Rob @ Longbow asked for:
* We're experimenting with showing stacks of chips next to each city to indicate how many recruits and how much gold each city has. Let us know what you think!

Rob,

I hate to be a ninny and complain all the time, considering my every free moment is spent becoming a better digital hyper-threaded Philip...

I absolutely HATE the clutter of the iconograph indicators; they have no tool tip or definition and are just clutter. Context tool tips would help, but see below:

1. I feel the icons clutter the otherwise clean UI and they don't match the 'bar' design already used throughout the system. My opinion: avoid Civilization similarities.

2. The icons, however they manage it, are causing a significant screen stutter-like lag on zoomed out views. I have a very fast, very tuned gaming machine and it causes uncomfortable chunkiness. It isn't "bad", just detracts from the normally graceful swooshing and zooming I do when fighting four battles at once.

3. I would rather the icons make their way into text on tooltip, or otherwise into the info screen and asset list.

4. We need to be able to size the asset list, its getting a bit wide of the window size.

5. We also need to size the text window and other display items.

6. Trade route increases cost too much: Heraklea Lycestis to Eordea (a straight shot of plains with little slope) is 51 gold to increase from 15 to 25, 102 gold to increase from 15 to 50 and 153 gold to increase from 15 to 100. This is nearly the cost of 2 Phalangite brigades. I can see penalizing a user for making road from Thebes to Pella... But really, this needs to be examined and thought out a bit more if we want to reduce the amount of 'move 160 slaves from here to here with food' minutae I experience regularly. I'm getting better at clustering materials and resources to move those materials, but to offset this 30 day learning period, I feel compelled to write a magnum opus strategy guide. I think this can be simplified by rewarding the user to use the road system upgrades instead of penalizing them.

I was in the entertainment business for 10 years back in the later 80's through mid-nineties. I am absolutely gobsmacked by what you folks do with this game and I love it. I have 4 major titles gathering dust around the house because I can't stop playing this title. I hate offering public criticism without praise. This game blows my mind, but what astounds me is how abstracted and simple most of the functions are. As I've written before, please keep it simple, or be prepared to silo in on various functionality and think it through in depth. Tweaking what is to me, a superbly fast and highly addictive micro-management interface to historical melee combat, is a ruinous enterprise. For the sake of all that is good, tweak little, improve much!

Yours,

Erik

On a totally inappropriate side note; I just attacked Tricca and Lyssia and Borboros with all my units from Pella with a stack of workers from all over Macedon ready to be turned back into units.

Of the total roster, 3 peltasts, 2 phalangite and 2 cavalry units were lost to 9 phalanx of hoplite and countless spear and peltast brigades. The battle for these three cities showed two things; the ai is a bitch and proper planning prevents piss poor performance.

God, I love this game. Totally unpredictable.

ps. the previous post made after 3 bottles of Brother David's Double Abbey Style (belgian) Ale from Anderson Valley Brewing Company. Wicked good times. Wicked good Ale.

Thanks for the update Guys

I took a look at the new chips around the city to indicate food and recruit and i must say even if the idea is great, the visual its gives is not the best. I mean i love to look at my empire and see all the city i control, the map is beautiful on the global view, but these chips kind of ruin the quality of the image. The quantity of chips is really hard to estimate and most of the time, what i want to know is if a city has no food or no recruit at all.

Maybe just moving the mouse over a city could give you the number of recruit and food supply.


The game is awesome and im playing it from the days you put the game on the market, keep your good work

I dont find the "chips" have any negative impact on the performance. zooming and panning are fine. however i'm not sure the same can be said for the aesthetic impact. it looked better without them imo and i'm not sure they serve any useful purpose. however i suppose if in the final release there is an option to have them on or off (which is what i read) then i guess ppl can simply choose their preference, but id suggest the default to be "off". but it seems a waste of effort to me as most ppl seem to dislike them and would have them off, myself included.

Maybe just moving the mouse over a city could give you the number of recruit and food supply.

Very good idea.

the map is beautiful on the global view, but these chips kind of ruin the quality of the image

Yes, it's not beautiful.

The only food indicators I need:
-less than a full stockpile
-at least a full stockpile
-a MASSIVE excess of food (Hereklea Lyncestis always has 40,000+ food in my games!)

