Suggestions and Feedback

[Sir Althfons]

Well, I was playing The Sundering right now... I have to tell you I'm enjoying your mod a lot, so thank you very much guys.

I like the units and the music, and where did you get from those fantastic elven protraits for the characters !?

By the way those war hydras have eaten my braves like pop corns, and I couldn't even kill but one of them, I think that perhaps it should be reviewed, cause I first emptied all my load of arrows on them (3 regiments) and then I attacked non-stop with 2 militia, 1 spearelves, and 2 noble bodyguards, and then the archers (one them a sea guard regiment).
I had to withdraw (...once more).

Oh, and the Tyranoci and Nagarite chariot and Avelornian ballista guys are somehow too glossy, and so is the Nagarite captain.

I've also recently wittnessed how a Veterans of Eltin Aryan (or something like that) unit dispatched a ing dragons regiment. By Godness sake, that can't be.

And also there is the militia issue... too much of it, I'm afraid. For instance, I recently conquered Everspring and returned it to the Avelornians, and all the AI could think of in returning was making plenty of militia troopers...

And the economy is still too mean, in my opinion it should still be boosted just a bit more, it is too hard to keep something of an army and make your settlement upgrades.
Oh, did I say settlements? It's incredible how quick do they grow; I'm in turn 54 right now, and Aerininian and Brigthmoon have not spent too much time as minor town, are already pressing to be upgraded to large city.

Cheers

[Kolwen]

Hi Althfons,
Are you playing with the 0.62 patch? Those silver-surfer bugs should be fixed with the patch.
We are aware of the militia problem. For the next release we are going to balance that issue.
Try with bolt throwers with hydras, you will beat them in a few shoots.
Regards!

[Sir Althfons]

Right, right. I'm glam you have in mynd correcting the militia issue.

I didn't still know of the existance of the 0.62 patch, so thank you, I'll try with it.
And I will make sure to bring some bolt throwers the next time I try to get rid out of that nasty hydras (they're still out there near Wallmourn).
Also remember about the dragons.


Bye mate.

[-=Lynx=-]

Just thought that I should say thanx!!
This is something that I have been waiting for since first playing TW:shogun many years ago.

I really like that you have been true too the lore and of course the units is absolutely stunning.

Even though this is my first venture in the world of mods I must say that download and installation was completely pain free and despite this being a beta version it has been very stable, not one ctd so far.

I will try to come back with some constructive feedback a soon as I have played some more

Keep up the good work and ones again thank you!

[Kolwen]

Thanks both for your comments!

[Kadath]

So, I've been playing the latest beta a bit after stumbling upon it a couple days ago, and I must say I'm impressed. Several others are, I see from the well deserved positive feedback you are getting, and indeed the quality of the mod is already pretty astonishing. I have never been a fan of Warhammer, so I'm completely oblivious to the lore involved, but I wanted a relatively simple, old fashioned sword & sorcery game and this mod really comes through. The ingame events - even though they usually aren't linked to actual scripted spawns, battles etc on the map (I myself prefer a more sandbox campaign anyway) - do a good enough job to let even a casual player enjoy the setting and get in the mood.

While indeed the mod is pretty awesome and I'm having tons of fun with it, I'll take the chance to report what I'm finding not entirely convincing. A couple of these things I see have already been reported in the various threads, so forgive me if you were already aware of them, it's just easier for me to list everything I come upon so I don't forget anything

