Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Locked thread
Pimpmust
Oct 1, 2008

It's sort of spectacular how Microsoft hosed up every single game studio they had going.

FASA Studio or Digital Anvil anyone?

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Orv
May 4, 2011

Pimpmust posted:

It's sort of spectacular how Microsoft hosed up every single game studio they had going.

FASA Studio or Digital Anvil anyone?

They killed all their PC dev studios from around '04 to '08, it was pretty spectacular watching them fall like dominoes while Microsoft went "We're very clearly committed to the PC as a platform!" Just, you know, not for video games.

Mr.48
May 1, 2007
I'm moving to a different country soon and leaving my gaming PC at home, which means lots of time to play AoE II HD on my laptop, who's (going to play online) with me?

Light Gun Man
Oct 17, 2009

toEjaM iS oN
vaCatioN




Lipstick Apathy
Is there any remote chance of an HD version of Galactic Battlegrounds happening because that is my all time favorite RTS and I can hardly play any others because they are not it and thus I hate the interface or whatever. Mythology is my number 2 favorite though, it owns.

Bloodly
Nov 3, 2008

Not as strong as you'd expect.
Probably not. That was a very weird circumstance. Lucasarts licensed the AOE2 engine and put a Star Wars skin on it. Now, them experimenting with air units in the engine was interesting. Dunno whether that warrants a re-do.

Bloodly fucked around with this message at 05:51 on May 8, 2014

Orv
May 4, 2011
I'd buy Galactic Battlegrounds HD for $20. If nothing else the factions were all visually interesting if not super distinct. Except for the useless Gungans. :argh:

Space Bat
Apr 17, 2009

hold it now hold it now hold it right there
you wouldn't drop, couldn't drop diddy, you wouldn't dare

Orv posted:

I'd buy Galactic Battlegrounds HD for $20. If nothing else the factions were all visually interesting if not super distinct. Except for the useless Gungans. :argh:

Respect the worker glurgs.

Orv
May 4, 2011
Not if you paid me.

Also this is perhaps the greatest Star Wars image known to man:

Orv fucked around with this message at 06:06 on May 8, 2014

WAMPA_STOMPA
Oct 21, 2010
I used to have an old PC at home that ran AoE I/Gold Edition. If only I knew how valuable that was. That game owned when I was 10 and then owned again when I was 15 and discovered the cheats.
Also, I was on AoE3 Heaven.

Sheng-Ji Yang
Mar 5, 2014


Orv posted:

I don't think you'll find a single human being that would describe Halo Wars as "well loved".

Don't think they're talking about Halo Wars. It wasn't a 'strategy franchise'. Only strategy franchise they have is AoE.

Ra Ra Rasputin
Apr 2, 2011
Age of mythology was the best in the series, the battles lasted a lot longer then the starcraft 2 fights that are over in 5 seconds and you had a constant stream of soldiers queued up pouring into the battle, half of which ended up as fodder for the myth units, it's just too bad they never got picked up for a sequel.

It's weird that in age of kings I much preferred playing deathmatch mode online over the regular mode, but in age of mythology the deathmatch mode was terrible and I preferred the regular mode.

What was everyone's favorite god or pantheon? I preferred Isis and making a super huge classic era economy over rushing to the heroic age, usually would hit heroic by 10 minutes after maxing my upgrades with the max of 80 villagers 3+ town centers and the rest barracks and temple units, most memorable game had to be beating another Isis player who got a titan out by 7 minutes supported by chariots while I was still in the classic era with tons of slingers, priests and a simcity base that blocked it's pathing, he quit once the titan died.

A COMPUTER GUY
Aug 23, 2007

I can't spare this man - he fights.

VALIS666 posted:

Please Rise of Nations next, please please.

You mean Rise of Legends :colbert:

Ms Adequate
Oct 30, 2011

Baby even when I'm dead and gone
You will always be my only one, my only one
When the night is calling
No matter who I become
You will always be my only one, my only one, my only one
When the night is calling



I enjoyed Age of Mythology a great deal when I was younger and I am eager to enjoy it once again very soon. :)

Orv
May 4, 2011

Ra Ra Rasputin posted:

What was everyone's favorite god or pantheon? I preferred Isis and making a super huge classic era economy over rushing to the heroic age, usually would hit heroic by 10 minutes after maxing my upgrades with the max of 80 villagers 3+ town centers and the rest barracks and temple units, most memorable game had to be beating another Isis player who got a titan out by 7 minutes supported by chariots while I was still in the classic era with tons of slingers, priests and a simcity base that blocked it's pathing, he quit once the titan died.

I moved around a lot back when I was doing ladder in the prime of Titans and I started out with a lot of Norse and ended up with a lot of Egyptian fast Heroics, mostly Ra. Think I got it down to about 5 minutes, which served to corrupt my playing the original Dawn of War years later by seeing how fast I could get Fire Prisms and an Avatar out.

Bloodly
Nov 3, 2008

Not as strong as you'd expect.

A COMPUTER GUY posted:

You mean Rise of Legends :colbert:

Don't be silly.

Both, of course.

