In my opinion this demo seems to be severly lacking in a few areas. Now I don’t expect a perfect product at this point, however this demo does seem to be severely lacking, especially compared to other pre-release demo’s of RTS games over the past year. I posted some of the following on AoTS but I’ll post a bit more here.

There’s an awful lot that feels far from complete. The UI is really horrid at this point. For starters it’s really huge without actually providing much information. The bottom UI takes up nearly 1/3 of the screen, they could have easily cut it down some no problem. On top of it being huge though there’s some important information missing…. like population limit. You have to click on a seperate tab to see the damage/stats etc.

I just seriously hope they redo the UI before final release because it is in a very very sad state right now.
The home city system seems kinda silly….. basically people who play more will always have the advantage over people who can’t play as much (in the beginning anyways). But new players to the game a year after it comes out will have troubles learning the game because they won’t be able to do the strategies that people with a full deck of home city cards can do. It seems like it’s meant to be an anti smurf system, but this doesn’t seem like the best solution.

The random treasure spots around the map…. this reminds me too much of creeps in WC3, at least they’re random in this so people won’t be able to pre-form strategies around getting certain ones first etc. Creeps IMO were the absolute worst feature of WC3 but ES seemed to like it for some reason, this one really disapoints me.

Another thing that really bugged me was not being able to rotate the map, or at least I couldn’t find a way to do so. Rotating is far more useful than zooming in and out is. I had a lot of troubles seeing the supplies etc that I called in using my experience points, and even more troubles selecting them with villagers.