Hi! I was actually looking forward to playing this game for quite some time now. It seems like a ton of effort has been put into it.
UI:
- UI tooltips are great and explanatory. The coloring of them makes the window content a bit hard to parse, though - most of the screenshots explaining stuff (specifically menu-related) blend in with the background and each other, making it a bit hard to read. Overall, some UI elements (and even elements on the map) blend in with each other - I know the intention was probably to limit the amount of colors on the screen, but as of now it makes everything to appear on one "layer" - it is sometimes hard to tell which objects are interactable, which are not and what is the current state of things
- A bit too much info dumped
- In battle, tooltips get underneath the turn order bar
- In battle, some enemy minion tooltips also cover the movement area highlight
- Cards UI is a little bit slow to appear/disappear - I feel like making it toggle on click could be more comfortable
- Overall, using UI is a little bit rough on the edges - some elements like selections and highlighs are not readable very clearly
- Moving/exchanging unit positions works a little bit inconsistently between screens - for example, you can switch unit positions by drag'n'drop in hero screen, but you can't do the same thing in hero interaction screen (at least between heroes)
- All that being said, this is a very complex game and you have already done HUGE work of making it understandable! for every such comment there is a huge number of UI features that really serve their purpose of making the game understandable and fun
- I couldn't help but notice that there are sounds on UI interaction, but either they had some sort of delay, or they were blending in with the background music - but I felt like they are a bit offset in time from my actions. I could not tell if that was intentional or not, got some mixed messages.
Gameplay:
- I utulize the following tactic: max out Leadership skill and then use 1-unit squads to "bait" enemy retaliation attacks before attacking with the powerful stack - kinda like it is regularly done in Heroes games. If feel like without this tactic the loss of units becomes too big to manage
- I feel the balance of enemy armies is a little off: the boss I killed had like 3 times less troops then the enemy pack guarding a pile of resources on a previous screen
- I destroyed a key artifact because I did not want to drop any other artifact from my hero, and the inventory was full. I did not expect the item to be destroyed - this effectively breaks the progression through the game
- When a hero is defeated, he disappears from the screen completely. It was a surprise for me I could actually interact with the fallen hero to transfer artifacts - that was nice. However, defeated hero still takes space on the map - in my case, it was a 1x1 square, so he effectively blocked part of the map for me
- Gold ended up being the most lacking resource, and I found the game a bit too hard until I picked up and artifact that gives 500g per day. The difficulty became much more manageable then. Feels like it breaks the current balance, though - it effectively eliminates gold as a limiter of anything.
- It seems like if you get 5 cards in your hand, you stop receiving daily cards completely (even after you use some of them)
- Units with "taunt" tiles are a little bit weird to utilize since it is very easy to play around them (they won't taunt an actual player, since you can move out of them easily) but they are absolutely awesome to use as 1-unit squads to protect the big damaging packs
I spent several hours playing, and I haven't unlocked any of the side areas - because the only time I got to the key I accidentally destroyed it - So I don't know how much more content is there. That being said, there is a TON of content already, enough to be replayed several times. I feel like this would be the best time to refine existing content, UI, difficulty and whatever issues there are. The game is quite addicting and I definitely had tons of fun - it has the vibe similar to old Heroes games (Heroes II was still my favourite).
I hope this feedback helps you make the game even better!
Good luck! I'll be looking forward for more!