First, thanks for allowing me to participate in the beta!
About me to help you understand where I come from and what kind of experience I have had: IRL an automotive electrical design engineer. I would consider myself a somewhat experienced light wargame fan, although I did not play PG1 or PG2 at all. I played Fantasy General quite a bit back in the day, but never finished the campaign because it got too easy and boring later on. Games of a similar type that I spent time with: Fallout Tactics, HOMM 3, Civ (does have some tactical gameplay...), Age of Wonders 2.
My setup: Core2 @3.15 GHz, 9800GTX video card, 2Gb ram, Win 7, 1080p widescreen monitor. I will also do a test trial on the laptop, which is a bit old. I don't remember the specs off the top of my head so I'll post that later.
First impressions: Things in general look nice, no complaints. Music score in the title screen is appropriate but a little forgettable. I would like to be able to play in a window, but can't.
Decided to play the tutorial campaign. Campaign and scenario selection screen layout is really big, would probably look better as a smaller popup on the titlescreen background. Being able to select any scenario without silly 'unlocks' is a nice bonus. 'Play' and 'Cancel' buttons are tiny and in the corner - seems suboptimal.
Mission briefing screen - nice. Purple 'stamp' looks odd - doesn't show up very well on the background.
Play screen - nice. Tooltip popup for embark/disembark shows a long line of incomprehensible text. The bottom right button no tooltip. Moving units - would prefer some kind of sliding movement to instant movement. It isn't immediately obvious which mouse buttons to press to move, but I learn quick. Hovering over 'weather' and 'forecast' tooltip blinks on and off repeatedly.
- Moved an inf next to city 13,4 in scn 1. I have a crosshair when hovering over the city, but how to I attack right then? I right-click, but nothing happens. I reselect the unit and right-click on the unit in the city and battle takes place. Animations are pretty nice.
- After a unit has moved, but not attacked but has no opportunity to attack shouldn't the unit be marked as 'done'? [Later] I realize that it's possible that an enemy unit might later retreat into a hex where it could be attacked by that unit, so that is not really a good idea.
- Hovering over the weather and forecast boxes should reveal what the weather or forecast is, perhaps. On second thought, I don't really like the icons for sunny/dry. That graphic just doesn't say sunny and dry to me. Maybe it's the clouds in the graphic...
- Would like to have a way to see the range of the arty near city 19,4 but don't see how if it can be done. Ok I see the unit stats panel now, but the option for an overlay on the play map when I click on the unit would be cool.
- Scenario 2: figured out how to upgrade and refit units. Nothing much else to say at this point.
- Am really enjoying the artwork - new hills look good. When there are larger areas of mountain or hills, it looks 'tiley.' Perhaps some variations or multi-hex tiles are in being worked on...?
- Am wondering if there's a way to see the combat odds somewhere... ? Ok I see the two boxes when hovering over a target. Does this indicate the most likely outcome or the absolute outcome?
- Scenario 3: How do I use the bridging unit? Does it work by merely occupying a river hex or what?
- I just figured out the unit sidebar. The column on the left is the selected unit. The column on the right is the unit under the mouse. Would adding the unit pic to the tops of the columns make this look better?
- Suggest allowing any unit to be selected at any time so that I can use the sidebar to compare any 2 units, even if they have moved or are not under my control.
- Suggest that unit list sidebar also show if the unit is 'done' Will help if I'm trying to find the odd unit that I forgot to move.
- Don't know exactly what you might come up with, but it might be helpful to have 3 'done' indicators, one for has moved not fired, one for has fired not moved, and one for has moved has fired.
- Scenario 4 - wasted some turns trying to attack the fort before realizing my inf could be better used to hunt the objective...
- Bug?- moving an arty into an unoccupied enemy city does not capture it?
- On second thought, what's the consensus on sliding vs. instant movement? I'm not sure which I would prefer now that I'm becoming used to the instant movement.
- In the purchase screen, if I select a transport, I cannot unselect a transport.
- Ocean tiles don't look all that good, currently.
- Strategic bombers: don't understand what they do. I haven't read anything that explains what they do. Do they destroy prestige?
- It would make more sense for bombs to come out of bombers than the rear gunner firing animation all the time.
- If there is anything akin to PG1's old "rugged defense" or other random combat modifiers, I'm missing it. Where is that visible during an attack sequence?
- My inf can't enter a dense forest? Is that because they have trucks with them or what?
- Roads and railways could stand to look a little more distinct from each other.
- Instead of alt-click for unit stats, why not just r-click on unit? It's not used for anything else...
- Unit stat window doesn't show what transport the unit has. In fact, where can this be seen? I don't know.
So I got through the tutorial in about 4 hours, with a few interruptions. The tutorial is well done. It introduced the elements in a logical manner and didn't impose itself on me. Some game tutorials force the player go through every menu pick "No, Recruit! You can't do anything else except scroll the screen up and down right now...
" On the other hand it could have been more verbose about explaining game elements with pop-up dialogues that you could either read or skip if you liked. There were definitely some things that I didn't figure out just through play, such as what exactly strategic bombers did, or where to repair ships, or how to use 2 bombers and an airfield to 'rotate' strikes and repairs to keep up the tempo of attack.Overall my impression is very good. Devs could have gone wrong a number of ways here. It keeps very well with the spirit of the PG series without adding any bad 'features' that might ruin a perfectly good game. The choice of 2d and 2d sprites is perfect - many game studios seem to think that 2d is the devil nowadays. The game would have been considerably worse off if done in 3d; at the scale the game is presented 3d models would have been less readable than the perfectly clear sprites at the same size. Adding rotation and zoom as necessary in 3d would have distracted from the gameplay by adding extra overhead to managing a turn of play.
I went through the this excercise without reading anyone else's comments or impressions of the game.
Thanks again for letting me participate in the beta!
-Ben
