Hi all,
I recently played through Conquistador and Viking back to back and I believe I can share my thoughts on this topic.
Expeditions Conquistador is one of the best strategy games ever made, imho. It blends perfect amount of out of combat content in the form of camping, map events, dialogue and exploration. Combat is brilliant, in a sense that you are limited by the skills you can use and you must use them in a smart way. Basically, less is more should be a motto of Conquistador and it shows a clear vision.
Viking is a huge disappointment. First, the combat. You have many skills, but their usage is very limited. Say, if you are playing an archer, the best way is to spam cripple or quick shot. Any debuff skills are far less useful when the enemies are capable of two shotting you. Also, cover is not very well thought out, you can't really tell the line of sight, positioning is less useful on a far smaller combat map than in Conquistador and preparation phase is completely useless because of it. Second, the characters are just weak. In Conquistador even though majority of characters were randomized I felt the bonding between my crew through random events, missions etc. In Viking, they are not very well written and honestly boring. Finally, camping. In Conquistador you had to pay attention to every position. In Viking, the whole thing is convoluted and tedious. You have to set up two shifts, have to fix equipment, there are tons of resources you have to spam around the map to steal them (who thought that clicking on every highlighted barrel is good design?) and after like 3 camps you just set it to auto-assign and forget about it.
Therefore, my conclusion for the Rome is please make abilities actually useful, combat map tactical and camping less busy-work. Story and characters are subjective, so I will leave that out, although it would be nice if our companions had more urgency, personal desires, quests and so on.
All the best to the dev team, looking forward to the game!
