The Generals story arcs get repetitive on multiple playthroughs. I don’t think that this can be fixed. Even if they all have the same amount of choice and consequence as the queens, because you always have the four generals storylines advancing at once, the four generals stories run out faster than the four queens.
I'd agree this cannot be fixed.
The general story arcs are too long but with too few branches. If you play through the campaigns at a brisk pace, you won't have enough time to actually finish any of their story arcs. At the same time, the relatively few junctions in their stories means they get very repetitive. It would have been better if their story arcs were much shorter (maybe 3 decision branches each) but had several different options at each stage.
(Subjective) The Generals don't have a big impact on gameplay. It's easy to advance cautiously and almost never need to use them. This does depend on how the individual player plays, though.
I've found them useless; their cost is so high that you're virtually always better off just accepting a loss. This is made even worse if you have access to an emporium, which lets you buy cards that will offer similar combat boosts for a tiny fraction of the cost.
It's pretty easy to keep lots of faction ratings high. I think one big cause for this is the faction decisions: they tend to be rather extreme, which often makes you want to turn them down.
Agreed; there are too many 4:1 council votes. Since you don't even know what political benefit you'll reap for rebuking the majority, the player will almost always go for the politically expedient choice. After experimenting with multiple approaches, I've found always voting with the majority to be by far the safest strategy.
I'd like it if the consequences of each decision were shown
before you make it, which could give you more reason to side with the minority if it gives a cool benefit that you like.
Genocide cards do not have negative political consequences in single-player (which Swen explicitly said was going to be in during a Q&A).
The genocide card is already one of the worst in the game; they'd need to be buffed significantly if they're getting a political downside. I personally only find the 100% variety to be useful, and even then I've used it maybe twice? The card is just way too circumstantial.
Wizard Towers aren't very useful, because they generate random cards, including already-researched skills.
Agreed; I sell these on the spot. The cards they produce are usually pure clutter.
Population regenerates to full immediately after a battle. That ruins what might have been an interesting wrinkle to battles on the front lines. There should be an option to let population regenerate over 0-10 turns (1 turn is default, 10 turns is 10% of max population per turn, 0 is no regeneration at all). That would also make population cards more useful.
This would make the genocide cards
a lot more interesting and influential at the same time. I wholeheartedly support this idea.
Troopers capture turrets so fast they're almost worthless as a base defense, which seems backwards.
The best way to counter this is to have your own troopers behind the turret ready to re-capture it. It defeats the point of a stand-alone defender, though, and is usually only worthwhile for shoring up a forward position when reinforcements won't arrive in time.