And in terms of recruits:
-Full recruits
-Some recruits
-No recruits

An indicator of whether food/recruits is currently falling or rising would be useful to.

Otherwise I don't really care about the indicators, nor would I find them useful.

To go a little crazy, I'd also like indicators visible from strategic view about how food is being transmitted between towns (i.e. arrows or something) just so you could tell what the overall food situation is, and where it's flowing (why is the entire former Chalcidian League starving?!)

Also, an indicator of the native culture of each town would be nice when looking at your kingdom strategically, but is obviously not necessary on the whole.

Keep in mind we already have tool tip floating bars as information for:

Wall Strength
Unrest
Population
Food vs the Set Level of supply

These are in left to right bar form which are very helpful. I'd rather see this expanded.

On one hand I like the graphical indicaters because I have used them to rearange some supply lines, so they do work. On the other hand I do find they are annoying and create clutter, I think they might be slowing down the map as well but I am not sure. If there was some quick button that could turn them on and off as an overlay that would give the best of both worlds.

Sidenote: The food piles are the only ones I find useful, I have trouble seeing the recruitment pile. Also I find i have to click on the city anyway just to remind myself if its a macedon or thessaly city, those are the only ones I use for recruits.

As for supply costs I think the price is ok the way it is, I very rarely come accross the issue of not being able to afford a supply upgrade when it is needed, The economy is balanced right now and if it was less costly to upgrade it would remove some of the challenge. MAybe making the upgrade time less would help though.

Rob,

Your comment about at-a-glance representation of food is an interesting one. It evokes the very urgent need to highlight visually where concentrations of resources are available. It took me weeks of play to really understand how to manipulate food and resources. It took a lot of time to really get good at preparing for campaigns. So lets ask ourselves; what would ease a player into maximizing resources and what would they do with the resources. Well, the latter is simple; conquest.

Identifying where surplus food is would best be achieved by use of a toggleable colored filter. It's a standard device in RTS and works because it provides maximum information without compacting or diminishing the UI.

A few things that I've thought of while playing. It would be very helpful to set a specific location to accumulate supplies. Using the food throttle controls (which I didn't understand for a while) makes this possible there are simpler methods that could be programmed to help.

A. Indicate a route collection point or "priority" hub. This could automatically set the math on a traceable route to ensure that supplies were forwarded within existing rules to that point. It would override individual settings along the path to ensure the most efficient transfer rate possible given the parameters of the trade route.

B. Allow conversion of slaves or workers in a form of automated supply chain. I know Alexander reformed the army to eliminate the conventional baggage train from his order of battle, but one of the main complaints I have is that if I put a unit into camp mode, it won't automatically exit and defend itself if attacked. This means I end up forcing large groups of slaves to carry supplies and sit with the army, while I'm looking elsewhere managing an operation or cleaning up a fight. The large spread out mob of 40 unit slaves is ungainly and they move very slowly. The ideal usage of a transport unit would be to establish a repeat order or "ad hoc" trade line that does nothing but deliver food. I know not how limited or capable your AI engine is at setting repeat waypoints and actions, but I'd love this type of solution.

C. I would like to see workers and slaves operate like battle units, be condensable and at the very least enter column or custom formations other than large squares.

I've been gestating on an idea similar to a "cross roads" concept where instead of a city, it would be helpful to join multiple node groups together by a logical point in the map. This would serve to reduce some distances. I've also been having to make choices of supply lines, mines vs. farms more than I would like, further exacerbating the supply problems in some areas.

I get the use of the tokens. I just dislike the method; however when phrased as a solution, if tool tips are added to qualify the subjective token pile size, I think the function will make gameplay easier for new players.

5. We also need to size the text window and other display items.

I need these dialogs to be sizble as in expanding and reducing the boundaries of the display box. Font size may be helpful with this, but can't visualize it being very impactful to the issue I'm experiencing - I want to size the window larger and wider and have the table inside resized as well. Easy, if it were Excel. :)

I've actually been surprised no one has brought this up previously. In addition to lowering the cost I was also looking into reducing the upgrade time as I had noticed myself I could sometimes walk units with food to the destination faster than I could upgrade the line.

