kroc: Firstly, thank you. I first heard of The Lords of Midnight from Jimmy Maher's The Digital Antiquarian and added it to my wishlists to get around to when I could. After seeing the game featured in Retro Gamer magazine I was reminded of it and was glad to find it at GoG.

Whilst I've only played a few hours, I wish to provide some feedback of my experience as a new player.

Of Mapping:

This is a game that one needs to die many times to work out where one needs to go and what to do. On my first couple of plays, I had not realised how soon Doomdark's forces pour through Dodrak by the thousands. I opted for the modern remake instead of playing the Spectrum original solely on the basis of the new auto-map; I'm playing on a laptop and move around a lot so I don't want to rely on old-school paper mapping. Ultimately though, the new map defeats itself because it is reset with every game. I want to be able to refer to the locations of the key items and places I've visited in past games for the requisite past-lives knowledge you have to have to be able to win the game.

If the map were to retain the areas explored in previous games this would make improving your play friendlier. The map could show the previously-explored areas in grey, and the currently explored areas in the usual white. An option could be provided to 'reset' the map for those who would prefer playing blind each time.

Of Character Portraits:

When characters are presented (such as the 'think' / 'seek' screen) it would help if Luxor / Corleth / Rorthron appeared slightly different than the other lords of the same house. Your own characters are the most important ones, and when you have several armies grouped to you, scrolling through the statuses can be disorientating with too many character portraits looking identical.

Of Approaching Lords:

When you click the button to approach a lord, there is no confirmation per-se that the lord has joined you, you are simply taken instantly to the status screen and this is rather confusing at first. A simple "Lord X has joined your cause" message would help avoid the confusion of the instant acceptance.

Of Armies:

Upon the select screen, I would find it useful to display the size of the army present with each character. This would make it easier to size-up your total army without having to manually check the status screen of each character.

The night report should include statements for when your characters are slain in battle.

Of Keys:

The ALT key should cause the key hints to appear.
I can't use keys to go directly from Think, to Seek for example. In a lot of instances, you are forced to follow the UI's buttons with the keyboard.

Of Manuals:

The Novella / Game-guide buttons always take you to online resources, rather than launching local offline copies. I would prefer to use an offline copy as I don't always have an internet connection.

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This is all I can immediately think of. I shall get back with more when I can.

Kind regards,
Kroc Camen.