My list of "issues"
Here's my entire list, SO FAR!
- Chevals and fences don't work. The attacking nobles just walk right over them as though they aren't even there. And while fences keep animals in, the animals can apparently open the gates right up and walk themselves right out of there. Chevals should do damage to enemies as they cross them (assuming they actually cross them at all) but they don't. It doesn't even slow them down. Chevals are useless.
- Need an icon to show character's preferred job on their portraits at the top. Right now it shows a symbol of what they are actually *doing* but not what I specialized them to do. The best example I can give to support this is, when being attacked, you want to very quickly spot and select your nurse(s) to send them out to care for fallen nobles. But as of right now, if you haven't memorized which nobles are your nurses, by name, you have to pause and search the job screen. This icon should also carry over to the belongings screen somehow, so you can see what you chose as their primary job, and assign gear accordingly. Otherwise, I'm constantly flipping between the character info window in the bottom left, or going back and forth between belongings and jobs.
- Ending/Objective should probably be decided on, and the players given a rough idea of what to expect later on as the game progresses in development. Are we going to be able to travel to other kingdoms and attack them? Do we win the game if we wipe them all out? Or is this a forever-sandbox kind of game that never has a goal? I see the roadmaps have been posted, but I don't see anything that actually mentioned the end-game goal, either.
- How about saving some (more) skills when nobles die? Right now I've only gotten about +3 of any one skill from equipment, which isn't much at all. But the kingdoms at war with me are killing my nobles easily! It's very difficult (and long) to get to 6 building so you can build curved stairs, and then the builder dies, setting you back to a skill level of 1 or 2. And with the current raids being unbalanced, there is no way to avoid sending *ALL* of your nobles in to battle. You can't live with just one or two of them Guarding and the rest doing other jobs. Those two on guard will die in seconds, and the rest of your kingdom has to step in anyway.
- Leveling the nobles on their preferred skill is SO SLOW, compared to the things you need it for.
- When music is turned completely off, some sound effects are muted as well, such as the sound of a character leveling up.
- The dialogue required to increase someone's opinion of my kingdom or my leader takes far too long. You can filter all you want, but unless I already know what they like, dislike, want, need, hate, or love, I'm just stabbing in the dark.
- This game really needs an exit/menu BUTTON. Something you can hit with the mouse. Experienced gamers will already know that you can probably leave the game by hitting Escape. Computer nerds know you can also hit Alt+F4 (although there is no way to save the game if you use that method). But there's not even a part in the "ramp up" tutorial that tells you how to leave the game, which is going to leave less-experienced people totally confused. Even worse - if one of these four-legged freaky things called CATS lands on my desk and spills a drink into my keyboard (again), I'll need a way to exit the game using a mouse! Ever tried typing with a keyboard in the process of drowning? It's not pretty (and doesn't work).
- The zoom (scroll) out function should go a bit further so you can see the *entire* map at once. It does show a good portion, but not the whole thing. If I know there is an attack happening soon, I want to be able to see the entire map so I can look for the horde of enemies coming into the area and prepare my people before the enemies get too close. This is also important for trying to keep an eye on my nobles who have chased a cow into the corner of the map!
- Items in your stockpile should be "findable" on the map. For example, double-click something in your stockpile and it goes right to it's location on the map - at your current zoom level. So if I'm zoomed in a lot, it just whips me to that spot, still looking up-close. If I'm zoomed out, it will only take me to a VERY general area for the item (although the item will obviously be very dead center of the area). This part is helpful when my nobles go running off into the woods chasing enemies that are trying to run away. They kill the enemy, but I can't find the corpse to loot them at all! I'm probably busy directing other nobles to treat, soothe, or transport the injured, so I don't even know which *direction* they went! But the corpse shows up in my inventory, so where is it?
- This should be likewise for items that you need. Some type of "master list" of things on the map so you can find them. Trying to find pumpkins, for instance (which tend to grow *under* the trees) is next to impossible even when you use the "hide the canopy" option. By the time you lower your view to see under the tree limbs, everything is blurry, or the hills and valleys really mess up the viewpoint. Having a word or search bar somewhere to double-click links to zoom to the spot on the map would make this much better.