I have no issue with the time it takes to upgrade; simply the enormous cost. I didn't even try and use this for a while, but then my organizing skills and understanding of the supply system wasn't very mature either. I'm trying hard to appreciate and utilize every bit you've provided us. The game has great replay value as a result of the many interesting things you DO have in place. Why I posted in another thread about the cost being punative to adopting road upgrade. Thank you VERY much for considering this, will have a tremendous impact on the ease with which I operate large campaigns.

I've already got an option to turn them on/off in our internal build and I'll look into a few of the other suggestions you guys have made.

I think thats a fine solution and really all I would need.

One odd bit I've noticed since B11 is that sometimes the combat round tics seem off. I literally lost multiple groups in a combat where I had a seeming 60-70% advantage in men. All at once all the units before my very eyes lost 80% of their strength in what seemed to be a single very rapid succession of updates. All of these units were under some form of melee and missile attack.

Can't wait to pay for this Gold version! :) You're doing great.

I've actually been surprised no one has brought this up previously. In addition to lowering the cost I was also looking into reducing the upgrade time as I had noticed myself I could sometimes walk units with food to the destination faster than I could upgrade the line.

I am also fine with the cost and time required to upgrade supply lines. Granted we can sometimes walk a unit to the destination in a shorter time, but that is a one-off solution as compared to the long-term solution that the supply line represents.


Now, I also have some feedback of my own. I gathered these feedback from beta 11, but I think it's still valid for beta 12.

First, I find the concept of limited supply nodes very restrictive, and I do not see how it contributes positively to the game. It gets frustrating where there are a lot of farms and mines near one city but I have to route them to other cities and suffer reduced supply bandwidth because the nearest city does not have enough nodes. Can you explain the rationale behind the current supply node system, Rob?

I was considering an alternative system where each city can have as many supply routes as the user desires, but each route a city has comes with an exponential maintenance cost in gold. In this way, players are still discouraged from making too many connections to any one city, but they still have freedom to organise their supply network however they like.

Secondly, large groups of units have a really big problem crossing narrow gaps, such as bridges and mountain passes. The speed difference between ordering a large group to cross a narrow gap, versus giving each individual unit its own orders to cross the gap, is enormous. This encourages the player to micromanage, making the game just a bit more tedious, and therefore less fun. Do you think this can be improved?

Lastly, right now when units load food, they will always load all that they can carry. Can there be a way for us to define how much food to load? Maybe, when we click and hold on the 'load food' button, we can then adjust a slider to determine how much food to load. Then when we release the mouse button, the defined amount of food gets loaded.

Loving the game so far, and I'm telling all my friends about it. Can't wait for the weekend, when I'll spend some time with beta 12. =)

First of all i retract my previous statement that the "chips" dont affect performance. as theyve increased in number they have begun to do so. i checked with fraps and i get 13 fps in a map view in Gold, compared to 50 fps in PoM for approximately the same view.

now i have feedback but not specifically for B12, as i didnt play any of the previous Betas, i was playing PoM. This is for Gold in general.

I see all this feedback and suggestions on possible tweaks and enhancements, things to make it easier and quicker. But what i have seen in my 2 weeks as a dedicated hegemony fan is this: time after time ppl have applauded PoM. They have applauded its depth and scale, hows it takes time to learn the intricacies of it: to manage the food distribution, to survive the constant raiding by the Athenian Empire all over your coastline (which is an historicaly accurate depiction not to mention a challenging part of the game), to manage supply lines, to maximise gold income, to fight battles, to expand your territory. its been described as an "Epic" game.

These are all the basic fundamental things that made hegemony great. All i see is suggestions to make things easier and quicker. To remove micro-management, to automate this or that, unlimited supply nodes so u dont have to prioritise food or gold (sorry to be specific on that example but i just read it and its easy to remember), to reduce the number of raids against you, etc etc
All those seemingly suicidal raids against one of your large, walled cities wore it down, interupting its supplies, and eventualy if you didnt do something about it the city would be starved into defeat. You were forced to go out and confront the source of the raids. In practical terms, whether intentional or not, wave after wave of assaults on your cities was a major challenge in PoM and part of what made it an epic challenge. The amphibious raids from Athens forces had to be dealt with meaning u had to maintain sufficent forces around your coastline to protect yourself.

