Sunday morning random thoughts

Having spent the day “play testing” the pre-beta 3 build I’ve had some thoughts on gameplay that I’d be interested in y’alls opinions.

In no particular order:

 

• Interesting Choices.  Being forced to spend essence to build a city is not a choice interesting or not.  I’m inclined to find some other use to revive land rather than forcing users to use it to effectively build a town. That is, we’d let the player build cities on the foresaken land. That’s a pretty big game change but when you add the new game behavior that the sovereign can only found their kingdom (after that, only pioneers can build cities) it makes things a lot more fun.  I’d rather see essence used to generate fertile land or something (as an example).
• NPCs. Playing as a Trog today makes me uncertain why an NPC from the race of men would want to sign on board.  Should they just cost more? Or should they be hostile? Or what?
• Quests. I’m inclined to have quests have an Allegiance tag. That is, Empires would get different quests than Kingdoms. Right now, they share them. Relias, the do-gooder might escort some princeling to his estate. Verga, however, would use his bones as a paste.
• Spells. Need a LOT more default spells that you can learn.
• Spells #2. Need some way to queue up spell learning.
• City Improvements. I’d rather see fewer general improvements and more 1 per faction (Imperial Achievement) and 1 per world (World Achievement) buildings so that specializing cities is more fun.
• Empires are more polished. Ironically, the Empires feel “better” than the kingdoms in terms of balance. Probably because they’ve gotten more love (polish wise) with the notable and obvious exception of graphics.