I absolutelly love the game concept and execution so far. With as many hours as I've spent within it, I can summarize my impressions after playing a couple of maps, mostly medium and large varieties.


The plus side:
> Very well structured tutorial. I actually found it funny how the tutorial simply kicks off on any skirmish you start and adapts to give tips as stuff happens (aka attacks, famine, resource lack), basically swapping the usual linearity of most tutorials of "Do X, then next scripted event part of the tutorial happens."
> Visuals are amazing. Very few times did I choose to tab into the 'map' view, sometimes just to make sure my field of view on surrounding islands was encompassing.
> Although not fully mechanically diverse, each faction has its own unit types that differ through model. Which is really appreciated!
> The magic! All the spells I end up trying always look so colourful and well designed. Even if most are just reskins of the same shared spells, it's really immersive and thematic to have (in an early access) so many icon and colour variations, when most of development has to go into adding features.
> Biomes actually affect your output. At first I was a bit indifferent on the biomes when playing dark elves and humans, but only when I ended up playing wild elves did I notice the biomes give advantages and disadvantages. So the transmutation spells made more sense afterwards, and their value to the game.
> The upgrades system! At first it was confusing, but once you got into how it works, it's easy to remember in following playthroughs. The problem however is that most of the time you might be more compelled to leave the upgrades to mid-game and then begin mass-upgrading and buying them.
> Self-destructing buildings! I know, this SHOULD be bad in any situation you try to think it, but when you have a resource deplete, the associated gathering buildings will demolish themselves too. That way, no more micromanagement to worry on what building is or not gathering stuff. Good on you!... Just make sure to change the message, too frequently did I think those blew up because enemies were attacking.


The issues (this is mostly constructive criticism, I'll try to give ideas on what can be considered alternatives) :
> First and foremost, while the 'flag' system works well for small raids and such, once you get a few islands, the units roam around too much. Only when they choose to go to a campfire can you really expect all of them to gather up and be prepared for an attack. That being said, maybe add in a 'rally' option? Not useable on islands you don't own or have structures on (so that way it can't replace the 'flag' system), only works on an island that you have built on. So in that way you can rally your army and make portals to where you wish to invade or make them wait for the bridge to build so they can march in, without having them roam around like silly. They end up a lot of times far away from eachother, taking extra time to arrive where they are needed and thus funnel themselves alone/one by one to the enemy and get obliterated quickly.
> Please make spellcasters stop running from a magical task. Far too many times did I have barbarians or enemies roam over my islands, and even if my army was massive enough to make the threat be nearly null, often my spellcasters decide to interrupt their casting of either biome change, destruction or creation spells to help in. This gets really frustrating if you are targetted frequently by enemy raids, making any of the second, third and fourth island spells practically useless due to the immense cast time that resets whenever a spellcaster decides to quit the job to fight off some raiders.
> Resource redundancy. Namely the resource allocation per island. It's fine when you have like 500+ resources, it gives a reason for you to try and mine them off than waste and destroy them. But when some islands have between 10 and 400 resources, it often makes it hard when you have more islands to manage and a lot of decissions to make on where to mine what. For gems and rubies and the rarer resources it works well, but for wood and stone it kind of feels a bit useless to mention them. Maybe hide the resource all together if under 500?
> Currrently island variety is a bit limited. I'm sure there are plans to add more things like events or such, so I'm not holding this as a full negative.
> Mounted units love to fly to their death. The AI seems very keen to literally fly 1 or 2 mounted units at random due to exploration purposes. That I can understand. But I feel maybe a quick fix to this would be for the AI to 'mark' out an area as off-limits for exploration if it's a player encampment? Most of the times and especially early game, these AI scouts don't do much other than fly over and aggro your army, and are too quick to take down unless you have many archers, so perhaps dividing exploration and scouting could fix this issue?
> Rebelling troops have a glitched name. This will likely be patched, but when you dive into famine for too long and begin to have citizens rebell, their names display an error code "Not_Scripted_Unit".
> Conquering islands is confusing. Whenever I would have the army ordered to attack and destroy everything on an island, the units would march on and sometimes not even capture the eagles nests, pursuing enemies even if they run back to another island. Which is a bit inconveniencing since it often means 1-2 soldiers at a time walk into instant death. But the worst part is that the islands you cleared out arn't "yours" untill you destroy the bridge connecting them to the rest of the enemy islands. Perhaps make it so that once an island is cleared, your units can capture it by building a flag?

Even with all the issues listed above, I have good faith that what I have seen so far is a great example of what to expect. I want this game to really shine, it's unique especially with the mechanic of interacting with islands. Sometimes I feel the islands should also be in some even larger chunks, but often it's not that much of a headache to have small ones too. So yes, I very much recommend people to try it out and support development!

I like what I see. There's still a few issues the devs need to work on, but the game is so far very impressive in how it presents itself. The building options are good, the design choices for structures is great, the army selection has a good few options as early as now. It's worth playing even at this stage, if you don't mind a few glitches.

Here's my current list of feedback for the game in it's current state.

Major issues that need fixed:
> Glitches with unit placement on walls. Sometimes units will be ordered to go somewhere and instead get stuck on a ramp or a tower stair because one soldier bugged in how its hitbox behaves and thus stops the whole conga line of troops.
> Glitches with unit spawns going inside buildings. Some units literally pathfind inside the buildings and get stuck and unresponsive that way. The only way to unstuck them is either frantically clicking directions so they unstuck, or by destroying the building. Maybe make some boundaries to buildings so they don't go under the roofs and stop at the arches? (Like the barracks)
> Builders glitching their job. Sometimes the builder NPCs don't see a 'path' to the construction sites or repair sites and it notifies you of this. However if you manually select them and click the structure, they know what they're doing now. (fixed in a patch)
> Blobbing lag and unit pathfinding optimization. Both for the sun soldiers and moon soldiers, sometimes features like closed doors or walls will break the pathfinding of the AI and make them stop, not understand how to go about anything and in the worst case cause a lot of lagg and FPS drops until you open your gates. On this note, sometimes when you tell a unit to go to a distant area and change your mind, clicking right away near it to stop it going to where you sent it will not interrupt that path.

Minor suggestions:
> Roads? Or a way to spawn pavement in the areas where your house's pavement can't coalesce with other. It makes dealing with tree spawns within your city square easier and stops them covering your town. (added in the roadmap)
> Respawn point for churches? It'd be nice to be able to send revived soldiers to the central rally location of barracks. (fixed in a patch)
> A bit less restriction on building 'hitboxes' when constructing? It would be more than welcomed for walls to not be affected by the same 'hitbox' at the same degree as all other buildings have when placed too close. The gap left between the wall and a structure sometimes draws away from available options for construction.
> Treasury, barn, warehouse and other such buildings having an NPC placement option? Later in the game you'll have too many free citizens, so filling a few slots would be really helpful.
> Automatic 'build site' option for a whole wall section? When walls are destroyed, piece by piece, the 'repair' option to make it a new build site is individual. Can this be reworked to at least be the whole wedge?
> Less restrictions on tower hitboxes for building? Sometimes if buildings are too close to a corner or a wall has a more sharp angle with the next piece, towers can't be built even if, in theory, they are able to support such angles or building practices.

I hope to see the game develop and evolve beautifully~

Edit: Some of the above have been added to the game, which shows how amazing the dev team is at working on this game. <3