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Mokinokaro
Sep 11, 2001

At the end of everything, hold onto anything



Fun Shoe
Pretty sure he's saying he owns and loves the base game.

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Delacroix
Dec 7, 2010

:munch:
Whatever you do, do not, under any circumstance, use iron heart on a unit that you have converted or dominated. Goodbye free fallen angel! :smithicide:

GERBLYN! :argh:

Impermanent
Apr 1, 2010
Honestly the thing that most excites me about this expansion is the idea of playing a Grey Guard human dreadnought with the biggest possible "gently caress you wizards" attitude.

Also my first playthrough was human necromancer shadowborn and it owns.

Thyrork
Apr 21, 2010

"COME PLAY MECHS M'LANCER."

Or at least use Retrograde Mini's to make cool mechs and fantasy stuff.

:awesomelon:
Slippery Tilde
Alright if I forget anything, ill add it in later:

Forging the Future. The Itemforge’s guide.

First off, building an Arcane Item Forge gives you 10 extra research per turn, 15 if you have Arcane Study, something that the tooltip doesn’t mention!

Once you’ve done that, you will get Forge Item down with all the other non-building upgrades. It comes in seven tabs, Head, Chest, Leg, Melee, Shield, Accessory and Use Item.

Every forgeable item has a budget of 5, and each ability has a cost equal to its usefulness. Sometimes the same ability can appear more than once, Predator for example is in both Accessory and Melee Weapon.

Lets make an example item, Madmac's “Necromancy for Dummies.” This will be a Use Item.


Images provided are not from a real game, disregard massive pile of money and exposed map!

As you can see in the image, Heal Undead costs 5 points, and the cost to make it is 33 gold, 130 mana, so two turns in my capital city with its 111 production per turn. This isn’t because its a skill that costs 5 either, Repair Machine costs 49 gold and 195 mana.


Compulsion-Hen is your friend.

Of course, not everything budgets for 5’s, lets make a melee weapon.


Good for all the Necromancers that are cropping up lately.

I heartily suggest people experiment with the item forge more. Theres some really good things to be had in here, and heck, your backwater “I’m only making merchandise.” cities at the rear end end of your empire can always be put to work. Remember, a unit is needed to ship it out once its made!

Heres a list of nice things to start you off: Seeker, Tireless, Undead Slayer, Healing, Heal Undead, Command Undead, Regeneration, Throw Filth and Fireworks.

Randler
Jan 3, 2013

ACER ET VEHEMENS BONAVIS
I can't play PBEM due to a horrifying bug.

Triumph please fix my real life commitments that keep me away from the computer. :smith:


(On a less :v: note, I too noticed that the game somehow looks a bit different for some reason. You're not alone other guy who that happened to. :))

Astns
Sep 4, 2011
Has anyone beaten the 3rd map in the Eternal Lords campaign?

If so any tips? There are four AI factions all giving me a hammering and I'm really struggling.

Also, this is a fantastic expansion. Goddamn.

Drone_Fragger
May 9, 2007


Lorini posted:

Keep in mind that it's not really an empire building game, I think Endless Legend is better if empire building is really what you are looking for. AOW3 is still a great game, but that's just not its strength.

I get to murder everyone in the world and wash over them in a tide of dwarves and robots / orcs and angels that shoot spirit bolts, I fail to see how this is an empire building game.

Voyager I
Jun 29, 2012

This is how your posting feels.
🐥🐥🐥🐥🐥
I got to hop into my first multiplayer game yesterday and it was pretty fun! Relying on the Autoresolve AI definitely changes the way you play the clearing game (thought it was surprisingly good at keeping my Swarm Darters alive), but I honestly don't mind not spending 10 minutes every turn manually controlling trivial fights.

I even got into a sweet 7-stack battle with Mad Mac at around 30 turns in, but unfortunately my computer was chugging with that much poo poo on screen and crashed out on like the second turn. On the other hand it was Crusaders vs Butcher so it probably would have involved at least a few instances of our units standing next to each other mashing guard and shouting "You attack into my Sun Shield Defenders" vs "No, you attack into my Lifestealing Pikemen!"


