Great job! (and a couple of questions)

[BiggerBoat]

Purchased the game a couple of days ago. Played through the tutorial and a couple of short campaigns, and then started the full French-Indian War campaign. I'm having a blast. Very hard to pull myself away to get some sleep last night.

Some comments:

* The art (map and units) are really beautiful.

* I'm not a grognard, but overall the game seems pretty approachable.

* The tutorial had some ackward moments (such as being asked to select the right arrow but the only way to advance is by ending the turn)

* I like the way you've handled active/inactive units and put the focus on strategic movement rather than budget and city-building. It keeps the game focused and keeps me from getting overwhelmed.

Suggstions:

* Would it be possible to have the message panel (where the results of each turn are displayed) have some sort of control to pop it up from the bottom to display a larger window? At the beginnering of the turn, I'd much rather click on one icon to pop up the full message panel than use the scroll arrows. It would also give me an at-a-glance overview of the results of last turn.

* As others have mentioned, It would be nice to be able to watch the results of the turn at a different pace or be more more aware when battles occur. I'm not really sure what to suggest here, but a lot of times I have something very dramatic happen and it's kind of anti-climactic to find out about it from the messages.

Questions:

* I'm not a grognard, as mentioned. Can you give me some sense of the scale that's involved (number of actual men) within the units/companies?

* How do you display the scenario ledger that I see pictured in the manual?

* can you tell me how to get the theme music out of my head? I've been humming it all day.

Congrats on your first big success.

[PhilThib]

Thanks for the comments and remarks ...

About your 3 questions :

* Scale: this was mentionned elsewhere already...roughly each regiment has 4 companies, with an average of 200 men each (but this vary a lot according to nation, type of units, time period).

* Click on the globe, or (faster) on keys F1 to F4

* Cut your head off (or you may also disable the music in the options menu present in the front end, although you have to restart the game for new options to be implemented)..

[Pocus]

for the pause or something like that during battles, we will work on that next week.

[Queeg]

How hard would it be to pause after certain important messages, such as the loss or capture of a city, an encounter with the enemy and battle and siege results? While I can understand that some folks might not want pauses all the time, the current system requires the player to spend a great deal of time going back through the messages after the fact to figure out what happened. Pausing the game at significant events and allowing the player to see them as they happen probably would speed up gameplay overall.

The interface otherwise works so well, and plotting your strategy and moves is so fun, that it's a bit anticlimactic to see everything play out in the blink of an eye.

[Pocus]

I can pause the game and have the focus on the region where the event happen, but this will be harder to allow clicking on the game objects when the game is halted in the midst of hosting, harder and dangerous.