Gameplay issues:
1. Civ-specific starting locations preference seems not to work. I try to start a game on the Huge Earth map (which I'd been looking forward to), and it puts me, Babylon, in Nevada or France or wherever. Also, on the "new game" map-generator page, why not just have a button for "load map"?
2. Combat: units attacking from a fortress or a city should NOT advance after combat - it's often disastrous when they do, and makes a mockery of the whole concept of the fortress. Civ 2 got this right. As an alternative, there could be a Ctrl-move or something that could mean attack but hold position under any circumstances.
3. Resistors: Units in a city retaken by resistors should not be automatically taken over or killed. I had about 7 units in a city I'd conquered. We'd quelled two of the four resistors, and the city had grown a notch. Three of these units were elite, none conscripts, and it was a larger army than I'd ever seen in one place in that game. The two remaining resistors suddenly overthrew their governor and took back the city. Now, that's reasonable, since their culture was about half again mine. But it's not reasonable that I should instantly loose an entire army which would have had no trouble taking the city in the first place, and which was only kept there (rather than sacking two more cities it could easily have reached in the time it waited) in order to put down resistance. They should be expelled from the city: either into the hills (possibly with significant damage), or maybe home. Or there could be a chance of their being taken over, killed, or expelled with more or less damage. These are the sorts of things that might really happen in such a circumstance: armies might be horribly mangled when a city rises against them, but if they want to, they can make an ordered retreat, and not be wiped out. Though maybe there should be a choice for the conqueror when the people rise up: fight them, and thus suffer nasty casualties (and probably diminish the population, and maybe destroy improvements in the bargain), or be allowed to leave peacefully., with some sort of restrictions.
Minor interface issues which would be easy to fix:
1. When a unit is produced, the popup asking you if you now want to create unit X in that city should be improved: first (and easiest) the dropdown menu of other possibilities should go away again if you click off of it (like a normal dropdown menu) , rather than requiring you to scroll back up and find the suggested unit if you decide to keep it. Also, it should have an option that makes the window not pop up IF you've set up a queue - and in any case should tell you if the suggestion it's making is from the queue you set up.
2. From the city window, you should be able to skip from city to city, either by clicking on another one visible, or by scrolling through a list, so policy wonks can make a habit of checking up on their whole empires.
You should also be able to HURRY PRODUCTION from the city window, and get the civilopeda entry for any of the units (and, basically, for anything you can see) direct from there.
3. During Diplomacy, you should be able to look at your own @!#*&! map!
4. I must be missing something, but surely you should be able to initiate diplomacy from the Foreign Affairs Advisor page. And found an embassy or initiate espionage, for that matter. Once again, there simply aren't enough ways of getting to a given command.
Okay, those'll do for the moment.
Lots more to be said - I wish they'd actually made it more functional and a bit less pretty, much though I enjoy the new look.
RCB
1. Civ-specific starting locations preference seems not to work. I try to start a game on the Huge Earth map (which I'd been looking forward to), and it puts me, Babylon, in Nevada or France or wherever. Also, on the "new game" map-generator page, why not just have a button for "load map"?
2. Combat: units attacking from a fortress or a city should NOT advance after combat - it's often disastrous when they do, and makes a mockery of the whole concept of the fortress. Civ 2 got this right. As an alternative, there could be a Ctrl-move or something that could mean attack but hold position under any circumstances.
3. Resistors: Units in a city retaken by resistors should not be automatically taken over or killed. I had about 7 units in a city I'd conquered. We'd quelled two of the four resistors, and the city had grown a notch. Three of these units were elite, none conscripts, and it was a larger army than I'd ever seen in one place in that game. The two remaining resistors suddenly overthrew their governor and took back the city. Now, that's reasonable, since their culture was about half again mine. But it's not reasonable that I should instantly loose an entire army which would have had no trouble taking the city in the first place, and which was only kept there (rather than sacking two more cities it could easily have reached in the time it waited) in order to put down resistance. They should be expelled from the city: either into the hills (possibly with significant damage), or maybe home. Or there could be a chance of their being taken over, killed, or expelled with more or less damage. These are the sorts of things that might really happen in such a circumstance: armies might be horribly mangled when a city rises against them, but if they want to, they can make an ordered retreat, and not be wiped out. Though maybe there should be a choice for the conqueror when the people rise up: fight them, and thus suffer nasty casualties (and probably diminish the population, and maybe destroy improvements in the bargain), or be allowed to leave peacefully., with some sort of restrictions.
Minor interface issues which would be easy to fix:
1. When a unit is produced, the popup asking you if you now want to create unit X in that city should be improved: first (and easiest) the dropdown menu of other possibilities should go away again if you click off of it (like a normal dropdown menu) , rather than requiring you to scroll back up and find the suggested unit if you decide to keep it. Also, it should have an option that makes the window not pop up IF you've set up a queue - and in any case should tell you if the suggestion it's making is from the queue you set up.
2. From the city window, you should be able to skip from city to city, either by clicking on another one visible, or by scrolling through a list, so policy wonks can make a habit of checking up on their whole empires.
You should also be able to HURRY PRODUCTION from the city window, and get the civilopeda entry for any of the units (and, basically, for anything you can see) direct from there.
3. During Diplomacy, you should be able to look at your own @!#*&! map!
4. I must be missing something, but surely you should be able to initiate diplomacy from the Foreign Affairs Advisor page. And found an embassy or initiate espionage, for that matter. Once again, there simply aren't enough ways of getting to a given command.
Okay, those'll do for the moment.
Lots more to be said - I wish they'd actually made it more functional and a bit less pretty, much though I enjoy the new look.
RCB
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