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Gerblyn posted:I'll be around for a little bit tonight, otherwise I can try and answer any questions people have tomorrow. For multiplayer, are there going to be any better options for keeping the pace up in this game? The problem with earlier AoW game's multiplayer was that even though they had simultaneous turns, tactical combat still bogged thing down a lot. Mostly hoping for a more robust quick combat system, maybe that allows you to have a small degree of control like choosing to retreat if things start looking bad, telling heroes what kind of spells they should/shouldn't cast, stuff like that. Also, IIRC in AoW2 if another player was involved in Tactical combat, nobody else could be doing ANYTHING. AoW1 wasn't like this, so definitely hoping for more like AoW1 here. Gerblyn posted:Just HP loss at the moment, we're worried that reducing unit effectiveness with HP levels will draw out battles and encourage annoying micro. It also creates odd imbalances, since formations with fewer figures become more powerful. This could change, it feels intuitively odd at the moment that a unit with a single archer is as much a threat as a group of 8. Warlock and it's predecessors basically just made unit effectiveness based on % HP, not in discreet levels based on the number of figures.
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Mar 27, 2013 00:55
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:Maybe the best compromise is just to have both. Obviously heroes will just be single units and shouldn't be affected much by HP loss, but maybe have most of the more powerful buildable units just be represented by a single unit and not lose effectiveness with HP loss, while a lot of the more generic units like archer squadrons be represented by groups of units that do get weaker with HP loss. You could also attach this to a skill, so heroes could decrease the effect of effectiveness scaling by taking extra ranks in it. Or some units would just come with it naturally. Oh yeah, have they said anything about modding capability? Mods sure added a lot of life to Shadow Magic, so it'd be good to see full support for them in AoW3.
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Mar 27, 2013 02:14
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Gerblyn posted:I'm sorry to say that this is most likely still going to be the case. There's a whole raft of technical and design issues that arise if you allow one player to do things in the world map, while another is busy fighting in tactical combat. I wasn't at Triumph for AoW1, so I have no idea how they managed to do it there. That's good stuff, I think better quick combat is probably the more important part to solve anyway. A lot of the issues before was that you could have high value units (like heroes or tier 4 units or high ranking units) that you'd really want to not die, but quick combat was mostly random so you didn't really have any control over who lived or died. Anything you could add in to help give control over that would be great. I have no idea how your AI works, but I would imagine there are probably different AI profiles for different types of units, like, Melee, Ranged, Spell Caster, Healers, Siege, Fliers, and such like that? What would probably be more than sufficient would be if for Hero units you could manually change the AI profile between those categories, and also toggles/sliders for the stuff like you mentioned (get out if HP/Army drops below %, go nuts with magic -> don't use any magic, etc). You could also have something like, when you are about to get into battle and get the 'Do you want to Retreat, Manual Combat, or Tactical Combat?' window, you could have a dropdown (or maybe separate buttons) for, fight defensively (units start to pull back if life less than 50% and army starts to pull back if more than 50% of units are retreating), fight normally (pull back units if their health drops below ~30%), or fight aggressively (units never retreat), etc' which would tell all units that they should try to retreat if their HP starts getting low, or something like that. That'd be really simple GUI wise and would give you a bit more control over the fight. Just some ideas anyway. It's pretty secondary stuff for most people I know, but anything you could add to make autocombat nicer would help speed up a lot of things, especially multiplayer. DatonKallandor posted:Fantasy General did it that way - most units are squads, each member of the squad attacks, so deaths reduce damage output but units that aren't squads don't lose power (and there's a few squad based units that are such badasses they fight ever harder as they lose people, leaving you at a net no-loss in power) - and it was great. Still the best fantasy TBS of all time, with the best combat mechanics. Fantasy General is the game that the Elven Legacy series is basically a spiritual successor to right? I really liked Elven Legacy, I should really try out Fantasy General at some point. Gwyrgyn Blood fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Mar 27, 2013 |
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Mar 27, 2013 16:03
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Gerblyn posted:Turns out there's an issue here for Play By Email matches, since the defender would never get a chance to make those choices (because only the attacker would actually be playing at that moment). I'm not sure how it'll pan out, maybe they'll decide to dump player driven quick battle config, or simply disable it for PBEM games... Correct me if I'm wrong, but in previous games, wasn't only the attacker able to retreat anyway? I guess there's still the question of unit self preservation when possible. But I would assume the defender would always operate in aggressive mode since he can't retreat units anyway. So basically: - Defensive: Units retreat if their life drops below 50%, army retreats if overall strength drops below 50%. - Agressive: Units will try to self preserve if their life drops below 25%, but won't retreat. And you could come up with more granularity if you felt it was needed. For spells, honestly I think just being able to tell a spellcasting hero if he should not cast spells would be fine. Easy to do and solves the real major problem anyway, which is heroes wasting their spellpoints and mana on battles where they don't need to. It'd probably be good to just make it a toggle on the battle mode selection screen.
