* I never liked the graphical style of the game.

* Building from scratch in a barren world becomes repetitive. Let me start with a fully grown empire with all or many of the tecs researched!

* Tech tree. You select the same things in each game. It should have more branches.

* The factions are boring. Undead was good though!

* City building is uninteresting.

* I prefer hexagons...

I like LH a lot but it could be even better with a few changes/additions etc:

1. Unit size is now too small.   In the beginning with EWOM the units leveled up to significant group sizes.  Now the growth from party to squad, etc adds about 1 figure to the unit for each new technology!.    The units should at least look bigger to make the battles immersive.

2. The lack of the spouse and children to build a dynasty.    That was a great EWOM mechanic.

3. Lack of minor factions.    This really reduces the complexity of the game.   

4. The game should not end so soon.    Playing on after the game tells me it is over is a bit of a let down. In order to explore the entire game world on a really large map more time is needed.    Game length should be an option the player selects every time they start a new game.

5. Truly random loot items are needed:    Something like the "+2 ice sword of life stealing".    The prefix and suffix are randomly determined from a truly large list of possibilities when the loot is found.   This is a bit more like how Diablo type games handle loot.   It adds to the fun a lot.

6. The loot found needs to be proportional in general level to the difficulty of the battle.    No more rusty iron gloves after defeating a dragon!

7. More creatures to summon and the high level ability to summon more than one.

What I really don't like is the complete lack of depth in tactical battles. No LOS, terrain penalties/bonuses, flanking, morale, "give bonus to adjacent friendly unit" and so on. Stardock have been trying hard to keep the time you spend on battles down to a few minutes at most, and it's hurting because of that.

But it doesn't go well with how combat is handled on the strategic level anyway. Fun fights or difficult fights - I'm there! But most fights just get auto-resolved by me anyway. And really, fighting a whole game just to end it all in a 5-minute "siege" feels pathetic. I'm not spending 50% of a game playing battles, it's more like 5%. It's not a good number to be around, 25% would be better and having important fights fly by is unforgivable either way.

Again, I understand you wanted to keep the tactical battle duration down and keep focus on strategy. I don't think it turned out well, I don't think those were good decisions. I think you missed out on about 1000 interesting unit traits to link strategic progress with the tactical side of things. I think fights can still be quick, even if they are complex. But tactics needs to be more important*.

* This is also an opportunity to make AI more nuanced and difficult. And it would be far more visible than strategic AI gameplay, which (imho) happens 99% behind fog of war anyway.

About the only thing that really ever annoyed me was the limited choices in heroes. Sometimes I may want a specific type, like a governor, but neither of the two choices that pop up are suited to the task. So I end up stuck with another meathead to go around mashing things.

I'd say the late game mop-up, when the world stops being dangerous. Not that FE:LH is a worse offender than other games, but if you could tackle that you'd be kings.

after ~100 hours of play I still don't understand how to set up the game so that it stays fun for more than a few hours.

there are just too many variables:

• enemy difficulty
• monster difficulty
• victory conditions
• how I approach the game: many small armies? focus on 1 strong army of heroes? spam cities? conquer AI opponents? ignore the other empires?
• how good I am at the game
• what faction/heroes I pick

when games take dozens of hours to finish and half the variables are changing from game-to-game (because of patches or different settings or my game knowledge increasing), figuring out how to set these by trial-and-error becomes impractical

i'm the last person to complain about having too many choices... But when the AI doesn't know how to play the game, the player basically has to become a game designer if the goal is to play an actual strategy game instead of something beyond an empire/hero sandbox

so I played the empire/hero sandbox and basically got to the point where I disliked:

• progression rate: customizing abilities / gear / armies can be fun, but when you just make the obvious choice and are stuck with it for a long time, it's not so exciting
• quests: too predictable / repetitive
• tactical battles: not exciting / suspensful enough. not enough strategy in them. once you learn how things work they're mostly determined by unit stats. the game doesn't force you to become better at tactics over time.
• games decided by coinflips: increasing monster difficulty to make games exciting is fine, but strong monsters randomly becoming aggressive and walking over my empire before I am anywhere close to being able to fight them is not so fun

I don't like the map, both the world map and the combat maps..  I hate the look of it, it's so square and so bland.  I think one of the main problems is that you designed a cool concept of being able to change and mold the land, but it was never really utilized and the cost was some really ugly squares that just don't look like anything.  I hate the squares that act like octagons.  It's a terrible thing for tactical combat.  With a tactical wargame, you should be able to form linear combat, but no matter what formation you create, anyone can be ganged up on.  I also that there doesn't seem to be good tactical combat zone of control, or maybe its too much movement in a small space.  There just isn't any real tactics in combat.  The tactical combat is just really bad.

