What could we steal from other fantasy games...

[Dragar]

As a new player it is definitely the UI that I think could be improved, it can be very tedious handling a lot of the small things each turn. In turns of content and depth the game is great. Civ IV probably handles a lot of similar issues, if we’re talking about games to steal from. Maybe some better ways around them exist and I just don’t know how yet, but the repetitive tasks I’d love to avoid are:
• Movement – scheduling movement over a number of turns with waypoints, or alternately a pathfinding mechanism. Wouldn’t hurt to have someway of automoving troops recruited in a province to a different province, particularly where the place you are recruiting from is far from the battlefront. I understand there is an issue with commander requirements, but there must be a valid solution to it.
• Repeat build – setting a province to recruit the same units each turn until you change it.
• Repeat forge – as above, would be a great time saver with some of the mass produced items especially.
• Site searching – would love to be able to tell a mage to wander amongst friendly provinces and site search. Or even to assign his movement with waypoints but be able to tell him to search for a turn at each one. Could do the same with site searching spells, the caster casts the specific spell each turn on a province that hasn’t been tested for it before.
• Goto next active unit – I often find I forget to move someone. The difficulty I guess is units that have moved defaulting to Defend, so how would the computer identify active units you want to do something with? I’m sure there is an answer somewhere though
• Battle reports – More detail on the units present and numbers of each type killed, not just overall numbers. Watching every battle is time consuming, having enough summary information would reduce the number we need to watch. Also when capturing a fortress or an assassination fight, no detail is given at all in the sense of a normal battle.

I’m sure there are others – basic theme is to take mundane tasks out of the game to save more time for the interesting stuff! I’m sure it would make multiplayer games faster and more viable too.

One other is with regards to save games. At first I thought it was great not to have a save option, no incentive to cheat a little to go back. That is until I sent my Pretender alone into a fight a couple of hours into a game, not realising that the other commander with the army hadn’t:
- been selected,
- couldn’t fulfil the move but it wasn’t flagged when I click
- picked up all the troops sitting in the province due to a retreat or commander death

Those little mistakes that happen because you aren’t spending a heap of time checking everything can ruin a long game due to the save system. I fully understand having the ability to save as an option only, especially in MP, but I find the level of checking required in a SP game when I’m trying to learn pretty tiring. I want to spend my time making interesting decisions, not micromanaging detail. I can only imagine how much work there is playing larger maps – I’m only on medium so far!
That said, very interesting game with a steep learning curve, which is awesome. I’ve already convinced one other friend to buy so we can MP.