Warlock is great. Its damage resistance formula is pure genius. What’s not to like?
I liked Warlock 1 and 2. They weren’t great, but worth spending some time with. The second cut down on the late game slog.
Largely by replacing it with early game slog. Expand one or two shards, get stuck on a dremer shard, tech up for 100 turns to get past the dremer shard, steamroll everything else. How it ever made it through playtesting I’ll never understand. And it’s not like this is something that happened once or twice, it was every game I ever played of the damn thing.
Dwemer shards are not fun, but I don’t remember ever having it either as a second or even a third shard. As far as playtesting goes… Well, Paradox wasn’t known for diligent playtesting back then.
I literally never saw one later than 3rd shard. I started at least a dozen games, some of them just playing long enough to run in to that bottleneck. Maybe I have the worst luck in the world, but it sure seemed like a design decision.
I guess I don’t remember that. I only put 27 hours into the game. From my achievements it looks like I played on challenging. I did have an achievement that said I entered a dwemer world, but I don’t remember anything about it.
I put at least 258 hours in the first game and 197 hours in the second one. These are Steam’s numbers, they don’t include time when I played offline while on a train.
Huh, that Godking game unlocks today 08 April and has captured my interest. I might actually take the chance on it. I might buy, might install, might even play! In a far out scenario, I could even return to share impressions.
You sound quite on the fence, haha. Should you push thru to the other side and pull the trigger let us know first impressions.
I watched a bit of footage, it has some potential but it lacks even animations right now, so you have to figure we’re at least a year out from release. If it wasn’t in early access I might have bit early, but as it is i’ll wait for awhile and see how it plays out. So many 4X games seem cool on paper or at first and then don’t have much for the mid-game or end-game, and/or lack a compelling AI.
Oh, I remember the early days of Chaos Reborn, when the pieces had neither textures nor animations. I kind of missed that look when they started to upgrade the models. But the end result was fine once I got used to it.
Without the kind of pedigree that Chaos Reborn had, I’m not going to splurge on an Early Access game when I still have a considerable backlog. I’m also kind of waiting for Gears Tactics to be released in a few weeks for my next turn-based fix, so…
But Godking looks interesting enough to wishlist for now. If @Lykurgos buys it, I’d be keen to read his impressions!
So I picked up and fired up Godking, and uh yeah. It’s super Early Access to the point where I noped out when looking at my first city’s details screen. I’ll give it a year and revisit.
That’s where I was coming from above - I could tell it was a bit too early to bite from the videos. But it has potential, so I hope we get a proper thread at some point.
I’m following it on steam.
Looks interesting.
There is a great review up on Steam for Godking confirming it as highly comparable to Conquest of Elysium from Illwinter, but in the current early access state, lacking in content, quality of life UI features and AI capability. Given the asking price of 31 UK pounds, that is enough for me to put it on wishlist and forget about it for now.
Dang, that isn’t great news. I fall off of CoE really hard.
@Mysterio saw that I bought Godking and asked I post impressions. It’s pretty simple to do, as it is essentially Conquest of Elysium with 3D-models. It has enough of it’s own character and ideas that I will call it an homage rather than a ripoff. I think there are currently six factions in the game - Undead, Lizardmen, Goblins, Barbarians, Chaos and the one I played, which is most similar to that Romanesque faction in COE. You can upgrade your initial city and any other cities you find with buildings to provide militia every turn, incrase your gold income, or offer access to better troops and commanders. You can recruit a couple of militia every turn from villages. You can recruit a dozen or so different commanders, but they are based on your cities’ upgrades, not what randomly appears that month.
One neat touch is that your militia commander can upgrade the militia units you get every turn into a Spearman. It cost one more food, but saved you a few gold in comparison to recruiting a spearman. In my game, I had decent gold at first and was low on food, so I didn’t start using it until I unlocked better troops that cost a lot more gold. Then, I did set up a couple commanders in a couple different cities to train my pool of militia into spearmen. You also had commanders with their own summons, but I didn’t get a chance to test them out. Likewise, there were commanders who could craft items (randomly), but I didn’t get to test them either.
The game is generous with items as commanders can wear many, and units can also equip them. Most of the items just seemed to provide +1 this or that. I think those are considered Minor Items, so hopefully there are some more interesting Major Items, but I didn’t notice any.
Towards the end, my Fire Mage Pretender had summoned a Fire Dragon (which is one of the potential Pretenders that can be chosen to lead any faction during game setup). My Dragon commander was in the process of destroying everything when I decided to stop playing until this game has more time to develop.
The UI is pretty clunky, even compared to COE’s less than ideal UI. The AI is totally lacking right now as well (there are no difficulty levels yet). If you are annoyed by COE’s randomness (I’m not), then you’ll appreciate that this game has less. The faction I played had few random situations. The only ones I can really think of was my Fire Mage’s summon Minor Champions (the Fire Dragon was the only non-minor champion) and the item crafting by the other commander. I was autocasting Summon Minor Champion (which is a nice feature that I can’t remember if COE has), and I saw a fire horse thing and a fire wyrm come up before I quit. The horse wasn’t a commander, but the wyrm was.
So, if you wanted a less random COE, with 3d models, you should wishlist this game. It has a ways to go before it can get provide an experience to rival COE, but hopefully it will by the time it leaves EA. The devs are certainly active in the Discussions, and will hopefully incorporate a lot of good ideas. My biggest concern might be their interest in making this multiplayer, and I worry that they’ll not include some of the crazy things to compare with the random things that could happen in COE.
Oh yeah, and while there were some wandering bands of neutrals, but they weren’t constantly taking over my holdings.
Thanks for taking the time to write this up.
I have such sway. Thanks for the detailed impressions!
Much obliged @belouski - this aligns with and adds to the Steam reviews nicely. This is not getting onto my purchase list in the very near future. I wonder if there are some Age of Wonders 3 mods I should try out . . . :-)