Where is all that in Gold? ive spent about 20 hours now playing the Philip campaign in Gold, theres been 1 (yes One), amphibious raid on my coastline. the Illyrians send 3-4 peltast units every now and again thru wolf pass which just die at the city walls there. no hoplites. the tribal cities (stobi etc) to the north sent one wave only in the entire campaign to capture the 4 cities for that achievement and to capture all those mines. The city just north of Pella once captured was never seriously contested. In PoM, it changed hands about 5 times before i could expand the front line beyond it.

In short Gold is too easy. its boring. cities are now very difficult to take without catapults but the AI doesnt use catapults. The glacially slow regeneration of recruits in cities means that you spend a helluva lot of time just waiting around before u can move on, and i'm guessing thats the reason the AI aggression is virtualy nil. This is no word of a lie but... ive actually been going afk to make coffee, smoke, even stopping by the tv room for a few mins on my way, leaving Gold running while my recruits regenerate, and this is on "Expert" level. You couldnt do that in PoM. In PoM you so much as take your eye off the ball even for a couple of mins u could find half your empire gone, no money to pay your troops, and all your supply lines in tatters so half your remaining cities are starving.

So while tweaks and enhancements are nice, do we really want to make things easier?... lets get back to the basic fundamental concept here... wheres the challenge?

Hey why dont we improve the game of Chess too? we can make all the pieces move the same, all can move in any direction and as far as you want. then it will be much easier to learn and easier to play. that way u can learn all there is to learn in, maybe 5 seconds. and after 10 mins playing u will have seen all there is to see and can go do something more interesting. i cant believe its lasted thousands of years... its too difficult.

To quote the OP:
Tweaking what is to me, a superbly fast and highly addictive micro-management interface to historical melee combat, is a ruinous enterprise
Or, in English,
If its not broke dont fix it.

And as for the ongoing question of what to do with all the excess slaves youve amassed... heres a crazy idea... once you have as many as u need stop capturing them.

Or, in English,

Sorry, in the throes of a stack of biographies and non-fiction from 1730 - 1815.

Kami,

I urge you to restart your game. I've restarted Philip now about 35 times and there are patterns, but gameplay can be radically different from game to game.

Erik

I think my biggest problem with the AI is that it always follows the same pattern. AI cities will always attack the same targets from the same direction with the same forces year after year.

Finding a way for the AI to build up forces over more than a year, or attack different places along your coast would greatly increase the challenge of holding massive coastlines or porous borders. The most interesting battles are when a fleet of triremes emerge from the aether and cruise along your coast, and you have no idea where they intend to land. You end up having to defeat them with local garrisons that have never before broached battle and raising half-size units of local Hoplites to defend your lands.

Or, in English,

Sorry, in the throes of a stack of biographies and non-fiction from 1730 - 1815.

dont apologise, theres no shame in using words of more than 4 letters :)
as for restarting, whether that works or not its not an ideal solution. somone new to the game who buys the release isnt going to want to restart over and over until they get a challenge they can enjoy.

And Rob, sorry i guess i missed the request for saved games that u referred to. i will mail u a saved game along with some info on what i am experiencing which may give u some ideas what to look for specifically.
I'm no programmer just a gamer (have been for 30 years. Ive just turned 43. someone else posted somewhere that when they started gaming their first comp had a whole 8MB of Ram, when i started mine had a whole 64K of RAM), but my best guess is either
A) the AI doesnt have the resources to put up a good fight, or
B) it doesnt have the hostility with the new Diplomacy features,
or its a combination of both. I read somewhere around here that currently the difficulty level doesnt really do much. My opinion is ppl would prefer that it did, and this may be the answer. Having mastered the game on Easy or Normal ppl would like to turn it up a notch and to play it again and it still be as challenging as when it was all new, or even more challenging.
Maybe the answer is as simple as increasing either or both of these for higher difficulties. "Expert" difficulty should be virtualy impossible, maybe max out the hostility, minimise the intimidation, and double the resource regen as a starting point. The current Expert setting is at best "Normal" and it could be argued its "Easy". And i'm not some superhuman gamer ive just been around the block a bit but so have lots of ppl. Lots must be feeling the same as me.

Or, in English,

Sorry, in the throes of a stack of biographies and non-fiction from 1730 - 1815.

dont apologise, theres no shame in using words of more than 4 letters :)
as for restarting, whether that works or not its not an ideal solution. somone new to the game who buys the release isnt going to want to restart over and over until they get a challenge they can enjoy.

