After starting a game and playing for a short while I have a couple of questions/comments on the UI
Research UI - there are 2 screens for looking at research options, the default one and the tree. I'm curious what the point of the non-tree option is? It seems to make it really confusing as to where specific tech paths lead to and it doesn't help me decide what I should research next. Maybe I'm just used to the tree a la GC2 - but the tree seems more intuitively informative in a long-term strategic manner...
One possible solution would be to combine the two formats as was done in FE where you have the 3 main tech schools (civ, war, magic) and when selecting a tech it displays its place on the tree as well as the little dab of story/info about what the specific thing you're hovering over actually is.
The obvious drawback to this is that the skill dependencies can't cross schools (ie a warfare tech can't be a prereq for a civ tech) - or at least it's difficult to portray that they do with a flat 2-dimensional tree.
Perhaps this could be remedied by a 3D tree, such as the skill tree from that old game Ascendency (from the mid 90's?), which had a sort of helical shaped "tree". The UI could be like the FE research screen and when a player switches from, say Warfare to Magic and the helical tree could rotate to display the techs on the Magic side of the helix/tree - but if there were Warfare or Civilization pre-reqs for the tech, it could still be presented by lines from techs that were rotated to the background as they are on the other side of the helix/tree.
Also, as an aside - my mousewheel doesn't zoom in nor out of the tech tree - it would be nice if it did so I could get a broader view.
Planet tile bonuses - the UI needs to be a lot better at explaining what the tile bonus is and what the adjacency bonuses are - and also, more generally what the differences are between the various bonuses (like the various types of production vs manufacturing) - I assume that this is slated to be cleaned up, but it's still confusing for me.
On another note, I was hoping/wishing that technology/research could be a more procedurally generated aspect of the game, rather than predefined specific technology stepping stones - but I realize that this is probably really difficult to do. Still though, having a trade off between blue sky research (IE a lot of DARPA research or old Bell Labs back in the day) and engineering research (ie research to solve a specific problem) would make for a really interesting research/technology dynamic. Maybe one of the later expansions could be focused on a deep and compelling research/technology overhaul (after all, ascension is a victory condition)...
Game's looking great (which is to say, as I expected) thus far. Trying not to do too much alpha/beta playing as it was a recipe for burn out with Elemental (there were so many tweaks/patches/reworks after release that it was functionally a pre-release experience for me) - I just played FE:LH for the first time yesterday (great game too, btw).
Cheers,
-tid242
