melkathi

Looked at Stellaris. Saw the amount of DLC. Wondered if it is a Paradox game.

Who grabbed the key? So we know who to pester for opinions.

That's Larian. Fun games if you can stop yourself from reading or hearing any of the writing. OK, Dragon Commander was also pretty crap as RTS goes.

I have a biased opinion perhaps. I used to playtest for Amplitude. Endless Legend is their only game I dislike Endless Legend has more interesting, races, and playing each of them differs from playing the other races. It has a narrative victory condition on top of the usual victory conditions, where you finish your faction quest line. My problem with the game is that it is extremely slow to get going. A friend among the people who playtested it extensively told me the game does not really start until after turn 100. Age of Wonders 3 diverged from previous Age of Wonders games by giving you two choices during commander creation: race and class. Your race dictates your starting city and race relations, though later you can, as always, absorb any race's cities into your empire and train units of those races. It also affects some resistances and possibly weaknesses for your commander. Your class is more important, as it will lock in your class specific units and spells. These class units can then be of any race you have a city (with the required buildings) of. So if you are a Warlord, in a goblin city you can train a goblin phalanx, in an orc city an orc phalanx.You also choose some specializations, such as fire mastery, for extra research (spells etc). Different classes do play differently (especially the mage and druid, who use a lot of summoned units), while race is mostly a flavour choice. The greatest problem here is that the game allows for tier 3 unit stacks of doom - spam your best unit and fill your armies with it. Once you raced to that, there is no point recruiting anything else. Age of Wonders Planetfall is in a way Age of Wonders 3 in a sci fi setting. It does a lot different though. They fixed a number of things in tactical combat that hadn't worked out in 3. They also changed the way cities grow. The maps are split into many sectors, and as cities grow, they take over sectors (max size 5). Planning your cities becomes a bit more involved, at the same time you loose the freedom you had when you were choosing the exact spot for your city. Planetfall adds garrisons to your cities for the first time in the series, so you don't have to keep defensive armies everywhere. The tech tree has been split and brought in line with other 4X games. It was extremely boring due to being bloated with loads of techs that just slowed down research progress without being interesting (your food production increases by 1... yay...). They have started addressing such issues with updates. Race choice is a bit more important, as it affects your initial tech tree (though you can unlock tech trees of other races that join your empire). While each class comes with it's own secret project - all secret projects requiring you to build the specific class building 3 times and then lasting for 10 turns... On low difficulties the AI in Planetfall is not aggressive at all, so the game can become boring. Melkathi is a forum regular and big time fan of the Age of Wonders series as well as Endless Space and Dungeon of the Endless. According to steam he has 133 hours in Age of Wonders Planetfall, 273 hours in Age of Wonders 3, but only just over 20 hours in Endless Legend. When not posting Mordheim screenshots, he is known to sometimes post relevant replies.

I need to play that at some point.

I'm out of town for a couple of days. Also, I am at that annoying last mission of the base game that combines all the previous ones...

@Amentep I half expected you to lock this thread and start a new one "because melkathi posted in it". Good thing not everyone shares my sense of humour

Apparently the Spelljammer game back then had tried to be interesting. The Darksun game existed and the Al Qadeem game was there too?

*grumble grumble* the only game that did romance right was The Outer Worlds *grumble grumble*

In case people are wondering why nobody is posting screenshots, people have independently decided to boycott the thread, to protest Amentep locking threads "for length" always just after I post in them. Obviously a conspiracy to prevent people from looking at my posts. Now I am not saying I support this boycott or that I believe these conspiracy theories to be true, but I am amazed and touched by how people have started this boycott for me. *sniff* Thanks guys and gals. I appreciate it, but for forum peace, start posting again.

So is this releasing this month?

The Dwarf that didn't work for me was one of limited vocabulary Enchantment? Enchantment!

Yes. Story wise it stays absolutely true to the book, with only one side quest and npc added to the game. That character is written by the book's author though for the game, so they don't feel out of place. The horde combat is fun enough as a gimmick. You get enough characters for your party so that eventually you can make a party that fits you. It isn't a long game and by the end of it you have gotten everything out of the gameplay that it had to offer. A good effort for a small studio. Don't regret backing it. Would have liked a bigger game but happy with what we got. The story I guess can feel a bit odd at times, if you haven't read the books, as the game faithfully follows all the chapters the protagonist is in. But it leaves out all the chapters he isn't present for. So as the protagonist comes across certain situations, the reader knows things the player doesn't. The asking price is too high though.

Dedicated to the discussion in the BG3 thread about Dwarves in crpgs: Dark Elf: "You are nothing but drunkard comic relieves with fake Scottish accents." Tungdil Goldhand: "Everything dark elves say is a lie, so..." "... I'll just go find dwarf on dwarf romance." Boïndil: "Kids..."

Well, money allows devs to keep working on a game. If they had spend another 6 months on Stygian, they could have done more. And then there is the security of knowing you haven't run out of money. That does wonders for letting people concentrate on their project

If the money that is being poured into BG3 had been given to the Devs who did Stygian. The RPG we would have gotten would have been for the ages.

Oi! Watch how you talk about Fallout!

Because in other games the pre-made characters you do not choose, die in a blimp crash, after a Molochean Hand orc flies his ornithopter into it to kill the Living One. And inadvertently getting the whole prophecy rolling.

By the teachings of Zerthimon! *Mind blown* I thought it was an ugly elf...

Doubt you'll get your own party. Larian seems too eager to prove they can write. And creating "iconic" npcs will be part of that. The more nostalgic people are about Minsc and Boo and whatever the others were called, the more newer RPG developers will try to live up to that memory they too have. Be it Pillars or DOS2 or Outer Worlds or whatever (though I'll say again, it was amazingly brave to make such unmemorable, plain party members as in Outer Worlds).

The short guy. Halfling or Gnome or whatever. With the extremely disproportionate head. *shudder* Obviously, they have time to improve.

Mordheim Screenshot of Authenticity:

Maybe he'll spoof an angry rant by me over spoofing a review in my name

It spoofs reviews from people on your friend list?