I used to play this a lot when everything was like on Classic. Man, I miss those days.
After trying it out for a bit, I have to say that I like the sprawling fortresses of Classic more than the meager shacks there are now. vOv
What's up with this talk about value of building is being cheapened? I always played a builder and I loved building big forts with spectacular defenses. There were a lot of people like me and we all built together giant forts, like we were a hivemind and agreed on what to build without talking.
What's on the new versions that forced players to drop this and go with small buildings instead?
BTW I downloaded Classic but there were like only 5 people playing it.
Kegs (and to a minor degree bomb/fire arrows, but if we're going to be honest it's the kegs). Two or three kegs will completely topple one of the old eight or nine tile wide skyscrapers with virtually no counterplay beyond your knights just being better and more responsive.
Wow, you guys think the new version is really that bad?
One class is useless and never played, one class can only make minor and temporary contributions, and the third class is heavily dependent on ping because of the nature of timing windows in melee combat. Also, and I've pretty thoroughly confirmed this after going back and forth between the two several times, but block placement and removal is actually
less reliable and more difficult to get the cursor where you want it than it was in alpha.
You know what I just did? I just played a forty minute long match in classic/alpha, almost entirely as an archer. Throughout that entire time I felt as if I was making meaningful contributions to the team, regardless of whether I was putting out spam at high trajectories to pepper a no-man's land that I didn't have direct line of sight to because there were three towers between me and it
1, climbing up our main tower to lay fire onto their catapults whenever they came up, destroying two (including one set into one of those well-protected bunkers by very careful high-angling of my shots) and forcing five others to be moved into worse positions
2, supporting our knights with direct fire from a forward tower
3, killing off the builders expanding their towers
4, providing plunging fire onto the knights and builders trying a direct assault on our towers
5, or trading shots with and killing or driving off enemy archers
6.
1. This is no longer possible.
2. Also no longer possible for multiple reasons: Archer range is shit, towers don't last long enough to be built high, and catapults have likewise had their range nerfed so nobody even bothers using them any more.
3. The 'support' aspect is no longer possible because of nerfed ranges. The 'forward' aspect is no longer possible because, due to the first part, 'forward' means 'close enough for a knight to bash your head in, and you can't even duck to disguise yourself as a corpse'.
4. You know the drill by now. No builders to kill because structures don't last long enough to become large, range is too shitty to shoot between buildings.
5. Holy shit, you can actually still do this one! Except that it's not as good, because I'm 95% certain you can't shoot through your team's wooden platforms in beta.
6. Guess what? Yep, doesn't happen any more, both because of your shit range and the fact that there'll be maybe one enemy archer, who is likewise too short-ranged to attack you and too squishy to get close enough.
And, with the sheer shittiness of archers in beta clearly outlined, you wanna know what? I still played archer more than builder. In alpha, your initial structures that you started working on during the prep time
could still be there fifteen or twenty minutes in, scarred and much uglier, with traces of enemy builders trying to scale or burrow under them. By the time the match ends, the entire map is covered in these beautiful skeletal buildings shot through with doors, platforms, and ladders built by both sides. In beta you're lucky if they last more than two or three minutes past the start, and once they go down it turns into a mindless CoD-esque barrage of knight spam.
Seriously, beta is to alpha what all those shitty first-person-slasher knockoffs were to Mount&Blade Warband's multiplayer: faster, shinier, and both thoroughly thoughtless and incredibly one-dimensional.