Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

TBS Age of Wonders: Planetfall - AoW gone to space

Citizen

Guest
Are they going with multiple people per unit? Because then, miss and hit seems like a wonky concept. They would have to define how much people is per unit - a squad? A platoon?

Hit&Miss works fine with multiple figures per unit. See SSI's General series or any of their clones. Just individual hit checks for each figure. It works pretty good and intuitive, when you get used to it, you don't even need to see the estimated damage numbers before an attack to know how it would be.

The fun thing is - it feels less random then a hit&miss mechanic with single figure per unit. When you add together many random variables with uniform distribution, you get something resembling a normal distribution, which has far less variance.
 

whatevername

Arcane
Joined
Sep 2, 2013
Messages
666
Location
666
For me, an absolutely critical feature - I uninstalled BattleTech as I couldn't speed things up and it wasted 80% of my time - and they had to get shit flung into their faces in the form of negative reviews and now will implement in a patch.
In a few months. Which means nothing else than they had not even planned such a feature.
It is such an incredible contempt for a player's time that it makes me angry just thinking about it.
Doing that should take like 1 hour tops of messing with a debugger for someone without any stinking source code.
How the hell would a debugger help anyone? It's not like they released their binaries with debug symbols.
Or did they? That would be incredibly amateurish.
The same way EVERYBODY else does it without any stinking debug symbols.
 

thesheeep

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 16, 2007
Messages
9,939
Location
Tampere, Finland
Codex 2012 Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Bubbles In Memoria A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
How the hell would a debugger help anyone? It's not like they released their binaries with debug symbols.
Or did they? That would be incredibly amateurish.
The same way EVERYBODY else does it without any stinking debug symbols.
One other way to lead to such an effect would be to reverse engineer, identify and rewrite the important parts, which definitely takes way more than an hour (except if the tools for that got significantly better since I last did that).
Or stuff like Cheat Engine, but the whole problem is that there is not simply a "speed" value for animations that could be turned up - if there was, this whole situation wouldn't exist.
If there is some other method, though, enlighten me.
 

Citizen

Guest
Turn based games with slow animations are a pure evil thing. It just means their developers don't even play tbs. Is there any sane person that doesn't crank up the speed to eleven the first time he launches the game? What's the reasons behind not implementing the speed options in your game, don't devs understand that people would whine about that on their forums and send them countless hate emails on that matter? They surely research a market before release, read about common mistakes - the first thing they should see while reading criticism on other similar games is complaints about slow animation speed and/or dumb ai.

But thats how (modern?) gaming works - you buy some overpriced unfinished shit, separated in 5 dlcs, only to spend hours in vain attempts to make it playable.

If you don't want to finish the job, sell fucking sources. I would better give my monies to some perfectionist modder.
 

whatevername

Arcane
Joined
Sep 2, 2013
Messages
666
Location
666
How the hell would a debugger help anyone? It's not like they released their binaries with debug symbols.
Or did they? That would be incredibly amateurish.
The same way EVERYBODY else does it without any stinking debug symbols.
One other way to lead to such an effect would be to reverse engineer, identify and rewrite the important parts, which definitely takes way more than an hour (except if the tools for that got significantly better since I last did that).
Or stuff like Cheat Engine, but the whole problem is that there is not simply a "speed" value for animations that could be turned up - if there was, this whole situation wouldn't exist.
If there is some other method, though, enlighten me.
The animation could be in a separate file or in a model or whatever. Imagine you have a goblin.hkx file in there with the animation. Then when the game is loaded you search for a good chunk of that file in memory with a debugger. When you find where it's stored in ram, you set a breakpoint on memory read in the debugger. If that stuff gets copied somewhere or unpacked put a mem breakpoint on that too. Then when some goblin attacks in your game your debugger will stop execution when the animation plays and if you're lucky you'll be in or near the function that plays animations. Start disabling functions by replacing push's and calls with nops or whatever until the animation stops playing. Then find what's causing the delays. Or ask your neighbor's 10 year old kid to do it for you.
 

