I checked all the usual ones.
Part 2 of Chapter 1 turned out to be surprisingly long. For me, anyways. Having to clear out ladders then repel a wave of heroes always required bringing all my squads back, so I wouldn't end up losing experienced guys on routine defense. Setting all your unsquaded minions to patrolling helps a lot with ladders too. Combat slows down a bit as levels go up, but visually it's hard to really settle on what's going on. The health bars alternate between squads and enemies, squads don't seem to retarget when you click on individuals in a squad and...yeah. It's basically all about numbers and levels, and picking your initial target carefully. You can always teleport your squads out too if they start taking losses.
The Ratmen are pretty nasty. I was getting away with 1 Squad and Baal when there were two or even 3. But when it came to 4 or more it took at least 2 squads, and I'd usually lose an Overlord. Eventually I said screw it, and started zerg teleporting all my squads in to overwhelm large groups of ratmen. And I still managed to lose some guys, even fully leveled up. I'm playing on normal.
Feeding your guys seem to be really important for combat performance. Unfortunately, it's kind of tedious. I'm going to try to build several kitchens next time, to see if that speeds things up. But having to rotate guys around constantly to feed them, is kind of annoying. Especially all the un-squaded guys who have to be told individually to go eat. Same goes with upgrading armor and weapons. There's a bit of tedium and micromanagement that I think they really just should have automated. When a guy qualifies for an armor upgrade, just give it to him ><
There's some cool synergy going on with squad skills, and it looks promising for when you get non-Imp critters. (Unless monsters all offer a lot of the same abilities...) The stun on hit one, while only 5% chance per hit, was knocking guys down left and right. Really helped on the Ratmen to keep the damage down.
Traps are kind of ho-hum so far, largely because you can only place them in corridors. Maybe I'll find more use for them later when the dungeon entrance isn't within spitting distance of my treasury.
Speaking of gold, and resources in general...the way it works is kinda quirky. You split your stockpile between food and materials. Materials only come from heroes, treasure chests and raids. Food gets produced all the time. Gold is stored in the treasury and as far as I can tell it's only used for buying up the # of squads you have. You can get it off heroes by imprisoning them and ransoming, or from treasure chests. Basically, you never really lack of ways to get resources. You can raid topside and most locations refresh every 2 minutes or something. The more I play the more the game seems geared toward RTS and MP, with trying to set up consistent streams of resources, so you can crank out guys constantly and attack. When you're playing on campaign though, you end up maxing out storage pretty quick and not really worrying about food or materials or gold. If you want either, you just send out a raid, and 2 minutes later you have what you want. You need at least 3 stockpiles to have enough potential materials storage to build the top-end structures. So unless you build like..6 stockpiles, you'd end up out of food, and materials, just so you can make room for materials. It's...quirky.
That said, there are a few upper rooms that could lead to some fun. You can build a big monster lair that functions as a treasure, and certain minions set to guard it get bonuses to defense. Heroes are drawn toward the monster lairs. You could set up some kinda fun dungeon-esqe layouts with that.
There's a little bit of exploration too while you're doing the missions, where you can find runes to unlock them for later use.
All in all it's pretty fun. No pause and some hectic clicking teleporting squads around to respond to threats makes it a little bit less laid back than I'd hoped for. But it's pretty solid, and while not all the systems and mechanics are deep and awesome, there's still quite a lot of moving parts.
Also really enjoying the music, which is in .ogg format in the game directory. It really nails the impish evil spirit of the game...where the dialog tends to just ham it up. When I'm not having to listen to Baal or the sorcerer, I kinda feel like the bad guy from
Legend playing this, which is pretty awesome.
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Topic: Impire (Read 18457 times)