🚀 go-pugleaf

I posted here about Fallen Enchantress by Stardock a while back, when I 
was only just getting into the game.

By now I have close to 150 hours of gameplay under my belt and I think I 
have a slightly better idea what game features I am talking about. 

The basic premises are mostly 4x bog standard ... resources, building 
structures on them, goodie huts, heroes as well as troups make for a 
nice rpg element. 
Sadly, the game looks dull and drab, and I am talking about brightness 
and colour here. From a couple of metres back off the monitor it's all 
ochres and blacks, for the most part, and I struggle to see anything 
unless I halve that distance. Ok, appearance, minor quibble really.

The thing is: they keep twiddling with it. Some is good - bug fixes like 
the map generator now puts gold resources on the map, wild game, fruit 
trees, bees ... but also they keep changing the mechanics, and I feel 
not always for the better. 
Someone asked me initially about the overpowered hero stacks. At that 
point (just as I was getting started on the game) you could still build 
viable hero stacks, but I found they did not do enough damage to take 
down the really nasty monster armies like dragons. You had to mix them 
up with troups. 

The second to last time I played, they had not only nerfed the one 
useful enchantment spell so it could only be cast ONCE per faction, they 
had also introduced a bug so if you cancelled it you could not cast it 
again. From the description, the spell should not stack, but be possible 
to cast on each separate army at least.  
The last time I played I found that one of my armies, about half troups 
and half heros was not advancing in levels at all. So now they have 
introduced a bug, or a nerf, that maybe divvies up xp or otherwise slows 
hero advancement to the point where you still have a level 6 main hero 
by the time you've settled half the map, researched 80% + of the tech 
tree and you're barely able to cast the first fireball that has about as 
much clout as a handful of wet snow.
The update before these two introduced a population requirement with 
building the settler-units; since the settlers are also the units that 
build resource harvesting outposts that almost slowed the game to a 
standstill, because you simply could not generate enough of them to get 
your empire started ... they have reversed that approach, but still ..
Was that a stampede by a committee?

Way, way, way too much fiddling with the gameplay mechanics yet. I don't 
like to have my game play differently every time I want to fire it up, 
not when the 'rebalancing' is as drastic as this.

What's more, I have encountered a passel of bugs in the special high 
class enemy areas, the 'wildlands'. Rivers that aren't rivers for 
purposes of building improvements, cities that are supposed to be 
conquered but don't show as taken when they're taken, invisible monster 
lairs that can't be found even in a square-by-square search, a supposed 
settlement spot that doesn't show up at all etc etc. That sort of thing 
makes a strategy game excruciatingly frustrating when you're trying a 
new strategy and you're defeated by bugs and lousy design or beta 
testing after you've gone thorugh several hours of building up an empire 
that can actually tackle these areas. Because shit just doesn't work as 
they said it would. 

So all that is why I am back to playing Civ 4 and 5 at the moment for my 
strategy fix. Enchantress is overall a very disappointing game 
considering it's from the house of the makers of GalCiv. The potential 
is there, the engine is nice, I just wish they'd iron out the bugs 
before they keep messing with the gameplay -- and keep the fiddling 
severity down, puhleeze. Not to mention *test before you auto-patch my 
client*.

-P.