Some small tooltip/ui thoughts
An option/button to skip enemy moves
It's exceptionally rare that I care about random enemy movements, so towards the mid and late game, I find myself constantly mashing through the animation skip button. An option to either disable enemy moves entirely, or a button to skip them all would be great.
An option to only show moves resulting in combat with your units would also be welcome.
Military/Terrain tooltips
It'd be nice if the terrain tooltips changed based on whether you were controlling a military unit or not
Right now, you always see the terrain resource boosts - but those are only meaningful when building/planning a city, casting certain spells, or if you have a settler selected
The rest of the time, if you have a
military unit selected, it'd be great if you could see combat mods based on the terrain type and the terrain skills that a given unit has, so you can quickly see at a glance where you should be moving/standing for combat
Movement distance indicator
Just a simple change to the current gold/grey/cursor marks - add a different color to the movement path to show when you are on the
final movement square. Note that the UI does this with a blue gem marker if you are moving long distances, but what it does
not do is show the indicator if you're moving
within the units movement distance.
That is: Say you have a unit with 3 movement. You're standing on a big flat field of plains. If you move the cursor three spaces away, you'll get the same indicator as two spaces, but you can't attack if you move three spaces. The only way to confirm this is to move the cursor
farther, and then the blue end-of-current-turn movement limit will show up.
This is kind of inconvenient when dealing with various types of terrain/terrain walking/friendly city spaces/etc and trying to figure out if you can move the unit far enough to attack an enemy unit. Simply changing the cursor color to indicate that you're at the edge of a units movement range and can no longer attack that turn would be nice.
I bring this up because I've lost an attack one too many times by moving one space farther than I should have
Adding a turn counter to long distance moves, so you can see how many turns it will take to get somewhere would be really nice too.
Resource right click tooltips
There are a good number of racial specific buildings for each rare resource, and I can't always remember which are which - it'd be awesome if you could right click terrain to bring up more info, specifically what structures could be built on a given resource. This would help with planning what racial city to drop on a tile if you have access to multiple settler types.
Fast buy unit upgrades
While I'm always picky about what upgrades go on what units, later in the game when I'm flush with gold, I often want a new unit to be fully upgraded. A button to buy ALL upgrades would speed up the tedious process of upgrading a fresh batch of recruits significantly.
Better sorting for unit enchantments
Mid/late game units can have an
insane number of buffs active. Normally this isn't a problem, but when you're trying to figure out if a unit already has an enchantment placed on it, this is really annoying.
So a few different suggestions for this:
1) Prevent casting a buff on a unit that already has the buff. This wouldn't be a perfect fix, but for whatever reason, you can recast a buff that a unit already has on it.
2) Change the buff sorting. Right now it displays all the buffs in a gigantic pile, sorted in the order the unit acquired them. If all unit inherent buffs, perks, upgrades, and then enchantments were separated, this would at least help a little.
3) Change the enchantment sorting. If all offensive/defensive/mobility/utility enchantments were clustered together, you could more easily identify if a unit is missing a weapon enhancement, haste spell, armor buff, etc.
4) Change the spell UI to dim out enchantments that a selected unit already has active. This would greatly simplify figuring out what a unit already has active.
5) Add a button for enchantments that behaves exactly the same way as the existing 'Upgrades' button. You pick a unit, click an 'Enchantments' button, and select an enchantment the unit doesn't already have. This would be my favorite choice for obvious reasons
It'd make maintaining your hero/temple/heavy hitter units much more efficient.
There's also a bug with the 'Expanded' spellbook. You a) can't use the mousewheel to scroll it and b) if you have too many spells in a category, it simply cuts off after one page and won't go any farther with the left/right buttons.
Custom hotkeys
Simple as that. I typically remap my buttons using something like autohotkey, but I'm sure there are plenty of players who would love the ability to remap hotkeys natively.
AI improvements to managing heroes/temple units
There are a lot of reasons the AI has trouble against a human player even on 'impossible' difficulty in this game, but I think a fairly major one is that the AI seems to be very poor about properly enhancing its 'super' units. I have yet to run into an AI hero or temple unit (or even high end upgraded unit) that is properly buffed to the gills with upgrades/enchantments/gear.
I don't know how much that can be improved, but if they AI could be taught to be much more careful with its strongest units and try to level them up and keep them alive and fully buff them, they'd be a lot more dangerous.
It should also be more aggressive about dispelling
your supremely buffed units. Piling every enchantment in the world onto a single unit would be a much less effective strategy if the AI was aggressive about removing them.
Adding new types of mid/high end monsters that strip off
single enchantments with each attack (not counter-attack) would also help.
Even some 'armor breaking' monsters that could break single
upgrades would also be another nasty type of resource/buff drainer.