thesheeep

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 16, 2007
Messages
9,939
Location
Tampere, Finland
Codex 2012 Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Bubbles In Memoria A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
The same way EVERYBODY else does it without any stinking debug symbols.
One other way to lead to such an effect would be to reverse engineer, identify and rewrite the important parts, which definitely takes way more than an hour (except if the tools for that got significantly better since I last did that).
Or stuff like Cheat Engine, but the whole problem is that there is not simply a "speed" value for animations that could be turned up - if there was, this whole situation wouldn't exist.
If there is some other method, though, enlighten me.
The animation could be in a separate file or in a model or whatever. Imagine you have a goblin.hkx file in there with the animation. Then when the game is loaded you search for a good chunk of that file in memory with a debugger. When you find where it's stored in ram, you set a breakpoint on memory read in the debugger. If that stuff gets copied somewhere or unpacked put a mem breakpoint on that too. Then when some goblin attacks in your game your debugger will stop execution when the animation plays and if you're lucky you'll be in or near the function that plays animations. Start disabling functions by replacing push's and calls with nops or whatever until the animation stops playing. Then find what's causing the delays. Or ask your neighbor's 10 year old kid to do it for you.
And that would take WAY longer than an hour to put into a form that works reliably and can be distributed (I'm not talking about making this only faster for yourself).
Because honestly, if it was easily done, someone would have done it already.
Not sure where your pseudo-knowledge comes from, but every single programmer that has ever had the "honor" to do reverse engineering can tell you that things never, ever work out that quickly or easily.
 
Vatnik
Joined
Apr 10, 2018
Messages
6,697
Location
Mouse Utopia
Insert Title Here Strap Yourselves In
It's such decline that AoW3 has multiple unit figures and DIDN'T implement the concomitant multi-unit mechanics like in Master of Magic. Instead it was just another way that casual generic game mindlessly aped civ5. Oh, and civ5 was dogshit compared to civ4, so it's a double whammy of decline. DISGUSTING!!!!!

I predict that Planetfall will be like aow3, mechanically balanced and interesting, but also 'streamlined' and casualised. Moreover, its factions will be hideously unoriginal. In this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9TVfp_v8OM the devs say in not so many words ''the space marine has an assault rifle but the alien has big claws!'' And ''We won't have multiple map levels, a dragon [like in aow1/2] would live in a cave, but a whole civilisation? Nah not really.''

So we're getting an AoW that doesn't even have multiple map levels. Every iteration of this series removes more mechanics than it adds, it's just incredible. It is going to take me years to even comprehend the full scale of the decline.
 

whatevername

Arcane
Joined
Sep 2, 2013
Messages
666
Location
666
The same way EVERYBODY else does it without any stinking debug symbols.
One other way to lead to such an effect would be to reverse engineer, identify and rewrite the important parts, which definitely takes way more than an hour (except if the tools for that got significantly better since I last did that).
Or stuff like Cheat Engine, but the whole problem is that there is not simply a "speed" value for animations that could be turned up - if there was, this whole situation wouldn't exist.
If there is some other method, though, enlighten me.
The animation could be in a separate file or in a model or whatever. Imagine you have a goblin.hkx file in there with the animation. Then when the game is loaded you search for a good chunk of that file in memory with a debugger. When you find where it's stored in ram, you set a breakpoint on memory read in the debugger. If that stuff gets copied somewhere or unpacked put a mem breakpoint on that too. Then when some goblin attacks in your game your debugger will stop execution when the animation plays and if you're lucky you'll be in or near the function that plays animations. Start disabling functions by replacing push's and calls with nops or whatever until the animation stops playing. Then find what's causing the delays. Or ask your neighbor's 10 year old kid to do it for you.
And that would take WAY longer than an hour to put into a form that works reliably and can be distributed (I'm not talking about making this only faster for yourself).
Because honestly, if it was easily done, someone would have done it already.
Not sure where your pseudo-knowledge comes from, but every single programmer that has ever had the "honor" to do reverse engineering can tell you that things never, ever work out that quickly or easily.
I meant 1 hour to a 10 year old 1337z0r h4x0R kid, not some slowpoke programmer who has never even seen softice.
Also nobody did it because a) 87% of programmers don't know wtf is assembly language b) they don't want to get sued c) the game is shit since paradox was involved.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
First dev diary: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...ll-–-dev-diary-1-welcome-and-premise.1105593/

Age of Wonders: Planetfall – Dev Diary #1: Welcome and Premise

Hi there! and welcome to the first Age of Wonders: Planetfall development journal. From here on, the team at Triumph will be giving you weekly updates on our progress and revealing details of the game along the way.

