melkathi

AoW 1 was quite different from AoW 2. Shadowmagic is basically a stand alone expansion for AoW 2 and adds some stuff. So game mechanic wise, there is no reason to play 2 if you own Shadow Magic and are not interested in the story and how the game evolved. In AoW 1 you play a hero on a campaign for either one of two factions. In AoW2 and SM you play a wizard who commands those heroes. In all games you still have heroes leading your armies around. In the later games your main wizard character is most likely to stay within your capital's wizard's tower to support them with magic from afar. Writing wise AoW 1 is the one to play, with choices throughout the campaign affecting which races you ally with and which one of four endings you end up with. I'll copy paste from an old post of mine from another forum: Without going into story detail, the AoW1 campaign was structured as follows: AoW2 follows a direct story as you play through the various spheres of magic: All Apprentice (Tutorial) -> Fire Apprentice -> Fire Master -> (Fire Bonus) -> Water Apprentice -> Water Master -> (Water Bonus) -> Life Apprentice -> Life Master -> (Life Bonus) -> Air Apprentice -> Air Master -> (Air Bonus) -> Earth Apprentice -> Earth Master -> (Earth Bonus) -> Death Apprentice -> Death Master -> (Death Bonus) -> All Master There is no choice in the path to follow. AoW: Shadow Magic then again only has one path, but now you play more characters, one campaign for each, which combined lead to the final mission.

I am slowly replaying AoW 1. But I am planning to have finished that, AoW2 and Shadow Magic before 3 comes out. As far as mechanics go... eh. The higher the stats of your units the better. The lower the stats of enemy units also the better. Is the manual not in the install directory? Guess I'll type the stuff out for you as I got the box from when the game first it the shelves Base chance to hit is 50% For every 1 point of difference between Attack and Defence or Resistance add or substract 5%. So a unit with an Attack 8 hiting a unit with Defence 6 has a 60% chance to hit (50% + 5%x2). Min chance to hit is always 5% and max 95%. The Damage stat shows the max damge dealt by the attack, minimum always being 1. So a unit with Damage 6 will deal between 1 and 6 points of damage on a successfull attack. Ranged attack chance is adjusted for range and height difference. Short Range: 4 hexes Medium Range: 8 hexes Long Range: 12 hexes Extra Long Range: 16 hexes The equation is: Penalty to Attack = (((Range + 1 - Distance) x 10) / Range) - 10 (where Range the range value of the specific ability) So for an archer unit with the basic Archery skill which has Range: Long shooting at a target 9 hexes away this would work out as (((16 + 1 - 9) x 10) / 16) - 10 = - 5. Archery has a base Attack of 8, so the resulting Attack value would be 8 - 5 = 3. So the resulting to hit chance if the target was a goblin grunt with Defence 4 would be 50% - 5% = 45% Height difference is calculated by this forumla: Height modifier = ((Attacker's Height - Defender's Height) x 5) / 127 The resulting number can range from -10 to +10 but should rarely have a larger value than +-5 Special effects caused by attacks such as holy strike have an Attack 8 and compare to Resistance. So an Archon Legionary (Attack 7 Damage 5) attacking an Undead Swordsman (Defence 5 Resistance 5) would first try to hit the undead witha 60% chance and upon successfully striking it deal between 1 to 5 damage and role for the added effect of the Holy Strike with a 65% chance of it happening. Anything else you need shout

Today I canceled my credit card. Tried to make a purchase from a store called Gamesrocket. After my payment went through and I got confirmation of the purchase, instead of getting my order I got told this: We apologize for any inconvenience. Unfortunately, we are forced to take precautions to prevent deceit of a very few customers. For security reasons, it is necessary that you send us an email to verification@gamesrocket.com containing the following: 1. A legible scan or photo of your ID card of your passport 2. The completed verification form as photo or scan 3. A picture of you together with your ID card or passport (your face and ID must be visible next to each other on the photo). Pictures taken with a mobile phone are acceptable in most cases. As soon as we have received all necessary documents from you, your order will be processed.

Interesting. They had said that they had some interesting funding.

Yeah, that was a great experience. Played it at a friend's with surround sound and the room dark except for one UV beam.