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Mar 27, 2013 19:06
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Gerblyn posted:We're thinking of having a global toggle, so PBEM players don't get screwed over. Well for me, I'd probably just assume any time I get attacked that it's probably okay to use magic, because it's not too often you get attacked by something far weaker than you. Plus, you get all your spellpoints back when your turn comes around again anyway. Though I guess you could do some scummy things like send in a single unit first and make the enemy caster waste his spellpoints, then attack with your actual army. I guess that's what the pre-battle prediction stuff you were talking about would be useful for. So then I guess I'd say, any time I get attacked it's okay to CONSIDER using magic, depending on if the attacking army looks super weak or not.
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Mar 27, 2013 19:34
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HOMM2 and 3 are the only two really worth playing IMO. 2 is the most charming, nice graphics and music and all that. HOMM3 has more and better gameplay features and stuff, but it's crazy ugly so I can never get into it myself. Eador: Genesis was the original game, to which Master of the Broken World is a remake to. Masters is mostly a remake, so the gameplay isn't changing too much. It's still looking pretty rough in beta right now and the full version comes out pretty soon, so you might want to wait and see on that one anyway. You won't go wrong with Genesis if you pick it up though, it's a lot of fun.
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Mar 27, 2013 21:43
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Nah HOMM3 is pretty ugly, it starting into the prerendered sprites stuff and it's just all very bad looking. HOMM2 looks a lot better, it has a very charming and clean hand drawn look to it. Edit: I'm being a bit harsh on HOMM3 I guess, I don't think it looks as good as HOMM2 and some units look really terrible, but it's not really that ugly. The map screen is better than HOMM2 in some ways as well. Gwyrgyn Blood fucked around with this message at 22:21 on Mar 27, 2013 |
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Mar 27, 2013 22:09
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I wouldn't worry about missing story, the games are all pretty self contained. Plus, if you wanted to do everything chronologically anyway, you'd need to play the regular Might and Magic games in there too, which just turns into a big mess timeline wise: HOMM1 HOMM2 Might and Magic 6 HOMM3 Might and Magic 7 HOMM3: Armageddon Might and Magic 8 HOMM3: Sword of Frost
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Mar 27, 2013 22:20
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Gerblyn posted:There's actually a very big difference that you might not realize. In AoW:SM, it was possible for units to miss, so low attack units were essentially worthless against high defense ones. In AoW3, this isn't the case, Attack and Damage have been merged into one value, a low attack unit striking a high defense one will always hit it, it will just do less damage. Oh my god this is the best. Seriously, chance to hit is the worst mechanic in every strategy game, I'm really glad you got rid of it. quote:We're definitely keeping randomness, since we don't want combat to deteriorate into a determinate chess game where people can accurately predict exactly what the consequences of their actions will be. I dunno, being that this is a strategy game, I could see a lot worse things happening than this. Usually games that go this route (see something like Vantage Master as an example) go to lengths to keep things interesting by having lots of subtle factors that are worth considering, like terrain effects, height effects, a unit type wheel (W->X->Y->Z->W kind of thing), unique temporarily unit buff skills and debuff skills, stuff of that nature. Not saying this is necessarily the way AoW3 should go mind you, just that it's perfectly viable for a strategy/rpg kind of game to have extremely few random factors and be a lot of fun.
