Bay 12 Games Forum

Contrast on the menus when you're creating a non-quickstart wizard is kinda' rough. The text could stand to be lightened a bit or the background darkened -- grey on grey can work, but there needs to be fairly different greys so it's easy to read. The currently-highlighted colors actually work fine, if it could be migrated to all the choices and the selection changed to something else (a border of some sort usually works, lines around the edge, etc.). As is it can be pretty hard to read the available selections, heh. (see contrast below)

Uh. Huh. First test game has enemy wizard tower generate literally adjacent to my starting province. Already forgot the exact world settings, but I think it was something like small/frequent/young/scattered/primeval/pervasive/unconventional/exotic, one wizard and one warlord very easy AI. (see howdyneighbor below, which is from turn 1)

... one of my starting followers is a chaste succubus. Part of me wants to ask, most of me doesn't, the remainder wonders if having certain traits forbidden for certain races is a good idea for the future. Also just noticed it's a male succubus. Not sure if this is an (un?)intentional implementation of transgender succubi, or the traditional use of incubus for male succubus equivalents is just being ignored/not used/not yet implemented. Not going to lie, I'd actually prefer the former. It's definitely not something I've ever seen a RNG spit out before. Would make for an interesting trait.

Might be for the future, but possibly disallow inspecting enemy armies? At least until you spy or scry on them or somethin'.

Failure message for construction ("Build Hunters' Lodge could not be started. Resources, characters, or workers missing.") could really stand to tell you what is missing. Related, I tried to start building a hunters lodge besides my tower at turn 1. Checked the auto buy box, checked the auto-assign box, assigned one worker. Cost etc. thing in the upper left of the construction window showed nothing missing, it let me click on the construct button normally, but it failed anyway. Near as I can tell, the auto-buy option is currently non-functional.

Things get... stuck, sometimes. For example, with the hunters lodge thing, after it failed and I clicked the failure message away, I had to select another hex and then re-select the one I wanted to build in before the build button would actually let me click it. This appears to be trivially repeatable -- click on a province you can build on, click on an appropriate option (hunters lodge, in this case), and then press cancel without doing anything else. Trying to press hunters lodge again will do nothing. Looks like you can actually click on another in-hex option to fix the problem, too (click on build vineyards, cancel, and then you can click on build hunters lodge again). Seems like any option with the little green box around it (indicating you clicked on it previously) becomes unresponsive until something else gets the green box.

Confirmation when buying materials on the market would be reeeeaaallly nice. At least a box (default checked) to click somewhere to toggle the behavior.

Also nice would be calculating costs on the fly -- putting 30 into a 7 cost item would give a little (210) to the right or somethin', and adjust to 203 if you changed the number to 29, stuff like that.

Be nice if you could get the culture tooltip you get on followers when you inspect a town, too. Might make sense for there to be one for the controller, too, particularly if the controller is something besides independent. Probably known, but relations and the six things at the bottom of the characteristics list (unrest, etc.) don't have tooltips like the rest of the stuff.

Probably known and intended for future implementation, but information on traits when you're creating custom units (e.g. golems) would be nice. Like to know what "Bulky" does, ferex. Also can't seem to replicate lesser golems with the custom golem creation? Actually, now that I check the stats on custom/scrap golems and minor/lesser golems don't seem to be similar anyway. Thought the minor/lesser was just what amounted to basic templates, not outright different units.

Okay, this is getting odd. Minor golems need no trainer, cost 200 gold, 20 granite, 15 mana, and have an upkeep of 100 gold and 1 mana. Scrap golems (scrap/bipedal/arcane/bulky/basic weapon) do need a trainer, cost 200 gold and 10 mana, and have an upkeep of only 1 mana. The latter also... appear to not have attacks. Don't think I'm even going to try to train one, heh. Some way to delete custom designs would be great, if it wasn't already intended, by the by.

"Your research has revealed a mana node." Think it was mentioned somewhere earlier in this thread about the pre-unity version that it'd be really nice if there was some kind of "okay, take me to the tile" thing.

It'd be nice if worker traits had tooltips. What exactly Domestic (1), Labor (1) means is something of a mystery, and that's less than optimal when you're considering a 300 gold, 60 influence hiring fee.

Some oddities with the economy screen. Can't quite work out what's going on, but sometimes it won't let me sell what I tell it to sell. Half looks like it's not letting me sell all of a resource, but like said, can't quite work out exactly what's happening. There's definitely some oddities with updating the number in the buy/sell amount box, though.

