So I have been playing this alpha for 4 days now. I must say I am really enjoying the combat at the moment and I am looking for more to come. I took the time to write down some things I noticed and observed as well as some ideas I had whilst playing. So here they are.
Building
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When you build an house, save the design and then revisit it later, when placing and removing slabs (and floors), The new slabs become a new entity on that building. Now a building is spliced in multiple pieces so hearthlings know what to build first, but if you revisit a design and change some stuff it becomes a new piece and won’t join with the existing ones.
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I also noticed for more complex designs, they build tons of unnecessary scaffolding and ladders, what’s more they actively trying to build more scaffolding then they are trying to finish the building.
Combat
- The warning that an enemy is approaching your time comes often to late now as they are almost immediately in your town. If you have no walls, they are often in your town center before you can properly set up a counter offensive.
- Another issue I was having was that my cleric has a greater speed then my other units, which caused him to arrive before the tanks in a battle. As a result I had to often micro manage the battles to ensure he didn’t die. I would love if they would move in group or you can assign different formations like tank in front footmen in the middle and archers and clerics in the back.
- Ogre Battles were impossible to defeat without a knight. I expected to loose 1 or maybe 2 guys, but I got obliterated every time.
- My cleric had a 45 courage stat, but since he didn’t got a courage boost, he kept running away scared from battle especially in fights with ogres (which may also be why I couldn’t win those)
- Units preferred sleeping on the ground after combat. I think they should have a debuf called ‘Tired’ that lowers there stats, but allows them to reach a bed (if one exists).
- Receiving EXP for combat is really slow. It took forever. Now in a sense that’s not a problem, but It does sucks when your level 6 footman that took forever to level gets killed by an over achieving ogre!
- If you have a cleric, apart from making potions , a herbalist becomes really useless. I think the cleric needs some limitation as when to heal with his aura, there should be some cost to that.
- Also for me the cleric doesn’t need to attack per se. I rather have that he stands back, away from the fight and heal from a small distance.
*Combat between trees was very difficult to manage, because you couldn’t see where each unit was. Maybe silhouettes in combat (red for enemies, white for allies ?) when behind trees ? or that in an area around the combat trees become translucent ?
Campaign
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Spoiler! - The bit with the mountain (the big ogre) where you make that wind chime didn’t work for me. They suddenly appear, you quickly place the wind chime, and there gone. It was very fast and confusing. I would have loved if they had a base camp. I think that would have worked better.
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I liked that you got a new recipe, it really surprised me in a good way. I would love to see more of those. You perhaps could even buy or trade new recipes for your various crafters.
Misc
- In the UI, can you switch the place of the Loot and cancel command. Seems to make more sense for me.
- Zombies should have a chance of inflicting you with zombie disease, which if untreated, would result in your heartling transforming in a zombie.
Crafting
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Heartlings tend to go for the nearest food they can find when hungry. They rather eat it raw from the field then actually eat the cooked food. This in turn results in me having no ingredients to cook food.
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For a cook the maintain thing doesn’t really work. What I would do is, queue like a 1000 of each menu item, so he would constantly be cooking as soon ingredients became available.
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The Blacksmith has to much recipes that require a leather bolt. I didn’t have a Trapper so I had very few leather bolts in inventory, so I couldn’t do much with Blacksmith because most of his recipes for weapons and armor require you to have a weaver and trapper as well for him to work
Bugs
- If a goblin steals an items, and drops it on a slab or a floor, it cannot be looted. Either make it possible to loot on slabs or add the loot button the item like for drops from killed enemies.
- Sometimes your soldiers prefers attacking buildings instead of active units. tends to happen with crypts more often.