4X Stardock's Elemental: Sorcerer King War of Fallen Legendary Heroes

[MoLAoS]

The two planes and the race thing are pretty cool. Can't argue with that. Especially back in 94. The lack of balance makes me happy since I hate the way MP goals have forced balance on games.

 

[MoLAoS]

Brad Wardell responded to my Reddit post about this question. Sadly he didn't have much useful to say really.

 

[fastjack]

I didn't play MoM until the 2000s when I was in my 20s and had played many strategy games including AoW and HoMM so I feel pretty immune to nostalgia in this case fwiw. While I think the game has its problems there really is just a feeling that it 'works'. I think the way Simtex made their games without (too much?) regard for balance is a part of that. Summoning nigh unkillable shadow demons in my first game a necromancer just felt right even if they rolled over an entire continent unopposed.

If I had to pick some aspects of the game that really shine for me top of the list would be the varied and genre-correct gameplay, but I also enjoyed the treasure hunt of ruins clearing (again unbalanced compared to elemental et al), the randomness of spell acquisition, the fact that my orc spearmen were slightly different from my human spearmen, and the great variety of spell effects (especially global enchantments felt unique iirc).

 

[Old One]

...and the great variety of spell effects (especially global enchantments felt unique iirc).

11 Red Book Chaos Mage is a great build for this sort of thing.

I only played one game like that, but it wasn't long before I could summon six units of Hellhounds in a single turn. You get fun, literally earth-shattering, global spells like the one that slowly spawns volcanoes everywhere in the world except your own territory. Each volcano gives you a little more magic. Awesome.

 

[MoLAoS]

The crazy balance was so amazing. I love casting awesome spells. Something you can only do in a game that's more focused on single player.

When working on Axioms, even though it isn't exactly like MoM I've been trying to make sure you can do all sorts of cool crazy stuff and find things through exploring that could cause you to give up your best laid plans cause the new thing is something you just have to try out.

 

[Galdred]

Dominions 5 is MP focused, but gives the player a lot of freedom in making cool things.
You can literally line control the entire event army, cast spells that give you a monopoly on magic, it invoke a ton of supernatural creatures that can wipe armies.

Its UI and presentation are not really better than those of master of magic though.

I gave sorcerer king a try. The game is really weird. It has a good "base" but the UI, AI and execution are pretty bad. It is mostly about making main party super strong(so closer to heroes of might and magic/disciple, or even a tactical RPG than master of magic) , with toned down 4X elements, but then, your diplomacy quests give you allies with a brain-dead AI.

The sorcerer king itself is an interesting idea, but his armies will randomly roam the land and only attack you sometimes.
The demon invasions of warlock 1/2 were better executed.

It is still enjoyable, with hints of the game it could have been with a lot more polish, but it is really flawed.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Dominions 5 is MP focused, but gives the player a lot of freedom in making cool things.
You can literally line control the entire event army, cast spells that give you a monopoly on magic, it invoke a ton of supernatural creatures that can wipe armies.

Its UI and presentation are not really better than those of master of magic though.

I gave sorcerer king a try. The game is really weird. It has a good "base" but the UI, AI and execution are pretty bad. It is mostly about making main party super strong(so closer to heroes of might and magic/disciple, or even a tactical RPG than master of magic) , with toned down 4X elements, but then, your diplomacy quests give you allies with a brain-dead AI.

The sorcerer king itself is an interesting idea, but his armies will randomly roam the land and only attack you sometimes.
The demon invasions of warlock 1/2 were better executed.

It is still enjoyable, with hints of the game it could have been with a lot more polish, but it is really flawed.

Got to thinking Fallen Enchantywossface is better.

 

[Galdred]

I liked having a customizable sovereign that actually fights on the field, dunno of many 4x games where I can do that other than AoW.

Deity Empires and Dominions 5 both let you do this.
In DE, you have gimped "strategic casting" abilities when you are incarnated. In Dominions 5, you need to be physically present to cast a spell anyway. However, you don't control your character directly (but it is well documented).

 

[ERYFKRAD]

casting

cast a spell

 

[Galdred]

casting

cast a spell

Sorry, my bad :D
Actually, you can very well incarnate a cannon wielding dwarf god specialized in wrecking faces in Deity Empires. In Dominions 5, you can kind of do it with an awake expander, especially in SP (you can do so in MP too, but you will have to retire him at some time).
AoW 1 was the best at letting you play whatever you wanted and lead your whole empire from the front.

 

[Norfleet]

Dang, there's a Dominions 5 now? I remember when it was just Dominions 2 (which was a perfectly balanced game with no exploits). I wonder if this newfangled one is perfectly balanced as well.

 

[Galdred]

Dominions 5 is not balanced, but it is good enough given that the game relies on players forming coalitions to kill the strongest.

I have nearly completed my play through of sorcerer king. The end game is a bit anticlimactic. I need to get more "Ascension points" than the bad guy, which I can get by spending mana on it instead of doing cool things with it.
It sounds like something the German school of boardgame design would have come up with.
As a tinkerer, I also got an enchantment that gives me 2 points of mana every time its wielder kills someone.

So basically, the end game is about killing hordes of random mobs with my angry dwarf to get ahead in Ascension points...

 

[InD_ImaginE]

The biggest problem with this game is lack of functional challenge in common 4X.

All the other factins are just "NPC" who you build relation with or something to get some bonus.

Imagine if this game has a functional AI for the other factions + actually aggressive Sorcerer King. Some of the factions buttering up to SK, some secretly rebelling, some pretending to be one of the other. Have some territory conflict while trying to "justify" it to the titular SK etc.

What every game plays is like a single-player RPG but 4X, extremely linear.

 

[Galdred]

The biggest problem with this game is lack of functional challenge in common 4X.

All the other factins are just "NPC" who you build relation with or something to get some bonus.

Imagine if this game has a functional AI for the other factions + actually aggressive Sorcerer King. Some of the factions buttering up to SK, some secretly rebelling, some pretending to be one of the other. Have some territory conflict while trying to "justify" it to the titular SK etc.

What every game plays is like a single-player RPG but 4X, extremely linear.

Indeed, in a way, it feels like another take on Tyrany, and it feels more like a sequence of tactical RPG battles than a real 4X, which is not an issue in itself, but there is not enough RPG elements to make up for the gutted 4X part.

 

[Galdred]

The game does suffer from late game fatigue, which is a shake given that it could have been avoided by making the RPG aspect more important:
Early game, you can only take on weak and medium "quests" and groups with your whole "army" of one hero and 3-4 units.
Late game, you can field multiple parties. Some that can deal with weak enemies only, other that can take on harder foes, and your hero parties that can kill the sorcerer king's forces and lieutenants. So optimizing play would be to have the smaller groups clean up while the better ones use all of their movement to take out bigger threats. What's worse is that I should transfer the ring of mana-on-kill to each party before a combat, but that would be super tedious, so I stopped doing that, but the 20 extra mana/turn would make a huge difference...
Going from one side of the map to another takes forever, especially for your pioneers who need to build outpost on resource nodes(which disbands the unit).
There are a lot of small annoyances that never got fixed:
Some spells that outright don't work, my logistical points get set to a seemingly random value on reload. My spider can sometimes use a hunting bow for some reason.
Loading an autosave can make you lose all spell research progress of you would have completed the research at the end of the turn...

The artifacts and enchantments let you do some wild combos, but the spells are rather underwhelming.

Edit:

I finished the game (on hard). I regret not playing insane directly, because the endgame was so tedious I don't think I will replay it.
The beginning of the game was hard, but as soon as you get a few levels in, the difficulty completely breaks down. I think it plummeted after I got my second hero. So 95% of the cool toys I unlocked were available after the game was basically won.
I soloed the main boss because I didn't want to wait for my other characters to join my murder dwarf.
The game has a lot of cool elements (I like the things you can craft, and the decisions you need to make because you never have enough of the crafting/enchantment material. So I ended up focusing on a single hero out of the 10 I had in the end, and outfitted the other with leftover).
Diplomacy was not as bad as I expected: allies don't do anything, but give you a hero, and you can nag them for resources, troops, or spell research, which makes them more useful than a lot of 4X allies actually.
It is a shame it is let down by bad pacing, and a janky engine (loading a save felt like a random event every time, between disappearing spell research and random logistical points), but it was more enjoyable than I gave it credit for.
The difference between what my "sovereign" could craft and what he could cast was gigantic (basically, the battlefield and strategic spells were lvl3 DnD equivalent, but I could turn a single dwarf hero into a killing machine with very high values in every defensive and offensive stats).