Join us at the Paradox Forums:
First a request to the AoW3 community: we kindly ask you to join us here on the Paradox forums, as the old Age of Wonders ones will be closed down later this year. This way Triumph can spend more time making games and less on fighting spam-bots. Please create your account here.

Inspiration:
By Gandalf’s beard - A sci-fi Age of Wonders? Yes - It’s been a long-standing wish from many of the team to do something with our love of sci fi: Starwars, Dune, Fallout, Starship Troopers have all been an inspiration in one form or another. We feel our beloved war-focussed 4X game formula is a great fit for sci-fi themes - and futuristic weapon arsenals. At the same time, nothing gets the creative juices flowing like a new setting.

Premise:
As one of the heirs to the shattered Star Union, you emerge from a cosmic Dark Age to craft a new future for your people. You travel to one of the many lost worlds of the old empire, where you will find marvels among the remnants of this once great civilization. You will need to develop / rediscover technologies and social doctrines for your colonists to thrive on these hostile worlds, for you are not alone here. Other houses compete with yours to rebuild the Star Union, and you will need both a carefully crafted arsenal, and a firm grip on diplomacy if you are to have a chance at victory.

Our Goals:

  • Build a new setting filled with lore and new gameplay opportunities.
  • Transform the melee centered fantasy battles to new ranged sci-fi clashes with cover, overwatch and destructible terrain. Hit chances are back. It’s familiar and vastly different at the same time.

  • Develop Planetary Empire building: Compared to AoW3, we want to added new layers of depth to the economy and diplomacy systems. Sessions now play on wrapping planets which are procedurally generated.
  • Roll out the fourth generation of Triumph’s Creator Engine, which is 64 bit, has a PBR renderer and a new toolset. This allows us – and eventually you through modding – to create a better looking worlds, that contain more content, more efficiently.
There is nothing that reflects the fusion of the gameplay and the setting better than the unit line up. So here is one in pre-alpha state for you: A Vanguard Liberator with Flechette Ammo and Jetpack mods called the Screaming Eagle. How would you name this unit variant?

index.php


Next week we’ll tell more about the setting and its central element: the galactic empire called the Star Union.
 
Vatnik
Joined
Apr 10, 2018
Messages
6,697
Location
Mouse Utopia
Insert Title Here Strap Yourselves In
What is it with people thinking sci-fi UI = semitransparent, washed out grey/blue, with some horrible neon colours thrown in? Looks like absolute trash. When I fire up AoW1 there's a stone-themed UI, there's a dragon draped over the main menu and when you mouse over different options the dragon shifts about, there are celtic patterns - it's NICE TO LOOK AT!

The ideal sci-fi visual theme would not even be very sci-fi, i would rip off Dune and base the UI around stereotypical middle eastern mediaeval palace luxuries like silks, persian carpets, bronze and gold ornaments, scimitars lying around etc. Why would you even want a truly sci-fi themed UI anyway, since when do a bunch of wires or some shit look nice?

The lore as to why the suits aren't automated but inhabited by soldiers is vague, indecisive tripe about criminals, or muh feels/the philosophy of the ''Emporers'' [sic]. Good writing would be to stick to ONE clear reason like AI being too expensive, or dangerously liable to become rogue, or banned by the priests, or ''service guarantees citizenship'' or it's punishment for criminals. Looks like the setting is generic and written by semiliterate fools.

Multi-figure units are a horrible idea unless they actually have multiple-unit mechanics to go with them, like in Master of Magic. Without mechanics to go with it, all you're doing is forcing yourself to make the unit graphics smaller and therefore giving yourself less lee-way to make things distinctive or good looking.