Drone_Fragger posted:

I get to murder everyone in the world and wash over them in a tide of dwarves and robots / orcs and angels that shoot spirit bolts, I fail to see how this is an empire building game.

Cities in this game are basically just army factories, and the real meat of the game comes from the very robust tactical combat layer when those armies smash into each other. There are some basic happiness mechanics and the like, but any city functions outside of building units are very heavily streamlined.

It's not even trying to be the same kind of deep empire-management game you'll see in something like Civ or EL, where combat is very heavily abstracted (or the old Civ games that didn't even do tactical combat).

Voyager I fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Apr 15, 2015

Rascyc
Jan 23, 2008

Dissatisfied Puppy
I dunno, I am actually finding a bit more macro options now with the expansion. It's no civ but it's refreshing.

Pharnakes
Aug 14, 2009
Is anyone else having serious difficulty keeping tier 1 and 2 tigran units alive? I'm probably just being a bad, but although they are good offensively they are just sooo squashy. Combined with the AI's obsession with getting a kill at any cost and I can't even clear out basic treasure sites without loosing a unit. Usually only one, but it's still really hurting. The other thing I'm noticing is you have to wait to heal to full with tigrans before attacking, and that can take 2 or 3 turns before you get a hero with the strategic healing skill.

Goatse James Bond
Mar 28, 2010


I've made a huge mistake.

So it's really rather easy by campaign mission 3 to give your necromancer enough abilities that they won't all show up on his bar.

Gonna need to shuffle some things to other heroes to get his ranged attack back!

Goatse James Bond fucked around with this message at 20:53 on Apr 15, 2015

madmac
Jun 22, 2010

Astns posted:

Has anyone beaten the 3rd map in the Eternal Lords campaign?

If so any tips? There are four AI factions all giving me a hammering and I'm really struggling.

Also, this is a fantastic expansion. Goddamn.

The last time I beat it, I think my upkeep was in red for 40 turns. Pretty much you can't afford to actually build anything for a long time, just blitz with your heroes and your Deathbringer (Avrik should also have inflict ghoul curse, remember it's melee only. Also Control Undead and Necromancers aura) and convert as many units as possible to keep you going. Use summons to fill gaps as needed.

On the Queens side of things, give her summon beast horde and use it liberally. She'll encounter a lot of units who will join for free as she goes, just have her slowly push through the dungeon and try not to lose too many units.

Zulily Zoetrope
Jun 1, 2011

Muldoon
Has anyone been able to forge alliances since the last patch before the expansion? I know they were patched to be less easy to obtain, but they seem to be completely impossible now.

Incidentally, in the third campaign map, can you forge an alliance with Ham after declaring war on Karl the Lich? Ham holds a huge part of the map and it bothers me that I can't see what's going on there. He keeps letting roamers slip past his cities and into mine. :argh:

madmac
Jun 22, 2010

Kajeesus posted:

Has anyone been able to forge alliances since the last patch before the expansion? I know they were patched to be less easy to obtain, but they seem to be completely impossible now.

Incidentally, in the third campaign map, can you forge an alliance with Ham after declaring war on Karl the Lich? Ham holds a huge part of the map and it bothers me that I can't see what's going on there. He keeps letting roamers slip past his cities and into mine. :argh:

Ham won't ally himself with a dirty Necromancer, but he'll graciously not go to war with you if you're nice to him and depending what other alliances you make.

There's three different endings to the map/campaign and they have different win conditions, allies, and enemies.

YorexTheMad
Apr 16, 2007
OBAMA IS A FALSE MESSIAH

ABANDON ALL HOPE
I haven't played AoW since before any expansions came out. What are some fun classes to play as for the new races (Halflings, Frostlings, Tigran)?

Covski
Jun 24, 2007

Bringing the forums together with the greatest thread!
Wow, this expansion is great. So many things I didn't even know I wanted and they're all awesome :allears:

However I seem to have run into a repeatable crash when losing my throne cities to the huge mass of independants that spawn after I started lighting the unity beacon. (I was dicking around in a knight level game to try things out, and I apparently missed that part of the unity victory, oops) The game crashes the moment the battle is lost, no matter if I autoresolve it or play it manually. Maybe it's related to the fact that I cancelled the beacon lighting to vainly panic build units to try to hold them off? Is there a place I should send the save or something?

