Hello everybody!

We hope you're enjoying the "Lucy" OpenDev scenario. This is definitely the biggest taste of the game we've given you yet!

In order to keep the forums easy to navigate, please share your first impressions only in this thread, and create new threads only to discuss specific topics.

We're looking forward to hearing from you! :)

This is my first OpenDev participation and I'm only 40+ turns in, but I'm absolutely loving what I've experienced so far. If I have any particular gripe it's only that the tutorial popups are too obtrusive and obscure elements of the UI that I'm actually trying to read, I try not to dismiss them unless as they have an 'Understood' button as the hovertext implies dismissing them will disable that particular tutorial - I don't know if it means just that specific popup or the thread of info it would relate to in other contexts? As such I leave them unless they're obscuring a button I need to press, but they should have some function to make them movable or minimisable in my opinion, rather than just dismissing it forever.

Besides that gripe though I'm deeply enjoying the gameplay so far, the combat feels like a happy medium between the Civ series and Endless Legend - a choice I understand is to appeal to a wider audience and I think is one that should work, I've only been fighting animals and early era units so far of course but the mechanics feel natural and intuitive without being uninteresting. City building/expansion too feels like a happy medium between both series, and I like the potential for creating megalopolis scale cities by combining regions and developing cities sparsely in the early eras and growing in the gaps in a manner that mimicks the real life development of such conurbations.

I have had some other trivial complaints with things like population control, I'd gotten into the habit of pops being stacked from right-to-left where it appears to be left-to-right in this title? It's not a real problem to adjust to but seems like an unnecessary change from the earlier titles to make; but on another point I do find the new growth and population mechanics interesting, where maximising my food is a boon not only to my future economy but also my military potential.

I'll likely share more specific feedback on other topics later once I've experienced more, for now I'll end this feedback by saying that I nearly never pre-order games and rarely have great expectations nowadays, but this is one title where I am comfortable with my pre-order and have high hopes for its release - certainly my hopes for it so far have been satisfied, wonderful work.

This is a minor gripe, but for events can we get the effect of decisions on the affinities with a mouseover or displayed as part of the event? I found myself constantly having to go back and forth between the culture menu and the event to know which option was going to push me in what direction.

This is my impressions complaints and comments after a single playthrough. I played the original open dev so its my only previous experience with the game. If i get something wrong missed something that you can point please do.

This was a fairly passive run in on the casual difficulty setting, as I tend to play low military in these kinds of games only got in one very one-sided war that was over quickly.

GOOD

1.         I love the choices given during the game it pretty much guarantees that every game is going to play differently even with the same cultures.
2.         I found the nomadic tribe phase at the start to be an interesting way to start a game though I worry that in future playthroughs it might get old and hugely unbalancing in a bad start
3.         The Idea to separate your empire era from just tech progression really lets you get rewarded from do whatever path you pick particularly military which normally only rewards if you can conquer territory
4.         Army and city list display is clean and give quick access to all of them particularly good for finding spread out armies 
5.         Outpost creation coming from military unites instead of sperate colonizer units lets people feel relatively safe about expanding and makes it more about finding the land you want and not just what you can quickly grab when spamming out settlers 
6.         I like the idea of crisis but I feel like it started to become too common later on with my large influence gain 
7.        Transcending seems pretty interesting but i feel like you should still maybe gain some bonus other then the fame 
8.         Civics and ideologies give even more customization options for you to pick what you need when.
9.        As a wonder rusher I love that you claim then before building so you don't keep getting beaten to them and getting frustrated and that you can focus on trying to unlock more quickly

1.         The impact of getting more food was unclear on how much faster it make pop grow and I think needs to be a bit more obvious
2.         It would be nice to get to see how I am getting my influence 
3.         in the tutorial for faith made the yellow for the word faith was basically invisible to me with no issues of color blindness. I'm sure their may be other of the colored text that might be an issue for some people and should probably be outlined in black for clarity 20201215234543_1.jpg
4.         I'm a bit confused on if luxuries bonuses are city specific or empire wide, for example I could not find the stability bonus for saffron anywhere. If they are city specific can we should be able to redistribute them
5.         I primarily use wasd to scroll and the speed was really slow and I couldn't find a way to increase it which later became a problem as I expanded
6.         when an ai gives demand resolution should probably specify that means they want you to drop it and wont give any recompense 
7.         Grievance forgiving by AI is a bit hard to see what exactly you did wrong and really as a whole a lot of the notifications are hard to see what exactly happened 
8.        Some of the choices I made with civics moved my ideologies in ways I didn't expect and probably should be more obvious.
9.        Wonders seem good but lack real big or interesting impacts id like to see  some effects towards that end

