izigame.me

You're either a strategy game or a city management game. Pick one. I would argue both are better when the clock Isn't constantly ticking while I think about what I want. I understand that this is in part an online game and pausing isn't an option for those games, and to that I say I guess i'm different than most people because I prefer to play alone, and playing alone without a real pause has been quite annoying so far.
Complaints:
Zones - If its in my territory and I have villagers doing nothing in the town center they should go build anything I place down in any zone and return to the town center or wherever they were assigned to. Especially since I have no power to control my men while the game is paused.
Assigning new workers - If I have open slots at any building of the same type as the one I am attempting to assign a villager to, and the one I assign it to is full. I should be able to assign that unit to that role and the unit should move to the building that has an open slot on it's own.
Camera panning- If I click on an icon for one of my men it shouldn't pan to that unit, I find it so infuriating that I constantly have to scroll the screen back and forth just to accomplish a simple task. It's not just one scenario that I get mad at this, its literally every time the camera moves without me moving it on my own that I get Irrationally annoyed at it. Stop. I moved the camera here because I want to look at something here. it's infuriatingly slow and hard to find where I was looking if I didn't have a reference on the mini map. This "Feature" would be perfectly fine and I'd have nothing wrong with it if every second of my time wasn't important, but it is, and I cant pause the game to do the assigning of units so I think it's noteworthy enough to be included in my review. Maybe a double click to pan to the unit but there's no reason for my screen to be jumping around so much, disassociating me from what I was looking at and the building I was about to assign said unit to.
Better unit grouping - I want an army group type of thing so I can tell one group of my military units to do one thing while the others do something else. This would make it much easier to set up split defenses/attacks, and especially useful when my units are too injured to be fighting. I'm not gonna make my almost dead axe throwers run in and die even though I have 5 other units at full health and want to clear a few hostile zones, but there is no easy way to do that without individually selecting each unit. Granted there is the control group thing but to assign and unassign units, and then to select them and control the groups is way too clunky, This needs some serious ironing out to become the feature I want. (also in times when you have to control allied units you cannot assign them to control groups further proving the need for a better army assignment/grouping feature.
Attacks- There is almost no warning of an attack until enemies are already in our teritory and killing my villagers. I find it so infuriating that I can spend a whole year basically improving things so that my population will continue to grow because I need more people to survive and conquer the map, only to have one villager be killed by a wolf so quickly I cant react to it. Completely setting back my progress for the year. If I only have one or two villagers in a zone, a wolf decides to invade and my military is on the other side of the map the only hope i have of saving my villagers is to notice fast enough and hope that the wolf hasn't killed one of them before I can tell them to run from the zone, or my defensive tower does anything useful. Villagers should hide in building and shoot at attackers like in AOE, there is no reason that as soon as an enemy touches our territory that my villager units should suicide into the threat.
Towers - I seriously feel like defensive towers are completely useless except as for distractions. Especially in chapter 7 of the story. It takes half a year for a tower to kill an invasion of one enemy. I'm convinced the only reason the devs were able to do it on the hardest difficulty if they even did, is because they likely cheesed it by kiting the enemies forever which makes it impossible to complete anything else in your city as you have to constantly be moving you military around. This Kiting method isn't even viable anymore because they added a charge mechanic to the enemies, so I feel like this chapter of the story really needs to be revisited.
Cut Scenes- I'm referring to the little quips from the leaders in the middle of the an ongoing game. When one happens the game doesn't pause, the screen moves, and you have to wait 5 second for the text to come up or spam exit which doesn't help the fact that if I was in combat while that happens half my army could be dead by the time I find them again.
Quick Selecting Villagers - there appears to be a hotkey (u) for this, but its not its only for idle units, and newly spawned villagers aren't idle because they start collecting food immediately. I just want a hot key to select any villager that I haven't given an order to.
Micro managing scouts - it's almost required that you micro manage you scouts. If you dont they will die and they will explore much more slowly than if you give them commands. No reason for this. just make them explore the map gradually without dieing, especially if i've upgraded the building.

Long story short, I feel there are too many things forgotten about to not have a pause button where I can interact with the game while it's paused, as well as expressing my displeasure in the unit management in this game. Address those issues or give me a pause button and I'm a happy man who will play this game for following six months straight. If these things are addressed, really in even the smallest way, Then I have no complaints about this game.
After about 50 hours I find the lack of a pause functionality in single player games much more frustrating than I previously did, bordering on the point of not wanting to play because of the constant minor inconveniences happening. As I play more I feel like this games entire objective is to kill your units through your own negligence, despite literally not having enough time to react to things. Just feels like constant cheap shots.
At the end of the day this scratches an itch that hasn't been touched since AOE,
Thank you to the creators, and hopefully my criticism can be used constructively