And Rob, sorry i guess i missed the request for saved games that u referred to. i will mail u a saved game along with some info on what i am experiencing which may give u some ideas what to look for specifically.
I'm no programmer just a gamer (have been for 30 years. Ive just turned 43. someone else posted somewhere that when they started gaming their first comp had a whole 8MB of Ram, when i started mine had a whole 64K of RAM), but my best guess is either
A) the AI doesnt have the resources to put up a good fight, or
B) it doesnt have the hostility with the new Diplomacy features,
or its a combination of both. I read somewhere around here that currently the difficulty level doesnt really do much. My opinion is ppl would prefer that it did, and this may be the answer. Having mastered the game on Easy or Normal ppl would like to turn it up a notch and to play it again and it still be as challenging as when it was all new, or even more challenging.
Maybe the answer is as simple as increasing either or both of these for higher difficulties. "Expert" difficulty should be virtualy impossible. Maybe max out the hostility, minimise the intimidation, and double the recruit regen as a starting point. The current Expert setting is at best "Normal" and it could be argued its "Easy". And i'm not some superhuman gamer ive just been around the block a bit but so have lots of ppl. Lots must be feeling the same as me.

i have some additional general suggestions if i may. sorry if this seems hypocritical but these are things i consider to be polish and/or bugspray, rather than automating gameplay or making it less challenging.
Migrant Safeguarding
On at least 2 occasions i have lost the migrants that were rewarded because i hadnt yet secured the area of the map where they spawned.
First was for completing the Fort at Borrhea and the migrants spawned up at Almopia where they were immediately attacked by some hostile peltast unit and were routed. i rushed there and routed the peltast but was unable to interact with the migrants in any way which were by then a "defeated unit".
The second was for completing the Fort at Mt Kissos and the migrants spawned north of Crestonia somewhere, an area i hadnt even exposed on the map. I "jumped to" their location using the arrow from the event log. the map zoomed to the location but it was still greyed out and i couldnt even see the units and couldnt select them.
Once lost migrants are gone permanently and it seems unfair that u may or may not be lucky enough to have seized certain areas of the map. Perhaps migrants could be immune to any attacks or ignored by everyone, and could have a line of sight like other units.

Unit Status Icons - Colored Borders
i'm referring to icons such as "out of food", "low morale" etc. in the thick of battle its very difficult to see whether the icon is above the enemy units or your own. especially when 2 or more melee units are toe-to-toe. i was thinking a colored border surrounding the icon like a picture frame, corresponding to the factions color ie purple for your own, would make it clear at a glance whose unit was about to route or was out of food.

Food sharing within/when-leaving cities
weve all seen when sieging a city its low on food and when a unit leaves the city it carries as much food as it can, up to its max capacity. this can, and often does, leave the city with zero food, thus rendering the remaining garrison ineffective (i'm working on the assumption that a garrison with no food is still equal to no garrison). if that unit is then defeated all that food is lost to the city. i suggest that the same mechanics used for distributing food amongst units in the field should be applied to units leaving the city and units remaining in the city. in other words, the amount the unit leaving carries should be proportionate to its numbers versus the numbers remaining. (i manualy move my garrison out then rush my unit thats leaving towards the nearest city with food, quickly returning my garrison to the city carrying their food. But the AI cant do this).

Game Speed Control
Personaly i dont need this, i'm patient. But sometimes u need to wait for a freshly taken areas food stocks to stabilise before you move your army out. Sometimes u need to wait for winter to end, or even autumn to begin, before u make your next move. I use these times to look around my empire, tweak some supply lines, review my troop levels and look to see if theres any city walls and garrisons i no longer need etc. But some ppl are less patient, and for them, and to give the game broader appeal, perhaps some game speed control might be a good idea. x2, x4 would probably be more than enough, perhaps with it reverting to x1 with the occurence of any actions that u have it set to auto-pause on. Just an idea i thought id put out there.

Thebes was the death of me this game try as well. I've hit some kind of fatal condition where all my save games are now corrupt. The only one working was the first save I made 32 hours before after liberating Pella.

I don't want to stop playing, but B12 has been exceedingly crash heavy for me. Anyone else getting a CTD? Mine seems to be locating or placing an actor in the game engine. Report and all that sent to Rob already.

- It also appears to be impossible to recruit the "6th" of Peltasts from Pella.