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Mar 28, 2013 16:17
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Removing chance to hit also doesn't remove their ability to have stuff like Leprechauns since they can always use skills that have similar effects. Like say, Leprechauns could always avoid the first attack a unit makes against it in a turn, so you have to use multiple strikes to do anything to them. Stuff like that.
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Mar 28, 2013 16:35
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What was the name of the spell that dropped swords on all of the enemy units? I always like that one a lot. That and Firestorm of course. :I
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Mar 28, 2013 22:50
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Kanfy posted:Gotta say, those 3D models look pretty crummy to me, but maybe that's an alpha thing. Not that I personally care but a lot of people tend to judge games by their visuals. Most of the units/terrain stuff looks fine, but the hero portraits do look pretty terrible. Something about the whole interface just looks really weird to me though. It looks ... I dunno, like something you'd expect to see in Civ5? It doesn't feel very fantasy like to me. Interface stuff always changes a ton before release though. Game looks pretty darn good, I like how they emphasized all of the uniqueness of each unit in the combat. Also it seems that there is unit facing now?
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Aug 21, 2013 16:40
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Leal posted:Even if it is just fantasy Civ 5 I would have no problem about that. I've been waiting forever for the Fall From Heaven 2 mod to make its way onto Civ 5. Oh yes, I noticed they also draw the tile resource values right on the map just like Civ as well now. So there you go!
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Aug 21, 2013 17:01
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DrManiac posted:You know what? After playing Eador and Legendary heroes I'll gladly take a nice neat civ 5 UI. Having to go to a bunch of different menus to access common stuff gets pretty tiring after a while. Like, In the Eador remake let's say you want to build a inn. You have to go into the build menu, find what ever category the building you want is under, select the right level of the building and hope to god you completed all the pre-requiste buildings or you have to go over that 2+ more times. That's why they put in that ridiculous alternate build screen where every buildable building is on the screen at once. Yeah it's not great, but it saves you a lot of clicks and searching, and it even has a search feature. Also if you don't have the prereqs you can just click on the prereq you don't have and it takes you right to it.
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Aug 24, 2013 18:40
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Wow holy poo poo that video looked good. Looks super polished already and the interface looks really great. I was not expecting that level of hero customization either, that's really great. Only thing I kind of would have liked is to have the gui themed to your race/alignment (I think HOMM2/3 did this?), that would have been an extra nice touch. Did you guys manage to get any new Multiplayer Quality of Life things in like I was asking about ages ago? Just like, improvements to auto-combat, making it so other players who aren't involved in combat can still do stuff or be in a different combat themselves, stuff like that? At the minimum, if you alt+tab or otherwise don't have the window focused, do you flash the taskbar when a new turn is up? That's super simple to do but you'd be surprised how few turn based games think to do that. Also I think I might have asked this before, but does this game have any concept of zones of control for tactical combat or the overworld? Gwyrgyn Blood fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Feb 14, 2014 |
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Feb 14, 2014 17:47
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Gerblyn posted:I'm afraid the world does still lock while combat is running, so you can't do anything but wait That's really unfortunate. I was thinking, playing Sword of the Stars the other day, that a good alternative way to handle this problem in a game like AoW would be to make multi-turn battles and put a shorter turn limit on tactical battles. So say you could play 5 tactical turns for every 1 strategic turn, for example. But of course something like that you'd have to plan for from the ground up and it'd radically change a lot of the game mechanics (like sieges, especially). So if the world is still 'locked', are the non-involved players stuck on the strategic map (like AoW1) or does the whole screen blank out (like AoW2)? I'm sure you can't get into the detail but I would be interested in hearing why you couldn't do something like allow other players in other regions of the main map still move around while other players are in tactical combat. The improvements to Auto-Combat are definitely a huge help here anyway. Didn't look like it from the video, but did you manage to add any extra control going into the battle, like telling a hero to spend or not spend Mana? Or options to tell units to play super conservative vs aggressive, etc? And as far as flashing the taskbar, yeah it's super duper easy to do, takes about 5 lines of code to do it in C#, which is mostly just importing some unmanaged user32.dll functions, so shouldn't be too much harder to do in C++ (as long as you can get your window's handle, that's basically all you need). quote:3) If a player drops, then you get a choice to either: This is kind of unfortunate too as it would be nicer to have the ability to drop in and drop out without having to back out of the game. Hopefully you can get a chance to add that at some point. quote:The strategic map doesn't, but tactical combat does. In combat, each unit has an awareness zone, which is usually the three hexes in front of it. If you move a unit out of a hex in an enemy's awareness zone, the enemy gets an attack of opportunity on it. The attack uses up one of the unit's 3 attacks per round, like retaliation does, but it does mean you can't just run past units willie-nillie. That sounds good. I can't remember if the old AoW games actually had this or not, I keep thinking they did but now I'm not sure.