Aesthetics

1. The default UI is quite good. Tidy and neat enough, though some color contrasts could be better here and there to make reading certain things easier, and some portraits or icons are missing in certain instances (as an example, while usually a captain does have a random elven portrait, it reverts back to a vanilla medieval one when it appears as a reinforcement army in the pre-battle screen), but nothing unusual for a beta. The "custom" UIs for Avelorn and Nagarythe, however, are less friendly, a bit too heavy on the colors, and Avelorn is especially messy. It's pretty, in a sense, but cluttered, hard to read and you often can't really distinguish where a button borders are, or where a section ends and another one begins.
   Also, I'm not really a fan of your buildings icons: I find the usual "isometric" cut offs with transparent backgrounds easier to distinguish than your picture/icons with frames. With several of these I have to hover them to see what they are instead of being able to recognize them at first glance.
2. The music is great, though there are a couple of world map tracks that seem to end with a loud scratch noise. I'm not really sure if it's the specifc track that has an issue, or if it's the engine that sometimes randomly goes bonkers when trying to load the next track.
3. I see one of the biggest selling points you have are the battle graphics, and indeed they are breathtaking. Surprisingly enough, performance seems to be rather good despite the high poly count of your models, and the high men count of your regiments. Actually, I seem to be able to play without any issues with the usual shader version 2: could I ask why is the shader 1 suggested? I've searched into the bug/tech threads but didn't find any specific info about it; is there some confirmed, repeatable visual bug I simply have not stumbled upon yet, or is it just a recommendation as something that could help if and when the high quality graphics do cause too much of a strain on the system?
4. Already reported, I believe, but just to be sure: Etaine and Cothique have inverted faction symbols.

Gameplay

1. It might be me, as I'm used to play TATW elves and even when I play Stainless Steel or other medieval mods I usually go for the elite archers factions, but archery seems a bit... underpowered in The Sundering. Most archer units, even supposedly elite ones, have somewhat mediocre missile attack stats and usually very few ammo: this, combined with several heavy armored units with crazy high defense stats, as well as creature units with more than 1HP, makes most archers quite useless unless you deploy A LOT of them. It especially strikes as wrong as we are in a war between elves: as stated, I don't know the lore so they just might be a less ranged combat oriented race than in other famous fantasy settings, yet from what I glance from the ingame descriptions it would seem they indeed are, or should be. It's a bit sad for an archery sucker like myself to have discovered a fantasy mod about elves... and then find myself hardly ever training archer units because they just ain't worth it.
2. Archery 2 - vengeance: no flaming arrows, apparently. Well, I guess it kinda makes sense for these tree huggers to not want to burn to the ground whatever they see, but when I see an horde of treemen and other... woody beings rushing at me, I'd really like to have the classic gameplay feature normal arrows are rather useless against them, but flaming ones, now those will hurt them, badly. At least some elite archers should imho have that skill, depending on their culture.
3. The roster is right now somewhat small, which isn't surprising given the sheer amount of work you must have put into the models, but anyway I don't mind it at all: I'm not really a super fan of those mods with hundreds of units, most of which end being actually pretty much the same from a gameplay perspective.
   Anyway, here I would differentiate a bit the units shared by all the factions. As I see they all already have their own specific entry in the EDU I suppose it's already planned: common archers from Avelorn, for instance, might have a bit more range than the others, standard cavalry from Ellyrion might be a little stronger at charging, melee units from Chrace could have an higher morale, and so on. It wouldn't change much, as one point here or there won't really shift the balance either way, but it's a bit of welcomed flavour.
4. This is an annoying quirk that's bugging me endlessly: somehow, it seems that the game keeps defaulting (and reverting to) the "fast map movement" setting. Just like when you press the spacebar to quicken the map movements of AI units so their turn ends faster. As it keeps reverting here, though, I often find myself having to hurry to press the space bar to actually slow down movement so to not miss some dangerous enemy army movement near my borders. I've never seen this happening in any other mod, and I thought it was pretty much an hardcoded feature of the game engine, I have no idea what is causing this odd behaviour here.
5. I have yet to play a campaign for a very long time, but I started several ones with different factions to get a feeling about them so I could find the ones I liked most. And in all these campaigns, that Anar guy joins me at around turn 10-20, while in all info posts I've seen you guys state he should spawn around turn 75 or so. Might it happen because the first thing I do is always to quickly have my diplomats go across the island to strike alliances with all the other loyalist factions, thus I usually am allied with Anar's faction as soon as turn 5-6? Not complaining, it's actually a pleasure to get him soon to spice things up, while you often still are only fortifying your territories, so you can use him for what he is intended: guerrilla warfare; I just don't know if it's intended for it to happen this way.
6. Archer Militia isn't a free_upkeep_unit like spear militia. Imho it should be, it's militia after all, and as archers are already quite useless as previously stated, if I even have to pay the crappy militia ones for my garrisons, then there's no reason whatsoever to ever train them.
7. Villages can't train units: they have zero recruiting slots. Might be intended, and I'm actually not against that... but it can be confusing at first when you see you can select certain units to train but then they just stay there in queue.
8. An issue I know Gigantus has already reported: the switching of settlement ownership between demons and cult often ends up leaving cities without garrisons around the map. This is especially bad because while the player can and will take advantage of that as soon as the occasion arises, the AI seems very reticent at taking over defenseless settlements. There's this Anar fullstack in my current Caledor campaign, for instance, that even though has lost its capital and is as such pretty much an horde, is just sitting next to an empty city in the Ellyrion/Avelorn area and seems to have no intention of grabbing it. And neither the other powers around the area seem to be interested in it.