With repulsive visuals and a totally trash setting, the mechanics have to be really good to salvage the game. Fortunately, judging by that unit's long list of abilities, the game might have really good mechanics - it has 7 abilities just to define the basic nature of the unit - Core, Light, Infantry, Biological, Overwatch, Favoured Territory, Land Movement. And it looks like units have two defense stats, the second of which may be the same old Resistance, or might be a ' energy shield'. Not to mention customising units on the fly, which should always turn out at least decently.
 
Last edited:

thesheeep

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 16, 2007
Messages
9,939
Location
Tampere, Finland
Codex 2012 Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Bubbles In Memoria A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Wtf is the hairy stuff they have between their legs?
Are future soldiers forbidden from shaving or is this the confirmation of furries?

BING XI LAO I rather have a clear UI that tells me everything at a glance (as this one seems to do) than some half-picasso shit trying to look fancy and forgetting that its foremost purpose is clarity.
Current interfaces everywhere already go the route of minimalism (because guess what, it actually works better), so it is only natural to apply the same logic to any SciFi UI.

The downside of this is that all SciFi UIs start to look very sameish, though.
Not really sure what to do about that. The last thing I want is those "painted" UIs from the DOS era.
 

Zboj Lamignat

Arcane
Joined
Feb 15, 2012
Messages
5,521
Er, care to name some semi-recognizable UIs from classic strategy games that had poor readability due to being ornate? I can't recall a single one. He gave an example of first Aow, you couldn't ask for a clearer UI.

Also, clear UI doesn't really help much when games are using shitty wow-like 3d like most strategies now do. In AoW3 it was pretty easy to miss a unit while looking directly at it (depending on terrain), unless zoomed out to the cloth map.
 
Vatnik
Joined
Apr 10, 2018
Messages
6,697
Location
Mouse Utopia
Insert Title Here Strap Yourselves In
Another thing that gets me with these modern UIs is having three separate bits of the UI on the bottom of the screen, with two main-view areas poking out between them. Those two bits of view are useless slivers that serve only to irritate.

And by the Gods why do they have to use bright neon teal, neon orange, neon purple etc, it hurts to look at. At least the little decoration in the top centre is actually nice, though.
 
Vatnik
Joined
Apr 10, 2018
Messages
6,697
Location
Mouse Utopia
Insert Title Here Strap Yourselves In
I wish they'd steal ideas from Star Control or Dune or any actually interesting and unique sci fi setting. Do we really need another sci fi setting where there's a human galactic empire, and the aliens are big monsters that fight with claws? At least the Empire's collapsed, I suppose.

AoW1 had several core concepts that were basically lifted from Elric of Melnibone, including the Keeper-Highman campaign ending, the default name of the Keeper campaign hero (Elric), and the Dark Elf Executioner. The cosmic struggle between Undead+Demons versus Highmen, and the role of the Elves as caretakers of worlds until they were ready to become more aspected to law with less magic and the fantastical races taking a backseat to humanity, was also very similar to the Elric-setting's role for the Imryrrians and other fantastical creatures. AoW2:SM didn't have the greatest storyline or setting but Syrons versus Shadow Demons was clearly very close to Githzerai versus illithids (remember Dak'kon telling you about it?) and Star Control's Ur-Quan versus Dnyarri. I thought all this was great.
 

thesheeep

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 16, 2007
Messages
9,939
Location
Tampere, Finland
Codex 2012 Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Bubbles In Memoria A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Er, care to name some semi-recognizable UIs from classic strategy games that had poor readability due to being ornate? I can't recall a single one. He gave an example of first Aow, you couldn't ask for a clearer UI.
I wasn't talking about strategy games specifically.
But many old games had the habit of making UIs so painted, they just weren't as clear as they should be.
Just take Wizardry 7:
alliriaL.jpg
To change professions, you have to click on the name.
To see your current experience and further stats you have to click on the candle in the BACKGROUND.
To see skills, you have to click on the axe,sword&shield in the BACKGROUND.
To see the expanded inventory (it isn't even clear that there is one from the get-go!), you have to click on the chest in the BACKGROUND.
Oooohhh, look at those spell numbers, so neatly laid out on the stone table! Well, too fucking bad it makes the numbers unecessarily hard to read because of that "fancy" pseudo 3D.
None of these elements are even recognizable as buttons (except the name, maybe), you have to know about everything before you are even able to decipher it.