I don't know if this is real or imagined, but it seems like certain monsters are grouped together on each random map. And if you get one group, you never see monsters from another group.

For example, I often get maps with a lot of skeletons or no skeletons. Lot's of fire elementals or no fire elementals, etc.

If this is true, I'd like to see a greater variety of all monster types on random maps.

The fact that the AI doesn't have to do quests. It's really annoying, because even if quests are easy they require a lot of back and forth with the hero stack, but not for the AI. In fact, this is what made me stop playing altogether a year ago. Almost everything that I don't like in the game, I can mod; not that.

I also don't like that the Building Requirement tag for units (for modders) is not working even though we were told, more than a year ago, that it would be fixed "within a week". A lot of cool stuff could be done with that tag.

• Faction differnentiation is weak on several fronts
• Faction traits could be more aligned with game lore and more unique, less spreadsheet oriented
• Each faction should have its own art style for buildings and equipment, and the environment it spreads. I'm surprised this hasn't vastly improved over the years.
• Each faction should have unique buildings (a few for each faction) and techs (not the entire tree) which reflect that factions pros and cons.  You did quite well with special units in this regard.
• Sovereign customization is weak.  You really could only come up with ten talents?
• Quests and random events.
• Some quests should span an entire game, progressing in difficulty as the sovereign/game progresses
• Quests and RE's should involve choices which evolve the quest in different directions and alter the game in a greater variety of ways depending on the choices the player makes
• More quests overall.  At least double or triple the current amount of quests.
• AI (or "Can you imagine a game of Starcraft where the AI player didn't even know some of the most important racial abilities even existed?")
• I know Frogboy believes the AI should be "generally smart; specifically stupid," but as the player it's really fucking annoying knowing the game could be so much more interesting, challenging, and enjoyable if the AI enemy just knew how to use some basic ability (eg Arcane Monoliths, Henchmen) that it's completely ignoring.  I really feel like each ability (especially faction abilities) should have some AI code associated with it so the computer will at least use them, even semi-competently.  Even something as ubiquitous as outpost upgrades are completely ignored by the AI, and it just feels like it's cheating using them as the human player.  An unfortunate side effect of this lack of AI attention is that the strategy these abilities are intended to impose upon the game are completely stifled. Sometimes holding on to ideals can get in the way of fun. 
  
• Diplomacy
• Diplomacy has gotten better with pretty much every patch, but there's still a long way to go with this.  Treaties and trading should be presented under one umbrella: the player should be able to trade resources for treaties, etc.

Just 2 things for me.

1) Wish there is a way to disable the count-down timer. I like to take my time, and build cities, not rush off to battle the other cities as soon as possible, that's not my style, just want to take my time. I started a fast tech on largest map. I hardly got started when the timer kicked in, 35 turns.....

2) Game starts off hard, which is great, but after 5ish hours of playing pretty much everything is cakewalk. You have a random event that all creatures gain 2 levels, which is nice. Just wish it happens more often. Mainly, mid game gets stale, need suddenly new monsters (higher level) to appear. I really like the wild lands, just wish there were more of them. I know that you have a map with, like 10, on it. Still having a hard time just getting that map started. I'll get it one day.

As a side note, I'd pay for a DLC that offers 64 bit support, and MUCH larger maps. (More wild / bad lands *grin*)

The AI is too stupid.

Auto complete battle gives inaccurate results.

Often, especially late in the game, I have to fight an extremely large number of battles per turn. The battles are often, individually, easy to win, often at little to no cost. However, together, they can take a large amount of time in order to win. Auto complete battle will often result in defeat, and is thus, unusable. This is often true, even when leaving it to the AI to fight the battle produces similar results to manually controlling the battle.

