Hi David,

We've investigated your save file and these are the results of our analysis:

• Intelligent minions don't respond to rally at all, anywhere.
• Archon is mine but his icon is not on the Rally left-side as an icon, and I can't click him
• Beasts are not an icon on the Rally left-side icons
• Recall doesn't work. Alt-0 doesn't work. Many UI button shortcuts (from the controls options) don't work.

These issues are all the result of the same cause. All your units have been added to the "Peaceband" removing them from the Warband infrastructure. As they are no longer part of that they do not show up with "type" warbands on the left interface and will not respond to the rally all flag. Once we removed your units from the peaceband all these issues were resolved. I think this could require some extra feedback but is working as intended.

• Happy workers won't work, for example the cultists stopped any work. Sins haven't added in several hours, even though the cultists are level 9 or 10 and happy.

Research tasks are no longer undertaken once the maximum number of sins is researched I.e. when you can unlock every aspect in the Veins of Evil + 3 for a Titan. As your Dungeon has reached this level no further sins will be researched until you need to top up back to 3 to summon a Titan, which you already have.

• Narrator keeps warning of a beast who "is hungry, unhappy, can't find his lair" but this beast is invisible, and there are many lairs and pigs available.
• Narrator warns of a beastmaster who's angry because he has not yet been paid, and this beast master does exist, but this beastmaster will not get paid even when dropped on gold.

We didn't have any issues locating unhappy units and we found that unit needs were being fulfilled normally in this save file. Although we did notice that Beastmasters in particular did remain unhappy for longer than expected after their needs were fulfilled (it takes a short time for a unit's mood to improve even after their needs are fulfilled.) this is probably due to their disposition and we'll investigate further when we come to doing a balance pass for the next major patch.

We've created some internal tickets to test this further on our other rigs and we'll be keeping your save file as a good example of a heavy map with a lot going on, it'll make a great testing ground so thanks for that. So we don't contact you in the future as requested I'll close this ticket now so you don't receive updates.

Once more thanks for your save and apologies that the game disappointed you, best of luck in the future.

Lee

As I'm not a programmer myself beyond some basic self-teaching I've been doing, I can't pretend to know the ins and outs that well so I can't say how the AI is handled currently but I thank you for your feedback and I'll be sure to pass it on to the code team to get their thoughts on what you've said. We've definitely had a lot of good grace and we've done our best to foster that but we have much higher expectations for ourselves as we move towards the future. WFTO was the first game many of us ever worked on so we've learned a lot from it, sadly I do know that a lot of the codebase is now buried heavily under technical debt thanks to a lack of time, resources and experience but we'll improve what we can and take the lessons forwards to future games.

As for the minimum requirements we aimed for something we felt would at least run the game, in our case a low-mid end GTX 400 series card we only use the benchmark as a comparison to help users identify that in some cases for example a 530M might not be better than the 450GTS. Likewise for recommended we aimed a bit higher. In most cases 1500 is actually quite easily achievable nowadays with cards below $100 at retail easily tripling it. While for just a few dollars more you can get a last gen mid-range card that nearly doubles the recommended requirements and I'm sure these are even more affordable used. 

I do agree that the goal should always be to reduce requirements as much as possible to widen the range of users we can support, however we prefer to edge on the side of caution as we definitely don't want people to have a bad experience with our game, it's definitely the last thing we wish to happen and it's a great regret when we see that a customer has had a poor experience as you have. Funnily enough a lot of people don't feel our graphics are pretty enough and as for AI it's an important part of the experience though I hope we can find more optimisations to both of these!

Cheers,

Lee

No worrys and thank you for the files. I'll make sure our QA guy looks into them. We sit next to each other so I'll make sure it gets a good look over :)

I'm sorry that we couldn't do more for you. I wish you the best in any case :)

Hi David,

Unfortunately we've never seen this issue for ourselves or seen a report similar to it. Is it possible for us to get the system specs of your rig so that we can look into what kind of system we might need to replicate? Its possible we might have something of a similar tier available to us in our office or in our network of users.

I don't see us getting much further on the discussion regarding WFTOs system requirements vs that of other games, I think we'll have to agree to disagree. All I'll say in that regard is we'll continue to hunt for places to optimise as we work towards the upcoming major patch. I believe one of our coders already has some thoughts for where the BT might be improved. So we'll see what can be done in that regard.

Cheers,

Lee

Thanks David, again I apologize for the issues you've faced and hope we can get to the bottom of this one. We look forward to receiving the save file.

I'm sorry that the game didn't meet your expectations and as I mentioned in the previous thread we'd be happy to advocate for a refund from Steam support if we can.

Cheers,

Lee

Hi David, 

Honestly I can only speak from the experience and working knowledge of the internal logic of our game and how it compares to others. God Games simply often have a higher CPU overhead than most other games and many other RTS games simply due to the sheer number of autonomous AI processes which is extremely uncommon for most games in god games every unit is autonomous while in RTS games units are only responsive (to orders, threats etc.). 