Malachamavet
Jan 12, 2009

Above the gigantic mouth is an eye as big as a shield that stares at you with pure hate
I see that savegames go to the steam cloud, but is there a way to copy leaders from the cloud and/or extract leaders from savegames?

Captain Oblivious
Oct 12, 2007

I'm not like other posters

YorexTheMad posted:

I haven't played AoW since before any expansions came out. What are some fun classes to play as for the new races (Halflings, Frostlings, Tigran)?

Something to note: Almost all of the races have been tweaked so much that it's a completely different experience now, relative to launch. So don't be afraid to go back to the originals.

Pomp
Apr 3, 2012

by Fluffdaddy
How is multiplayer these days? Does having tactical combat on still grind everything to a halt with no way to work around it?

Zore
Sep 21, 2010
willfully illiterate, aggressively miserable sourpuss whose sole raison d’etre is to put other people down for liking the wrong things

YorexTheMad posted:

I haven't played AoW since before any expansions came out. What are some fun classes to play as for the new races (Halflings, Frostlings, Tigran)?

They've added a lot of cool touches to almost every class/race combo now. Like Orc Hunters getting throw Javelin instead of Shoot Bow, or Goblin Engineers shooting blight damage with their blunderbusses.

For Halflings, I really like Dreadnaught or Rogue as they give you the easiest ways to manage happiness and a wide variety of ways to get non-Halfling units for your frontline (Machines, (lesser) Shadow Stalkers and Seduce). Tigrans make really cool and good Warlord and Rogues, they have some crazy synergy and are basically balls to the wall fast offense . Frostlings are really great with stuff like Theocrat (you want that extra healing for your Mammoth riders), Archdruid and Necromancer.

Honestly though almost all race/class combos are good and fun. There are only a few that really lack any synergy (Ex: Frostling/Tigran Dreadnaughts are bland because none of their units are armored, they don't have a racial cavalry tier 3 and their elemental attacks all completely overlap (Frostlings get frost tanks)). They're not bad, but you don't get as much cool poo poo as you do with other combos.

Thyrork
Apr 21, 2010

"COME PLAY MECHS M'LANCER."

Or at least use Retrograde Mini's to make cool mechs and fantasy stuff.

:awesomelon:
Slippery Tilde

Pomp posted:

How is multiplayer these days? Does having tactical combat on still grind everything to a halt with no way to work around it?

You can force it to go max speed (which you should) in multi-player tactical combat. Combined with spectating and its less tedious.

You're still going to want something easily dismissed in the background for slow turns, part of the genre I think!

Goatse James Bond
Mar 28, 2010


I've made a huge mistake.

So, I expect a good few people noticed in the campaign (especially mission 3)...

But Frostling Deathbringers are female. Royal guards to the rescue!

Zore
Sep 21, 2010
willfully illiterate, aggressively miserable sourpuss whose sole raison d’etre is to put other people down for liking the wrong things
I will say one of my only problems with the expansion is probably the way Necromancers, healing and Heroes interact.

If you want two site clearing teams you need a Necro hero as one of your first three hero options. Its not really optional, Reanimators take 6 turns of research at standard speed and you need 2 turns or a rush to pop one out. And a Necro stack can only barely get by with one healer (especially in the AI's hands).

I understand why all the systems interact as they do, but your early game feels like its made or broken by getting an early second Necromancer healer.

Other than that quibble though, I really do enjoy playing as a Necro. Its right up there with Archdruid and Warlord as one of my favorite classes.

John Charity Spring
Nov 4, 2009

SCREEEEE
Necromancer Goblins are so much fun. Best swarm darters in the whole drat game. I'm having a hell of a problem fighting shadow stalkers though - blight immunity and frost protection makes them a right bastard for almost anything I can produce. Spirit damage seems the best bet, but...

Ra Ra Rasputin
Apr 2, 2011
How much would it effect game balance if guard mode just did +1 +1 for defense/res instead of 2/2?

Even at 0/0 without the chance to be flanked it seems like it would be strong.

