About that Fallen Enchantress. It will be the strategy game of the year, I believe. They are really putting in a real effort, and they have learned from their mistakes. Its already ten times better than Elemental:WoM. I have played the beta of FE since the first version, and it really is awesome. Beta 4 with focus on city building and a new resource (essence) is due in a few weeks.
SGOTY, I doubt it. The year is only half over and I can think of 2 other games that are more likely to take that title because the reviewers tend to go for big name titles that sell a lot. After E:WoM boom I don't think the series has much hype left. Plus it's still in beta so they have to actually release it this year.
I went and got the latest copy of the beta and still not overly impressed. It just doesn't feel right when, to make a Warlock comparison, you have monster units that are stronger than Temple units just hanging out near your starting point. Then they mostly just sit there while you build cities around them. Sure some of them raze outpost and resource buildings but that's about it.
Hero units are as powerful as back in the E:WoM days. In a lot of regards it feels more like an RPG which does kind of appeal to that side of me. But at the same time I recruit 3 heroes plus my sovereign and just go to town. I work on the weaker monsters while the insainly difficult ones just sit there doing nothing. After I get research so I can buy better equipment I deck out all 4 of my Hero units and start going to down against the local AI. He sends waves of armies with standard units and I cut them down with my army of 4.
The increase of min distance between cities to 9 tiles and the required setting up of outpost I am kind of torn on because even unarmed pioneers can destroy them. Also the uber monsters were spawn points for other weaker monsters which kept razing them and I spent a lot of time early game constantly rebuilding them because they were constantly spawning in my land and razing stuff since I wasn't able to clear out their main nest. The extra min distance meant it would take my units a few turns just to get from one city to the next before I got tech for roads.
I always did like the Resource nodes give you resources that accumulate and you then spend on units more than Civ5's approach of 1 resource gives you X amount which lets you then only support X number of units. And units seem more reasonably prices in terms of resources than they were back in E:WoM.
Yea it's a lot better than E:WoM but I already knew that from the earlier beta. I'm still not that fond of their combat system though. Sure it zooms in to tactical map mode like MoM did but the maps are so much smaller and just the way numbers play out don't really sit right as it's easy to uber out your heroes. And the Auto-Battle system is just as broke as ever, it has the same problem most 4x games do that allow the player to play tactical or auto-battle. That is the systems use completely different formulas and thus result in vastly different outcomes. The auto-battle system is easy to exploit as the units on the bottom of the list tend to get most of the damage so put a few cheap high HP units in to soak up the hits. If they survive to level up their HP becomes massive and they do their job even better.
I'm still amazed that there are some of the same old bugs are still around for Cloth Map view that were in E:WoM, which is the mode I primarily play in. I'm starting to wonder if it's a limitation of the engine. I played for about 250 turns and then it crashed, tried loading the auto-save and the previous one but for whatever reason it keeps crashing on the following turn. So I called it quits.
It seems decent enough and I'll likely play another game or two when it does finally come out of beta, or if someone again reminds me of it after a new update, since I do already own it thanks to the free copy for E:WoM customers. But I don't see myself putting nearly as much time into it as I have many of my other 4x games. I got over 300 hours on Civ5, 250 hours on Warlock, 200 hours on Star Ruler, No clue time on Sins of Solar Empire because it's not tied to steam but easily 200+, or any of the other 4x games I've played over the years that I spent hundreds of hours on. Heck even that new 4x game Endless Space has me eaten up 60 hours already, of course I pre-ordered it and got in Alpha so got some time in that way.