I'm not saying there can't be more stylization, the Dune RTS is a good example (well, if you ignore the fact that the UI takes up too much space). AoW3 also looked better.
But if I had to choose between the extremes, I'd go for the UI that lets me play the game without having to refer to manuals on how to use the interface.

You also have to take into account that there is a shitload of information in AoW: P and I'm fairly sure the icons for abilities, etc. are early versions.
But even if not, I find them easy enough to read. The shapes are distinct enough, even if it would be nice if they had some color.

The 3D style is generic as fuck, yes.
That's a shame for sure, but that path was set with AoW 3.
 
Last edited:

Zeriel

Arcane
Joined
Jun 17, 2012
Messages
13,378
First dev diary: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...ll-–-dev-diary-1-welcome-and-premise.1105593/

Age of Wonders: Planetfall – Dev Diary #1: Welcome and Premise

Hi there! and welcome to the first Age of Wonders: Planetfall development journal. From here on, the team at Triumph will be giving you weekly updates on our progress and revealing details of the game along the way.

Join us at the Paradox Forums:
First a request to the AoW3 community: we kindly ask you to join us here on the Paradox forums, as the old Age of Wonders ones will be closed down later this year. This way Triumph can spend more time making games and less on fighting spam-bots. Please create your account here.

Inspiration:
By Gandalf’s beard - A sci-fi Age of Wonders? Yes - It’s been a long-standing wish from many of the team to do something with our love of sci fi: Starwars, Dune, Fallout, Starship Troopers have all been an inspiration in one form or another. We feel our beloved war-focussed 4X game formula is a great fit for sci-fi themes - and futuristic weapon arsenals. At the same time, nothing gets the creative juices flowing like a new setting.

Premise:
As one of the heirs to the shattered Star Union, you emerge from a cosmic Dark Age to craft a new future for your people. You travel to one of the many lost worlds of the old empire, where you will find marvels among the remnants of this once great civilization. You will need to develop / rediscover technologies and social doctrines for your colonists to thrive on these hostile worlds, for you are not alone here. Other houses compete with yours to rebuild the Star Union, and you will need both a carefully crafted arsenal, and a firm grip on diplomacy if you are to have a chance at victory.

Our Goals:

  • Build a new setting filled with lore and new gameplay opportunities.
  • Transform the melee centered fantasy battles to new ranged sci-fi clashes with cover, overwatch and destructible terrain. Hit chances are back. It’s familiar and vastly different at the same time.

  • Develop Planetary Empire building: Compared to AoW3, we want to added new layers of depth to the economy and diplomacy systems. Sessions now play on wrapping planets which are procedurally generated.
  • Roll out the fourth generation of Triumph’s Creator Engine, which is 64 bit, has a PBR renderer and a new toolset. This allows us – and eventually you through modding – to create a better looking worlds, that contain more content, more efficiently.
There is nothing that reflects the fusion of the gameplay and the setting better than the unit line up. So here is one in pre-alpha state for you: A Vanguard Liberator with Flechette Ammo and Jetpack mods called the Screaming Eagle. How would you name this unit variant?

index.php


Next week we’ll tell more about the setting and its central element: the galactic empire called the Star Union.


I really dislike the new style they went for unit description writing in Age of Wonders 3 and here. In at least Age of Wonders 1 the unit description actually described what the unit was and how it fit into the world, which is important when you are talking about something that is unique to the setting. In 3 & here you have this in-universe blurb where they just provide some flavor... which would be okay as an ADDITION to an actual description of what the unit actually is within the setting, but fucking sucks as the primary info-dump. It's not even an "odd exception, some units don't give you any info but most are okay" in Age of Wonders 3, it is the reverse: most unit descriptions are random details that tell you nothing about the unit or the world, and are instead some random mini story... which again, is a fine and interesting idea on its own, but as a replacement for a lore-dump about the unit it just fucking sucks.
 

