Hi all
I am fairly casual gamer (with limited gaming time!) who loves strategy games such as this and was keen to play this demo - I used to spend hours playing Empire-type games in my youth. In general whilst I loved playing the game, I'm not sure I'm going to buy it because I am not convinced I have the time to play it (or at least too much of my valuable game time is going to be spent doing almost accounting-like tasks).
I did feel a couple of things could have the handling of 100s of units a little easier. Later in the game, I felt I was spending too much time managing units (finding idle transports, loading units, unloading units etc) when I knew exactly what I wanted to do - it just seemed to take a long time to execute on my plans.
I found that as a person short of time, ship transports with a very island heavy demo map to be quite frustrating. I seemed to spend so much time waiting for transports to be constructed or for units to load up or transport ships to move to where I wanted to attack.
I think this leads to a couple of suggestions:
1. Review of hot keys (or maybe better documentation) so that:
a. I can select idle units (maybe tab between them).
b. If I sentry them (S) then the next idle unit should be selected automatically.
c. Don't un-sentry all units after i upgrade them. At least that is what I seemed to find and it was annoying!
2. Simplify the left hand news/task bar:
a. Ability to suppress units that require upgrade if they aren't in a city and so can't be upgraded. I had 10s of ships that were out on patrol that continually cluttered the interface.
b. As someone previously mentioned, ability to sort idle units by type or even have a tree control so that items could be closed.
c. Put idle units above "require upgrade" list in the bar. It's good to know upgrades are available but they shouldn't take up so much room.
3. Better "center on units control". Sometimes it didn't seem obvious what unit was selected when I clicked on an idle unit in the list.
Anyway, I still like the game and I want to love it/buy it... I still need to think about it though. I do wonder whether a map with more landmass might be better for a gamer with less time like me (?)
- Andrew
