I realize that, but the reference compendium says the overlord's forces have to be T2 or higher, and I haven't found any T2 or higher spaces outside of missions or lieutenants...
Oh, I see. Once your EP gets high enough (>=200), then everything is T2 on that continent. You pretty much have to wait until then to be able to craft those things.
it's kind of hard to have any meaningful combat when everything is one hit kills; it's just a reflexes game then.
Oh, I don't know. You can get as much combat out of fighting ten 1-hitpoint enemies as you can fighting one 10-hitpoint enemy. I suppose it depends on what defines 'meaningful combat' in this context. Fighting a bunch of enemies that feel like bullet sponges can be less than gratifying. I'm feeling this especially lately, since I just played through Star Wars Republic Commando (fun game, but so many bullet soaking bad guys) and Duke Nukem Forever (avoid avoid avoid avoid) which both suffer from this problem. Then I went back and played Painkiller, and popping bad guys in one shotgun blast was just so gratifying.
It doesn't feel like the enemies in AVWW are too far along on the sliding scale of damage absorption right now, though. So this is more of a hypothetical situation. Although I wouldn't mind the bats being one hit kills. Flighty camouflaged little jerks...
Some things being lower-health like that is good, I agree. It's good to have a range. But the difference in concentrating all your power into one enemy versus into ten enemies is that the enemy actually gets a chance to act before dying. This is assuming that enemy density is vaguely in the same ballpark either way. If you're getting 2 enemies at a time, and both are 10x weaker than one enemy that you fight, then -- bam, bam, two shots and they didn't have time to do anything interesting. The only thing that varies from enemy to enemy is mostly the art, because they hardly get off a shot.
Whereas if you're getting swarmed by 10x of those 1/10th strength enemies, then sure -- they all have plenty of time to act. But now they ALWAYS have to appear in huge volumes or they are ineffectual. And if they are appearing in huge volumes... then you can't dodge them. So either they need to be doing almost no damage, which makes them pointless and reduces the need for tactics, or the player needs to have hugely powerful AOE effects which gets you back to the point of them being one-hit kills and not really threatening you much.
This is why I say there's not much room for strategy there. It takes out all ability or need to maneuver for position. Versus when there's only a couple of enemies, and they do a lot of damage to you, and they take several hits to kill... then you and the enemy both have time to move around and actually think about what's going on. There's little enough chaos that you actually CAN maneuver and dodge to get a superior position in some fashion, and so on.
The best situations are when two or three such enemies gang up on you, as that really can make for some tricky tactical situations to figure out. You just don't get that with clouds of weaker enemies, which I feel confident in saying given that's how the game used to be.
Have the character animations been changed in the latest build? My character seems to be running and a double image appears as I move.
This seems to be more noticable inside buildings.
Nothing intentional, no. I'll have to see if there's some sort of odd bug. Is this in solo or multiplayer?