Well, it's been officially released. I've previously posted my impressions of the beta (not a bad game, just not a good or exciting game either, but a definite improvement over Elemental: War of Magic). But now that I have the actual game, I'll be posting new impressions over the next few days. I actually have a manual now (and there's a tutorial!). So I'll let you know what I think. I just wanted to let people know that it's been officially released.
Yeah, if I had to pay for it, I wouldn't have without waiting for a lot of reviews and word of mouth, after War of Magic. Fortunately I got it for free as well. I played for a couple of hours last night, and so far here are a few observations: 1. Appearance --I don't care for the art style. The map is incredibly dark, making it an unpleasant experience to look at. I don't usually care a lot about graphics -- hell I play rogue-likes that have no graphics. But this game is just plain ugly. 2. Bugginess -- so far I've only noticed one major bug. It's not totally game killing, but it is VERY annoying. Sometimes you lose the ability to scroll the tactical map during combat. Enemy troops may be off-screen so you can't target them. The only way to deal with that problem that I've found is to switch to automatic combat (which can lose you your already wounded troops, because they seem to want to charge into battle no matter how close to death they are). 3. Tutorial -- it works (unlike that in War of Magic), but imho, it is insufficient. That said, my first game has been educational, and I AM slowly figuring things out. 4. Game play -- this may simply be my lame strategy at work, but I found that it's incredibly hard to totally stomp out an enemy, because their leader doesn't die, he simply respawns elsewhere. I was playing on a medium map with 3 enemies, and I decided to deal with Magnar first (as he kind of attacked me out of nowhere, without declaring war(?) without me even knowing of his existence (still not sure how that happened -- I declared war on one nation, and got attacked by a different one). Unlike Master of Magic, because of how long it takes to develop armies, you can't build a lot of them. I only had a few (meager) garrisons, and one army with my sovereign. I would have LIKED to have created multiple armies, but that just was not happening. There's just too much to do, and it is too resource intensive. So instead, My army kept chasing Magnar's army all over the place, and defeating that army just felt like a futile gesture. Part of my problem was not having enough resources to build anything but the weakest armies. I had ALL of this great technology to build super troops, but I couldn't build them because I had no source of iron (despite a growing nation), insufficient crystal, etc. I guess next time I'll try to build more of a summoning-focused hero to make up for that. The only good aspect to that was that the cheap/weak troops can be built fast and easily.
I did start a new game today, this time playing the 'Scenario' which seems more like a single-player campaign. I completed. It tells a story (which I honestly haven't been interested enough in to actually read. Instead of playing against AI opponents as in sandbox mode, it plays more like an rpg. You wander around doing quests, unlocking new parts of the map, and building up your army. In both the first and second map you have one city, and cannot actually build settlers. Note that it's called a Scenario, which was why I was totally surprised when, after winning what I thought would be the final battle, the game restarted with 'chapter 5' on a new map. So I can't say for sure yet how long it is. But there's only one. I will say that so far, it's not bad. That said, It has no replay value either. And it seems to be going on for far too long (or maybe I'm just starting to get bored with it).
Something I figured out last night -- the inability to scroll the tactical map is not so much an inability, but the fact that the method of doing it is simply non-intuitive. I figured this out accidentally. On the tactical combat screen, you can zoom way out. When you zoom back in, it will recenter the map wherever your cursor is. Once I figured that out, tactical combat got a whole lot better. I'm not sure why they didn't simply allow you to scroll the screen, though.
E:WoM was like this and FE kept this theme - armies and even champions are quite expendable, you need to take out cities to make headway. Just killing the enemy's sovereign over and over accomplishes nothing but grinding levels and being mildly annoying, but losing an established city is a massive setback if not a deathblow. For that reason, taking a city is also extremely difficult. Best tactic is to kill the sovereign, then assault the city while they're weak. They can still whip out their nasty buffs/spells but at least they'll go down with only an arrow volley or two. Wiping out other factions really doesn't take all that long... unless it's %*#! Gilder lategame when they've created a dozen cities and have armies crawling all over every inch of the map.
I will say that my impression of the game increased a bit as soon as I figured out how to actually deal with the tactical map (it's amazing how hard it is to win a battle if you can't see everyone on the map. Also, I'm finding the game a little buggier than I thought. Occasionally (well at least 3 times so far), the UI seems to disappear and won't come back at all during tactical combat. The game simply doesn't respond to anything. But a patch or two may fix that, so I'm not terribly concerned (Stardock has a good record on that front). I'm going to play another game this weekend and see if changing map parameters, etc. will handle my concerns (no I haven't given up on it yet). The favorable response that the game is getting has me thinking 'could I possibly be missing something?' If I actually start having fun, I'll let you know lol.
Oh yeah i know that. But still, it takes so long to build a garrison, so while you move to take another city or outpost, the city or outpost you just captured changes color. I would take one city and lose 3 outposts, go to take the outposts and lose the city again. As I said, whackamole. I couldn't build enough units to keep my main army filled, much garrison up what I'd captured. I would have loved to start building a second army. It didn't help that most of my army was simply dragon fodder to my heroes (militia and archers suck, and that was all I could build without iron).
You can also with a cursor 'grab' the map and drag it, effectively changing the camera position (or the map underneath).
