Masters of the Broken World (Eador 2)

Start a soccer league. That works well in Brazil.

 

Dude, centaur soccer is just fucking polo.

 

Why is that kid trying to wipe his nose with his hair?

 

because hes a problem child, heretic

 

just realize how i missed an "E" shortcut

 

Trying it now. I never played the original Eador. Note that I am still exploring the tutorial.

First of all, the game does not run very well. I don't know if it caps at 30 fps, but it feels very sluggish and framerate is needlessly low. Changing settings does not seem to affect the framerate much if at all. Anyone had any luck?

Second, the interface is awful. There is a lot of stuff you think should be very convenient to do, but isn't. Why can't I drag buildings into the construction queue, but have to do this weird 2-click stuff? When recruiting units, why can't I drag units by holding the mouse button down? I have to click once to pick up, once to drop. There is weirdness in shops too - for instance, if you have an item equipped in a slot and try to swap it with another item, instead the item you're trying to replace it with will be sold to the shop, and you have to manually unequip the original item in the inventory slot instead. It's just missing all those intuitive things you would expect to see in a game like this. And don't get me started on the radial menus, canceling orders on heroes accidentally, etc. At least hotkey support isn't bad.

As for gameplay, eh. It's very slow-paced, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but compared to HoMM it seems like it will require more patience. Combat is not too hard but I do find it near-impossible to win fights without any losses unless I have overwhelming odds. Either the battle map is just a bit too small or units can move a bit too far each round, but something about it seems a little off. I like being able to explore your territory to find extra stuff, and the idea of taking over an entire map is of course appealing. I picked wizard for now, and they really shower you with gems - not sure if they will be a rare resource later on or if they're just a "don't overuse spells, stupid" sort of thing.

I haven't run into too many bugs. The first was that I had to disable DEP for the game before it would run, otherwise it'd just crash on loading past the main menu. It's 2013 and we still have problems with DEP? God damn it. The second was the tutorial fucking up the first time and not registering that I recruited an army, forcing me to restart it. Either way, it doesn't really bode well for the game. Anti-aliasing seems broken and I couldn't get SweetFX/SMAA working. Sound effects are also extremely low-rent. Most of them don't even align properly with the character animations, if they even exist at all. Not a huge problem but still just more presentation weirdness that shouldn't be there.

Holding off on the 1.0.3 update because I don't know if it'll be properly compatible with the GOG version.

 

Made the mistake to buy it.

Perhaps there is gem hidden somewhere inside this game, but 50% of the time I just sit and watch awful combat animations. Or I fight with the UI. Or I'm staring at the bugged end-of-fight statistic window. Or... where is the fun in this game?

 

have you played the first or just jumped on the second?

 

Why wouldn't it be if it updates straight from the launcher?

 

GOG version is borked, the updater does not work. I'm not certain if these patches are 100% compatible with it.

 

I manually updated to the 1.0.2 version which brought a new updater.exe and I got the 1.0.3 version from the launcher the next day without any problems.

 

Just tried that approach, did not work. Still gives me an error when I try to auto-update with 1.02. Other people on the GOG forums confirm this too; it appears to be quite inconsistent.

 

Weird stuff, did you try to update it from the launcher, like, clicking "Play" and getting the pop-up that your version is out-of-date, or did you try to execute update.exe? Because I tried the executable to no avail, only when I did the former it did work.

 

Both.

I manually updated to 1.0.3 using a user-provided file and it seems to work okay. I think they fixed some interface issues (like being able to not drag items in certain situations) but performance of the game overall is still poor, both on the main map and in combat.

The "enemy strength" indicator is kinda broken. Yeah, right, the enemy are doomed, yeah we'll crush them alright... surviving with all but 1 or 2 troops slaughtered is "easy"? There's no way my tactics are that bad, I've played more than enough HoMM-likes.

Auto-combat is also completely schizophrenic. Not sure how random it is but sometimes you will win impossible fights with no casualties even though it's basically a literal impossibility to do so manually, and other times your entire army will be decimated even though the game tells you you can win without casualties. lolwut?

Exploring also seems really badly balanced. Many regions you get 5% per turn or less, and 90% of the time you find nothing anyway. Spend 10 turns for a bonus of 20 gems? Spend 20 turns and you get +2 income? Gee, thanks.

 

Nobody said you are supposed to completely explore the provinces (hint: you arent). 90% is massive hyperbole. Exploring is something you do to gain some money early game (by finding sites) and as something to do while you cant actually attack anything. When you are exploring it is essentially wasting time with a chance of gaining something or finding a decent site to attack

 

I'm not deluded into thinking exploring is required to win or even that important. But it just seems completely pointless and the benefits of it are so small (which sucks because the stuff you do find is occasionally cool). Only a handful of times do you ever get anything remotely worthwhile, and when you stack it up vs. actually taking out the enemy or getting another province conquered, the value proposition just falls apart. Most of the ones that are worthwhile require combat, so it's not even especially useful to do while waiting for your army to heal.

I feel like this could be handled much better, like only 1-2 exploration attempts per province and you have a random chance of getting X or Y depending on the terrain, and what you find should be worthwhile, not a few gold coins or yet another combat encounter against random mobs.

 

You can also find hidden shops, but yeah, is a pointless time-sink most of the time.

 

*shrug* I don't agree. Exploring feels exactly like it should to me. Something that is generally a waste of time for a ruler but can, on rare occasions, lead to a great find. It also captures the fact that you never would really completely explore your lands. I feel like your suggestion would just make it feel like some mechanic meant to reward the player under guise of false exploration. you could name the button: random encounter 4 lootz (1 remaining).

edit: not sure if you have gotten anything great but you can find amazing shit while exploring. Its just very rare (again i think it should be)

edit: also i have to ask what else the player should be doing during off time. Again, this exploration thing is something you do to pass time for the most part. And passing time is considered BAD in this game. Exploration is not meant as reward but as something more interesting then pressing end turn.

You could argue that the game is designed badly if passing time is a bad thing but thats a completely different issue

edit yet again: I would agree that there could be more types of events though. seeing the same shit over and over is stupid

 

good luck playing the game without exploration
it's there for you to grind, even more so when you get stuck with too powerful (or annoying) enemies at the borders

or did I play eador (1) the wrong way?

 

It's hard for noobs to understand and to use exploration right, that's all. They saw nothing of the game so far plus it's not the original so something can be "broken"

 

I guess my perspective on the matter is that in a game like HoMM, you are always doing something interesting and important. Yeah, okay, claiming mines and other resources is less about strategy and more about just clicking on everything you find, but at higher levels you have to think about which resources you want to go for, and when you want to use them, and on what heroes. That is much more interesting than grinding for random encounters.

I know that the whole hex grid province setup does not quite allow that, but in my opinion it would have been more fun to make taking optional provinces more important... more resources to find, more possibilities of unlocking extra units, that sort of thing. The only reason you really have to capture provinces as it stands now is to make money, and because you can't progress on the map until you have. But, since shards are not too big it also leads to you capturing several provinces only to find yourself with nothing to do until you've grinded up. That's not very entertaining, at least for me.

It really is a structural issue more than anything. I agree exploration is there to give you something to do, but every time I find myself exploring I also feel like I'm wasting my time and that I could be doing something else more useful. It's like busywork to do before you go do important things (taking enemy territory, fighting enemy heroes).

For the record, the game is still fun (much, much more so now that I got the chance to start the real campaign). But to me the strategy is less about smart resource management and more about whoever can grind up the fastest to get the biggest army first.

 

I think there is plenty about that game that is up for debate. I just dont think exploration is one of them (But you do bring up the point about how the game is structured in general which i agree is debatable). There are other issues as well such as pacing (start is always much harder than rest of shard, apart from the grind that pops up)
I still love the design and I literally consider eador 1 to be in my top 10 all time fav games.

edit: Also they arent hexes Why do i see so many people calling them hexes. they are voronoi cells dammit