The AI tends to create very large armies, but uses generally ineffective troops. For most factions, this is a poor strategy that should financially cripple the AI. It is also an extremely annoying strategy. For the sake of time and sanity, the AI should build a few powerful regiments, using its best fortresses and relying on their heroes as the core of each unit.

Balance is poor. The AI does not take advantage of many of the game's most powerful abilities. Many abilities are worth very little and should not be used under nearly all circumstances.

Monsters and events can oftentimes be too random. Late game, I can handle such threats. But, even early in the game, dragons wander out of the wild lands, and juggernaughts spawn in the middle of my empire.

Havok tools is not compatible with Blender.

Most of my complaints about LH come down to a lack of realism. Now obviously we are talking about a made up computer game about a made up fantasy world. How realistic can it be?

Well, rather more than it is I think. So many parts of LH just don't seem to make much sense.

Look at EvilSalmon's recent post about his disappointment in the game. Most of his complaints are actually about a lack of realism. My sovereign has been traveling for years and decides to start a settlement but the starting land is totally inhospitable, why didn't he pick a better place? My settlement builds to beside a nearby forest or river but I can't build a forest or river building, why? Why can the AI settle in places I can't? Why can't I tell the AI that if they enter my land then I'm declaring war on them so that they might think twice about constantly crossing my borders? Why can't I build a wonder just because someone somewhere has laid the foundations for it then forgotten about it? (OK being limited to one of a wonder is a gameplay construct anyway but at least not being able to build it because someone else has already FINISHED it is transparent!). Why do strong bandits have nothing of value while a much weaker bear cub has an amazing treasure?

My list of complaints wouldn't be exactly the same as EvilSalmon's but it would come down to much the same thing - there are still too many things in LH which just make no sense (and it was worse in previous iterations). A fantasy game is by definition going to be an abstraction of reality but that doesn't mean it has to be a random inconsistent abstraction.

If I was to nominate a second major problem it would be bugs or doubtful 'features'. In many cases the ones which particularly annoy me are those which also break realism and hence immersion. Things like growth increasing when I queue settlers, the AI settling in unsettlable places, strange auto-resolve results and monsters not attacking AI settlements then immediately attacking the settlement once the player captures them. (NOTE: I haven't played in a little while, some of these may have been fixed in recent patches).

First I'm not a huge fan of custom units, but it can be enjoyable if done right. It's not in this game. There aren't enough options, it doesn't feel like building a custom unit, it's just taking a generic unit and putting the best gear on it. I could live with that, but what annoys me most about the system is the lack of visual customization. There are only a handful of armor types, meaning every unit in every game ends up looking like the same 5-6 units in a different color. The gender option was a big deal for me, I was very happy you added it, but then you only gave half of those limited armors a female model, the other half look brokenly bad in the unit design screen and make it so you can't tell them apart from male units in actual gameplay. I've been hoping for a cosmetic tab in unit design, where any researched armor or clothes could be used to cover up the actual equipment a unit is wearing, along with a vast improvement in armor designs and quantity. It sounds like one of the future DLCs might add a few new armors, but I doubt it will solve the problem.

Terrain and the map in general are annoyingly pointless. Fertile city locations feel arbitrary, I know they aren't and they do take into account some surrounding features, but they still feel random because everything is hidden from the player. There's nothing to do with the map or terrain, no improvements to build on specific tiles, you just click a button on resources and have the city magically harvest it without thought or choice, it doesn't matter where you place buildings, the forest and river buildings feel like an afterthought. Look at Civ or even Warlock, terrain matters in those games, there are things to build on specific terrain, city location is a big factor in determining city specialization, that adds a lot to the game, instead here cities just spread green or purple and that's the end of it. It feels like Elemental could be played on a flat white featureless plane without having any effect on the gameplay. Eyecandy? Lipstick on a pig.

I absolutely hated the art style for the characters/world and unfortunately as a result barely played. I like to normally play humans and could not get immersed into the world due to art style.

I didn't like the customization for soldiers and would have preferred unique units per race with lots of visual difference per unit and heroes.

I couldn't get into the lore as well. It's ok to have cookie cutter fantasy races. I missed dwarves/elves/beholders/artifacts etc. old school d and d stuff. The fun factor just wasn't there.

Luckily I have getting my fix with Age of Wonder 3. Solid game.