Elemental : War On Magic

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Fri Feb 25, 2011 3:47 am

Funnily enough, I played Warlords Battlecry (the Real-Time-Strategy spinoff) 1, 2, and 3 without ever hearing about Warlords. Only realized it was a spin-off series around a year ago when I was reading about different strategy games online. I should really check W4 out some time. I'd like to see how it compares to Age of Wonders.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Feb 25, 2011 5:42 am

Koumei wrote:Heroes of Might and Magic... was that the one (possibly HOMAM 2 or 3) where you had the Warlocks who could make 4 colours of dragon, the Necromancers who could take skeleton legions which improved based on how many dudes you murdered on the field, a fairly simple but decent map maker and all that? I think I played the hell out of that, years ago.

Sounds like HOMM3.

And I *think* I played a demo of Warlords 3 once and loved it. You get heroes who, upon completing quests or exploring ruins, can get special allies (squads of air elementals) and half the pictures of heroines/female units included partial nudity?

Sounds right.

-Username17

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Fri Feb 25, 2011 5:56 am

I asked my sister, and apparently the one we played the hell out of was HOMM2.

"Yeah, the whole series was pretty good and had many of those traits, but 2 is the one you're specifically talking about. That's the one we played, and that will have a special place in my heart."

I recall playing Risk once, deciding the game was rhino bollocks, and then making a sort of Risk map (vaguely Earth-ish, with different nations getting the various castles - with a given player getting, say, South Africa and Poland, and resources spread everywhere so you really wanted to expand). That was an awesome (if space-consuming) map.

And now I want to go find Warlords 3, or at least a bundle of all the art.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Fri Feb 25, 2011 11:08 am

There was a CCG Workshop module for the Warlords CCG, I don't know what resolution the art was at but that should have basically all the warlords 3-4 / Battle Cry art by that guy that did that...

If you can't source it otherwise that might help you out.

Surgo · Post by **Surgo** » Fri Feb 25, 2011 8:23 pm

Funny enough, HOMM 5 is on sale this weekend on Impulse.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Fri Feb 25, 2011 8:29 pm

Five is pretty much the worst of the batch. Both for it's era, and in comparison with it's predecessors.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Feb 25, 2011 8:38 pm

PhoneLobster wrote:Five is pretty much the worst of the batch. Both for it's era, and in comparison with it's predecessors.

I wouldn't know. I have been living in Eastern Europe, making do with a laptop with onboard graphics since 2007. I haven't been able to play HoMM5 or the new King's Bounty, and can't tell you how they rate in comparison to the rest of the series.

I did have a lot more fun with 3 than 4 though, so I grant it is possible.

-Username17

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Fri Feb 25, 2011 8:40 pm

From what I hear from my cousin, 5 basically happened when they decided that the reason for 4's bad sales was absolutely every change and not just some of them. And so they reverted them all and made different changes.

DragonChild · Post by **DragonChild** » Fri Feb 25, 2011 9:02 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:
PhoneLobster wrote:Five is pretty much the worst of the batch. Both for it's era, and in comparison with it's predecessors.
I wouldn't know. I have been living in Eastern Europe, making do with a laptop with onboard graphics since 2007. I haven't been able to play HoMM5 or the new King's Bounty, and can't tell you how they rate in comparison to the rest of the series.

I did have a lot more fun with 3 than 4 though, so I grant it is possible.

-Username17

The new King's Bounty is pretty awesome. I suggest picking it up when you can. The only real warning is that I'd skip right to the newest one, whichever it was, because they're kinda long and after getting mostly through the first one, you'll be sorta worn out, unless you REALLY like that style of game. Also, early on the difficulty is kind of WTF crazy. There tend to be a lot of enemies in the starting zones that you flat out have to avoid, or lose your entire army to just to beat.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Sat Feb 26, 2011 2:11 am

Letsee, the kings bounty I played the most of was Armoured Princess.

It lost me when I realized my maxed out Mage could (and already did) wipe every single regular encounter on the map in a matter of a few combat turns each with little to no casualties... but couldn't finish almost any of the actual bullshit giant boss fights where you apparently need some sort of gigantic army because spells and any tricks other than mass dragon attrition don't cut it.

I mean what? I was supposed to be a god damn Fighter all along? They could have damn well told me before then.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Sat Feb 26, 2011 2:17 am

The newest King's Bounty is Crossworlds, which is Armored Princess with a few new areas/spells/units and two additional standlone campaigns.

Crossworlds is surprisingly excellent - battles are rather more interesting with new enemy mob compositions. No more huge stacks of peasants which are bore to kill.

Also, Boss fights in KB are weird, but not that tough even for a mage. You just need to really up damage output by increasing your Intellect. Warriors actually have it worse against boss fights, because they get little mana but lots of rage, but rage is totally disabled against bosses.

Most of the time I leave the bosses alone, then come back when I'm of a higher level.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Sat Feb 26, 2011 1:54 pm

Oh gee if I had only thought to max out intellect... no, tried it, didn't work, dumb ass.

As to coming back higher level... I cleared everything on every island except for the bosses. I then cleared every single levelling item I could get my hands on my spell and dragon damage output was stupendously stupid.

