Pick 5 THINGS for FE 1.3

Published on Saturday, January 12, 2013 By Brad Wardell In Fallen Enchantress

With v1.2 just about ready to go out, it's time to think about v1.3.

Before people start making feature requests, I would like to emphasize what I'd like v1.3 to be about: Playability glitches.

A playability glitch is hard to really classify. It's not a crash. It's some feature that doesn't work as you'd expect or as you would assume was intended. And if you play a game for hundreds of hours, they become maddening.

So what I would like to use this post for is to ask the regulars here to post five (and only five so that people have to put some thought into what really bugs them) things you'd like to see us "fix" about Fallen Enchantress.

I'll post my 5 later in the thread but I don't want to bias things with my own pet peeves.

!!! Update !!!

We read through this thread carefully and tried to implement as many of these things as possible.  Here are a few of the things that got special attention for 1.3 which should be going into internal beta soon:

  • Pathfinding.  You should notice that when you have a unit in a city and tell him to go somewhere else that it'll get there.  Same for a lot of other pathfinding that seems wonky. I don't know if it's perfect but it should be better.
  • AI winning. This may turn out to be more controversial (or more to the point, we may have to nerf this as it may be a case of "be careful for what you wish for).  The AI is a lot better now at pursuing *victory* conditions.  The AI, overall, is substantially better and more interesting.
  • Pacing. This is a general issue that I saw people bring up in various forms. 
  • Greater city differentiation. Conclaves vs. Towns vs. Fortresses have had their benefits / penalties magnified.
  • More interesting map generation in terms of resources.
  • Tile selection. This is one that we'll have to see how well the fix works. It's a hit or miss thing (seems to be camera related). Some users have reported that selecting a tile doesn't always select the tile they think they're clicking on.
  • Diplomacy. A lot of people talked about this.  Now, there's only so much we can do in an update but basically the AI's behavior should be a lot less schizophrenic. 

That's not the only change in 1.3. There's the usual assortment of bug fixes and balance changes. But those the above are the things that got the most engineering hours.