Bought MAN2 today (lifetime subscription... about time) and had a quick game against the AI. Below are a few points I noted. Before we get into those, just let me register how much I loved MA, and I really like the idea behind the series, I just think the implementation has gone backwards in some respects, and in others has failed to fix problems that existed back in the original game.

Anything in italics is no longer an issue.

So here goes:

1. Interface is confusing when you hit the lobby. The game seems to assume that you played MAN and thus know WTF half that stuff does.

2. The message informing you of the existence of AI opponents when you join the lobby for the first time disappears without you acknowledging you even having been in the room when it came up, and then it never appears again.

3. There is no "no time limit" mode, when there certainly should be because some of us don't want fast games, we want to be able to undo entire turns and think on positions for days. That's how we enjoyed MA and that's how I'd like to enjoy MAN2. How can I learn against the AI when there's a timer ticking down FFS?

3. Bullfrog... ouch. If anything makes it powerful it's the ability to destroy one unit per turn. Nasty.

4. The N key doesn't work while an animation is in progress, and when you're checking unit by unit waiting for every animation to finish (when the animations were written with looks, not practicallity in mind) is tedious.

5. Transport menus seem aren't very reliable at registering fast clicks and you often end up moving the transport rather than unloading it.

6. You can no longer un-deploy a unit during the recruitment phase by clicking on it. Very annoying loss of feature.

7. Game doesn't auto detect appropriate graphic settings (if it does it ain't telling) and provides no FPS counter to assist in setting up your graphics. The background animation would be useful, but it doesn't respect your camera settings and thus bears no resemblance to your in-game frame-rate. Nor are you able to test your settings in a game because every game counts to your score, and you're on a timer. IMO, this is the biggest problem in the game, you're basically taking a wild guess with your settings and hoping to God that they're playable.

8. Replays window is made smaller than the file names automatically generated... WTF?! Why generate a filename the game isn't producing a window large enough for you to read??

9. Game suffers from a lack of scaling for resolutions. Replays window doesn't get bigger as I increase the res. Purchase window stays divided into three, even though most of it would fit on one screen, nor does the game provide an option for this.

10. Purchase menus should have the option to combine all three into one, ala MA.

11. Chat font is too small at high resolutions. I should be able to configure its size, or better yet, it should be scaling with the resolution.

12. I can see everyone elses score in the lobby area, but my score is not displayed, only my other stats.

13. My stats are only displayed on the My Games screen, when they should be in every section as they are your objective in MP after all.

14. If you cycle through units with N then move something, N goes back to the beginning of its cycle. Either N should continue from where it was, or there should be a "cycle to next unit and ignore this unit from now one" key.

15. When N brings up a unit in a transport, the transport is not highlighted and no indication is give as to where the unit is. Only a lucky guess allowed me to even realise what N was trying to tell me.

16. Units in a transport give no indication (that I recall) of how many moves they have left, even though this is vital information. Leads to a lot of pointless undoing.

17. The background animation should draw from the replay, not the intro folder (surely it's far cooler to see your previous games than the same replay over and over?).

18. The replays area still doesn't support folders for organising games.

19. Replays are still sorted by date created, instead of allowing me a choice of sorting methods (like game number).

I don't no why you can't do it. Probably, you should check option in the menu.

Is that what the totally undocumented "Automatic Undo" option does?

20. Automatic Undo is a name which tells me nothing about this buttons function.

I agree VERY hard with this one. When I started MAN2 beta I never played MAN, didn't have a clue what to do or where to start... ending up with sending challenges withouth wanting to send them.



I partly agree, imho one hour is enough to think and make moves and undo moves and retry etc. (for non AI games)
Playing against AI always gives 10 minutes, and that is really too short.



N key? I suppose that's "next" ?



Or unloading and then wanting to move the unit but reload it
Right clicking after moving the transport unit helps



Oh? When I clicked on a unit after deploying in recruitement face there was an pop up that said that feature wasn't enabled, but there's a tick box to enable it.



Mmh, for me that's the case with most of the games. Put the details to a certain level, try the game and change it if necessery. Don't see the problem here.



How do you mean this? (Never played man)



Agreed. When accepting a challenge it's annoying to have to go back to my games to compare yourself against challenger.



I guess this is only the case when using N?



You can click on the units that are in a transport unit, brings up the info about that unit, also how many moves are left.



This should be optional. I think it would be neith if you could choose your own replays for the background. But keep it optional because I can imagine not everyone likes to wait for the replay to load..

I don't see a reason NOT to have an unlimited turn time. When you're playing by "mail" then what's the point of a turn limit? What does it matter if I spend an hour now or an hour in three days time. Either way it's the turn limit on the game of X days that's deciding how quick I reply, not a turn limit.

Plus, as we enter the realms of an hour we start entertaining the possibility of interruption, loo breaks, etc. If someone doesn't want to play infinte time to think (up to the turn limit of X days obviously) then they can simply decline a game with that setting. I really don't see a reason to exclude the option.



The N key selects the next unit with moves remaining.



Yes, an extra click, and extra clicks = bad design. Should be fixed.



If I realise I just mis-deployed a unit it's faster to click when my hand is on the mouse and the cursor is already on the unit rather than reach across the keyboard. But the main reason I prefer the old method is that you could remove units out of order, which meant that if later in your deployment you realised you'd made an error, you could remove that error without removing the other 500 units you just deployed. Again, it's all about saving on clicks.

Plus, I find the rewind feature is a tad unresponsive, seeming to pause for a second before undoing something.



The problem is that there's no such thing as a friendly game in MAN2. Every game counts against your stats and rank.

The replays can probably be used to configure this.



MA (not MAN, that came after) had a single menu down the side which scrolled. If you were to put everything on one menu and played at 1600x1200, then it would take less clicks to buy a unit from every section under that system than the current one as the entire menu would fit on two screens (or could actually be shown as two columns and fit on one).