I mean if only I had thought of such brilliant strategies as "max out primary stat" or "come back later". Sorry, they don't work, Armoured Princess had poor class balance and a rather ludicrous difficulty curve between islands and even individual encounters, so much so that I killed the entire universe on what I think was every island and didn't gain enough power to kill all bar the most minor of boss monsters.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Sun Feb 27, 2011 2:32 am

You do realize that people have even completed the game with 0 losses as a Mage and killed all the bosses yes? There are even detailed walkthroughs in the 1C forums.

Doom · Post by **Doom** » Sun Feb 27, 2011 3:32 am

There are numerous cheeseball combos that will let you go through the game easily as a wizard.

But I don't get how anyone could play the game that long. I mean massive fight after massive fight after massive fight. You *must* use cheese, since even taking 1% casualties per fight would still deplete your forces repeatedly, requiring long marches back (or army-doubling cheat codes) to rebuild.

Wayyyyy too grindy a game for me,no matter how pretty the graphics are.

I remember Warlords, even won their contest, years ago (made a statue to myself out of the corpses of my slain enemies, won the hubris award or something like that). Warlords II was pretty good, I lost interest when they tried to make it a RTS.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Sun Feb 27, 2011 4:16 am

Armored Princess is grindy largely because there's little variety in what you're fighting. Big stacks of similar units don't make for interesting tactical battles.

But Crosswinds is an improvement as they've redone a lot of the mob compositions, so that battles are now much more interesting.

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Fri Nov 02, 2012 6:06 am

Apparently, a new Elemental game has been released.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/article ... ess-Review

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Fri Nov 02, 2012 7:31 am

And if you bought the previous Elemental near release date, you get the game for free. Which is good, because after months of patchwork Elemental: WoM still largely sucks.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Mon Nov 05, 2012 1:59 am

It's apparently a massively patched Elemental. Jury's out on whether it's any good.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Mon Nov 05, 2012 2:35 am

I have played this new game.

It seems to be less blatantly buggy.

Some particularly stupid aspects of game play or character/faction creation have been, marginally, cleaned up, or more often just sort of swept under the carpet.

Fun wise? Well. I've played it a fair bit and not managed to actually enjoy it yet. So I'm going with this being a clear advancement on basic technicality of being functional, but I don't know if I can sit down and call it playable due to the clear lack of anything remotely engaging or fun about it.

In fact it's such an amorphous blob of drab "not fun-ness" that I find it hard to even talk about it in any form of detail. It's just... blah...

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Mon Nov 05, 2012 2:46 am

Can you do anything interesting with the magic? Are the summons all still super-bland?

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Mon Nov 05, 2012 3:12 am

Magic seems to have been dramatically altered.

There are no longer "magic missile clone" and "fire ball" clone spells for all elements. Instead some, indeed most, elements just don't get those in their lower level tiers at all and get weird shit like "zap a random enemy with lightning"... eventually after leveling up a lot.

This makes the elements less generic, but also makes them sort of sucky and boring because if your only spell for the first five levels of monarch is "slight increase to dodge" or some similar bullshit you just don't care.

Elemental summoning spells kick in mid to late on all the element types and are pretty damn good. But everyone just gets relatively generic "I'm an elemental' elementals and as far as I can tell there is one such summon per magic type and we don't care which we get all that much.

You can take a trait that is supposed to let you tech your dudes different magic types they didn't start with... but it seems it unlocks the books that do that somewhere late in the tech trees or something, which then makes that largely worthless because learning first tier spells of a new element as a late game character is sort of not all that worth it unless you run out of other character advancement to do, though, you MIGHT well run out...

There are a few OK spells around, but really the only spells you REALLY care about all that much seem to be monster summons, direct tactical damage spells (so the Fire Element mostly), and that one from Earth Element that makes your cities build shit faster.

Not that we really CARE about building shit faster as the economic system in the game is both opaque and also as far as I can tell really stupid and indeed for that matter... probably not that big a deal.

Basically it is hard to engage with the economic system, it is hard to TELL if you are engaged with the economic system, and you probably don't NEED to engage with the economic system. Which for a strategy game in which you will spend a large amount of time building structures in cities seems sort of like a bad thing.

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Mon Nov 05, 2012 4:46 am

Sad. Welp, back to Dom 3 and Warlock : Master of the Arcane. Thanks for the warnings.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Mon Nov 05, 2012 5:39 am

PL hates everything, including Dom 3, which is perhaps case and point that his review may not be relevant to you. That said, I was sucker enough to buy the first one around release, so I am currently sitting on the second game free and haven't had a chance to get into it. If you want, I'll give a second opinion when I've had a chance to play it some more (my plate's kinda full, and depending on life and interests that may happen never). Honestly, though, first glances tell me PL is probably totally right here. It is a very polished WoM that has retained WoM's core design flaw of not being any fun. But I should probably sink more time into it, because I think I'm still just in that "not interested in learning how to play a new game" slump that has been afflicting me lately.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Mon Nov 05, 2012 6:20 am

Oh wow, DSM, pretty please tell my you bought the original Elemental AFTER my suggestion that people who made exactly the claim you just made about my credibility as a critic should go out and buy themselves a copy of Elemental.

PLEASE. That would so make my day.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Nov 05, 2012 6:40 am

I just want to pop in and say that Heroes of Might and Magic VI is actually the worst one in the series. That game is a war crime.

-Username17