Zeriel

Arcane
Joined
Jun 17, 2012
Messages
13,378
I've said it before, but AoW 1 had great writing, and then from that point on it's like they got lobotomized. Just absolute shit from 2 onwards.
 

Citizen

Guest
I've said it before, but AoW 1 had great writing, and then from that point on it's like they got lobotomized. Just absolute shit from 2 onwards.

I recently replayed AoW and SM, and posted some screen here, the decline in writing is REAL. From moral dilemma of your PC about which side is right in first game to dumb jokes about Julia's breastplate in SM.

8oz0Zk.png

8oziUe.png

8ozW7a.png

8oz2yM.png

8ozATQ.png
8ozZuH.png

8ozImx.png

8ozrA1.png

8oztQc.png

8oz1nK.png

8ozR5Z.png

8ozETP.png

8ozkOm.png
 
Vatnik
Joined
Apr 10, 2018
Messages
6,697
Location
Mouse Utopia
Insert Title Here Strap Yourselves In
I've said it before, but AoW 1 had great writing, and then from that point on it's like they got lobotomized. Just absolute shit from 2 onwards.
I read somewhere that AoW1 was where Ray Bingham used a whole load of wiriting ideas he'd had knocking around for ages. For the sequels, he was running on empty.

I'm glad I played AoW1 after AoW2, so that it felt like AoW1 was better, rather than AoW2 worse.
 
Last edited:

Citizen

Guest
so that it felt like AoW1 was better, rather than AoW2 worse.

I too prefer AoW's looks, UI and campaign, but SM's gameplay is so much better. 3 AP system in combat alone gets it leagues ahead of AoW, where an archer can't shoot if he makes a step, and melee guys do 2-3 attacks every time, regardless of how long they ran to the target. Also wizards instead of leaders, no defeat on wizard's death and so on.
 
Vatnik
Joined
Apr 10, 2018
Messages
6,697
Location
Mouse Utopia
Insert Title Here Strap Yourselves In
I preferred AoW1's version of all those things you mention, but not by much. I like having to think ahead of time where I want my archers, and I like melee troops that can charge a distance and still get their full attacks. AoW2 punishes archers for being at a distance from the enemy with a reduction to hitchance, and punishes melee troops for moving in to attack - it feels lame. AoW2 wizards are quite uninteresting, but at least being sent to the Void temporarily dispels all your active enchantments - which is something that had an impact in a multiplayer game or two. Admittedly AoW1 is much less balanced but you can adjust for lame things, like rushing 10 DEF heroes over ever getting spellcasting, using some modding or map design.

But anyhow, the really big preferences I have for AoW1 over AoW2 - aside from aesthetic and setting aspects we agree on - are the Altar map structures, and the invincibility of walls to non-wallcrushing attacks. You can leave walled structures totally ungarrisoned and they still can't be captured by an enemy unless they have wallclimbing, wallcrushing, or Flying. That potentially adds a whole level of depth to the game which was removed in the sequels. Elephants really need a nerf though, even bigger than what Warlock inflicted.
 

vota DC

Augur
Joined
Aug 23, 2016
Messages
2,258
I've said it before, but AoW 1 had great writing, and then from that point on it's like they got lobotomized. Just absolute shit from 2 onwards.
I read somewhere that AoW1 was where Ray Bingham used a whole load of wiriting ideas he'd had knocking around for ages. For the sequels, he was running on empty.

I'm glad I played AoW1 after AoW2, so that it felt like AoW1 was better, rather than AoW2 worse.

Played AOW1 before AOW2 and still felt AOW1 was better since AOW2 vanilla had LESS factions, only one underground level and while totally unbalanced I liked overpowered leader fighting in AOW1 campaign because with the sound effect used for the sceptre bash it gave me Bud&Terence vibe.
AOW2 vanilla also lacked unit description, was worse than AOW3 and this game for this aspect.