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Feb 14, 2014 19:11
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The reasons for this are long and complicated, suffice to say if we could have fixed it, we would have. I'll pass on the idea about making the task bar flash though, it sounds easy to implement.
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Gerblyn posted:I *think* non-involved players come and watch the battle as observers. To be honest, I don't really do much with multiplayer at the moment, so I'm not sure. If you were in the world map, you'd be able to look at things, just not pass through any commands into the system. Or to put it another way, you'd be able to do anything which didn't involve actually changing the game world. Big thanks for all the answers. And yeah you'd really have to design the game differently from the beginning to fix all of those problems. I believe the way AoW2 worked for observing the battles for non-involved players was that you could watch another player's battle as long as it was happening in your domain.
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Feb 15, 2014 17:27
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I'm pretty annoyed because I've somehow lost my copy of Shadow Magic entirely, can't find the CDs and it isn't installed or anything. Well, I've at least got AoW1 to play and I never really played the campaign for that. Kind of impressed that it seems to still mostly run fine on Windows 7, although I have to play it windowed or else the framerate goes super terrible (like, sub 1 FPS). I really like the music in AoW1 much better than 2/SM, but man the sprites are just so tiny, I wish there was a 2x size option so I could see the drat things. Also, did they change the to-hit formula between 1 and 2? I remember they changed the damage formula between the two, 1 is straight up linear chance and 2 works on a bell curve. I'm super excited about there not being a to-hit chance in AoW3 let me tell you, I hate how much units miss in AoW1.
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Feb 18, 2014 17:32
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Pretty curious as to how the overall flow and strategy of AoW3 is going to turn out, going back through a lot of the stuff we know about the mechanics so far. It sounds like there's a lot more focus on developing towns now in 3, which could be a good or bad thing. Getting town development to be anything other than a build queue is pretty tough, lots of 4x games struggle with making it interesting. Likewise, finding a balance between ICS and building vertically, and allowing for multiple kinds of strategies to be useful, seems to be something very few games manage. That's mostly rambling anyway, but I'd be interested to hear if there are anti-ICS mechanics in the game, or other stuff related to town development and expansion. We don't seem to have had any videos so far about town development at all I guess? Just got a brief look at it in the last video as far as I've seen.
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Feb 20, 2014 20:16
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Gerblyn posted:To be honest, I don't think ICS has ever been brought up. The main thing getting in the way of ICS is that you need to have a few good structures, like goldmines or mana nodes, to make a city worth having. Without them, a starting city doesn't produce any gold or anything until it's developed, which can take a while. You also need to get an army over to the structures to clear them of guards before you can start gathering income from them. It's usually more efficient to explore and capture/buy independent cities that you find on the map. Oh and what happens if two players try to build forts right near each other to try and capture something? Like say two forts are both 3 hexes away from a resource, who gets it? I'm asking this half as a joke but I'm actually kind of curious. Triskelli posted:Just don't want to go too far in the opposite direction either: Civ 5 had a problem with Infinite City Sprawl, but now it's punished so much people are sticking to 4-5 cities for the entire game on every map.
