Tablet players: what setup do you use?

[Dr. B]

Just curious. What's the tablet make and model and OS? Do you use a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and if so which ones? How does it run? Thanks.

[Floral Shoppe]

(nm)

[Ping14]

Playing on a tablet has some pains of its own. The dialogue box you get when playing the mobile version is smaller, hence you can only see 6 choices at a time, giving you a "next and previous" button to see 7-12 options. And if those choices are long enough, they could bug out and not show the other choices.

This is a problem when you will be using any portals, as some of the leys have very long names. I usually fix this by using -portal_ord command, picking the longest names portal first so they won't bug out the next ones. There's also the bookshelves, which can be annoying since you really can't fix this aside from taking out books and see if it changes anything. I tend to just make my book titles short so that it doesn't bug out like this. Also- message boards will have this problem, specially if people are putting in lengthy titles. Can be fixed by just trial and error, keep clicking on it till the "next" button becomes visible.

On topic:
Samsung Galaxy Tab, it comes with the notebook keyboard, and I just use a wireless mouse. Works great! Aside from the issues above. Also, when an area gets crowded with heavily warded people + a heavy visual weather effect, I can notice that the tablet gets hotter - I usually just log off at that point.

[Dr. B]

[...]

Do you know how many gigs of RAM your Samsung has? Will 4 GB cut it or do you need more for Arelith to run smoothly?

[Ping14]

It has 8GBs, but I think its more of the GPU and chipset that matters for mobile gaming.

[Cnaym]

Heya, played on pretty much anything able to run Arelith by now.

Tablet is super nice for laying in bed and just roleplaying with folks in a quarter or city, the menu issues of the mobile version have already been mentioned.
There is some bug where certain areas will just not load on mobile client for me regardless of device - namelay Skals tundra and the odd Guldorand Library or Greyport District House.
Pretty much crash on enter, with crashes on relogging till at some random point you get lucky and can wobble out again.

If you plan to play mainly with Keyboard and mouse while looking for a mobile solution I'd recommend the Steamdeck instead. It runs the game like computers do, accepts workshop stuff (character images being the big one I really miss on my phone, everyone is just a white square) and you can connect it to a bigger screen like a TV.

As for power drain, you usually get a couple of hours out of any device. My phone has a 20k power cell though so that can in theory run it for a lot longer (it's a construction site phone, not recommended for small hands huehuehue).

---

TLDR: If you got a table and are unsure about spending 5 bucks on the game, it do be functional.
If you wanna buy a tablet just to play Arelith on, I'd only go for it if 1. phone was unable to run it and 2. I only wanted the tablet without keyboard and mouse.
Other than that, Steamdeck or its alternatives.

[Dr. B]

There is some bug where certain areas will just not load on mobile client for me regardless of device - namelay Skals tundra and the odd Guldorand Library or Greyport District House.
Pretty much crash on enter, with crashes on relogging till at some random point you get lucky and can wobble out again.

May I ask what OS and specs for the tablet you were playing on? Do you think the crashes were due to a bug or due to the game's requirements exceeding the hardware's limits?

[Cnaym]

There is some bug where certain areas will just not load on mobile client for me regardless of device - namelay Skals tundra and the odd Guldorand Library or Greyport District House.
Pretty much crash on enter, with crashes on relogging till at some random point you get lucky and can wobble out again.

May I ask what OS and specs for the tablet you were playing on? Do you think the crashes were due to a bug or due to the game's requirements exceeding the hardware's limits?

Sure thing.
Tablet I use is a Lenovo P11 with 4gigs of ram
Old phone was a Oukitel WP18, 4gigs as well
New one is the WP33, 8gigs

All running different Android versions, but nothing ancient, didn't have any trouble elsewhere or with lag / other games.

[Dreams]

iPhone 15, runs smoothly. UI options are terrible and systems like sailing which only work through UI are unplayable.

[Critique]

Consistent crashes, especially on entering areas, are more likely due to the mobile version of EE running behind the PC than due to the version of Android you're using. I was playing it on a very mid Samsung tablet a few years ago and it handled Arelith just fine. I don't think hardware and Android version are going to be a huge issue unless you're going bottom rung ie don't bother with a Fire tablet or some $79 thing from Walmart. But a recurring problem was, the server would move to a new version of EE and Android wasn't running it yet so some stuff would get broken and some areas would immediately crash on entry.

iPhone 15, runs smoothly. UI options are terrible and systems like sailing which only work through UI are unplayable.

FWIW you can actually plug in a monitor or, if you have one, use an Apple TV device to play it on the big screen from your iphone if you were for some reason inclined to do so. It will be pretty close to the PC version with a few differences but I am pretty sure UI should be fine. As well as if you were to use an ipad to play, but OP seems to want Android so not getting into that.

[Ping14]

Consistent crashes, especially on entering areas, are more likely due to the mobile version of EE running behind the PC than due to the version of Android you're using.

Not sure if you can do this in Apple - as I never use apple devices myself, but in android you can sign up to be a beta-tester for the game. It shortens the version gap between the mobile and PC versions. I have never experienced a crash (unless its a connection issue), but have experienced some texture missing in some places. (Sencliff harbor being all white, some sands in Sibayad becoming weird mush of brown, sewer covers in Guldorand becoming white). Other than those, haven't really experienced any major crash. The game runs kinda slow on Shadow plane though, and the astrolabe, or when in an area that has heavy mist + rain/snow weather effects. You can feel the slow down and how hot the device gets when these things happen.

ADD: You can see the Opt in for Beta at the Google Play store.