Thought I'd do another play through and make some notes as I was going along. I respect the fact that no more work is being done, so I guess this is more intended for fallen enchantress and any more general interest.
save game located at: http://www.filedropper.com/3_102
Teleport seems obscenely expensive for it's level and the point in the game it appears. I know that it was open to abuse (especially by the player) at it's previous cost, but surely it would have been better to have limited it to the caster ONLY, rather than their whole army. Or, if it's going to be so expensive, shouldn't it at least be a higher level spell?
Playing the game from the cloth map, I keep running across goodie huts that weren't visible before I stepped on them. Thank god they're usually positive!
When I alt tabbed out to write this post, I got a DV error: invalid call on the way back in. Never had this on previous versions.
You know, i've always thought those little pubic stubble forests looked kinda lame. Looking at the screens I've seen of FE, it looks much more fantastical and interesting. I've really tried to get to love the wasteland idea of WOM, but I really can't. It's all just endless, depressing brown (I hated fallout for the same reason).
I find some of the recruitment dialogue slightly confusing as regarding which response corresponds to accepting the offer. For example “Your greed amuses me” could be seen as the positive response couldn't it?
You know, even after a year of playing this game, I still don't fully understand which technologies spawn monster lairs, which technologies allow me to build on them, which technologies spawn notable locations, which technologies raise my notable location level and which technologies spawn new resources. Can the descriptions of these finally be made clear? I always want to go down the route of recruiting monsters instead of units, but when I inevitably get some lairs they are usually far away from the front lines. My view is for monsters to be worth it, I either need to be able to recruit them easily where I need them (as easily as training) or they need to be sufficiently better than trained units to justify lugging them around the map.
Fire Shrine looks like THIS
When I fought the battle against the alpha wolf for the maggie's key quest, I got an odd bug where it was my sov's turn, but it wouldn't let him attack or move or cast a spell (even though the squares around him were highlighted blue), so I had to quit. As an aside I never understood why the quest spawned a wolf at the lost key location, who you had to fight, and then when you entered the location, you had to fight another battle against wolves. Shouldn't there just be one battle?
I keep thinking about founding settlements to grab all the odd little wolf dens and refugee camps around, but it doesn't seem worth it for the food costs of developing them properly. I try not to go beyond 2 or 3 settlements per food resource. But that just leaves loads and loads of dead space between my settlements, and whole sub continents of land that might as well not be there, that the influences of my towns will never be large enough to cover. I'm never really sure whether this game is supposed to be encouraging me to build settlements all over the place, or only where there is good stuff. Visually, it just looks weird with all these patchwork areas of fallen territory separated by random areas of wasteland brown or winter snows.
So anyway, after a while the nearest AI declares war. He has a strength of 400 and I have one of 50. Nothing happens. He has an army of lurks and trolls (how?) hanging around, but they don't do anything. After a while I train 2x guardian groups and 2x peons (next tier). I take my sovereign and beat the lurk army. Then I take the nearest settlement of his, with the aid of an ice elemental. He has two or three depleted units of lord hammer guys, and I kill most of them with blizzard (I have three water shards) and finish them off with archers. So far, pretty familiar.
I still enjoy making my units, even if they are the same every time. I'd prefer to have some sort of meaningful strategic choice when doing so. Ie, one game I might think “this time I will raise an army of disciplined but tactically inflexible pikemen” or “this time I will train an army of hard hitting berzerkers,” but it's never like that, just “best current weapon.” I remember brad saying unit design was included because people enjoyed the GalCiv2 ship builder so much, and there's a lot of sense in that idea. But it currently neither has meaningful strategic equipment choices for playing styles or ingenuity, nor the aesthetic options for personalisation. It surely would not be massively difficult to get some different aesthetic cloaks to choose between (with personal symbols) or banners or armour style variations, or personalised colouring, would it?
At this point I gave up with the game, and I think I'll leave it now until FE. I'm in a situation now where I just can't afford the food to take any more settlements from the faction to the west. I still haven't made contact with anyone in the other directions. I've done some exploring further east but not run into anything worth a settlement, and I don't have the food really to afford one. I can't really afford to take my sov from the front line to do any adventuring or exploring. Normally I'd use teleport, but as mentioned, it's completely prohibitive. I have a bunch of goodie huts constricting the growth of my cities that it will take me the best part of 50 turns to reach on foot.
I'm running on Windows 7 64, GeForce 9600 GT.
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