About the writing in AOW 1 it wasn't only the fact that it was done better, but the entire concept was more interesting: every faction is racing toward the Valley of Wonder and when you pick an action the other side pick an action too.
Only thing that I miss are
1)Alternate route for personal power: after I mess with Blackwater Lake it make totally sense to have the choice between Undead and Highmen, but after saving Dwarves or making Orcs defeat even the Emperor of Azrac I expected a path where I am the boss. "I am a sinner" highmen introduction make sense if I choose Lizardmen path, but no if I saved Dwarves for extinction: in that case "Julia sit while I did the job, I am the real hope for Keepers" was better.
2)Mechanic adapted to campaign: was marvellous seeing Goblins being locked friendly with Highmen. Problem is that creatures didn't follow you. With Lizardmen that where neutral was annoying since their high tier units deserted on both Undead and Highmen campaign. Also this mechanic didn't apply on the other people: it would be nice seeing Goblins and Orcs or Dwarves and Halflings not being friendly to Meandor and Julia if you did their campaign.
3)More mentions to previous races if I don't follow the loyal path. I if don't stay loyal all the writing is about Highmen or Undead. I get one reference to Halflings (two if I count the ending) in the Undead path for Keeper, zero to Lizardmen, Orcs and Goblins if I remember well. For Highmen I get zero references at all while tons of Elves reference that I never campaigned for.
Also I expect Highmen to give a better treatment to Goblins, Halflings, Dwarves and Lizardmen if they were ally....I mean they allow Elves to go Evermore but they don't give anything to Lizardmen that helped to save Humans (and Keepers were among the forces that invaded the Valley). While I am not surprised that Undead give to Elves and their allies the same treatment.
 
Vatnik
Joined
Apr 10, 2018
Messages
6,697
Location
Mouse Utopia
Insert Title Here Strap Yourselves In
AoW2 vanilla had the same number of factions, but Azracs and Lizardmen were cooler than Tigrans and Draconians which replaced them. Highman--->Archon rename was bad too.
 
Vatnik
Joined
Apr 10, 2018
Messages
6,697
Location
Mouse Utopia
Insert Title Here Strap Yourselves In
I think the problem of the Lizardmen is how inherently cheesy they are - they can simply walk around on water. Which gives them a mobility advantage over pretty much every single faction. Then you can get the Flood spell and simply sink the map and tell everyone else to suck it. Granted, they're not THAT cheesy unit-stats wise - I think their general units are pretty average, and that low magic res HURTS when the AI starts throwing spells around. Still, pretty cheesy.

I think one way to fix it would be to create different levels of water terrain, so Lizardmen can swin on water, but not ALL the water.

Lizardmen and Elephants are broken OP in multiplayer, but they're really cool at the same time. It feels like you have to have elephant and lizardman auxiliaries to even play on the same level as the opponent (who also has them). This may not be balanced, but thinking to yourself ''I have to find a city of these guys to have them as auxiliaries to my main force, because they have unique talents'' is a really cool aspect of this strategy game. Having entire battles on a river between auxiliary lizardman troops, while the main armies are on the shore, is awesome (whoever wins the river-battle can now scout the enemy land force with impunity).

AoW2 and AoW3 took the approach of removing lizardmen entirely, and making wallcrushing less and less important. That was a defeatist approach that made the games worse.

Elephants should be made 2-3 times as expensive, or even moved up a tier, and warships should have been made stronger and faster-training to compete with lizards. Nothing should have been removed. The way to balance an OP mechanic isn't to nerf it, but to introduce or strengthen a countervailing mechanic. Imagine if every race had some unique aspect that made you think ''I want some of them as auxiliaries''. It'd be hard to achieve that level of diversity for 12 races, but it'd be worth attempting.

Maybe I'll give all Draconians swimming in my AoW2 mod.....

Also, I don't think Azracs were specifically Arab Muslim themed. Sure, you have the imperial mindset, but Fire is a Zoroastrian ideal and the Yaka Avatar looks like Pharaoh, sort of. Also the whole game feels more classical era than mediaeval.
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom