Few suggestions – Retreat Prompt, Overland Speed, UI Lag, Fleeing enemies

[guidon101]

Just wanted to first say, this is a FUN GAME, GREAT WORK so far. Found it very challenging, especially in the beginning, but it seems once you get a few brothers armored and a couple levels, I can start to survive and not have to run away from everything; everything, except the UI…

Had just a few suggestions; have read the forums a little bit, hopefully not double posting same ideas, but I want to point them out in case anyway:

1) Fleeing enemies – Just had a long battle over 30 mins+ 9 v 13 bandits. The main melee engagement was only about maybe 10 mins, the rest of the 20+ mins, I spent running around clearing up the FoW to hunt down the remaining 2 archers (and apparently couple other melee guys that must’ve fled and re-rallied). Can’t help feel like the end of battles like this is just a waste of time. The morale and bravery mechanics are great ideas and work really well in my opinion, so I don’t want to undermine them. I just feel like there must be a more efficient way to do a battle “clean up”… maybe:
(a) if every single enemy unit is routing, then allow the enemy the option to “surrender”; in this case, the player can accept the surrender, and let the survivors live (with their loot), or optionally to “quick slaughter” the prisoners and take all loot (maybe some consequences to balance this out – imagine having traits/ancillaries that evolve with the characters choices, wouldn’t that be cool, like in the TW series?).
(b) allow an “auto-resolve” or “Auto-play” for player units to mop up the fleeing AI; this owuld be nice in general for the easy or mop-up battles; but hopefully on “auto-play” mode, it would be possible to stop it and take over again as player, if needed

2) Retreat Verification Prompt (Y/N) – Speaking of the same long 30+ min battle, when I was down to the last 1 enemy unit that was hidden in the FoW somewhere, I thought, maybe there’s something in the options that can help speed things up or help me find this last unit… so I checked on the “Always show AI moves”, and then went to close the options screen, and then… I hit “RETREAT” in haste when I meant to press “resume”…. OMG… WHY DID I DO THAT…. suffice to say, my winning battle 9v13, with no casualties and minimal damage on my side, with only 1 remaining enemy left… my forces instantly retreated and half of my men died… I just wish there was a Y/N prompt before retreating for the player.

3) Overland map speed – I’ve seen this topic mentioned a few times elsewhere, and I kind of agree with some of the comments that this might need some improvement. Some suggestions:
(a) player and enemy overland map units move basically the same speed, but the player unit does not have good AI pathfinding…it’s just point-to-point, and so sometimes the player unit gets stuck or stops when it reaches its destination, but then the TIME KEEPS MOVING, so the enemy inevitably catches up; in Mount&Blade, the TIME PAUSES when the player unit is stopped by default, and you could optionally let the time run by pressing spacebar; this would be a nice feature!
(b) as others have mentioned, it might add an interesting dimension to have “overland map” skills, such as Pathfinding (faster movement) or Scouting (larger visibility/tracking/footsteps, etc.);
(c) It seems safer and faster to travel mostly by roads, but doing it manually is a little bit tedious and annoying; it would be nice if there was a “stick-to-roads” feature while moving for the player army, like the caravans do

4) UI Lag Issues — I’ve seen some posts of this elsewhere and I have the same issues and found similar solutions…
(a) turn off mouse hardware acceleration – this seems to fix general UI, inventory lag
(b) turning off v-sync – this seems to fix the lag in combat when switching between my units; although there is still a little lag there, and I’m not sure why; i’m not even sure why v-sync would have anything to do with the lag when the combat switches to one of my units, but it seems to work…
(c) I usually run 1920×1080, but it seems the UI is smoother on lower resolutions
Overall, for a 2D game, on a system that can run the best 3D engine games at high quality and high framerates, the UI framerate/lag issues here seems inappropriate. If the three options above hadn’t fixed the lag issues (about 80% resolved, still not perfectly smooth), I was ready to quit the game early. It’s one thing to battle the game difficulty design, another thing to battle the UI :)

Anyway, like I said, still a FUN GAME even in its early release! I’m happy to have bought this to support the development. I see tremendous potential here. Hope these comments help and look forward to some of the fixes!

Thank you for the great work!

[Sky]

1 – Well that a thing for sure.

2 – There is a prompt when you press the retreat icon on the battle screen that explains about being on the edge of the map and such. Now if you retreat from the “Esc” menu then there is none. Just noticed myself, and this is if not a bug then a small error.

3 – Devs already said there will be speed differences. A system somewhat like M&B has.

4 – Now this is a rare thing to me and did not manage to catch how and why it occurs, might have to do with video drivers but still looking for it. Had it yesterday a heavy one. The same game client run for full day on pause while was doing other things sometimes jumping back for a battle. In the evening the heavy UI delay kicked in inside the battle. It was time to go home so didn’t care much.

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