Corbeau
Sep 13, 2010

Jack of All Trades
Trying my first expansion game with a Tigran Grey Guard/Expander Rogue. Holy poo poo that eco-boom. :stare:

Voyager I
Jun 29, 2012

This is how your posting feels.
🐥🐥🐥🐥🐥

John Charity Spring posted:

Necromancer Goblins are so much fun. Best swarm darters in the whole drat game. I'm having a hell of a problem fighting shadow stalkers though - blight immunity and frost protection makes them a right bastard for almost anything I can produce. Spirit damage seems the best bet, but...

Incorporeal Units are basically the bane of Goblins. Improved Weaken and solid physical units like Butchers mean you can deal with blight resistance as long as you didn't go all-in on Darters (don't go all-in on Darters), but when you run into poo poo that ignores blight damage and has 60% physical protection (and gently caress it, it ignors the lifedrain on Butchers too), then you suddenly have a serious problem and you will need to start taking active steps to deal with it. Get some elemental magic, absorb some humans, whatever you gotta do it's worth it to not get countered that hard.

In this regard, Gerblyn tweaking a lot of Goblin units to favor blight damage is actually something of a nerf, because as much as Goblins can really build around exploiting blight vulnerabilities a harder commitment to blight damage is the last loving thing they need.

Captain Oblivious
Oct 12, 2007

I'm not like other posters
Ghouled Hell Hounds. The bane of any Draconian. How did you even ghoul those things :negative:

Zore
Sep 21, 2010
willfully illiterate, aggressively miserable sourpuss whose sole raison d’etre is to put other people down for liking the wrong things

Captain Oblivious posted:

Ghouled Hell Hounds. The bane of any Draconian. How did you even ghoul those things :negative:

Drink from a Well of Unlife, get hit by a Death Bringer/High Level Necro with Ghoul Curse or be in the stack of a hero after a Necro researches the Archlich upgrade.

Voyager I
Jun 29, 2012

This is how your posting feels.
🐥🐥🐥🐥🐥
From messing around a bit, it feels like Goblin Warlord is actually really good. The cost reductions stack linearly (making them proportionally more powerful), so you end up with 1 turn Swarm Darters as soon as you finish your Builder's Hall and 1 turn Butchers/Wargs/Monster Hunters shortly thereafter. Butchers in particular make an amazing meatwall to hide your rear end in a top hat ranged units behind and are more than capable of holding their own head-on against other T2s thanks to solid all-around stats and lifesteal, even completely ignoring what they do to Cavalry. Being able to start spamming them on like turn 9 while already having a solid count of Swarm Darters behind them can get scary very quickly.

CaptCommy
Aug 13, 2012

The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a goat.
What AI difficulty do you guys play on? I'm trying to figure out which has the best balance of providing a challenge without being totally friggin impossible.

madmac
Jun 22, 2010
My general advice, if you're looking for a challenge is to play King and then adjust up and down from there depending on your preferences.

Basically it works like this:

Squire: Gimped
Knight: "Fair" Still wimpy
Lord: Cheats a little
King: Cheats a lot
Emperor: Cheats like a Mofo

King is the middle option for the challenging modes so it's the easiest one to go up or down from, assuming you're already pretty experienced. If you're relatively knew to the game start with Lord instead until you are comfortable with it.

Gerblyn
Apr 4, 2007

"TO BATTLE!"
Fun Shoe

Covski posted:

However I seem to have run into a repeatable crash when losing my throne cities to the huge mass of independants that spawn after I started lighting the unity beacon. (I was dicking around in a knight level game to try things out, and I apparently missed that part of the unity victory, oops) The game crashes the moment the battle is lost, no matter if I autoresolve it or play it manually. Maybe it's related to the fact that I cancelled the beacon lighting to vainly panic build units to try to hold them off? Is there a place I should send the save or something?

savegames@triumphstudios.com

Please! I'll check it out when I get to work

Ra Ra Rasputin
Apr 2, 2011
Falling clouds either has a typo or is bugged, because it says vision is 2 lower but it's actually 2 higher.

Malachamavet
Jan 12, 2009

Above the gigantic mouth is an eye as big as a shield that stares at you with pure hate
Minor thing, but Frostling Ability says they have Arctic Running when the ability they get is Arctic Walking.

