>>1511
The fact that literally everything that happens takes time is, really, a huge balancing issue that most games just don't have to deal with. It's directly responsible for, for instance, the time limits on individual exploration excursions, which means you need careful planning to avoid going over your time limit. Since planning routes during exploration requires knowing how fast your party is on each terrain type, taking changing encumbrance and new members into account, it's actually an intricate problem. The interface also doesn't really present that information to you directly. It's not going over the exploration time limit that I find to be the problem, but rather spending so much time in one portal that the farm, king quests, brothel, other quests, and so on don't get attended to. More or less everything in the game has an element of time pressure connected to it.
There's actually quite a lot going on during portal exploration that can trap new players, or even uncautious old ones--like recruiting a large example of a new species but forgetting that the portal is too small for them to return with you, and only finding out when it's time to go home. That makes you not only have to miss the new species, but also take the morale hit for kicking the person out. Managing weight alone is a huge task, especially if you actively want to develop a particular portal with roads and whatever. I get the feeling the idea is to do an Etrian Odyssey-like thing and have parties dedicated to things like quickly scouting portals and carrying lots of stuff for building, but the clunky interface doesn't really make it easy to manage things like that. You can kinda organize people by changing their name, but this is the kind of game that could use party management or note-making features. Also, since every game (except the freeform ones, I guess) is effectively timed, I at least constantly wonder why I bother doing anything intricate since I'm going to inevitably have to tear it down and restart again, but that's a personal problem.
Really, a badass UI could make this game. I'm not going to go so far as the current UI breaks it, but it's been a weak point right from the start. This dev has never liked to save players from their own mistakes, though, so the UI might be part of the rough design philosophy. In early versions you could do things like sell or library away unique characters without even a prompt. It's certainly arguable that it's a legitimate design decision to let players do silly things like that without confirmation, but I more get the feeling that it's something the dev just didn't consider. Maybe he overestimated his audience. I dunno.