AOB
I, for one, kind of like the harsh economy/unrest issues we have to face. Indeed there's a better balance that can be achieved, for certain particularly crippled factions especially, but it's supposed to be a civil war, I find it fitting and it does offer a different gameplay approach than usual. You have to fortify your borders and strengthen your approval before being able to go on the offensive, even though you know there's the Bad Guy™ coming. This helps building the feeling of urgency and menace, you can't do what you actually can for instance in TATW: steamroll Mordor in the first turns just because... why not?

Also, and finally, I know they wouldn't fit the lore and this would be material for a submod... but when the dwarves and orcs will be in the mod, someone's better make a submod to have them recruitable as rare mercenaries or something like that in the campaign!


Anyway, again, kudos and thanks for a surprisingly good and fun mod, it's honestly been years since the last time a mod for MTW2 really drove my attention away from Third Age or Stainless Steel. And it's still a beta: I can't wait to see what you have in store for the 1.0 release

[TWmadman]

Thank you for your feedback dude, and i'am glad our mod pleases you!

Concerning UI's yeah it is a well known problem about Avelorn and Nagarythe ones, it is not easy to read. The problem is our team was always very small (no more 3 people working on the mod AT ONCE) so i ve pointed out that problem but our 2d artists were too busy to fix this (which demands some long work) and focused on anything else more important.

About music, i apologie for the scratch sound that may happens on rare occasions. It is a bug i was never able to fix yet but i'am glad you still like my soundtrack.

We are aware about Cothique and Eataine symbols stuff don't worry we even added all the missing banners.

About gameplay, you have to know we tried to make the balance system as close to real tabletop battle system. Elven archers are deadly, yeah, and you will notice they will hit infantries pretty well. It is obvious they won't decimate elite heavy infantries wearing large shield and Ithilmar armor... they are "normal" archers.

Some archers are more powerful than others : Sea Rangers, Lost Vale Maidens, Shadow Warriors....

Archers are not supposed to kill easily giant beasts like dragons, hydras or manticores! to kill such foes, it is simple : artillery

Eagle Claw, Repeater Bolt Thrower etc will easily shut down the big stuff.

Regarding the lore, Avelorn is not supposed to have the best archers ever. Chrace has the best wood for bows, their sawmill give archer bonus. Chrace and Avelorn has many tools for ambushing and believe me they hare white lions, their strenght is enough etc... Any suggestion is good but be conscious everything has been thought and debated for monts amongst the team. i personnaly balance the EDU (unit stats, morale and abilities) for an entire month.

About fire arrows the choice is simple, we wanted to give Shadow Warriors (recruitable from Shadow Warriors Hideout building, and mercenary in Anar region) to have all the dirty tricks. Fire arrows, good hiding skills, stakes, toughest missile dmg...