The current method is, IMO, unecessary.



The only other way is to select the transport manually, and when you do this you are shown units inside. N doesn't, but it should and it should highlight the unit it's talking about.



More clicks that shouldn't be necessary. A green number in one corner for moves and a red number for health. Real click savers, and when you're battling the clock you want to know as much as possible as fast as possible (imagine having to click every unit to know its health, rather than having a number overhead).



The option already exists to switch off the menu replay, I'd just rather it picked from replays in the replay folder at random, rather than selecting that one replay from the intro folder... and no, I don't want to create a copy of all my replays in there (and I don't know if it even looks beyond the first replay).

21. It is no longer possible to re-direct fire. What's with the feature regression??

22. The lobby makes all sort of noises but there's no visual indicator as to what they mean. The drum noise for example, the appropriate tab should flash or something. This appears to be rank gain, but unless you were in the lobby when the game spotted this, you are not notified

Look at the options menu before you start whining.

Hi Chris,

Perhaps you haven't used beta software before, but allow me to explain what that means. Beta software is essentially unfinished, the engine is in place and should be pretty stable, but the product itself is unfinished. During a beta people will provide FEEDBACK (yes, feedback), and sometimes this feedback will be negative (yes, if it's not ass kissing it's still feedback I'm afraid).

Once this feedback has come in the developers can ask themselves why X thought or did Y, and how it can be improved to increase sales, which is the point of a beta test, releasing a more finished product by the end of it. No one is more qualified to comment on an interface than people who've never touched it before.

So, please, in the future, and I hope you won't take offence at this, shut your mouth. Thanks.

There is NO obvious "Enable Fire Redirection" option. Is ia automatic undo? WTF knows, because several of those options suffer from developer names, names that'd make sense if you'd worked on the program because they were names tossed around the office, but would make no sense to a user. What is automatic undo, and why would I want it automated (and if it is fire redirection then that's not automated so why call it automatic?). I'd say that "free camera in replays/game" falls under this as well, since thinking of a camera as "free" is a very geeky bit of thinking, your average user will more likely think of it as the "fancy shots" or "slow-mo" or "kill cam" etc. Just flicking through the Domination forum early on showed this as many people asked how to disable those fancy shots, thus showing they didn't realise what this option did.

On the other hand you may be referring to the "Fire redirection warning" on the confirmation screen, which is even more confusing because by default a warning is enabled for something which doesn't even seem to exist... yet another thing wrong with the interface.

It's not whining, it's feedback. Yes, I put a paragraph at the beginning of my first post to avoid nonsense like you've posted, but still it comes. Please, worship the altar by all means and let me get on with doing what a beta is actually about: testing and reporting.

23. AI is only available online. Why? What if my net connection is down? Offline games should still count towards your score though.

24. "Training" AI defaults to settings that are insane for any newcomer who doesn't know the units or maps. 10 minutes per turn is way too little, it should be set to 60 minutes, or better yet, infinity.

25. Domination introduced some rather catchy tracks (my girlfriend was humming one today when it got stuck in her head) and MAN2 continues the trend (though I don't know all the Domination music, so whether MAN2 features anything new...). I'd like to see some music controls added to the bottom of the screen (as an option) along with the rest of the stuff down there, so I can flick between my favourites. C&C is a good example of how positively people remember this sort of thing.

You see Quitch, the problem is you come on here talking about feature regression, but the problem is there is no regression in features. Actually there was an increase in features.

When you want to redirect fire what do you have to do first? Undo. Hence automatic undo? Seems pretty simple to me, but then maybe some people need it spelled out completely. I do think a nice manual explaining all this would be very usefull.

If Automatic Undo = Allow Fire Redirect then why not call it Allow Fire Redirect? If it also affects deployment then a better name would be "Click to undo/redirect fire".

There's nothing automatic about it for a start, I have to make several clicks. But, to my mind, the best bit, the really good bit, is that this option has absolutely NOTHING to do with undo. I speant ages trying to work out why there would be an option to automatically undo my moves... was it some automatic assistant that would stop me making mistakes? It is automated after all (since it's automatic) so it can't be something I do.

But of course, I forgot that I'm retarded and obviously, OBVIOUSLY, automatic means "you click". Ah, but of course. All this time I thought me doing it was the opposite of automatic, but I must be mistaken.

Great, you figured it out, but search the forum, I'm not the first who didn't realise what this option did. I'd love to see how many people KNEW what that option did Vs. how many enabled it to see what it did. Personally, I don't enable anything that's automatic since automatic = doing something without your consent, and I'm damned if I'd want that happening without knowing what the option does.

I agree about the "automatic undo".
Didn't made any sense for me neither.

But asking it in the chat did help..

I don't know if changing the name will help, a manual would help me much more.. also for the "noises" in the menu like the drumroll..

But since the game's still in beta, I don't expect a manual.

26. A players position (no. 53 etc.) doesn't appear on the "More" screen.

Hmmm, doesn't it appear in the window list where the more button is? I think it does.

Sorry, by rank I mean position as in "No. 53" rather than Major.

I think it does show it for me when i click more. Maybe i remember wrong..hmm

No, I checked last night and it doesn't (unless I'm blind?).

No your right, its the score that they show. And i believe it is the score that matters over the rank number?

No, they both matter. 1800 is meaningless unless you knows how it compares to what everyone scores, and the position number tells you that (you're 35th etc.)

I'd prefer it to say something like 35/1024

Hmm, i get your point. Works for me.

27. Getting a message from your opponent forces your camera to their view, but doesn't switch back to yours afterwards. This is a very annoying left over issue from MA which needs addressing.

28. There should be a "default camera position" hotkey.