While you can argue that its a better game then Mark of Chaos I hate it more because I see it as a big disappointment after the first game which I loved.
The only thing I remember of Mark of Chaos was my shock at noticing range units could shoot at enemies engaged in melee with friendlies with no consequence, and the very first battle were supposedly you defend from the high ground but it is actually all clunky. I know I went until the end because it was pre-Steam and pre-being rich and buying all the games I wanted, but still.
I am a big fan on Panzer General type of games so thats why Rites of War is so high, Armageddon could have been a good game maybe even better then RoW but some things just pull the game down like losing xp for replenishing units and one of the worst AI I ever saw in a game.
Well I am a bit fan of PG type and played most of them (though since I played Order of Battle I am not sure si could go back to PG/PC) and I really did not like Rites of War. Possibly it is because I played it recently, early 2020, but then I also played Chaos Gate and Final Liberation early 2020 and those two I love. I am currently playing Armageddon.
I disagree with the fact that there is no experience in Armageddon. The difference with most PG games is that you can’t buy reinforcements without losing experience which makes sense in a realism and gameplay point of view : losing troops of any specific group a real bummer rather than just make you tap in your common resource pool whatever’troop you lost - in addition it means that in end game you don’t have only an army of super elite with the balancing issue it causes but only an handful of super veteran you cherish.
I am in the middle of part II to have units reach max level: anti-tank infantry (which I eventually lost), snotlings and even Ogryns who never reached 10 but stayed between 7 and 9 though they just died. Most of my armors is XP 4-6. This system also works well with the fact that elements of an unit can have more HP than 1 - you have to balance healing them so slowly but maybe saving their XP and attacking with them.
Having played Rites of War and Armageddon back to back I don’t think the AI of the former is better or worse than the one of the later. But at least with works, terrible Intelligence is thematic. Less so with humans.
There are two things I dislike with Armageddon : apparently you only fight Orks from the beginning to the end whereas at least with Rites of War you had Imperial Guard the Space Marines then Genestealer, and in Armageddon you cannot buy troops any more once you reach the maximum, ie you cannot have troops in reserve because you feel there are not going to be useful in the scenario.
What I really like is that each scenario has its own pool of ressources rather than being stocked and spent from one battle to another. For a player like me that tries to Ironman // accept the consequence it is golden. In PG clone you can find yourself fucked because your reserve is too low to proceed. Panzer Corps is worst offender in that regard. In Rites of War the problem was more when losing super high experience units, by mid game given the opposition low experience units have no survivability.
Did you play Order of Battle by the way ?
