I have put about 180 hours into this since I downloaded the Beta. I have played 7 full games. I started on the easiest difficulty level and have very slowly worked up the difficulty tree. I am currently playing my first "normal" difficulty game. Please read my comments with this in mind as the game mechanics may be dumbed down considerably by the lower difficulty levels I am playing at. I like to play random generated games with most things set to random, very long research times to give the games an epic feel, and medium or smaller maps.
Whatever faction I play I always seem to play the same game. I explore, build a city or two, turn out a couple of scouts and explore the whole map, expand to 4 or 5 cities, avoid combat with enemy AI, do whatever I can to keep the Ai happy, pretty much ignore unrest but minimise it as much as possible, until commander units and city improvements put my unrest to zero for the rest of the game, then expand and expand and expand. build and max out cities, CRITICALLY paralyse AI cities with curse and whatever spells add unrest to enemy cities. Then grow and grow and finish the tech tree, occupy all the land, do the special quests like pyre of man, pick off the ai one at a time, enjoy my gold income which may be thousands per turn, enjoy my mana income which may be hundreds per turn, enjoy my buffed champions and units which are maxed out.
Different faction just enable me to slightly alter the way I play each game. In my opinion a faction should force me to totally change my game plan.
Curse is too powerful, lasts too long and is too cheap. Earthquake allows a faction to be taken to pieces surgically and remotely and is too cheap and easy to use.
AI factions should resent having bad spells cast on their cities if they firgure out who did it. City detail screens should show bad spells placed on cities. Some kind of notification or grahic should result after an ai faction casts a bad city spell on me. Cureently so far as I can see the only way to identify a bad effect is to see indirect efects on individual items within the city detail screen or the enchantments screen showing something like 2/1 or 4/3.
However, the highest level I get my heroes to is about 10 to 15 which makes most of the trait trees irrelevant. There are just too many traits and not enough opportunities to level. There should be a way to view the trait trees in a very detailed and much more informative way.
All the little icons for traits and spell effects on a unit's portrait are hard to differentiate and often mousing over a portrait or the traits on it does not throw up a help tip to explain things.
Heroes are very underpowered for much of the game. Trained units become very overpowered ( if kept updated) towards endgame.
A beastmaster in an army with a couple of captured big nasty spiders or a couple of capured MAULing bears is awesome early on.
When my champions etc have purchased all the amulets etc it would be nice to be able to set configurations of gear to allow quick selection of fire resistance, physical combat, quick regen after combat, etc tec etc.
I agree, spells are very powerful. At high difficulties I find tremor/freeze/cloud walk critical to controlling large kingdoms with my relatively few (but elite) armies, as it gives me time to respond to threats.
I discovered mana blast from a quest, and it feels too powerful to use really, as it gives all my henchman a nuke that kills anything.
I suppose all this would be balanced if the AI, which gets access to the same spells, would use all these tools against us. But it doesn't. The only strategic offensive spells I seen the AI use is to cast antipathy on my cities (+10 unrest), and once kraxis stole one of my cities with its city steal spell, and I got it back next turn cause it had no defenders.
If the enemy decided to chain cast tremor on my few elite armies, I would be in a world of hurt with my elite armies lockdown and my kingdom would quickly collapse if my cities were then attacked. If it blasted me with star fire when I entered its territory, my units would have too quickly retreat.
In tactical combat I never seen a AI faction cast a fire ball, a command kill, or anything threatening at my troops. Only seen banshees and necros go offensive with spells. I hope part of this being the beta, is they are still teaching the AI how to use its abilities / spells.
The main problem with levelling up heroes is that versus other civilisations you barely gain any XP.
In FE (not Legendary Heroes), the AI (don't know which faction) cursed several of my cities with the winter spell.
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