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Feb 20, 2014 23:09
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Gerblyn posted:We tried out lots of different designs for making cities work, including civilization-esque systems, where different types of terrain would give different resources. In the end none of them worked very well, they all had balance issues and there complexity ended up distracting players from the main point of the game, which is stomping around with an enormous army of goblins, murdering elves.  Gerblyn posted:A fortress needs a builder to be constructed (~50g I think), the builder spends ~80g to build the fortress and can be reused. A city needs a settler (~150g and 650 population, which is about 2 turns worth), the settler is used up once you build the city. Essentially, the fort is cheaper, eats up 1 turn worth of city production instead of 3 or 4, and doesn't stop cities from growing. It's also less of a big deal if you lose a fortress. Also, if you construct a city on a fort, the city gets free walls (worth 100g). On paper it's a great deal, though in practice I suspect most people go straight for cities. - Use a fort if you just want something cheap to gather resources. - Use a city if you have the cash to spend and you need another place to generate more military, OR you need to gather resources in a highly contested area and need a little more secure defenses. Forts being 'less of a big deal' to lose sounds kind of debatable to me though, if I'm understanding things correctly. Say I have an undefended fort and some jerk flies a Zephyr Bird in and captures it. He can raise it faster, meaning I'll probably have to haul a builder over there to rebuild it for ~80g. But if it's a city instead, it'd take longer to raise, so maybe I have enough time to get some units over there to retake it for free. Is that right or am I missing part of it?
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Feb 20, 2014 23:44
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Gerblyn posted:It's more that you can quickly put a fort somewhere, collect the local resources, and if you lose it, all you're out is the 80g it cost to make it. Cities are a lot bigger investment, 150 for the settler, maybe a few hundred more on buildings. The original design idea was to use forts in places too remote for your empire to properly defend. You're right that cities take much longer to raze though, which gives you more time to rally and retrieve them. Can you use that self destruct spell you mentioned on forts? Because if you left forts in places you couldn't defend, it could be risky because another player could snipe them, as opposed to having to send out their own builder to make one.
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Feb 21, 2014 00:33
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New dev diary, all about tactical combat: http://ageofwonders.com/dev-journal-tactical-combat-bonanza/ Question about how flanking works. If I flank a unit and only do 1 attack, does that mean the defender just loses an action point and doesn't get a single counterattack? If so, I guess that means you could attack something entirely without fear of counter attacks as long as you make sure each unit flanks and only makes one attack? And you could lock down a unit forever like that I guess since they won't be able to act on their next turn? Or can you activate guard mode even if you start a turn with no action points? And one comment, based on the screenshots in that diary. I feel like I'd like a really clear indicator of what counts as a unit's flank and front. You can tell from looking at the unit's facing itself, but that's not quite as easy to see at a glance as you might want. Maybe some sort pulse or thickened lines along the edges of the hex that count as their 'front'? And if a unit is defending, all of the edges would change obviously. I dunno, maybe my eyes are just drawn to looking at the hexes or something, but I feel like it'd be a lot more clear to be able to see that. Edit: Found the answer to one of my questions: quote:Guarding only requires one action point, so a unit can move full distance and still guard. Gwyrgyn Blood fucked around with this message at 02:20 on Feb 23, 2014 |
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Feb 23, 2014 02:15
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Snow Job posted:Single shot ranged units sound odd with this game's rules. Crossbowmen (and worse, siege units) are probably going to be zooming around like mongol horse archers if they can fire after moving maximum distance. Maybe so, but I would imagine that would be balanced with other factors. Say crossbowmen might have a shorter effective range. Or maybe they'd get 1 shot at 10 damage, but longbowmen would get 3 shots at 5 damage each, so their max damage output would be worse but their scoot+shoot damage output better. Prism posted:Unless what they actually have to do is give up actions to reload, or firing takes more than one action point for them, or both. Looks like from the previous videos that reloading is just a cooldown, not an active action, so looks like they will be able to scoot around quite a bit in this game. I'm not actually certain if there are actions that REQUIRE more than 1 action point or not, it wasn't really clear from the journal. Gwyrgyn Blood fucked around with this message at 04:09 on Feb 23, 2014 |
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Feb 23, 2014 04:02
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Gerblyn posted:The unit doesn't lose an action point as it turns around, it loses an opportunity to retaliate. So: quote:You can try the "everyone does a single flank attack once" thing, but it can mean sacrificing some of your damage to make sure each of your guys only hits once. It's often better to get each of your guys to hit twice, so you can spread the retaliations around and not waste as much damage output. The "all damage types +2" for the flanking bonus is kind of interesting as well, since that makes it sound like it'll be WAY better to spread to as many different types of damage as opposed to stacking up one specific type. quote:Yeah, I've been worried that sometimes the little formations of guys means its hard to see what's in front and what's behind sometimes. I'm not sure if your solution would be practical though, as you can see from some of the screenshots, there's a LOT of colored poo poo on the floor sometimes, it would be difficult to squeeze another indicator onto the ground and not have it get completely lost.
