Well, as sort of a bump, and so as not to start a brand new topic, I sprung for Disciples II Gold last night after doing some looking around.
My first inclination was to buy the ultimate edition off of totalgaming, however I was having difficulties with their little control program under wine, and just decided to reboot into windows for the moment and go with Steam. (I know the game works under wine, so the idea here is to take Steam which also works under and hope that the combo also works under wine). Same price, same content, apparently, even with the differing names as far as I could tell from the "feature" lists.
The game, pretty simple, resource capture on a particular map, gold for buying units and upgrades, and 4 types of mana spent researching and/or casting various spells. The maps are fairly small, and come with a fair range of objectives from capturing territory to wiping out the other side(s).
Armies: consists of a leader type(ranged, melee, mage, thief, and archangel) plus a combination of "lesser" units from the same gamut. Each unit and leader gets xp from battles and has levels. Basic units upgrade(melee, mage, and cleric have two options int he upgrade paths) generally leading to better things. the leader type just levels up, and has a small selection of skills available at level up allowing for expansion of party size(usually 4 at level 1, except for the archangel which is 2 (total #s)). Skills mostly allow usage of various items found in the game, e.g. artifacts, scrolls, staves, etc. which give the leader and/or party various bonuses. Leaders can be exported from games, and keep whatever equipment that they have equipped at export time and then can be imported into other "quests" and the saga, I think. Base units just go away at the end of a scenario, meaning starting from scratch or whatever you are given in the next one.
Archangels can plant rods, which change the terrain around the rod, which means capturing mines and/or mana crystal locations(resources). They are "controlled" (captured) by changing the terrain around them. The archangel can also remove enemy rods.
Thieves, a leader type, get to do a variety of things, like plant spies(let you see unit and city occupation force composition of enemy units/cities, inspect ruins, poison enemy cities/combat groups, etc. lots of nifty little things).
Combat: When you make your combat groups(parties?) the right column is the front most and is where you would want your melee characters, with the back row being relegated to mages, cleric, and other ranged/utility as usual. Once in combat there is NO position change, and most "characters" only have one option: some kind of attack or a heal. Other than that units can defend(reduce damage and hit chance) or retreat(entire party). Combat is pretty simplistic.
Terrain: Grows from cities, and rods. Grows fastes from capitol city(which gets an uber guardian that cannot leave the capitol city). Also grows faster with more and larger cities.
Building: A variety of buildings can be bought for the capital allowing various things, e.g. mage tow for spell research, temple to allow units to be healed in any city, etc. Regular cities can be increased in size, which mostly means a larger garrison capacity, but also contributes to terrain type expansion if I understand that part correctly.
Comes with a scenario editor so that you can make your own quests, along with an option to have it randomly general maps for you.
Overall a very simple game, yet it has already given me several hours of entertainment and is TURN BASED!
Surprising with this Steam version, the PDF manuals are still in the game's directory, although this is another one where I wish that I had a paper manual. It's definitely worth $20, but if D3 is anything like D2 it's better be a $30 game at release as I'd've been pissed paying $40 or $50 for D2 when it was released. (Probably why I skipped it way back when...)
(I got it because I was looking for a replacement that I could hopefully run under wine on linux, for Age of Wonders. I realized why I dumped it so fast the first time, fantastically incredibly shitty AI coupled with incredibly dull play, horrible execution, and general pokiness. Along with their assinine mechanics system, e.g. only attack can retreat, hex stacking, no random maps, etc. Makes me wonder if AoW2 and/or the addon were any better. Passed up GalCivII after reading the 3some comparison/contrast here, and SEV as it sounds to be a work in progress. Looked at Dominions 3, looked at price, looked at desc + features + teh grafix + reviews + forum, looked goggle eyed at price, ROFLMAO and went and got D2. I also looked at Spacerangers 2, and did a brief search for the original Spellforce 1 which I'd likely have gotten instead if I could've found an online purveyor of it. Oh also for the hell of it looked at Harpoon 3's price, ROFLMAO that's more than I paid for any of my originals AND the updated OSX version before whoever has it now got their greeedy little fingers onto it.)
The sequels IV and V only proves how near gaming perfection HoMM III is. HoMM V also proves that 3D graphics don't add anything worthwhile to the formula.