Orv
May 4, 2011
Last I heard the people who had acquired the Rise Of rights were busy rooting around in old HDDs to try and find the source code. No idea if they ever found it.

lonter
Oct 12, 2012

Orv posted:

Here is the least overlayed version of it I could find without digging into files.

Also are you sure you don't want this?

I want the Shh-HAH from Age of Empires 1 when villager is created or town hall is selected, can't remember which

Malcolm
May 11, 2008
Was it when you needed to build more houses because your pop limit hit? I can't remember what triggered that sound. Town hall must have been involved.

Start the game already.

Unlucky7
Jul 11, 2006

Fallen Rib
Is the SP campaign(s) worth playing? I am wondering if it is worth $20 bucks off GMG.

Space Bat
Apr 17, 2009

hold it now hold it now hold it right there
you wouldn't drop, couldn't drop diddy, you wouldn't dare

Unlucky7 posted:

Is the SP campaign(s) worth playing? I am wondering if it is worth $20 bucks off GMG.

For Age of Mythology? I'd say so. Both the original and the expansion's campaigns are a lot of fun.

Unlucky7
Jul 11, 2006

Fallen Rib

Space Bat posted:

For Age of Mythology? I'd say so. Both the original and the expansion's campaigns are a lot of fun.

Are they like AoE2? Because to me it felt kind of dry. That said, I did not play much at all of it (Did not get past the tutorial campaign, so my opinion is limited, to say the least), and I do not have any real nostalgia for the game.

Orv
May 4, 2011

Unlucky7 posted:

Are they like AoE2? Because to me it felt kind of dry. That said, I did not play much at all of it (Did not get past the tutorial campaign, so my opinion is limited, to say the least), and I do not have any real nostalgia for the game.

They're more like RPGs than your traditional dry "Take these ten dudes and go here to win" RTS campaigns. Big cast of characters, corny as hell VA, some neat stuff from various mythologies.

THE PWNER
Sep 7, 2006

by merry exmarx
What does "Leagues" mean? Automatic matchmaking ranking ala SC2? If so might have to pick this up. The thing I didn't like about AOE II HD was the lack of modernized matchmaking.

Orv
May 4, 2011

THE PWNER posted:

What does "Leagues" mean? Automatic matchmaking ranking ala SC2? If so might have to pick this up. The thing I didn't like about AOE II HD was the lack of modernized matchmaking.

Correct. AoM has always had SC2 style ladder play for 1v1 Supremacy and Deathmatch, and they're continuing that with deeper functionality for this release.

Adam Bowen
Jan 6, 2003

This post probably contains a Rickroll link!
Is AoM multiplayer as boring and slow as AoE and AoK were? I bought it purely for the single-player but it would be awesome to find a good multiplayer RTS that isn't SC2.

Orv
May 4, 2011
I'm not sure how you quantify slow and boring. It's definitely way slower than the clickfest that is SC2, but I think it's also considerably faster than 1 and 2. One of my favorite, very often recurring, moments in AoM MP matches is when you get a 3v3 or 4v4 match going you run into situations where you're constantly building your base forward and streaming units into the enemy base. It's one of my favorite things about Norse, is taking a TC from the enemy team and moving in with my army (military units do building for Norse) and building a base where theirs used to be and setting all the new barracks to stream huge masses of units into their new front line. Again, definitely slower than SC but I think it's still pretty quick given the speeds that AoE2 could move at. Hour long+ games in AoM are pretty rare on the smaller end of player numbers, where-in AoE2 I'm always surprised by a match being shorter than an hour and a half or two.

NoNotTheMindProbe
Aug 9, 2010
pony porn was here

Adam Bowen posted:

Is AoM multiplayer as boring and slow as AoE and AoK were? I bought it purely for the single-player but it would be awesome to find a good multiplayer RTS that isn't SC2.

Nah, it can play out really fast. Almost as fast as AOE3 with experienced players.

Adam Bowen
Jan 6, 2003

This post probably contains a Rickroll link!
That sounds pretty good. I had a decent amount of experience with AoE1 multiplayer when that game first came out and as I recall it took an hour for a game to even start getting interesting.

NoNotTheMindProbe
Aug 9, 2010
pony porn was here
Unlike AOE1 and 2 where each faction is pretty much symetrical and it bogs down into a war of attirition, AoM has special myth units and God powers which if used properly can turn a battle quickly.

Think of it like a cross between AOE1 and C&C Generals.

Malcolm
May 11, 2008
Yeah, as I recall many of the god powers are once-per-game casts (!) that can swing the battle around. Sure you've got some benevolent wussy economic god powers but that's not as exciting as blasting meteors down on the enemy's farm complex. Bet he didn't see that coming. I never really got into multi-player however. I wonder how the meta and all that jazz will stack up.

Ra Ra Rasputin
Apr 2, 2011
The game was a lot better when they eventually got around to fixing the game breaking exploits and bugs many months after release.
Afew off the top off my head,

Norse and Loki were full of bugs that seemed to favor them, Loki had oxcarts that were cheaper faster and suppose to be weaker, but were actually twice as strong.
Loki always won water maps because boats had way more damage then land units and for whatever reason boats counted towards the damage his hero units needed to do to summon myth units so if you ever tried to fight for sea control he would walk in to your base with half a dozen heroes and instantly summon a thousand myth units.

