Hi
I finally started playing your Mod and want to give you some feedback. First, let me say that you (and all the people who contributed to the mod) did an outstanding work there. In fact I regret that I cannot tell you exactly *how* much I like it, but doing so would require time and I need my to play the mod.
Let's just say that your mod is the reason for me to come out of lurking in these forums for more than three years.
I wanted to play your mod since i first learned about, but didn't until recently. I read some posts of you where you sounded a little disappointed because you wanted more feedback, so I thought why I didn't start playing earlier. For me, the "beta" status was the problem. I always thought "I got to play this mod once it's out of beta". This may be understandable because I like to play epic games which may well stretch across several weeks. It's very disappointing to lose such games due to bugs, so I refrained from testing the beta. In fact I remember a post in this thread were you stated that "this beta might be the final version", and this post finally pushed me over the edge and I started playing as soon as I had some time. (I also started to put myself in your perspective and found out that it's a little egoistic from me to wait until others run into the bugs and do the dirty work so that I can play my "perfect" mod later on.)
Speaking about feedback, it might make sense to leave your email address somewhere in the mod, preferably in an accompanying readme, and in the blurbs that are shown when selecting a scenario and when pressing "I" in the game. Perhaps it's only me, but I prefer mail contact over forums, and if I didn't like this mod so much, this might have been another reason for me not to provide feedback.
Now to my game: I'm playing beta 9, Update 1 installed, on a large world with all opponents, on regent difficulty (I usually play Monarch). All other parameters are set to random (probably suboptimal for playtesting, but I like it to play this way, I like it *not* to know what's awaiting me.) God Random decided that I should play as Vlad.
So far I enjoyed the game very much (so please don't be fooled by following nitpicks). Some things i note may be old knows or even obsolete by now, i don't follow this thread regularly, my apologies if I'm only repeating known problems.
First impressions:
- Very innovative concepts, I like the way how you integrated the different races as resources, and how you built a "magical" tech tree.
- Great graphics
- Many specials on the map, which is a little confusing at first, but I like diversified terrain, so I do like them, I justed needed a little time to learn them.
- The interface still is a little too dark for my taste. It's probably more my problem but the interface's, as my eyesight isn't too good. However I find it hard to read some number, e.g. cities' happiness and treasure in the domestic advisor screen.
- I also have difficulties to recognize that other civ's colors. To the southeast from me there is a point where Tauron, Sssra and Lo Pan meet. Since the area is partially in my sight range and partially out of it, there are six different shades of red running around, and I find it very difficult to see who's who. To a lesser extrent I had the same problem with Ariel and Oberic who started in my north and northeast.
- I started right on a death node, with ten other nodes no more than 8 steps away. With my first two cities I covered all four node types. A little too easy for my taste, I like the battles for scarce resources. But I might just have been lucky. (In fact my starting location had a death node, a nature node, a river and three grass lands with cattle along the river. Compare that to Merlin's start location - he has a couple of mountains on the east coast of a vast desert. But I like diversified terrain.
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- The scientific advisor still babbles about learning horse riding and many other techs that aren't in the game - you probly know this.
I guess if there was an easy way to stop him, you would have done it already.
- The Civilopedia could contain a little more information, but that's low priority. The link from "Spider Mastery" to "Giant Spider" leads to an invalid entry. In the pedia text for Tauron, his government is listed as "^Chaos".
- When I look at my build list and see wonders, I sometimes want to know whether they are great or small wonders. However when I liik at the pedia entry for them, this isn't stated there. I have to go up a pedia level and see whether this leads to "Great Wonders" or "Small Wonders" to retrieve this information. But perhaps I'm just stupid here, I sometimes am.
However I suggest putting information like "This is a small wonder" into the pedia entries for all wonders.
- My flood plain cities still suffer from disease (quite heavily sometimes), although the Pedia states they shouldn't, because I'm a Death mage.
My game is running smoothly so far. In the beginning I secured four nodes and built skeleton warriors (very cheap) to use them as scouts. Putting money into research didn't have any effect for the first three levels of research, so I hoarded money instead (seems that the first techs are a little expensive). Quickly made contact to most others, traded some techs, expanded. I started near three rivers and built some cities along them, now that I have them up and running, I can afford a really *large* military. I continued to build skeleton warriors instead of zombies (because they are quicker to build), beelined for "Death Summon" (from Death Magic III on it started to have an effect to invest into science, probably because my cities grew larger and I got wizards guilds in the meantime), and spent all the money I was hoarding by upgrading my skeleton warriors to shadowmen. (This gave me more shadowmen as compared to building zombies and upgrading those.) With these I overran Ariel's capital and two other cities of her. She defends with clerics and acolytes - the clerics do okay, but her cities can't stand a storm of 8+ shadowmen. Also she doesn't seem to have offensive units to counterattack (but I think that's actually in-role for Life mages). In the meantime one city of Oberic and one of Tauron flipped over to me (I built shrines and wizard's guilds on the borders).
In the meantime I got a scientific great leader and built the spell of knowledge, which gave me three or for techs so far. With your mod's tech tree being less linear than Civ's, players are perhaps more diversified in their techs, which in turn makes the spell of knowledge very powerful, especially with many players on the map. However it's appropriately expensive. I just got lucky (again) with my great leader showing up right in time.
I'm pretty sure I'll win this game, it goes almost too easy. But this hasn't necessarily anything to do with the mod. I had a lucky start position and got a crucial wonder through a leader, and I play on Regent. My regular Civ games on Regent also tend to be easy when I my start is so lucky.
Okay, I hope me feedback helps. Again, don't be fooled by the nitpicking, I *do* find your mod absolutely gorgeous. And now back to playing it.