Though I do fundamentally agree there's always more optimization that can be done and we'll always continue to look for better approaches towards things. Ideally we would like to broaden the range of systems the game runs well on and I'm sorry that it does not appear to run well on your system.

We'll keep our eyes on the UI space, sadly at the time we were making the game the Unity UI was not suitable for our needs and there wasn't enough time to develop a full suite of our own code to cope with the needs we had, unfortunately when you're working on a project of this scale with one 2.5 programmers you have to choose your battles. Fortunately Unity's UI has come a long way and for future projects it's likely we'll either use that or start building our own frameworks on top of it rather than using third-party solutions. As for WFTO it's so far down the road that we won't be able to transition anywhere but to a version of Coherent which has wider support and we're working with them to try and get the new versions integrated but as I'm sure you recognize this is a uphill struggle. If we had known at the time what we know now things might have been different.

On the subject of comparisons we use a wide range of systems and have a number of test machines of varying degrees in the office, though most do meet our minimum specs. We also have a number of trusted volunteers who help us with testing and the range of their PCs is quite large and where possible we try to get information on people's machines so we can see at what point people are having issues with the game. Sadly I can't speak for the comparison of Age of Empires all I can say is that it's a product of a different time (at least a decade old) and the system requirements are vastly different.

However I would say that we'd happily support a refund claim if you're completely disheartened with the product, although it is not common Steam does occasionally permit refunds even after the two hour window and I would suggest contacting Steam Support to see if they will refund you for WFTO. Tell them that the developer would be happy for a refund to be issued if possible and link to this thread. We certainly don't want you to feel like your money was wasted and our only desire is to ensure as many players as possible enjoy our game.

Cheers,

Lee

Hi David,

I'm sorry for the confusion, by referring to the genre of god games I'm not referring to games like AOE or AOM.

Age of Empires and Age of Mythology are not God Games but RTS games. God Games are a sub-genre of RTS where the player is placed in the role as a god-like being with no direct control over their units some examples of this genre are:

• Populous
• Black and White
• Dungeon Keeper (Our inspiration) - Now known as the Dungeon Management Genre (a mix of RTS and God Game)

Although not all of these games feature the ability to pick up objects from the world the first game to do so was to my knowledge Dungeon Keeper, the game which we are most heavily inspired by. This feature would then make it into other games such as Black and White and other God and Dungeon Management Games. Our behaviour is consistent with these games which is why I said it can be unusual if you are a RTS gamer who has not played God games before.

In any case the big thing that separates RTS and God Games are the lack of direct influence or straight orders and often characterized by "units" behaving under the propulsion of their own AI, but also that the "God" interacts with the world in an abstract unusual manner. Rather than issuing orders he interacts directly through spells and powers.

As I mentioned in my above post it is not necessary to locate a cauldron to return the potion to one. Simply right clicking on the "Crackpot" icon on the potion bar while a potion is in hand will return the potion to any free cauldron in your dungeon.

I've attached a video to demonstrate this behaviour:

I've not seen a case where a unit wont drop in a valid location but we'd love to investigate if you can show us a case where this occurs. We're always happy to address bugs where we can.

Cheers,

Lee

Hi David,

We'd love to get a full report from you including output log and a save file for this level so we can take a look and see exactly what is happening. Please take a look at this article to see what's required: How to: Submit a Bug Ticket.

I think in this case the save file would be most important as we might be able to find out what has happened to the unit in question.

Cheers,

Lee

Hi David,

I'm sorry to hear about your issues with the game and we're always to happy to try to help and I can really appreciate your frustrations and understand that you'd want to leave a negative review for this. It's not something we're particularly happy with either and we've definitely had quite a number of customers frustrated with UI issues caused by this particular middleware. For what its worth we are currently investigating upgrading to a better version, 

As Cian has identified correctly an input lag on the UI is usually caused by the CoherentUI process being starved of resources, whether that be CPU or GPU, it's very unlikely that this would be helped in any way by more RAM. In order to investigate further we'd love to get a full list of system specs and output log from you.

WFTO is a particularly CPU and RAM heavy game it's true, there's a lot of unique scenarios happening that you just don't see in many RTS games like the vast amount of Unit AI that is running at any moment, the pathfinding calculations required to deal with a dynamically changing underworld terrain among a number of other aspects that just don't happen elsewhere. This need for CPU time can leave other processes starved and if the UI process is starved then the UI does not behave to our expectations.

There are also a few more options that you might want to try some workarounds here: Missing, Invisible or Laggy UI  which can help with a few compatibility issues some systems occasionally have with Coherent. you could also try setting the CoherentUI process in your task manager to higher priority. 

Look forward to hearing from you,

Lee