As I stated in my last feedback posting, I continue to be afraid the split personality of free mobile/pay PC is doing more harm than good for both platforms. But clearly 22cans is intent on staying the course on this point. To be clear, I'm one of those that is hoping the PC version ends up as a "god game" along the lines of Populus and not Sculptville the Facebook game.

Overall the PC version plays like a mobile game more than ever, where you just tend to it once an hour for five minutes. Frankly, I think this is terrible, and I hope it is rectified before release on the PC. Sticking in voyages to kill time while waiting on timers is just a band-aid and doesn't address the core issues at stake here. In my dream scenario, the game evolves over time so that in the beginning, I have to manually control each person, click each pink bubble, harvest each crop, etc., but by the end game it's all built up into a huge self maintaining system where I don't have to do anything. Large parts of the game play are setting up automated processes so the world runs the way I envision it. Of course, along the way I get bigger and badder powers to interact with the world in fun ways.

On redoing the wheat mechanic: Over all it works much more intuitively now, so I'm happy. A couple of things on game mechanics I think the game loses sight of occasionally is that you should never lose an ability after the game gives it to you. So being able to expand willy nilly is great, until you unlock wheat and then suddenly you hit a roadblock where you can no longer build until your first farm pops out a wheat an hour later is jarring to say the least. I think there has to be a better game mechanic here that is being overlooked. My idea is this: once you unlock wheat, you are not required to have wheat to expand, just that your villagers will only build lesser quality houses if you don't. At any time, you can click on a lesser version of an existing house/settlement and have an option to pay wheat/ore/belief/whatever to upgrade it to the next level. Ideally to me, once you put a house down you would never have to destroy it and make them rebuild it from scratch to get a better version, they would *always* upgrade it in place.

On making settlements bigger: While I'm at it, I haven't currently found a way to increase the size of a settlement/village once it's been established. (Other than a shrine of capacity.) This is unfortunate, if I clear out more land around the settlement, I should be able to somehow grow the size of the settlement after it was already built. I'm referring to the number of farmers/miners, as well as its radius of influence. As above, an option to pay wheat/ore once adjacent land has been cleared up would be a good way to go.

On settlements: As above, don't make me feel like I should have to delete an 'inferior' settlement once the bigger villages are available. Just let me pay wheat/ore/belief to upgrade from one to another. Or perhaps a settlement only can turn into a village when connected by a road to another one.

On Pit of Doom: While I like the Pit, I feel now the game balance absolutely requires a constant stream of sacrifices in the early game so much, it's a requirement and not an option. People wanting to play a nice god are going to be put off by this.

On the small ore/wheat/belief icons: The ones with the number after them in the lower left corner of the screen that say how much of each resource you currently have to spend. I can't tell exactly how these are supposed to work, because they seem very buggy, so I'm going to just say how I thought they should work. When you have an ore mine ready to be harvested, the icon should wiggle, and when you click on it, it should take you to the ore that needs to be harvested. If it is still wiggling, you can continue to click it to warp around to each unharvested mine. The same should be true for collection wheat and belief. If this is indeed how it should work (because the wheat/ore ones are really broken) then awesome, if not, then this is how they should work.

On the loss of roads: Can't say I'm really crying here, the old roads were a lot of effort to build with no tangible results. Although I do think it could be cool if they were added back as a way of connecting farm plots to settlements and/or connecting one village to another. Perhaps if you build a road from a settlement to a gathering plot, the gathers would auto-collect that plot for you.

On leashing cost: The 100 cost in the start of the game is too painful. To get 5 gems to trade for 1000 belief costs 500 belief by the time you drag those 5 guys... Too often in early game I'm waiting and bored to get 100 belief to leash one guy. I recommending lowering the leash cost in the early game to 10, but perhaps after you've activated "Stronger Followers" or equivalent cards, you increase the amount it takes to leash them with each upgrade. Or alternatively, make the cost of the leash reflected in how far you're dragging them.

On beautify: I wish this power cost was based on each hunk of un-beautified land that gets turned into beautified land, rather than how long you hold down the mouse. This lets you scrub land at a leisurely pace and it only charges you when fixing up a piece of land. I feel I waste massive amounts of belief with this skill going over and over the same land trying to get that one little bit I missed.

On the stream: This made me so happy to see, I don't even understand why. It really made a difference in feeling like it was a living world. I want a god power to plop down a spring/stream anywhere on the map. In real life, settlements/villages next to water always fare better, so it seems the game mechanics should reinforce this somehow. Bridges over them would be amazing.

On ending powers: I still wish I could press Esc (or something) to end a power. Clicking on the close X is annoying, trying to make the visual transition between 3D world space to 2D screen viewport space means I always end up accidentally blowing up something with FoG I didn't mean to.

On destroying houses: It is still quite frustrating when trying to blow up houses with Finger of God, having the blue guys start immediately rebuilding underneath you. Of course, this would be greatly mitigated if I could upgrade a house in place, rather than nuke it and make them build a new one.

On sculpting over top of things: You can sculpt over/under rocks which adjust their heights accordingly, so I don't understand the artificial limit of not being able to sculpt around the Pit of Doom, Fountains that are gifts, etc. This is just irksome to have a placed a fountain early in game, but then later want to raise the land without having the fountain remain in a hole in the ground.

On god powers in general: I have to say these still feel lacking. What I would really love to see is severe land sculpting through your powers, as in a volcano power that creates a large raising action across a wide area, a meteor that makes a big crater, and an earthquake that sort of levels out the land to an average overall height. For example, if there is a large mountain I want to clear out to make room for a few settlements, it would feel much more godly to drop a few meteors on it and a couple earthquakes to smooth it out than to sit there for a hour sculpting to wipe out each bit a tiny bit at a time. Conversely if you have some ocean or a valley you want to fill in, you could cause a few volcanoes over the area to bring it up above sea level. Tectonic plate shifts that could move a whole settlement over in a particular direction and things of this nature would be awesome. It should probably cost more belief overall to do it this way, but it would be immensely more satisfying once you get the point in the game you can sculpt more dramatically in this sort of fashion.

On Astari: I miss the idea of an opposing tribe from the original Populous. I am hoping the Astari will be bringing this back. It was really fun to be able to use the destructive powers on an enemy tribe more often in game play. I liked the added pressure against your expansion. Same story with the wolves from the earliest versions. You can't properly enjoy FoG, swamps, meteors while nuking your own people, especially when you can't save/restore your game.

On use of belief in powers: Whenever you gain belief, the game has pink text like "+50" that floats for a second or two. The same should be true whenever you spend belief, it should say "-100" whenever you zap a FoG, etc. I admit this might be annoying for sculpting, I'd have to see it first to say.

Many of the things I criticised in my last feedback post a few months ago have been rectified, often fixed very similar to ways I recommended they be addressed, so I am very happy about a lot of the progress that has been made. It is very encouraging overall, I just hope game loses the mobile app game play feel before it's all said and done.