First impressions and comments

[pethogergely2009]

Hi, thank you for the opportunity to take part in beta-testing Armageddon. I have been playing the game for about an hour up to the first crash to desktop. My first impressions are positive. I'm looking forward to find out whether the game is as good as Rites of War, which I liked very much back in the old days. But I'm just at the beginning, having played just the first 3 missions, so these are literally just first impressions and comments. Most of them concern the aesthetics of the user interface, typos and display errors.

The game installed and started up fine, without any issues. Controls work perfectly, sounds play fine, the user interface is standard, familiar and comfortable (I have played the old SSI Panzer General series and its spinoffs, as well as some Panzer Corps and Unity of Command).

I'm not sure whether the Tutorial Missions in their current state are supposed to stay more or less like this in the final version, or whether the tutorial as such is yet to be added to them. As of now there isn't anything tutorial-like about them, they do not explain anything about the gameplay mechanics or the user interface. If there will be a real scripted tutorial built into these missions later, that's fine, but if not, then calling them Tutorial is somewhat misleading.

I really liked the in-game graphics. What I didn't like, though, were the fonts used for the dialogs between the missions. There the font size is a bit too big, and the font style (white sans-serif fonts) is very bland. The in-game fonts look much nicer.

I think the three tutorial missions I played were too easy. The AI was very passive and hardly moved its units at all, it barely did anything but counter-attack a few times. Even its counter-attacks were too weak and hardly caused damage. Beating the turn limits was too easy in all 3 missions. Stricter turn limits, or at least some reward for beating a stricter optional turn limit would be nice.

There are several typos and punctuation mistakes in the dialog texts between the missions. Here are some that I found, along with my suggested corrections:
Before mission 1:
"It is believed uninhabied" > "It is believed (to be) uninhabited"
"presense" > "presence"
"training sessions in Steel Legion units" > "training sessions for Steel Legion units"
"leave you with Drill-Sergeant Goryle, technically you out-rank him" > "leave you with Drill-Sergeant Goryle. Technically you out-rank him"

Before mission 2:
"Greetings citizens" > "Greetings, citizens"

Before mission 3:
"remember the Commissar is watching!" > "remember, the Commissar is watching!"

There were lots of issues with the pop-up text boxes in-game. The text often displayed incorrectly: only part of it was visible, or it didn't fit properly into the box. Some examples:
The text in the first box in mission 1, "According to my reports...", is too long and overlaps the "Ok" at the bottom. There is also an extra empty line between "Schola" and "Progenia".
The text in the "Victory" text box appearing at the end of the first mission is too large and doesn't fit into the dialog box.
In missions 2 and 3, the text boxes appearing after the start of the mission (I think, after turn 4 and turn 2 respectively) are completely illegible. I've attached screen shots.

The troop selection box at the beginning of each mission overlaps the "End deploy" button at the top, so most of the button is not visible.

As I mentioned, my first session with the game ended with a crash to desktop. The game crashed after the last turn of mission 3, after I completed the mission objectives, the "Victory" box had already appeared, I had clicked on its "Ok" button, and finally clicked on the "End mission" button. I have attached a screen shot.

[pethogergely2009]

I'm also attaching the files in my Beta folder, in case you should have any use for them.

[Rudankort]

Great feedback, keep it coming. While this game does not really try to copy Rites of War, I did play some of RoW on early development stages. It inspired me to rotate hexes by 90 degrees, compared to Panzer Corps.

Have you installed the hot fix which I've posted here: http://slitherine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=321&t=53652 ? If not, try it, this can solve some of your crashes. However, a crash connected to max zoom out seems to be a problem we have not addressed yet.

The game still has some issues on 5:4 screens (1280x1024 being the most common example of this ratio), we'll try to address them asap. We'll also carefully check text problems you've mentioned. The fon in briefing UI will be replaced. Nobody likes it.