While playing the alpha, I felt like the core gameplay was really solid. There wasn't much that stood out to me there, aside from the stuff that we all know is missing. However, there are some 'nice things' kind of features I would really like to see when it comes to actually managing the empire. How do other testers feel about these?
1: I'd like a showing of the potential income that you actually bring in for each resource per turn. That is, how much each resource is actually being produced per turn. That is, unless resource buildings aren't actually bound specifically to red or blue. It's nice to know what needs a boost just at a glance.
2: How about a visual indication of how large a town is? Just an outline around the town, a box, that shows the area where you can place town buildings. Then, at a glance, you just know where to put any given thing.
3: I remember plenty of hunting through menus to find pre-requisite buildings for various things. Maybe when you mouse over a structure you can't build, there'd be a little highlight over where you can find what you need to build it... or even just more detail as to why you can't build it. For instance, as opposed to 'cut stone required' you might see 'you don't have enough cut stone'. I'm becoming less and less sure about this the more I think about it, because I can't think of a very good way to implement it.
4: This is pretty important to me. When something is shown as 'new', it could be something you built, something that nature built, or something that a player built. It's not as if I need to know who built what necessarily, but it'd be really nice if the game made the things I didn't explicitly place very distinctive. Then, at a glance, I can see how the map has changed. It could be anything from a sparkly 'new' sign to a shiny glowing mountain to show that it was shoved in by nature... but again only for the turn that it was built on. I just find the regular old 'new' sign to be a bit hard to spot.