The... status thing (what your followers and workers are doing, etc.) in the upper right is a bit wonky about updating. (see littlemessy below)

Hrm. Seems like when you do the send new party thing to a dungeon, at the least if you click on the resend button first, when you press the select party button nothing appears to happen. It does appear to appropriately assign the selected party, but it probably should close the window or somethin'.

... however, after assigning the party, leaving the inspection screen turns my cursor into that X of more than nominal irritation and stops me from doing anything. Can't figure out any way to make it stop, either, and there's no indication as to what's causing it. Gave saving/loading a try, but while the save appeared to go through fine, the load sat itself at 0% and refused to move. This, at least, appears to be a game-ending bug.

Huh. Once you start creating a non-quickstart wizard, it appears you can't cancel out of it. Would be nice if you could, or at the absolute least quit to main menu worked at that point. Also, it seems that if you make a non-quickstart game, then quit to the main menu and try to start a new game, it won't pop up that initial game settings box again.

I... have no idea how to split armies. Change the name, etc.

Definite suggestion: Change the cursor to an hourglass when something's processing/loading/etc. Or a gear, or whatever. Basically anything except that X.

Just as a general thing, something, somewhere, that mentions why in the blue hell that X is there, would be amazing. Right now that sodding thing is driving me up the wall, telling me something's gone wrong and it's not going to let me progress the turns, without telling me why, and it's rather amazingly frustrating.

In related news, after about 71 turns of relatively smooth sailing, my tower apparently hit 13/12 turns left to complete a crystal vault and attempting to end turn seems to have caused the game to tie itself into a pretzel and try to choke me. The X is there, the turn won't progress, I can click on some things and do some things (I managed to sell 40 chitin and not get the gold for it! Also move one of my armies one hex.), but others don't work (I can't sell anything else, including more chitin), and nothing seems to be able to make the game progress or tell me what the blazes is going wrong. If it would help at all, I made a save of it. Or told it to, anyway. I can't actually figure out where the game's saving stuff to, heh.

Throwing it out there, but if there's some kind of debug logging or whatev' I can kick on or be looking at to see what errors are being spat out when I try to do stuff the game isn't letting me do, it'd be pretty amazing to know about, from a testing standpoint. Always helps pretty tremendously in tying down exactly what a problem is, what's causing it, and if there's a way around it that'll let you keep poking around.

Minor, but if your idle workers popup is there, but you assign one or more the idle workers to something before you use the popup to assign idle workers to the tower, it'll change the worker(s) you assign to the tower, too.

When assigning workers, some kind of in-menu indication of what they're doing (if anything) is probably warranted. You can eyeball the outliner(?) thing and they'll be in the same order, but it's generally something you want in the actual choose-critter menu.

Turns left for recruitment doesn't seem to tick down appropriately in the outliner whatsit.

... huh. I summon a regiment of skeleton light infantry. On the recruit screen, it says the expected upkeep will be 2 mana. In the inspect army thing, the upkeep is 22 gold. One of these is not like the other :V

Hrm. Looks like assigning someone new to a party (while they're waiting for one of the members to recover?) does the X lock thing. Telling said critter to leave the party fixes it.

Uh. Huh. Apparently the resend party thing in dungeons, while appearing to work, is also creating a new expedition every time it resends the party. Just tried canceling an expedition (so I could get the above guy in on things), then spent a few turns wondering why they were still exploring after I told them to stop before noticing there were seven or eight copies of the party assigned to the dungeon.

Yeah, there's something rather profoundly wrong with the economy screen/market thing. Selling is incredibly inconsistent, and it won't tell me why I can't sell my pile of 300 silver, or why it's not buying that 1 gemstone, or why it let me sell 139 pieces of chitin but not 140. All sorts of mess.

Yeeaaaah, dungeon party stuff is still kinda' messed up. Near as I can tell to repeat a major problem, if you set a party to explore (resend party + repeat party task), and then cancel the expedition, trying to send a party back into the dungeon will cause X lock. Which... isn't the most optimal thing in the world, heh. You end up having to disband the party entirely to break the lock.

... combining armies does some weird stuff. Just tried to combine a new recruit army that had a single mounted death knight regiment with my grand army, which had a passel of random junk, and instead of combining into the grand army (like I thought I told it, since I clicked on the command "combine with grand army"), it took on the name of the new recruit army, the assigned general appeared to disappear (its task still says "Commanding army: Grand Army", despite the grand army no longer existing), and I apparently can't assign a new general to the new recruit army -- clicking on the appoint general button does nothing.

Aaannnnddd suddenly my income and gold reserves somehow vanished entirely, despite being a few thousand up and well positive the turn before, and most of my military units just kinda' disappeared. I'm... I'm just going to make a save, for whatever good that does, and stop for the mo'.