Action game would either be larger than life or just smaller and would feel wierd at nearly life size. It would feel wierd to me. A strategy game at least my mpire would seem huge

I posted about this a few days ago in the random video game news thread but then people turned that into a Wasteland 2 discussion so nobody noticed I'm a bit disappointed that the game will have fewer races at release. It means frostlings may not make the cut and that would be a shame. It is good to see them re-thinking sea battles. The new classes and culture based units sound very interesting.

But the Superbowl or World Series parties you could have! It would be dah awesome! Screw superbowl parties. I want to play a strategy game on that. Some city builder like Anno 2070 or some 4X game like Endles Space or Imperium Galactica or Master of Orion: Reloaded (one can dream) or even Civilization. Now that would be awesome.

Been going through phases like that this year as well.

No worries. As long as typos don't turn it into something like pawnoplies or even ponypleas

looks great!

I had been wondering about the logo on every screenshot

Age of Wonders 3 is announced for (hopefully) autumn. http://www.ageofwonders.com/aow3live/ Gah. Can't wait...

Yeah, right

Know the feeling. Though I woke up because I dreamed John Travolta had kidnapped me (among other people). He wasn't very good at the kidnapping thing, so I told him that if he was going to waste my time this way I'd just close my eyes and sleep 'til the kidnapping was over. That made me wake up...

Was playing Anno 2070 (yeah, how original of me...) when I got a message I never had gotten in 150+ hours of game-time: Tornado detected Eek!? http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=125733078

Eh, I don't like the taste of alcohol, so not going to drink through everything in the bar on the off chance that the nth drink will be the one I like. I'll stick to orange juice, tea, milk and sparkly water

Yes thats is a concerning development, its makes it hard when David Cameron says the Conservative party "is a progressive party for change " How can anyone seriously describe a group that labels itself as conservative as progressive and for change ?

Not by choice. I'll have a sip if really pressured, but do not like it. Had a sip of commandaria in December because it was a going away thing at the office and saying "Yeah, well I am touched you are all gathered to wish me farewell, but you know, I don't actually drink." Before that I had half a glass of vodka in June because it was the goodbye party of the masters and one of the erasmus students from the previous term drove all the way from another country to celebrate with us. Before that I had two sips of vodka in December 2012 at a birthday party after having been pressured into it. I have not forgiven people One sip of punch or something similar in summer of 2012 at a friend's wedding. 2008 - 2011 four weddings. A sip of champagne at two of them... Eh, you get the picture.

Well I can spot the alcoholic in this post, can you? With "this" do you mean your post? With all the milk I drink I am probably a lactolic... (other than a teetotaler)

All this talk about drinking water made me wonder. If an alcoholic drinks alcohol, does this make all those forum posters drinking so much water hydroholics or hydrolics or hydroics?

Eeek! And of course Amazon plays along.

I seriously tried to give The Cave a chance. It just is not a good game. They tried to mix platformer with adventure. As a platformer it is terrible. The controls are bad (and apparently worse when played with a gamepad as it was originaly intended). As an adventure it may have had potential had mixing it with a platformer not turned it into an Adventure Lite. Pushing a block onto a pressure plate is not the quality or depth of puzzle one would expect from the maker of games such as Monkey Island. Some of the character areas may have interesting bits in them. Thus the Time Traveler level is a nice touch back to Day of the Tentacle. But even those nice moments are plagued by the game's tedious running back and forth. Artificialy trying to make it appear longer than the couple of hours of gameplay it has, is a major design point of the game. Thus there are 7 characters of which you choose 3 for your playthrough. Each character has 2 endings, so to see them all you have to play through the game 5 times. The endings only depend on your choice at the very end though, making both playthroughs with the same character identical. Autosave and Save & Exit though are meant to keep you from simply loading the game again at the end. You have to start from scrap if you want to see one different ending screen. And every time you start the game, you have to listen to the intro speech. There is no skipping it. It may have been (kinda) witty and cute the first time round. The second time was still ok as one remembers that it was fun the first time. The third time round though... In the end, there is not enough story to justify not playing the game and watching a youtube video of it instead, but there also is not enough story to truly make it worth enduring bad, reptitive gameplay. Good thing the game was cheap.

Isn't she Charlie Sheen's ex-wife or something?

Why is a kid that is too young to read itself being read a StarWars novel? What happened to Padington Bear and the other awesome childrens books?