- I think there should be an option to "replace" or "upgrade" all items of a certain type at once. For example, walls. I have about 16 cabins right now, all tier 4 with plain wooden walls. I was in the process of upgrading the floors with stone when I picked up the skill to make everything out of Fine Wood, instead. But even though the houses are next to each other, I had to go to each individual house and "build" the walls all over again with the fine wood. WHAT A PAIN IN THE BUTT! Sixteen houses, two stories each, with 16 wall sections per floor (or 15 plus a door for the lower level). That's a lot of wall-drawing! I'd like to double-click it to select all of the walls in the area (which I can already do) and then select "upgrade to:" and pick a new type of wall.
- This next one is a problem even in the ramp-up tutorial. BOWS. The first thing they always seem to ask for is for you to mark animals for them to hunt. But they never have a BOW for it! I have to wait until I can learn how to make them OR wait until someone who absolutely adores my leader to come sell me one. I've got nobles asking me left and right to mark animals to hunt, but no one can do anything about it! In this last game I've started, I tried buying from the first group that visited, and the bow was like 125 coins! And trying to level up my crafting enough to make the bows took a good 3-4 hours of playing!
- Next idea is a tooltip (mouse-over) that tells you how close you are to a requirement. For example, curved stairs require building level 6. A mouse-over tooltip that says "your highest level of building is 4" would help. Then I can see how close I am, and whether it would be worthwhile to have the noble buckle down on all building to level up as fast as possible (because I'm "right there" in level), or just let the game play out for a bit and then recheck (because OMG, that is a 12-hour grind).
- There should be a hot key (industry default is the Delete key) for dismantling or cancelling. You select a wall, you hit Delete, it gets marked to dismantle it. You select a wall blueprint, hit Delete, the blueprint goes away and there are no longer orders to build it. Same with crafting tables. You select an item, hit Delete, and it removes that project from the crafting table.
- Item icons (in the belongings screen) should be same color - and a bright one at that. I don't care if it's leggings or greaves, I just care that it's a LOWER piece of gear that may or may not replace the current one. I don't care if it's sabatons, boots, or cloth shoes, I only care at looking for the FOOTWEAR icons to replace it. The color of the gear's prestige level will tell me if the noble loves, likes, dislikes, or hates it. Mousing over the gear will tell me which jobs benefit from it. And I really don't care about color of the item. In the belongings menu, on the left, I just need to see what slot the item fits. So there doesn't need to be a different icon if it's a shoe than if it were a boot. It just needs to look like ONE piece of footwear for both so I can find it quickly and easily. It also shouldn't be dark and blending in with the background so easily. Honestly, I don't care if it's hot pink, as long as the icon is visible, and you use the same icon for similar SLOT types.
- Resources (like stone) shouldn’t spawn in water if we can’t collect them This is probably one of the most ANNOYING parts of this game right now. Oh I need stone, but I can't get this big rock in the water next to me? I have to go to the other side of that entire lake?? UGH!
- Water color should not be so similar to the background color. Both are a grey-ish color. They are different, but not enough. Lemme explain (yes, I feel stupid about this). I had my layers activated earlier so I could see the bottom floor of the houses. The layers tool also removes the tops of mountains and shows the "background" color instead. It's the first time I've used the layers tool on purpose (hitting Alt+Tab to switch windows and coming back to a missing mountain doesn't count). Anyway, I start looking around for cows to tame and think to myself "there is VERY LITTLE land on this map! There is too much water!" Well, my dumb self had the layers tool on and saw the grey as water sources - because I know the water tends to show up grey. Granted, it didn't have the effects of water, but I wasn't thinking clearly at the time (see COFFEE, Pg 6). Now if the water were very blue and/or if the background (when layers are removed) was actually pitch black, I might not have gotten them confused. DERP!
- I saw someone else already posted about being able to skip the monologue/dialogue that happens in the very beginning. I'm on my third game and YES IT'S ANNOYING! I know about the gods, I know about the dumb one that got shot in the eye with an arrow while controlling his noble. I know the other four left their kingdom because somebody hates carrots, and they stumble on a crown. I just need to get to the point where I'm comparing stats, likes, dislikes, etc., so I can get on with the game. Give me two more game restarts and I'll probably be able to recite the entire scenario verbatim. (It's that annoying.)
And don't worry about spam - easier to categorize and track lots of small items than combined ones like this on my end!