Armageddon Empires

Another vote here for not being able to lose your game because you pressed one key, I don’t care if it is ESC. ESC in most games will at least take you to a “save game y/n” screen, having one key lose your entire game should just be a no-no. OTOH, using an alt/ctrl/shift combo to be able to instantly leave the game or a BOSS option would be great. Even mlb.com has a BOSS option under their Game Audio, I thought that was pretty funny.

I’m just getting up to speed by reading the manual. I already wasted $30 on Lost Empires, a game with a very poor UI, so I don’t know that I want to do that again. It’s interesting that UI is usually what kills an indie game, which is surprising to me because the people who develop these games have usually played a zillion other games and should know better. Looking at http://www.gametunnel.com/articles.php?id=620, all of the top 10 games have really good UI’s. Just keep it in mind please, thanks.

Sorry, one question still hasn’t been answered:

Is there a way to see the full stats of a card from your hand?

After playing all morning, despite UI issues, I’m loving the game more and more. It reminds me a lot of Chaos Overlords, but is much better imo.

The stuff you can find when you explore the map is just awesome. I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but suffice it to say Vic appears to have folded the thematic material from every post-apocalyptic source you can imagine: Fallout, Gamma World, Escape From New York, Mad Max, and even, I think, Nausicaa. It’d great fun to discover it all in-game.

Some notes:

  • The AI is extremely competent from what I have seen. It sends out recon units, fields strong, mixed armies, and (annoyingly if you’re the target) will hurt your bases with stealthy sabotage attacks. The only realy hole in its actions that I’ve noticed so far is that it often uses Fate points to reroll when it will lose the roll no matter what.

  • Accelerated die rolls and being able to hit “Enter” to make default choices will improve the game 500%. This cannot be emphasized enough. Combat consists of a TON of die rolling and popup dialogue windows, and there desperately needs to be a way to progress through them that doesn’t feel tedious. I know it’s been said before, but it bears repeating over and over.

  • It would be nice if there were a quick and dirty solution to turn initiative die roll ties, since the tie rerolls just add to the tedium. Accelerated rolls would obviously help, but something like “tie goes to the player who ranked lower in the turn order on the last turn” would do the trick, and help balance things a bit.

  • It would be nice if unit stats were color coded when they are subject to bonus or penalty other than being out of supply. When a unit is out of supply range its affected stats turn red, and it would be great if that applied to penalties suffered in combat as well. Likewise, if a unit is getting a bonus, the stats could show up green.

I don’t think there is, which is a big ease-of-access issue. All of the abilities are explained in the back of the manual, though, so you can always refer to that. Once you drop cards on the map, you can access their full info from the facility/army screens, but that’s obviously no substitute.

I agree with all of the comments so far. Awesome game mechanics, some quirky UI elements, but a really good indie game.

Things I’d like to see…

Definitely need a detail screen for cards in your hand. I am constantly looking at cards in my hand and wondering, what does this card do? And I really don’t know until I put it into play.

Some sort if indicator to highlight cards that were just drawn, perhaps a temporary outline or an animation of the card entering your hand. Or, simply a message that says, you drew x.

Tooltips everywhere. I find myself hovering over numbers and fields waiting on a tooltip that shows what that particular stat is. Yes, it’s all in the manual, but in-game would be great.

Something no one mentioned, and maybe it’s just me, but when I click the arrow buttons to pan my hand of cards, they feel reversed for me. My brain wants to see it as panning the window across the cars and not moving the cards across the window. Make sense? Maybe an option to reverse the pan?

The dice roll animations don’t bother me at all, although revealing them one at a time or randomly would be interesting.

Haven’t hit escape, so no problem there. But probably should require a modifier key, ctrl, shift, etc.

Things I like…

The fact that the AI does not cheat. Awesome to hear.

Greats docs.

The artwork is really top notch.

The game itself. I’ve only played through the demo twice and can tell the strategy potential is huge.

Overall, it’s a great game. I love the old-school feel. Will be purchasing soon and look forward to future updates.

The card hand is a bit of a cludge. Like I said I went through several different versions but none was ideal. My main concern was to make sure the map real estate was maxed and not have some fixed tool bar on the bottom.

If you are having problems figuring out what card you drew the UI works this way: If you have 5 or greater cards in the hand the new card always pops into the center slot (number 3 from the left). If you have less than 5 cards in your hand then it fills up the slots from left to right.

You can alt tab to bring up the desktop and have the appendix in the manual available to look up the special abilities…that said it is a pretty sad excuse and I’m going to look into adding some type of info pad that is either a roll over or right click selectable.

