Hangly Man said:
First of all, I love your mod. It's all I ever play anymore. The religion-specific buildings and units are pure genius, as are the magic units.
That said, I have some criticisms.
1.) Too god damn many different buildings. Seriously. Not that I dislike the variety, but it's a lot of trouble to keep track of which city can make archers, which city has the barracks, etc etc. This confusion just gets worse in the later game. I always try to have all my cities build all available buildings, but that is just impossible in FFH.
Its intended to be impossible, you will need to specialize your cities. I am working on cutting late game buildings (wizards tower, cathedral and the summoning chamber are currently on the chopping block) in FfH2. A few buildings were cut in the last few betas of FfH1, but where it is at is as thin as I was able to get it.
I like the religion and race-specific aspects of the game, perhaps the game can be simplified by (for example) making the hunters lodge elf-only. You could likewise restrict the mages to certain races/religions, etc etc. Seriously, one player can only make use of about a third of the buildings that are available.
That is what we are doing in FfH2. For example the Doviello cant build barracks, libraries, archery ranges, alchemy labs, bowyers, machinists shop or monasterys. In some cases this will keep them from making certain units (they can make monks for example) but in other they can build the units without the buildings. Other civs like the Balseraphs can build a lot of units out of carnivals instead of needing multiple buildings.
The nice thing about making the civs different form each other is we can make civs that people who dont like a ton of options will enjoy, and another civ that people who want tons of choices will love. As long as we keep them balanced it should work out well.
2.) Too hard to get established in the early game.
I find myself with my cities garrisonned with warriors far far longer than is safe to do so. The problem again is that I have to discover archery, build an archery range, and then distribute archers to all my cities. Once I get all that accomplished Grog the flaming barbarian king has taken half my cities.
Thats intentional Orthus is made to hit early enough that players who dont focus on a defense (who economy or religion rush) will be hard pressed to fight him off. Its still possible, and I usually still worthwile, but it is the disadvantage of a non-military starting build. What difficulty level do you play on?
3.) Subdue animal:
Awesome. At this point in the game however there are usually no animals to subdue.
This may be a function of the difficulty you are playing on as well, though I am kinda surprised by this. It tells me your opponents are getting out and grabbing all of the animals first because they never dissapear. You may want to lower the difficulty a little.
4.) Worker sniping barbarian scouts:
Gay.
In FfH2 the barbarians have been replaced by orcs, and the scouts by goblins that can only move 1. So this won't occur any longer in the next version but I probably won't change it in 1.0.
5.) Heroes that accrue experience while sitting on their asses:
Confusing, but ok.
Its not the best system, but we have been unable to come up with a better system that the AI will use as effectivly as a human player.
6.) Reagents:
If they're going to play such a huge role in the game, they should be a bit more plentiful I think. More fantastical resources that do interesting things would be quite cool also.
That's all! Hope that was constructive.
Yeah, one of my biggest headaches has been trying to get some resources to be rare by always present. I need a "minimum" number of a bonus that will appear on every map but I havent figured out a way to do it yet. If I figure out a way to do it and its simple I'll look at backporting it to 1.0 too.
As for fantastical resources, there are 16 new resources in FfH2 so you will definitly get that request.
. But this seems to be a nice compromise.
)
