I've played the demo a few times now and really enjoyed it (with some reservations - see below), considerably more than CivV I must say, which remains forever uninstalled.
I'd like to ask the developers how different the released game is to the demo? Is there any information available on what changes have been made?
As indicated above, I found some issues with the game which I hope will be improved on.
o Diplomacy
This felt rather weak, possibly the worst aspect of the game and unfortunately on a par with CivV's diplomacy. I offered the Rat peace, "you will regreeeet it". I offered him an absolute ton of gold for 1 (one) mana, "you will regreeeeet it". No matter what negotiation I tried, it seems that I would regreeeeet it. I next tried the Lich chap, apparently he liked me because of 'religion'; I wasn't aware that I had one, or what it was even. Instead of regreeeeeeting it, it seems that everything I offered him disappointed him. I have no idea why. Diplomacy has to make sense to the player else it's not worth bothering with. Civ IV pretty much nailed diplomacy IMO, you always had a good idea of what was going on. If you're playing Ghandi and meet Montezuma, you know pretty much what to expect
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o Resource balance (gold, food, mana)
I have always ended up with a ton of gold that I couldn't spend each time I've played the demo. Mana seems to be very hard to accumulate even if I build a lot of mana traps because a) the spells seem to be very expensive and b) there are a lot of factors which reduce your mana income (e.g. army size), much more so than affects the gold income.
o Spells
When a cast spell becomes available didn't seem to be intuitive, but that could well be lack of experience on my part. I'd hoped that I could 'store up' spells, for example I'd cast a healing spell, but when it became available I didn't need it anymore (due to resting the unit). I then found that I couldn't cast any others until I'd 'gotten rid of' the healing spell. It seemed to me that it might provide some interesting tactics to be able to cast and 'store up' a few spells.
o 'Rest' order
I could not work out why I could rest/heal units sometimes and not at others. There was no pattern that I could recognise.
o Left-click for both select and move
A cause for some frustration as often in trying to select a building on a hex to see its information, this would issue a continue-move order to a unit which I thought I'd finished with, sometimes moving them in range of enemy units. Perhaps it would make more sense to differentiate selection and movement/attacking.
o Left click ('LMB') to cancel orders
I found this to be really quite frustrating. The functionality seems to be broken, resulting in multiple clicks all over the place to try to cancel an existing order. I don't even understand the need for this mechanic to exist; if no new orders are given to a unit, it should proceed with the orders previously given, else why not just allow a new order to be issued? Then there's no need to have to both explicitly cancel an existing order and issue a new one.
o Information
I assume that the full game will provide information on the various upgrades and perks, whereas the demo did not..? For example, the different types of armour upgrades, how do they differ? What perks do they offer? Should I go for silver or a different type of armour? Will this sort of information be made available in-game?
o 'Defend' order
It's not clear whether this gives a unit a defensive bonus or not. Also, it's a pain to have to issue this order every turn, as somebody else has suggested a 'Fortify' order might make sense. Similarly to the 'Rest' order problem indicated above, there's an order which tells a unit to defend until an enemy comes within range (can't remember what that's called now, sorry) but this order was not always available and it was not clear why this was.
On balance, I think that I'm going to buy the game even with the above reservations, because it was fun and playable and I wanted to keep going when the demo timed me out.
I sincerely hope that the developers do not pull the same trick as was done for CivV, and actually fix the game properly before bringing out a ton of DLC. That was possibly the most insulting aspect of CivV; to release such a buggy and fundamentally broken game with a triple-A price tag and then ask for even more money without addressing the game's fundamental problems is pretty outrageous.
Right, time to visit Steam and get my wallet out...