If you were Norse but not loki, you could still win the sea because of the flaming weapons godpower, it would usually double the damage of everything for a minute, but for ram ships it would turn their damage from 20 to +400

When you cancelled a upgrade at 99% or 100% when it was about to finish you'd still get the upgrade, but you'd get a full refund of the resources used for it, I suspected a lot of people using it when my base was flooded by units and the enemy was in the mythic age by 6 minutes.

Not a bug, but at release Set could have his pharoah poop out 1 population monkeys every second for less favor then 2 monuments generated, each one of those monkeys was about as strong as a regular spearman which cost 2 population and a chunk of food and gold, a barracks to train him in and 10 seconds to make, Set would literally drown you in swarms of monkeys if you left the safety of your base, god forbid you started on a map like watering hole and he has been converting rhinos, hippos, alligators, water buffalos and elephants in the middle of the map, his monkeys and animals eventually got some major nerfs, before that your only hope was to find a 1 in 20 games super rare relic that let your villagers one shot animals, which set could just as easily pick up with his wandering priests.

People could cancel the ranked queue as soon as it showed what map it was with no penalty for leaving, so Loki could always play water maps and Odin/Set would always play maps full of animals.

Another bug was Hades could spawn shades from his temple, but if he walled off the temple for afew minutes and then destroyed the wall, a thousand shades would flood out of the temple.

I did not know that microsoft was the reason why it took so long to patch out these major bugs, makes sense.
\/\/\/

Ra Ra Rasputin fucked around with this message at 13:19 on May 8, 2014

ronya
Nov 8, 2010

I'm the normal one.

You hate ridden fucks will regret your words when you eventually grow up.

Peace.
one of the reasons I remember the post-ES-breakup interviews mentioning about Microsoft was that the patches were so infrequent because the publisher - that is, Microsoft - demanded that the patches be put through a crazily rigorous set of hardware compatibility testing

which is why you could find AoE/AoK/AoM patches on download.microsoft.com

on the other hand, it also meant that ES couldn't get patches out for months

Orv
May 4, 2011
You should check out the second post if you are interested in Age of Mythology Multiplayer. It's a little General FAQ right now but sometime in the next few days it'll get even more stupiduseful.

ronya
Nov 8, 2010

I'm the normal one.

You hate ridden fucks will regret your words when you eventually grow up.

Peace.
Zeus OP.

For players from AoK, a point to note is that the fact that all human military units cost gold is very very important - games basically revolve around gold mine control.

Orv
May 4, 2011

lonter posted:

I need to find the town center sound as my text message sound, can anyone help me here.

For vu.

President Ark
May 16, 2010

:iiam:
It's also worth mentioning that picking Kronos as your god for Atlantis also lets you teleport buildings for a fee and a longish cast time. This isn't a true god power and you can do it as much as you want, although only one building can be in the process of teleporting at a time.

Also certain 4th-age gods can only be picked if you're one major god in particular - you can only take Hera if you're Zeus and only take Hel if you're Loki. The latter one is really loving important because the Norse get a bunch of really good giant myth units at various points/from various gods and picking Hel lets you build all of them no matter what.


e: The AoM campaign is mostly good fun but the last couple missions of the Greek campaign kinda drag on.

Orv
May 4, 2011
Yeah I didn't add in all the "Cool poo poo Major Gods allow" because I was going slowly insane. I'll do that tomorrow along with Minor Gods and who can pick what. Minor God segregation actually starts as early as Classical, in fact.

President Ark
May 16, 2010

:iiam:

Orv posted:

Yeah I didn't add in all the "Cool poo poo Major Gods allow" because I was going slowly insane. I'll do that tomorrow along with Minor Gods and who can pick what. Minor God segregation actually starts as early as Classical, in fact.

That's cool. To help, here's the extra major god perks I can remember offhand:

- Zeus: Higher Favor cap (others can only hold 100, he can hold 200)
- Thor: Dwarves don't suffer gathering non-gold resources, can build a special armory in age 1 (everyone else needs age 2), can research all the armory upgrades at any point, and has an extra tier of upgrades. The first thing with the dwarves lets him get to age 2 superfast because that only costs food and he doesn't have to spend any to get his economy running.
- Ra: Priests can also empower (but are not as good as the Pharaoh)
- Set: Priests can convert neutral animals into units
- Kronos: Building teleportation
- Oranos: Can build a building (whose name escapes me :v:) which lets you teleport units around, like the Nydus canals/worms/whatever from the Starcraft games.

bencelot
May 8, 2014

VALIS666 posted:

Please Rise of Nations next, please please.

I've been hoping for this ever since AoE2:HD came out. The Dutch boom in that game was incredible.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Koramei
Nov 11, 2011

I have three regrets
The first is to be born in Joseon.
Sky passages.

Be sure to mention scenarios, they're a huge part of the multiplayer experience. Age of Mythology is second only to Starcraft 2 and Warcraft 3 in the quality of them and eventually they made up far and away the majority of games on ESO.

  • Locked thread