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Feb 23, 2014 18:16
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Taliesyn posted:It's a bit weird seeing 'user' reviews from people with 50-100 hours playing a game that isn't out yet and isn't doing early access. There's a closed beta going on and it counts as the same app in Steam by the looks of it.
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Feb 25, 2014 00:15
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That pre-order scenario is the same for GoG and Steam. Looks like they are the only two carrying it so far. So pre-ordering gets you the Elven Resurgence scenario, and the Deluxe Edition gets you the Dragon’s Throne scenario and the soundtrack (with some bonus tracks). No pre-order discount though it looks like. And if we are to assume that release date of March 31st is accurate, that puts us about 5 weeks from release.
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Feb 25, 2014 20:28
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Fintilgin posted:Isn't the heart of these sorts of games the random sandboxes? I don't think I've ever played a pre-made scenario in a 4x game. I never did really get into Shadow Magic, is the focus there on pre-made scenarios/campaigns, or is the 'primary' mode random maps, more like Civilization? Both are good. The campaign in the first game is branching, you get to take some stuff along with you as you go (items/troops/etc), and there are many missions with unique objectives to accomplish. So aside from getting some extra story and lore for the game it also has some unique mechanics to it. Many of the 'scenario' maps will have scripted events and unique objectives and such too, so it's more than just 'a map'. I haven't heard much about the campaign for AoW3 yet, but there are 2 sides to it at least. Hopefully they bring back some of the fun stuff from the AoW1 campaign for it, or come up with new stuff. As far as which race/class to play, I'm thinking I'm going to try Draconian Sorcerer, because let's face it that's just a fancy way of saying Lizard Wizards. Gwyrgyn Blood fucked around with this message at 05:38 on Feb 26, 2014 |
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Feb 26, 2014 05:34
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Babyface Mingo posted:Having been enjoying Eador: Masters of the Broken World a lot lately, how much would you guys recommend Age of Wonders III? The general gist of it is really appealing to me but y'know, haven't ever played / heard of the older titles or much of this game until recently. They're in the same general genre but they play pretty radically different. If you're interested in a good, but very different Fantasy 4x, you should definitely try some version of AoW. As far as differences go, AoW has a hex tile based map instead of provinces. One super cool part about this is that you can change the hexes with spells, creating/destroying forests, deserts, rivers, for example you can be a huge jerk and wait for someone to move their hero onto a frozen river and then melt it with a fireblast spell. You also can move troops around independently, it isn't of the style of 'the heroes do everything' like Eador (or HOMM). You can also have many towns, and of different races, but the complexity of the build tree in them is much lower than Eador's castle. There aren't really events in AoW like there are in Eador, but there are still quests and revolts and such. The tactical combat is pretty similar, but AoW has bigger battle maps and trends towards more troops in battles. The normal units in AoW don't continue to gain levels though, they just get 2 ranks (that only give fairly small bonuses) and that's it. Heroes don't conform to classes in AoW either, you can mix and match skills as you want, but I think this does have the side effect of making them less distinct and interesting as Eador's heroes. AoW also has a much more standard style campaign than Eador, mostly being a series of branching missions where things carry over. Honestly though the biggest thing I like better about AoW over Eador is that AoW has a much better pace in general. Eador tends to drag a lot at times, and the campaign progresses painfully slowly, IMO anyway. And like DrManiac said, you can always try out Shadow Magic for $10 and see if you like it. AoW1 is even cheaper but it might be harder to get into because the interface and controls are pretty dated and the sprites are super small for the resolutions monitors run at these days. You might also get lucky and see a sale for them on GoG between now and the release of AoW3, but who knows.
