Chaos gods. I wonder if the same is planned for other gods, such as Ulric, Morr or Shallya. I'm not sure having too many different religions into the mod would be good at all, I'm just asking here.
- I found it strange that my warriors could get the Woodsman and Junglesman promotions, but not Guerilla. I used fogbusting hill-locked warriors during the whole game, and was sort of frustrated that I could not promote them to guerilla (especially considering I was playing a dwarf civ). Besides than that, the Flagbearer-series of promotions is good, although I'm not sure first strikes is the better way to represent the morale bonus effect of a flag-bearer (then again, from what I've read before I guess a full morale mechanics is under dev for the mod). Also, good catch on separating promotions for forest-based defense and jungle-based defense, it seemed so wrong in Vanilla that a single promotion would allow units to get benefits of terrains as different as forest and jungle. Besides, I always pictured jungle as being untamed, hostile and dangerous, and it felt wrong that training units in scandinavian-type forests would make them so efficient in tropical jungles.
- a minor change that I found cool : giving spears and axes the same base strengh, AND giving spears a first strike. It makes sense, and certainly adds a bit of strategy here.
- I don't know if you intend to address this (it's a vanilla thing, and changing this could require a lot of work for little benefit), but I'll mention anyway : sometimes the vanilla engine has trouble dealing with units of 5-10 soldiers. One of my fogbuster unit was on a hill tile, and barbarians would keep arriving from a tile that was on a hill and disposed so that when attacking the barbs would have to move diagonally, cross a river and run along a peak tile that was adjacent to both their tile and mine... anyway, the game engine would sent the warrior soldiers one by one so that simple one-on-one warrior battles took ages to occur (the game engine interrupts everything before all barb warriors get killed of course, but it's annoying nontheless).
- this one was already mentionned before : workers not being able to build camps is confusing. Building a scout just to build camps is not a real problem, but it's somehow a little annoying, and besides there's only so much a scout is useful for after you've explored the continent you start in. Besides, I didn't check but I guess the AI won't be good at gathering ivory, furs and deer if it can't use workers to claim those.
