If the Ai was great at using counter-SoD spells I think that would help a lot. If you walk a SoD into their territory and get perma-locked down from Earthquake, that'd be cool. Or maybe they spam pillar of flame all over the place. Encourage the user to not use SoDs in faction vs faction strategic gameplay.

I find the comment about lack of soul to be spot-on.The lore still seems weak to me, the game fails to draw me in, make me involved about the factions.

What has improved are all those little flavor texts on monsters, The ingame encyclopedia (I love that in games), and despite many, I consider the game to be visually attractive.

What drags the game down are lack of synergy among its various components, repetetive quests, fact that NPC monsters and characters don't fight each other, poorly designed interface (scattered information, idle town warnings), uninteresting tactical combat (seriously? No walls, just a bonus? Single greatest opportunity to make the tactical combat interesting wasted).

But compared to the first game, the effort put into this iteration is obvious. Still, I think a score in the range of 7.3 - 7.8 would be more fair.

I'm sorry, but I have to disagree. In my current game, I watched a non-recruited champion getting killed by a pack of Ignyses. I have observed similar things all the time during the beta. Regular monster fighting against roaming Wildland monster. AI players fighting against monster. Sometimes the AI player get even killed off by the monster. On turn three of my current game I got notified that Tarth had been wiped out. So, the AI and the monster definitely do fight each other, and this is a fact.

I've actually played the game for an amount of time now.  Tactical combat appears to be less tactical, more waste of time.  Then again, this is a strategy game.

The main counter to a SoD has always been multiple smaller stacks that can be in many places doing things you don't want them to, like taking your cities.  If you have whatever city your SoD conquered, and the enemy now combines their multiple smaller units that made up several strikes forces to take the rest of your cities into a SoD, you now have no cities and a SoD coming after you.

So the question is, in this game, can multiple smaller armies do enough damage economic damage to compare to a single SoD over the same amount of time?

Completely agree.  No, the writing is not at the level of LeGuin (THE best fantasy writer ever, bar none), but it's comparable to what you get from fantasy writers nowadays.

Soulless doesn't refer to the quality of the lore, but to the lack of player engagement with that lore.

As an example of "soulful" gaming, consider the times you've played an Elder Scrolls game and have recovered some ancient, storied artifact/spell; at that moment the lore is no longer just blocks of text, but is substantiated in game terms.  Or think of any LotR game ever released; getting to claim relics from the first and second ages of Middle-Earth connect you, in game terms, to the storied lore that sits on your shelf.

E:FE tries to get this feel: we have random events that harken back to Curgen, and a couple of artifacts as quest rewards, and we have a couple of Wildlands that trace their history to pre-Cataclysm days.  There are monsters that tell you that they are still strong, though their might has diminished.  All of these things convey soul; there's just not enough of it.

Just my opinion/observation.

I dont think you need to change the game to get rid of the option for a stack of doom, since there are countless strategies that could be deployed to counter such a tactic.  You could work units behind such a stack and take the under defended cities behind that stack.  You could create muktiple smaller stacks to destroy the trade routes and to take any outposts, use spells that do damage to stacks on the strategic map, use spells to hinder that stack from even moving while you attack with multiple stacks. I far prefer the AI to take some of these tactics than to get rid of the Blitzkrieg option.

good job guys!

I may have said this in another thread, but IMHO fantasy writing is, in general, not very good. So saying that FE has writing quality on the level of that of most fantasy writing is not exactly a compliment. But I fully admit to being a snob.

The other issue, for me, is that sometimes there are sentences or paragraphs that fall decently far below FE's average quality. They are not that common, and certainly it's a tough job to have so many different bits of unrelated text in there (founding your first city, description of monster X, threat from AI Y, etc.), but when I do read one it leaves more of a negative impression on me than an equally-above-average paragraph would leave a positive impression. (If that makes sense; never said I was a good writer.) It's unfair, but true. If someone were to go through and clean this up, it would make a difference to me.

That said, it certainly doesn't detract from the game in a broader sense. I don't play games for the writing.

Larger maps would fix this I"m thinkin, it's good to have a 'stack of doom' but in a large enough world, one isn't enough (64 bit?!?)

AI will just have a more spread out set of weaker armies, and the player will have multiple stacks of doom (as is the case in my current game where I'm fending off Gilden with one SoD and Yithril with another).

I think nerfing roads would be a huge start... but the AI has always prioritized quantity over quality, which is just bad.

Although it does make for fun feelings of power when you defeat hordes and hordes and hordes and hordes and hordes and hordes and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes  and hordes of bad guys.

The problem here is that Stacks of Doom don't need those resources. Once a stack gets tough enough it can't be worn down, and will have tons of high level units with absurd hitpoints. Destroy all the undefended cities you want it won't stop a stack from laying waste to all your cities, and then turning back to retake all their stuff. Stacks also aren't that large, they are simply super high quality and level. Thus having a stack won't mean you don't have defenses anyway. 

It exactly like he said in the review, quality beats quantity to a ridiculous degree still. Get some high armor units and get them a few levels and they can wade through endless amounts of the units the AI designs. Getting stronger and stronger as they go. Not that the AI doesn't have some high quality units it's just they tend not to level them well or mass them in one spot to counter your stack. I can think of 3 things to help with this. Firstly, make the AI better at judging the strength of stacks and recognizing when it needs to form it's own super stack by putting all it's tough units and champions in one group. Secondly, reduce the leveling speed of units. This way you won't be getting level 10 squads with +20 hp per man. Lastly, reduce the scaling on weapons and armor. Either by just increasing the attack values on lower level weapons a bit and reducing the values on higher level armor, or tweaking the entire system so armor is less effective in general.

doesn't seem like stacks of doom wouldn't be a problem at all if the ai uses overland spells, 2nd lvl water mage gets freeze which holds an entire army still for two turns - I believe just this one spell could end a stack of doom style opponent pretty easily -

or if the ai used stacks of doom, I think a human player could/would take them more easily in alot of cases

Ok the problem facing a lot if not all fantasy writers is the fact that everything has already been done before, so they are stuck with taking themes that have been used since man started writing and making it new enough to be interesting, while avoiding too many cliches or being too similar to a story already written. And thats a very hard thing to do. Even Disney has issues with that, as evidence, the shitty sequels they release of their classics. Coming up with a truly new idea and implimenting it is not easy.

this is a good point. Although the freeze spell has a 5 turn cooldown, there's another similar tremor spell in earth.