Comments on: Thoughts: Age of Wonders III.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Sat, 19 Apr 2014 08:33:04 +0000

Yeah okay, that was a bit harsh. Better to say that he is behaving exactly like you’d expect a nerd who has become a multimillionaire to act, which has its ups (funding Age of Wonders III) and downs (knee-jerk reactions driven on prevailing internet wisdom and his own gut feeling, like cancelling Minecraft for Oculus RIft because he didn’t like the Facebook acquisition).

By: Zoqfotpik

Zoqfotpik — Wed, 16 Apr 2014 07:52:56 +0000

I’d just like to say that I think Notch is NOT a dick. Not at all. He had some apparent stress or irritability issues a while back (the Yogscast fight in which he was definitely not the only asshole in the room) but the way he conducts himself otherwise is frankly inspirational. How can you say that when you’re talking about a wonderful game that he saved from ruin?

By: Aleksei Volchok

Aleksei Volchok — Tue, 15 Apr 2014 08:38:39 +0000

>not sure how different it is from the first Warlock

Not very different. You can check out InoCo’s Elven Legacy and other wargames which were basically updated Fantasy General (which was Panzer General WITH ELVES). Warlock took some UI from Civilization, added basic city-building, global spells and terraforming to almost classic Panzer General formula, and as Civilization 5 was influenced by PG too it looked like Civilization on drugs to many. Warlock 2 is iterative upgrade with more of everything + sort-of-campaign game mode.

Their older games (Elven legacy) are much more conservative (you have more traditional branching campaign), though unforgiving: your army moves from mission to mission and you can lose guys forever (to be replaced by newbies for money) or miss an opportunity to recruit some guy or get some artifact. Kind of Fire Emblem. This sort of campaign makes those campaigns you don’t like (the one with every scenario starting from scratch) look much more benevolent. You won’t get to mission 6 and see that you can’t win the scenario cause you’ve lost your flying ship in mission 2.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Mon, 14 Apr 2014 20:05:53 +0000

Hah, part of the reason I haven’t messed with those yet is that Civilization has conditioned me to think of messing with the random map generation in any way as a form of cheating, but I’ll definitely have to get over it because Triumph really have provided a kitchen sink of options for game customisation.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Mon, 14 Apr 2014 20:02:48 +0000

Warlock minus points: very bland and generic presentation and UI.
Warlock plus points: getting my skeletons to build a tax office so that I can construct a vampire mansion.

Like I said below, I don’t think it’s actually that good, but it is a fascinating spin on the concept.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Mon, 14 Apr 2014 20:00:58 +0000

It’s certainly far more developed than it was in the previous games, in part because it’s not so easy to summon a bunch of Dark Angels and faceroll the enemy, and I think that having the majority of battles take no more than a couple of minutes was inspired. Tactical battle fatigue starts to set in when playing a campaign of XCOM, but it never does in AoW; that’s the fault of the strategic layer.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Mon, 14 Apr 2014 19:57:23 +0000

Warlock 2 is a really, really interesting game. This is not the same thing as good, and I’m not sure how different it is from the first Warlock (which I didn’t play), but some of their solutions to the typical issues 4Xes face are fascinating.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Mon, 14 Apr 2014 19:55:45 +0000

I agree that loss of identity is part of the tradeoff for classes, and part of the problem is that most of the time you don’t even have to make an effort to keep your population of sky-hating Goblins happy as an Elf leader. All the races are very middle-of-the-road and there’s no Pure Evil or Pure Good races in the game (who were at permanent war with anyone who wasn’t at least Evil/Good). I haven’t really noticed the T4 spam, but then I admitted in the review I haven’t really played into the late-late game.

Will try a game with founding cities off at some point; it took some digging to find the actual option in the game setup, which I think is why I missed it the first time around.

By: Aleksei Volchok

Aleksei Volchok — Fri, 11 Apr 2014 12:58:49 +0000

Perhaps this is the reason I’ve played Inferno campaign and it felt like David Lynch trying to make DnD module. I still don’t understand how the hero became demon, what did he try to accomplish and who the hell where those faceless guys.

Also, cheap effortless castle conversion and common pull of recruites is a nice way to tell the player he only needs one hero. And if you try to recruit some other guy we make his icon small and obviously insignificant. Is this King’s Bounty influence?

By: Darren

Darren — Fri, 11 Apr 2014 12:54:27 +0000

The campaigns get lots of points for allowing you to play them in whatever order you want. HoMMV was a terrible slog that forced you to play each faction in order.