Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[gimli]

[...] it's just that they've obviously not had the time/resources/testing available to properly differentiate between the different races to the extent of making them feel very different.

It's more likely been done on purpose.

It sounds weird but I agree. I think it's all about the marketing & profit. I guess they wanted to release a game which attracts a "wide" audience on the TBS market.  The design & various gameplay elements are quite minimalistic and generic in many aspects.

[Retropunch]

I can understand why they might decide that different mechanics for each race would be too complicated (and attract a smaller audience) but I don't think that's true. Take HOMM for instance, each race plays pretty differently, and yet still achieves balance. This has been worked out over a number of years (with varying degrees of overall game success), but I don't think that it's impossible to both be accessible and have differing races/factions.

Again, I think it's all down to having enough time to test things and to balance stuff out. I'm sure in the patches to come the balance will improve and allow for a little bit more differentiation, but I'm mainly just annoyed that it's another 'don't worry we'll patch this loads after launch!!' games.

[Mindmaker]

Well I'm not going to finish this game.
Finally started waging proper war on each other and apparently I'm supposed to pit endless legions of my t4 units against endless legions of his t4 units, since most lower tier units with a few exceptions become useless.

Instead of repeating that for the next 20 hours I'd rather be doing something fun.

[ed boy]

That was the case in the previous games as well, where the only way to spend your mana was to cast spells, which could only be done with your leader and had the bottleneck of casting points.

This is not true.

Previous games had a lot of permanent unit enchantments that had upkeep. This games enchantments are "for this combat only".
Only a handful global enchantments, which rather low cost.
I summon heavy classes may be able to use it to their full capacity, but I haven't yet played them.
Sources for mana generation are rather common.
The previous game let you funnel excess mana into reasearch (well more like it let you convert excess research into mana, since research was more important most of the time.

There were unit enchantment, but your ability to output those was still limited by your casting points, so you still had to deal with that bottleneck.

And on long maps it wasn't unusual for you to max out the research tree (or at least it wasn't if you play slow like me).

[Niveras]

But enchantments had a per-turn upkeep, effectively lowering your mana income.

[Criptfeind]

I never found casting points to be a limitation on enchantments. Typically I would have plenty of turns where I didn't use all my casting points, and there I could use my enchantments, since it typically doesn't matter when you cast them (of course that also means that the whole having too much mana was still a "issue" for me, after four or five cities for my mana and money were functionally limitless)

[Muz]

Everything technically works, but the units are almost all carbon copies with a +1 or -1 here and different abilities gained at elite tiers.

This is exactly why I hesitated on buying the game. Kinda expected this. AoW2 had this problem, but it seems worse in AoW3. I actually really liked AoW 1 because it had dungeon crawling and a lot of weird units. AoW2 annoyed me when they gave every race generic 'archer', 'fighter', 'priest' units, but it looks like AoW3 doesn't even bother with variety. AoW2 at least had some nice low level units with special abilities to make up for the generic ones, like the spider, frostling lvl 0, goblin darts, goblin bomber, etc.

I play AoW to basically just have a tactical RPG, so I found this quite sad. From forums, I understand that units always hit now and never miss. And that flyers can be attacked by melee. I'm looking for Vertigo, Cursed, Burning effects in AoW 3 and it seems like it's been removed. Is that true? Where's the strategy then?

[Mindmaker]

Well I don't understand the complaint against AoW 2 with generic units, considering Master of Magic had a pool of 13 generic units, which all races had varying access to and gave them some sort of racial +/- bonus or a minor twist and then 1-3 unique racial units and it's considered the best Fantasy TBS by many.
Meanwhile AoW 2 has the generic spear/pikeman, swordsman, archer, priest, rider, which only some races strictly follow, many giving them interesting abilities and at least 4 unique units per race (more in SM).
There are also Races like the Draconians, Tigrans, Nomads, Syrons and Shadow Demons which don't use the generic units of other races.

You might be complaining from the original AoW perspective, but I haven't played that one yet.
Might get it off GoG, since I'd like to see for myself. Also probably going to try SM with an AI mod.

[Mipe]

Meh, it's all rock-paper-scissors rehash...

[gimli]

Also probably going to try SM with an AI mod.

Hm, is there a decent AI mod for SM? I might install the game again in that case.

[Mindmaker]

Also probably going to try SM with an AI mod.

Hm, is there a decent AI mod for SM? I might install the game again in that case.

No idea if it's decent, but at least they use settlers now. The whole thing changes up hundreds of other things and looks like an SP balance mod, but read for yourself:
http://aow2.heavengames.com/downloads/showfile.php?fileid=785

[Wiles]

I'm looking for Vertigo, Cursed, Burning effects in AoW 3 and it seems like it's been removed. Is that true? Where's the strategy then?

There are some effects like that, I've run into bleeding, immolated and shocked so far.

[ed boy]

For those saying that the units are pretty much the same across all the races, that's been the case right from AOW1, where each race has the following:
T1:archer, swordsman, battering ram, other
T2:Priest, Cavalry, catapult, ballista
T3:Flyer, ranged, other (with a couple exceptions in the 12 races)
T4:unique

Each race only had 3 distinctive units out of 12, and while that does mean it had more variety than recent installments, it also had lots more balance issues.

[Retropunch]

For those saying that the units are pretty much the same across all the races, that's been the case right from AOW1, where each race has the following:
T1:archer, swordsman, battering ram, other
T2:Priest, Cavalry, catapult, ballista
T3:Flyer, ranged, other (with a couple exceptions in the 12 races)
T4:unique

Each race only had 3 distinctive units out of 12, and while that does mean it had more variety than recent installments, it also had lots more balance issues.

I think it's less about the units themselves (as all fantasy games stick to those tropes) but more about the racial differences that each have. For instance, in HOMM3 (one of the best TBS games in my opinion) you had racial differences like the rampart/sylvan which had very strong ranged units and flying/fast units whilst the stronghold town had very weak ranged units but strong and slow melee ones. Similarly, the tower race was different as it had units which could cast a variety of spells on each other and the only L1 unit that was ranged. The heroes then had spells and abilities which complemented their races.

Really, I just mean to say that it's not impossible to mix things up within a TBS to the point where each race places significantly different, yet still stay balanced and tactical.

[gimli]

Also probably going to try SM with an AI mod.

Hm, is there a decent AI mod for SM? I might install the game again in that case.

No idea if it's decent, but at least they use settlers now. The whole thing changes up hundreds of other things and looks like an SP balance mod, but read for yourself:
http://aow2.heavengames.com/downloads/showfile.php?fileid=785

Hm, this looks interesting, thanks for the link!