The Shadow Warriors are legendary, read about them.

I'am glad you enjoyed the lore and all the events while knowing nothing about warhammer universe coz it was intended. we wanted to give immersion to any kind of player and allow him to learn everything about this conflict without any heavy knowledge needed in the lore.


About other races, well, you ll know more soon about this project and believe me you won't be disapointed!

[Slor]

I dont play M2 much anymore but i've enjoyed what i have played of your mod and eagerly await the next.

My lone suggestion would be to throw in some orange/red tint to the sky color. It really gives off that Warhammer essence imo.

Great job though!!!

[Alkarin]

Using 0.69

A lot of units names have extra spaces usually in the beginning of the name which makes them look awkward. Like "Prince__blahblah" instead of "Prince_blahblah"
UI on treasury screen doesn't fit properly and one of the borders actually covers up the bottom line of the treasury balances
Eataine unless you are playing as them always die by about turn 3 due to an army of cultists that come and siege Lothern
A lot of Ellyrion units since they are missing Icons are hard to tell whether they are Calvary or infantry before you recruit them and use them on the field.
A lot of Unit descriptions are lacking and have a lot of Grammatical errors and in some cases don't make sense
Ellyrion seems to have a ridiculously hard time with money I think but I'm not sure if its economy is where you guys want it or not. I'll play a bit more into the campaign with this faction and others to see.
Was trying out Dark Elves in Custom battle and a lot of their limbs and legs and chests are all out of wack. Also they don't have the shield button you click to light up all the units on the map but I think this is only an issue with the Custom Battle factions. In campaign the shield button is always there.

This is all I have so far feedback wise. I have to play more to see if what I'm saying is justified or not.

[paradamed]

I dont know if this is the right place to ask but where do I hire cavalry units as Yvresse, pls?

[Sephiroth91]

I've just started taking a look at the new units and all I have to say it's: ing awesome.

However, I noticed a few bugs: princesses still have no traits, Horse Lords lack their melee weapon and I had to edit the files, and quite oddly yvressian generals add religious unrest to their cities.

[Bela]

I dont know if this is the right place to ask but where do I hire cavalry units as Yvresse, pls?

Yvresse is Scotland, you should be able to recruit cavalry units (Riders, Silver Helms and so on) from the House of Horse and its upgrades.

[Ichigorukia]

this may or may not be the right place to ask but will Tiranoc and the cultists be playable in the sundering campagin in the next version?

[rummtata]

@devs: Are you looking for any specific feedback on the beta 0.69? Anything you need us to test in particular? I'd like to help you out in that departement, but I guess you're not helped a lot by a thousand random suggestions ;-)

If you've got your hands full and there isn't really anything we can do right now that's allright too, but if there is, pray tell =)

[radioroo]

Hey guys, firstly to say, love the mod. I came from COW via surrealbeliefs youtube channel and I have to say this mod really hits the spot, congrats on a job well done. Like many others, I can't wait to check out SFTOW so keep up the good work.
Not sure if this is the best place to post this but I'm kinda new to this stuff...
Playing as Ellyrion, I joined a purge for Galthyr and took it out, no probs. However, they countered with a stack and a half next turn and besieged. Knowing I didn't have much chance, I thought I'd send my diplomat to see what I could glean out of them and, lo and behold, they deemed a ceasefire 'very generous'. To the tune of 25000 silver leaves to be exact. And they have done for the past 10 turns! Whilst they besiege me at this city every turn, they are provding enough funds for me to build armies to take all of their cities in one fell swoop (obviously I can't take anything yet as every turn I broker a ceasefire it would break my sieges too). Anyway, it put paid to my money troubles, but doesn't really feel fair! I'm playing 0.69 on med/med (because I suck) Any ideas how to change/prevent this or should I just up the difficulty?
Cheers