Lobsterpillar
Feb 4, 2014

GreyjoyBastard posted:

So it's really rather easy by campaign mission 3 to give your necromancer enough abilities that they won't all show up on his bar.

Gonna need to shuffle some things to other heroes to get his ranged attack back!

You can still access abilities that aren't on the quick bar - select the hero portrait and it'll come up with a list of all his abilities. You can select any activated ability from this list to use.

Covski
Jun 24, 2007

Bringing the forums together with the greatest thread!

Gerblyn posted:

savegames@triumphstudios.com

Please! I'll check it out when I get to work

Done!

Speedball
Apr 15, 2008

Never actually played Age of Wonders, though some have said it's kind of a magical Master of Orion or other 4X game. How robust is its replayability? Like victory conditions, faction differences, etc? I've burned through Endless Legend, Civ V, Civ BE in the past year.

I'm guessing it's pretty good, I guess, and that steam sale is tempting, as all steam sales are.

Speedball fucked around with this message at 07:12 on Apr 16, 2015

Zore
Sep 21, 2010
willfully illiterate, aggressively miserable sourpuss whose sole raison d’etre is to put other people down for liking the wrong things

Speedball posted:

Never actually played Age of Wonders, though some have said it's kind of a magical Master of Orion or other 4X game. How robust is its replayability? Like victory conditions, faction differences, etc? I've burned through Endless Legend, Civ V, Civ BE in the past year.

I'm guessing it's pretty good, I guess, and that steam sale is tempting, as all steam sales are.

3 current victory types; Conquer the whole map (with or without allies), Seals (control points on the map until you get X points, neutral creatures and opponents will fight you for them) and the new Beacon victory (essentially a mix of a Wonder and Diplomatic victory in Civ parlance. Build up your reputation with multiple races (adjustable) and then build massive 'beacon' projects in your cities to win.)

The way the game is structured is that there are 7 Classes and 9 Races you can mix and match into any combination you like. On top of that, you have 3 'specialization' slots on your leader that give you access to things like Fire Magic, the ability to grow your empire and expand faster etc.

Races are organized along similar lines for their racial units, but as the game has gone on they've gotten very differentiated and unique. So the tier one Irregular unit, the very basic combat unit you can build out of literally any settlement, is usually something with a weak melee attack and a single shot ranged attack. Halfling Irregulars get a three shot ranged attack, Tigrans don't get one at all etc. Units you get from the class are also often differentiated by race. So if you're a Warlord and make Mounted Archers the Elven Mounted Archers you can produce will have longbows (no damage penalty at long range) while Human Mounted Archers will have Blessed Arrows (+2 spirit damage in addition to their regular physical damage).

Needless to say, there's a lot of variation and various structures on the strategic map that can get you access to fun upgrades for your units or new units entirely! If a Temple of the Ancient Serpent is within a city's domain you can clear it out and produce Feathered Serpents from the city. Other ones can give you benefits like having your Support-class units come back to life if they die in battle but you win, or giving your Pike units +2 spirit damage.

In a general sense though it very much is about the tactical combat over Empire Building. Think of it as a much more fleshed out version of Endless Legend's combat system with a lot more active ability, positional movement and attacking. Also Strategic and Tactical spells that can help your economy or just straight up drop fireballs on dude's heads in combat.

Very replayable, highly recommended.

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Triskelli
Sep 27, 2011

I AM A SKELETON
WITH VERY HIGH
STANDARDS


Speedball posted:

Never actually played Age of Wonders, though some have said it's kind of a magical Master of Orion or other 4X game. How robust is its replayability? Like victory conditions, faction differences, etc? I've burned through Endless Legend, Civ V, Civ BE in the past year.

I'm guessing it's pretty good, I guess, and that steam sale is tempting, as all steam sales are.

The game is almost closer to say XCOM than Endless Legend or Civ V. You need to be fighting all the time, and the focus is on combat. Everything you do in regards to empire-building either makes you to build more units, build better units, or build them faster. Which is a good thing, since the tactical combat is very solid, and the random map generator is great.

As far as replayability goes, there's endless fun to be had just in working out race/class/specialization synergies and then dressing your leader up in all the different costumes. Definitely check out some of madmac's posts in the OP to see some of the complexity available.

E: and would love to see you LP the game, FYI.

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