So I gave this a whirl tonight and it was better than I expected. I'm actually impressed at how well it plays.
I started on Easy since people were saying that the AI is brutal, but on the next game I went Normal. It seems like the AI prefers to build up and launch a big attack roughly around the time you upgrade your town to level 2. If you survive that you're pretty much golden. I lost a couple of times and won three times against the AI on Normal. The deciding factor is if I managed to build a Defense Tower in time. Those are basically impossible for regular troops to hurt at that point and the AI will fixate on it and let itself get cut down. Actually, garrisoned buildings are really deadly. I don't see a way to zerg rush your way to victory except possibly as an economic victory where you kill all of the workers and then keep them from spawning new ones until you've built your siege engines. Your troops just can't hurt the town square, even when they have it fully surrounded.
I found controlling the troops to be difficult at times. The healers love to run away at the first sign of danger and other troops will rush at towers and fortresses no matter how many times you tell them to stay away. You can also bait the AI into sending a steady stream of lone troops into a meatgrinder (massed archers are murder) while you casually build up your army.
I only ran into one bug. On one map I wiped out the enemy base but it didn't declare me a winner. I searched high and low for a lone troop or something but there was none to be found. I even filled the map with blue just to make sure it wasn't some building thing.
Performance was not an issue for me, even when I was moving maximum size armies around. There were a handful of pathfinding quirks but nothing too major. Mostly units getting stuck on other units and being left behind. It was pretty rare, but when it happened it tended to happen to big expensive units which makes it a little more annoying. I'd have to carefully separate them to get them moving again. I couldn't get the AI to build any boats so naval combat went untested.
One UI thing I couldn't find that I'd like is a way to select all combat troops currently harvesting and tell them to switch to combat mode and rally somewhere. It can be kind of hard to pick them out, especially when you're under attack. Even better if after combat I could tell them to go back to their previous job.
I started on Easy since people were saying that the AI is brutal, but on the next game I went Normal. It seems like the AI prefers to build up and launch a big attack roughly around the time you upgrade your town to level 2. If you survive that you're pretty much golden. I lost a couple of times and won three times against the AI on Normal. The deciding factor is if I managed to build a Defense Tower in time. Those are basically impossible for regular troops to hurt at that point and the AI will fixate on it and let itself get cut down. Actually, garrisoned buildings are really deadly. I don't see a way to zerg rush your way to victory except possibly as an economic victory where you kill all of the workers and then keep them from spawning new ones until you've built your siege engines. Your troops just can't hurt the town square, even when they have it fully surrounded.
I found controlling the troops to be difficult at times. The healers love to run away at the first sign of danger and other troops will rush at towers and fortresses no matter how many times you tell them to stay away. You can also bait the AI into sending a steady stream of lone troops into a meatgrinder (massed archers are murder) while you casually build up your army.
I only ran into one bug. On one map I wiped out the enemy base but it didn't declare me a winner. I searched high and low for a lone troop or something but there was none to be found. I even filled the map with blue just to make sure it wasn't some building thing.
Performance was not an issue for me, even when I was moving maximum size armies around. There were a handful of pathfinding quirks but nothing too major. Mostly units getting stuck on other units and being left behind. It was pretty rare, but when it happened it tended to happen to big expensive units which makes it a little more annoying. I'd have to carefully separate them to get them moving again. I couldn't get the AI to build any boats so naval combat went untested.
One UI thing I couldn't find that I'd like is a way to select all combat troops currently harvesting and tell them to switch to combat mode and rally somewhere. It can be kind of hard to pick them out, especially when you're under attack. Even better if after combat I could tell them to go back to their previous job.