1.         Visual bug on fort icon when I researched it 20201215233819_1.jpg
2.         Why does it say unlock buyout on empire for every culture on all ages
3.        A lot if not all the of the toggle switches look like they reset position but don't really don't. For example this one I toggled it to buyout then reselected the city and the switch is still in the buyout position but the icons show timers but not cost 20201216010332_1.jpg
4.         I had a single crash to desktop when I ended a turn after setting an explore to auto explore
5.         After the crash I loaded an auto save and all the tutorials reset on their own 
6.         I hit the switch of auto battle once and it flipped back forth several times before I clicked off the battle screen        
7.         When I tried to assign cites to help a wonder it wouldn't let me and later I found that somehow the wonder had been added to the end of their que without me doing it

coloneluber wrote:

This is a minor gripe, but for events can we get the effect of decisions on the affinities with a mouseover or displayed as part of the event? I found myself constantly having to go back and forth between the culture menu and the event to know which option was going to push me in what direction.

I definitely agree here.

bork9128 wrote:
I'm a bit confused on if luxuries bonuses are city specific or empire wide, for example I could not find the stability bonus for saffron anywhere. If they are city specific can we should be able to redistribute them

The bonuses are per city. The stability bonus doesn't stack when you have several copies, but the other effect does. The stability effect in cities is currently labeled "Unknown" in the breakdown.

I have played through the scenario once, and have started another playthrough two times. I have very much enjoyed the core gameplay of choosing civilizations at every era, and having a variety of ways to progress to the next age. I feel pretty good about understanding what each of the four core resources does. I do have some concerns about the gameplay, however.

Maybe it is the nature of the premade scenario, but I feel like the continent the player starts on has neighbors pushing up against one another extremely fast. This results in the civilizations I may have initially been friendly with inevitably turning against me, usually with at least one war. 

Most of my confusion has come from not understanding what other civilizations are doing. It took me far too long to find where to see other civilizations' attitudes of me. Now that I've found that, when I am notified that someone's attitude of me has changed, I don't always know whether it's changed for better or worse. What separates afraid from fearful (I'm struggling to remember a specific one, but I hope the point is made)? Further, I opened up the influence and religion tabs at times to find that opponents have seriously overwhelmed me on these fronts, but I have had no feedback from the game that this was happening, nor have there been any consequences that I've seen.

In my completed playthrough, by about the halfway point I had no trouble with money, science, or influence, and most infrastructure and districts took about 2 turns to build. It felt to me like these resources snowballed in a way that made them ignorable. When I got to the early modern, I saw that some of the technologies were going to take much longer than anything prior, which made me excited as it seemed I'd need to start making real choices, though the game ended shortly after. 

There is quite a bit I need to figure out still, as this is my first open dev and I know not all the tutorials are implemented. I think the core is great, there are just some things I am confused by, and some points during the game where I am not finding interesting choices.

I played one game to turn ~90 or so and two more through ~30-40 turns. The early turns feel really good, but things then start snowballing really hard even though I didn't really even know what I was doing. Before long you're researching/building things in just a turn or two and all the decisions become uninteresting in a hurry. Not sure what needs to change, but there are pretty big pace problems right now imo. The game at turn 90 felt like I should be at like turn 300 how I would normally enjoy playing. 

I really like a lot of the systems, though. I just think numbers need tweaked a lot, which I'm sure is going to happen a lot over the next four months.

My biggest first impression that I've not seen before here (otherwise I would just spend most of this parroting the lack of tooltips, the unclear impact of food and other things)

The biggest issue I see is the unintuitive way you want to place districts and outposts/cities. When building your outpost/city you want to take as much good land around it as possible for a good start. I took Harappans early and with other river bonuses I would settle near a bend in a river and have most tiles around being really high production. However, when I then want to expand with districts, this means I don't want to build them near the center of my city, since that will build over these prime resource locations. Oftentimes I would by building a farmers quarters severely lose food income, which felt very counterproductive. As such most of my actual districts were then built on more marginal land from outposts later merged, or out of free-standing districts (which are very powerful as pointed out), or harbours, leaving me with sprawling urban areas in one place and my actual capital in the city somewhere else. This is further made weird as only the city itself and any districts chained actually get the walls.

The War system with goals and what you can claim is not clear. It is hard to get a grasp of what will actually be claimed by the winning goals and how much can be demanded. It also does not seem clear how the actual war end screen is triggered, although maybe that had to do with the person I was attacking multiple times was the "never surrender" type

Also some way of getting your troops home safely after a war would be nice. Having units die because you won a war and now they are stuck trespassing in enemy territory taking damage feels really bad.

Would be helpful if the notifications you've received an Era Star would say why.

As someone else mentioned, some of the text was nearly impossible to read, especially the yellow.

Because the leader's have names, it would nice if it would refer to that instead of AI #  (i.e., "Vlad wants..." instead of "AI 5...")

It's wonderful to finally be able to play more of this game!

