I played it some today and it is tighter than I imagined. You really have to plan your expansion or else you will fuck yourself.
It is essentially an RTS is the vein of Warcraft 3, but this one has territories or zones. You have to save up enough food in order to purchase the neighboring territory. But you need more food in order to buy more territories, so when you first start to expand, you have to be careful only to expand to the food-producing territories first such as lakes for fishing, deer herds for hunting, or river valleys for farming. You can also expand into territories that are woodlands that give you a bonus to lumber or some territories that give gold or stone, but if you expand into those first before you expand into the food-producing areas you can fuck yourself. Maybe not in the immediate, but later on in level 3 when there is an active enemy attacking you you will be screwed if you didn't build in the proper order.
This is both good and bad. It means that you are slightly limited in how a level plays out, but it also means that you have to play smart. You can not just lay down random buildings at random times and expect to win. You have to build them in more-or-less the proper order and play it tight, to the resource.
It reminds me of a microcosm of a Civilization city. When you found a city in Civ, you have to develop the area around it in a smart order. The same general rule applies to this game. It is like Civ only zoomed in to the single city level, sorta, and made real-time.
So far I am really enjoying the game. It seems well balanced overall. One thing I do not like is the lack of a numerical display as to how much life one of your units has left. It displays the unit's max life, but not it's current life. The current life is displayed only as a bar graphic.
Also, healers can heal across your entire empire. The healer does not need to be with your army or near any unit. You can have a healer in the starting zone by your town hall, and it can heal your front-line battle units 7 zones away. The only restriction is that the healer and the healed-unit both be inside your territory.
Oh, and the animations of your gatherers (of any type) is irrelevant. The resource is gathered the second you assign the worker to a new zone and does not require that the unit actually be there to play out its animation on the field. It does not matter which part of a worker's animation is playing out. If they are heading out to gather stuff, or heading back to the camp to deliver stuff is irrelevant. You can always grab a worker at any time and re-assign him and you will not lose that worker's... work. Does that make sense?
