BTW, a group of us testers are planning to start a pbem cooperative 'progression' game on the day of launch (March 19th). Each of us will play 15 turns, write a colorful summary, and then pass the game to the next player to continue with the next 15 turns. Essentially, we are all playing the same side, just taking turns as to the decision-making.
It's launch day. There have been a few launch-day woes, certainly there are bugs. A few people are not able to launch the game at all. But I'm currently playing it just fine.
BTW, if you'd like to follow the play by play of our Succession game, it's here: http://steamcommunity.com/app/265970/discussions/0/617328967247498651/ I kind of screwed up on my turn -- I don't mean strategically, but I did kind of lose most of the text for my turn, so I simply left a summary (which is probably just as well -- I don't think anyone really needs the kind of detail that people are including anyway). Strategically, I think I did well, and had a most eventful turn. I successfully defended one of our cities from an incursion, captured two neutral cities (including a really juicy dwarven city that was really well-built and ready to generate both gold and armies), I expanded our exploration of the eastern continent, found an easy path to the western continent that didn't require boats, made first contact with an enemy setting up the next player to capture an enemy node AND great library, as well as finding an open gateway to the Plane of Fire (thanks yellow peril). It's interesting to see people's different tactics -- some are city spammers, always building wide. I'm more in favor of a hybrid strategy of building high and wide. So you get some rebels? That's the price of growth. I know that the players who went after me tend to favor my strategy, whereas the people early in the queue tend to favor the more expansive strategy (one so much so that he quit the game I suspect because he didn't like the direction our late-game players were taking it in). I was actually building... you know, buildings, and that costs money. Well, that money has to be for a purpose, I just found a purpose for it.
Another update on our succession game. You can read the details at the above URL. But here's the thing: 1. The AI cheats like heck -- On my turn last night, our principal AI rival, that we had a non-aggression pact with, attacked one of our cities twice on one turn, the second time capturing it... without actually declaring war. Now that's just screwed up. 2. On the positive side, the AI has vastly improved to the point that I discovered to my surprise (and regret) that our principal rival is now multi-planar -- he has cities on the prime and fire planes. This is not going to go well.
I thought that this was worth posting about. WI has posted their roadmap for future updates. You can read about it here: http://steamcommunity.com/app/265970/discussions/0/618458030677983536/
It is a nice roadmap to see- but I didn't observe any expansion or paid dlc releases? Devs can't work for free, and all. I hope sales allow them to continue to work on it. I have both WoM and Stardrive 2 on my wishlist once the patching settles out.
Honestly, I've been a little frustrated because each new patch, while fixing old bugs, brings all new bugs, or even occasionally returns previously fixed bugs. Whats worse is that the new stuff that is broken seems to be very basic things, like centering on selected units, and so on. I think part of the problem was that they increased the rate of patching to a point that their quality control was badly slipping. They are slowing down starting next week though (back to one beta + one official patch per week). I'm hoping that their QC will improve with the slower pace.
They have said that they plan on having additional DLCs. there's been a lot of interesting suggesions, some of which they've even said they'd like to do in a DLC, or at least they'd consider doing in a DLC. I just think that's too far in the future for them to be making concrete promises about.
FYI: 2 free DLCs will be available shortly for the game (unfortunately, they are still waiting on Steam to make them available). The first one adds 5 new sorceror lords. The second one adds Titans, which are god-like unique units that you can either fight or somehow convince (?) to join your forces and fight on your side. As I've told others, the state of the game is as follows: It's now very stable. There are still bugs. I know of one spell that you should definitely not use as it causes issues (Spiky Rocks I think it's called, which function kind of like caltrops). That's the only game-killing bug I know of. The rest are relatively minor. Diplomacy is weak on all levels (the UI and the use of diplomacy by the AI). The Combat AI is good. It needs tweaking, but it does some smart stuff now also, like preferring to attack non-summoned units over summoned units, and avoiding attacking units that have huge defensive bonuses (I've seen it wait out certain defensive enchantments when prudent). Strategic AI needs a lot of work, but it's been getting better (the AI actually does expand to other planes, and does build top-tier units). I haven't played multiplayer yet, but it is available now (there are PBEM servers). I can't speak as to how well it works though. I do know that some people are playing hot-seat games though, which does work. The summer sale should be coming up soonish, so if you like 4X games, you may want to consider this one. I'm still enjoying it. I'm frustrated that the DLC aren't yet available but that's steam's fault, from what I understand.
The DLC are working now: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=450336267 http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=450472595 http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=450472672