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Feb 26, 2014 20:34
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Arrrthritis posted:It's worth noting that a lot of this stuff applies to age of wonders 1. Shadow Magic does try to differentiate its heroes, although by the time they hit 15 they more or less become harbingers of doom. Yeah for one reason or another I've spent far more time with AoW1 than the other games. I've actually spent a lot more time with AoW2 than SM even, and I can't explain that. Also that reminds me, I really, really hope to god that this game doesn't restrict the number of players based on the map size. I hate that so much, just let me cram 8 players into the tiniest map imaginable if I want to. Both Warlock and Eador both do this and it drives me crazy.
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Feb 28, 2014 00:08
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Zurai posted:Yep! He ran the smallest map size with 8 players, which appeared to be the max. Antti posted:I was also a little surprised that units, if ordered on a multi-turn move, don't actually move automatically every turn - you need to move them manually. Is this a preference I can change somewhere? Yeah this is kind of a pain. There are a ton of little things like this missing from AoW1 which makes it drag a lot. Not being able to group move units/stacks really sucks (can't remember if they added this in 2/SM or not). Not auto-selecting the next unit in tactical combat sucks. Having to double click every loving time you want to move or do anything sucks. My hand actually starts hurting after playing for an hour or so because EVERYTHING takes so many clicks to do. Using the N and M keys definitely helps a little but it's not really reducing the number of clicks/presses to do things, just spreading it out between hands. Hey Gerblyn, is there any sort of smart stack group movement in AoW3? Like, can I take 3 adjacent stacks, select them all, and then have it move them all in formation? Basically just to reduce the micro of moving groups, so I don't have to figure out which group moves the slowest and then move them all individually and worry about terrain penalties etc etc?
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Feb 28, 2014 19:45
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Does the multiturn automove at the end of the turn or the beginning? Both have their uses is the problem. Moving at the start (before the AI, hopefully) is something that you can't really do manually most of the time (unless you only need to move 1 stack anyway) so that's kind of a more useful feature. But moving at the end allows you to react to the AI, so you can change plans if you need to, so it's 'safer', but not really giving you any new functionality (just saving you clicks). It'd be nice if you could use both somehow, like Shift+Click sets up the stack to move at the end of turns, regular click sets them up to move ASAP. The other problem though I guess is that, if multiple players have stacks set up to move at the start of the turn, which one does it decide gets to move first? Simultaneous turns are hard like that. :I You should look into adding group stack moving at some point if you ever get the chance. It's not a necessity or anything, but it would be really helpful to reduce the number of clicks it takes to do things. Moving in formation is really helpful as a defensive technique as I'm sure you're aware, it can just get really tedious if you're moving 7 stacks together a long ways. Rally points are awesome though and kind of a much needed feature I think.
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Feb 28, 2014 21:22
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Fintilgin posted:If more then one stack can join a combat(did I read this?), why are stacks limited to ~6(?) units? Seems awful small. Up to 7 stacks can join into combat, the 'center' hex (ie the target of the attack) and the 6 hexes surrounding it. As to why limit the number of units, it does add some changes to the strategy that you need to work with. It means you can't make big 'stacks of doom' obviously, so for an AoW1 example, if a town is 3 hexes large, you can still only ever have 3x8 units defending that town inside its walls. It also has the effect of changing where units start in battle too, which can be important depending on how your units are organized. It also adds weird little strategies like the defensive stack formations I was mentioning. Basically if you setup 3x stacks in a triangle formation, you make it so the enemy must engage all 3 stacks at once if he attempts to attack at all (3-4 in his favor at worst). Same with 7x stacks circle formation, except he must engage 4 of your stacks at once if he attempts to attack at all(4-3 in your favor at worst). That's also important as it lets you do stuff like plan out what order you want to handle the other player's units in, when a lot of stacks are involved. Like maybe if the enemy has one hex setup with nothing but priests in it, and you can manuver around and get those engaged head on, you can eliminate his healing right out and make other fights much easier. Another common thing is using this to choose when to engage the other player's heroes, since they are super powerful, it might benefit you to be able to attack as many other stacks as possible before taking them on. (Note that in 2/SM this often matters less because your main wizard is typically the one blasting down spells and they have infinite range as long as you are within your domain) It also lets you setup bottleneck situations where say underground there may only be a 2 hex wide passage, so you can force the enemy to engage you with only 2 stacks at once. There are also some other effects like, units can only effect other units in the same stack. Like in AoW1 healers can use Healing once per turn, but it only can be used on units in the same stack. I think there are spells that effect whole stacks as well but I don't remember any off the top of my head. Basically in short, it's a lot more interesting than having stacks of doom. As to why to change it from 8 to 6, Gerbs will have to answer that.