Alright, Mr. Davis, I’m afraid I’m going to have to take back the nice things I was saying about eccentric UI’s. There’s such a thing as going too far and I think you’ve found it. New cards pop into the center slot? Why? How in the world did you come up with that? :)

Hey Vic, I hit my first showstopper bug. Should I send the savegame to the Cryptic Comet contact address?

I heart that you included an Iron Man mode, but it’s a double-edged sword where bugs are concerned…

Sorry, Please do. I tested this thing on mice up to humans but I’m afraid some things got through. you can send it to [email protected].

I sent one in as well; a repeatable script error. Nice job on the autosave feature.

Very good to hear. Not being able to see card details when they’re in your hand is probably my #1 issue with the game.

I have a suggestion on that, Vic. How about highlighting or outlining new cards? Maybe make them flash a few times when first drawn? Another suggestion is dimming out cards that you don’t have the resources to play. It would have to refreshed as you spent AP and resources or discovered new ones, but I think it would make scanning your cards a lot easier.

I just ran through a deck for the first time, and apparently there’s no reshuffle once you’ve gone through all your cards? I can’t find anything in the manual about it. I assume I have to make do with the cards I have in play at this point?

Managed to get a bit further now that I know I have to constantly train myself to never ever even THINK about hitting the ESC key.

Lots of the things you get on AI turns about where combat is occurring, spotted enemies, etc give you only hex coordinates, but I couldn’t find any way to actually see what hex coords a given one has after the event went by… another thing where an event log would be super useful. :)

I’ll amend this to say that I didn’t realize how combat rolls worked before I wrote the above. Attack roll - Defense roll = Damage inflicted, which justifies at least some of the Fate expenditures I’ve seen the AI make.

I just wrapped up my second Iron Man game (lost as Mutants on a normal size map with a score of 312; THANK YOU Vic, for allowing lost games to score and show up on the high score list). I’ve got the hang of it now, and just need to remember to defend the home front better. Both games I lost because the AI managed to besiege my HQ with sizable armies.

Yeah, that is an undocumented but rather important feature. You never get the discards back. I did it that way so that if you are going to expend your energy it had better be worth it. It makes protecting those 7 and 8 point cards more of a priority. Also, if you go for a high point card load out there is a downside in that you can eventually be decked and worn down. It makes infantry a bit more useful…and infantry also makes good cheap outpost garrison material. If you leave the outposts open the AI will take advantage and grab them. They may decide they can’t hold it and just use it to disrupt your supply lines or the may use as a staging area for a drive on your stronghold. It sucks to lose one within four hexes of your stronghold and then go to retake it only to finde that its been reinforced with a 7/8 point card.

I agree. I recogized how unintuitive the hexcoord was while working on it. I have the map auto center on the event to help out. I found that after a lot of playing I got a hang for where 6 by 7 was and just clicked inspect and spotted the unit and did a mouse rollover to confirm who it was. The log idea occured to me but with the IFace so filled up already with buttons and an “Event” log for espionage I put the idea on the back burner.

What really sucks about having made this game is I can’t recapture the magic of learning it for the first time. Sort of like Dominions before you knew all the specials and the perfect route to forge the mega weapon of death or cast the global of ultimate doom. I still get a chuckle when somebody nukes me when I’m doing just great. If something like that annoys you then you can pick a hardened stronghold and have pretty good odds of surviving. I really love picking the weakest stronghold, 175 card points, 5 tile points, no resources, rare specials and load out with a lot of infantry…it’s a real challenge.

Sorry missed this. My drummer has been playing with one stick for a while. Give it a try and you will see…er maybe not. When you click on the draw card button and watch the cards the new one just pops in there. I do like Raife’s idea of highlighting the cards according to playability and maybe just drawn. I’ll have to investigate that.

Played the demo, fun stuff. I was trying to get it to work in a windowed mode with D3Dwindower, but no luck :( Really wish there was a way to do that…

This game looks very interesting. Especially since Vic is a Dominions fan he probably created the kind of deep turn based game I like. How long does a typical game last?

awesome game…but i have a question.

how do i build outposts? I know I need a hero, but are they cards I have to put in my deck (outposts)?

I have gone through the Empire of Man’s cards, and I do not see any “outposts”, only strongholds.

I also am assuming that I need to be “in supply”…but I cannot figure out how to build an outpost. I have a resource center right outside my supply range, but I cannot figure out how to extend that supply.

Thanks

Chris

There was some card I had in the default deck that I think was an outpost. “Firebase” maybe? I didn’t get around to building it though.

You can probably extend your supply by building an outpost. ;)