There is however one main thing I'm starting to worry about with this game and the best way I can find to describe it is that it feels "loose". By this I mean two things.

- Some player actions feel less impactful than you'd think because of how drowned out they are in the giant machine this game is and because of how small the cost tends to be. Districts are a big example of this. They end up being very easy to build because stability is quite easy to deal with and the net gain per district is very small once a city has a few. There should be a larger cost/stability penalty to building them, or a hard upper limit. Wonders also feel a bit underwhelming because their bonus are just numerical values added to your giant engine. I wish they had more personality, but this can easily be added later on. Nice snappy animations for both wonders and districts could also help with the sense of impact (as much as I hate comparing the two games, the way civ 6 does it is great)

- The game feels strangely directionless, leaving everything up to player choice. I understand the appeal of it but it never felt like the game was compelling me to do anything specific or tried to resist me. Coupled with the fame victory system and things sometime feel a bit pointless. I guess I want the game to push me in unplanned directions a bit more. Things such as world quests or an AI that pushes more interactions would help a lot.

For these two reasons I feel the new player experience might suffer and people might give up before they get to the really good part of the game. I'm glad I kept playing after my first game because it only got better moving forward.

The good part now:

- It's incredibly satisfying to watch your empire and cities grow on the map. The game is gorgeous and visual representation is a big part of the appeal for me in 4X games (main reason why I love EL and never managed to get into ES2)

- Cultures feel impactful and it's a ton of fun to plan ahead, but only once you start to understand the systems enough, which is also why I'm worried about new player experience

- I love the hard decision between choosing a culture for patching up one of your flaws (science, production...) or choosing a culture in something you're already great at to get easy fame score.

- I also like culture that are very dependant on your territory (coastal cultures, mountaint cultures...). It gives a lot of incentive to trying to get them quickly.

- I love the implementation of the diplomacy system but I never felt like I was playing against other empires. The current AI never pushed interaction in my experience

- Very happy about the culture system. Mutually exclusive choice are good in those games and the 4 political axis is a fun system, kind of a light weight version of the wonderful political system in ES2

- I love the fact that there are deadend techs. It's actually something I talked about in a previous open dev feedback

- Anomalies finally visible on the map!

- I still love the combat, I can't wait to play against AIs that actually build an army to fight against. Retreat looks way to strong though

- It's so great to be able to merge cities to reduce the micromanagement

Smaller complaints:

- Current implementation of religion just feels redundant with culture, and I really never cared to explore it more

- Some UI problems still. I hate how the "see more" magnifying glass icon on the notifications is way smaller than the dismiss button. Construction buttons in the city screen are too big.

- Patronage feels too weak and minor factions never mattered in my games

- It's too easy to snowball out of control removing a lot of satisfaction from playing. This includes things I was not even paying attention to. Influence seems especially easy to accumulate

- Expansion stars look like the hardest to get, especially in later eras

This was long, but I hope it can be hopeful. Cheers!

Finding out that I could recycle military units into pops only by accident during the second day of playing was kinda painful, that's a critical feature that should be a lot more visible, right now it's buried in the UI. 

I had made this post elsewhere in the forum before these threads existed just reposting this here where it is supposed to be.

First off love it the money spent on the preorder was well worth it, I could probably fill many pages of this with all of the things I did like but I'm going to offer things that I don't like or that seemed jarring:

BTW this is minor stuff that's really just polishing and knowing that the game is in alpha please do not consider this in any way a complaint I'm just trying to give good beta feedback.

UI stuff

1. When getting various events, like osmosis or knowledge discovery in the notification bar, there is no UI or tooltip that says what the benefit was.

2. when hovering over the culture when going to the next age there is no tooltip that says what the benefit is even though the tutorial help tips specifically recommend hovering over the icon (IE when you hover over a tech-focused culture, no tooltip pops up saying that they can research one age ahead)

3. When placing new districts the tooltip that shows the bonuses you'll get for placing on that tile are inconsistent and sometimes confusing. As an example when placing a commons quarter usually there is a little black shield that shows the sum of the stability and influence you'll get by building in that hex, additionally sometimes there is floating larger text that shows a separate benefit underneath that shield, I can't tell if that's in addition to the benefits or added on to the tile as well.

4. Mouse controls seem a little counter-intuitive compared to standards in other games, oftentimes you can hold the middle mouse button to drag around the map, more importantly when you're moving a unit you can't just click the right mouse button you actually have to click and hold until the command registers, it makes it feel like there is lag in the game.

5. more mouse controls... when your culture is ready to advance to the next age and you left-click, instead of taking you to your current age showing your current stars it immediately takes you to the age select screen, it seems odd to then have to right-click which is the cancel button to look at your current era goals.