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Feb 28, 2014 21:45
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Baron Porkface posted:What is the point of researching multiple tactical spells if you only get 20 mana per battle to work with? 1) Gives you more options to work with depending on what you need (elemental weaknesses, AoEs, etc) 2) You can increase the amount of mana you have to work with for your Wizard (in AoW2/SM) by researching Casting Specialist, and Spell Casting for heroes. 3) There's some sort of order to how you get spells, so you may have to research lower level ones to get access to higher level ones. I'm not sure if there are just straight prereqs or if it's based on spell levels (ie have to research a few Level 1 spells to get access to Level 2 spells) though. Either way, researching spells opens up slots for new ones to choose from, so it might be to your benefit to research a quick 2 turn spell to see what else might pop up.
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Mar 2, 2014 03:28
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I think the real questionable thing is that there IS an auto-balance button for trades, but nothing to indicate their likeliness to agree otherwise? That's just weird, it's like the game knows what the AI will consider a good deal or not but won't just tell you directly? You could probably figure out complicated trades or what the AI values certain things for by messing with the auto-balance button enough, it just seems like an extra level of busywork to me. Or maybe the auto-balance isn't taking into consideration the opinion level of the AI, just the value of the things to trade? Also I dunno about EU4 but CK2 absolutely does the same thing that is going on here, in some cases. When you have a 'Maybe' level for acceptance, the AI may choose to accept or decline, and it even has a delay as to how long it takes to respond to you (usually something like 7-14 days). You might not have any idea why they chose to decline a call to war, for example, even if you had a slight positive edge on the Maybe. It doesn't bother me too much anyway, diplomacy is generally a much, much smaller part of AoW than it is something like Civ. I'd personally rather they lean towards telling the player too much than too little though.
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Mar 7, 2014 17:59
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Someone asked that on the official forums and two people answered with the opposite answer (yes it does, no it does), so yeah I'm curious about that as well. AI seems to be something they've spent the last 3 months working on pretty heavily so I wouldn't be surprised if it's still a work in progress. Stealth seems like something that's pretty hard to get the AI to handle fairly as well.
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Mar 9, 2014 16:17
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Yes in AoW1/2/SM the AI just knows where everything is so Concealment is worthless. One of the beta testers was saying that the AI was ignoring his concealed units in AoW3 so it might actually do something now.
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Mar 9, 2014 19:39
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Oh yeah, forgot to mention this: http://www.gog.com/news/preorder_offer_update_age_of_wonders_3 In a nutshell, because European countries get screwed by the regional price differences, GoG is giving those countries store credit to make up for it if you pre-order the game.
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Mar 13, 2014 05:03
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So it looks like spells are separated out into more tiers now? Used to be just 4, but here it looks like they go up to at least 6. And also I don't remember this being the case before, but it looks like you get xp now for just attacking something? Not an all-or-nothing from the killing blow. I know there are now 4 tiers of xp for regular units too, though the bonuses from those tiers look relatively smaller than from previous games. Something also feels really funny about that Eldritch Horror getting a defensive bonus for being behind the wall. Gives a pretty hilarious mental image if nothing else.
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Mar 14, 2014 17:26
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 17:19 |
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From that LP... Looks like Simultaneous multiplayer made it in. Someone was mentioning it might not make the initial release? But I guess they were wrong. Also looks like they managed to get the checkbox to allow or disallow heroes from casting spells in auto combat! Awesome. I also have to say, the interface in general just looks fantastic. Tooltips all have tons of useful info, and the Tome of Wonders has a search and everything. The leader customization looks better than a lot of MMOs I've played. I didn't realize you also get a mount slot for your heroes too, that's really great. Deltasquid posted:1 minute and 20 seconds in: "Knife fight in a cupboard". I think they should change a map/mission name to this now just as a running gag.
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Mar 15, 2014 21:27
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