6. Please throw in a tooltip for how much the legacy fame bonus is, is it 5%? 50% I have no idea so I can't make an informed decision about taking legacy as an advancement option

Balance stuff (I know it's likely silly to even be posting this as it's still so early in the dev cycle but I'm hoping balance feedback can be helpful.

1. Population seems weak and developments seem way too strong adding a worker to the industry might only add 4-6 gears, placing a new district can add 20+ gears, you can have a city of 1 person cranking out 400+ gears... feels weird. Please consider developments shifting some resources off the map and on too how productive workers are

2. I like that you added the limiting factor of stability to soft cap how many developments a city can have... and while that works in the early game at some point stability becomes so easy to stack that the number of developments a city can have is effectively unlimited, You may want to consider tieing in the number of developments to population size in some way if populations where more productive and the land hexes less productive AND pop size had a larger impact on stability I think it would make the whole system feel way better

3. consider adding some type of maintenance to military units it feels weird to have an unlimited army size that doesn't impact the economy... yes I know they are built with population but it doesn't seem like a hard enough limit... maybe tie in the maintenance to both food and money? which brings us to food...

4. Food just feels wrong, I like the idea of a population growing faster as the population gets bigger and that having an abundance of food contributes to stability but... food is ridiculously easy to come by and all cities are pretty much permanently in abundance, pop growth feels really slow in the beginning and meaningless in the end as a large city can crank out a new pop every turn, and even at a size 40 food is still so easy to get it's worthless, consider soft caps on pop size based on medical technology techs not just number of districts, having populations eat more food, having armies eat food, or some other useful thing to do with surplus food or things that consume more food... right now I would never consider taking a food-based culture as food is just a throw-away resource.

5. Expansionist cultures seems really bad... or the tooltip needs a lot of extra clarification, I spent about 20 turns roaming all over the map with units trying to find any sectors I could force claim and never found a single eligible one... consider redoing how this mechanic is supposed to work

6. put in some more resource sinks for influence and stability, for the first 2 ages influence and stability are a difficult resource to come by and that feels good, I was constantly needing more influence to claim territories and build cities but at some point towards the end of the classical age both of those resources just snowballed and became effectively unlimited

AI - I know I know I'm not even going to begin to address the ton of things that are likely very obvious and on the to-do list there is only one that I will point out, please limit units that are capable of dieing at sea from going into deep water when they are on auto-explore, right now they all insta suicide by drowning

I'm sure there is more I'll update this as I play more

Thanks again for the wonderful open dev! Well done guys I'm super excited to follow this game as it progresses

Oh, one more thing, please slow down tech research speed, all 4x games suffer from this and its a really tricky thing to balance. But especially in the classical age without even focusing on tech I rushed through all the techs and just felt like I skipped over the classical age without getting to interact with any of the barbarian tribes or really experience the classical age. Just nerfing the tech costs or research points production can't fix this, there needs to be some soft cap or rubber banding pulling advanced cultures back and or scaling research costs with the number of turns played... IE make the techs cost 4x what they do now but then decrease the costs by 1% every turn, or give a 10% scaling increase for every tech that you have that's not researched by everyone else. 

And I know that every single 4x game has this debate and there are a 100 different ways to attack this problem and no game yet has gotten this problem right yet

oops, I'm playing on the other monitor and here's another thing that just popped up. When a decision pops up (which I LOVE these BTW) and you are offered 2 or three choices, each choice has an icon in the upper right-hand corner that shows what part of your culture sliders it's going to influence, please add a hover-over tooltip that shows what the name of that slider is and what benifits of that slider are. Right now I have to exit out of the menu go to the culture tab hover over the sliders and then go back to the decision screen... and then I wonder if I remembered the icon correctly so I go back and double-check. This is a ton of mouse clicks and closing and opening interfaces that could be solved with a tooltip. 

So after playing a bit with other culture, I can confidently say that the Egyptian Emblematic Quarter is OP OP PLS NERF.

I will try to avoid repeating what others are already saying. Most of the concerns and compliments written I agree with.

I would like to write about Era Starts:

I really liked the mechanic, it makes the game unique and it's fun and thrilling. However, war/expansionism can snowball everything: more cities imply more food for more people, more science, more districts, more money, more influence. There's no big stability downside too growing larger and larger. So expansion implies indirectly in all starts.

Number of territories and number of districts are roughly the same thing. Having more territories means more Districts, however having more districts does not imply more territory. So, we can expect that a militaristic player will get their stars in territories and districts, just doing the same thing: going to war.

This leads to my other big concern: taking cities is way too easy. We can grab the capital in one turn, that's insane.

There should be a era star counterpart to territories, perhaps districts in yout capital instead of globally. Diplomacy is weak in the current state.

Also growing larger is way more effective than growing taller. Transforming outpost into cities should be more hard to do. There's no advantaged in attaching an outpost if you can easily make another city.