1601

So, Voice of El. Is there any point to this faction except to troll catholics?

1602

El can convert towns which will then give 1/3 of their income to the church which is then divided up between the church officials based on their rank.

El can “open the Seven Seals”. At first it brings them volunteers like Flagellate troops and mounted Paladins. Later it brings angels BUT also releases the Four Riders of the Apocalypse one at a time, and the final seal will also unleash an Apocalypse upon the earth (it doesnt end the game but it makes things really rough for everyone)

El makes a great ally. He can convert his allies cities and get benefits from them. Many of the beings that just appear at his cities are uncontrolled wanderers which help defend you. He pairs well with Baron (who can put PD into his allies cities)

1603

Hahahahaha

I need to go ahead and start playing this game now. I’ve owned it for at least a few months.

1604

I know what he does. It’s just almost everything he does is terrible.

Why would I want to pay money to permanently reduce the income of my farm/town/city/etc so I can get it back at the end of the year, especially if getting it back is contingent upon having the highest ranking church official? I could end up paying money for the pleasure of giving a significant chunk of my income to an opposing AI faction. The only upside of this seems to be you can get extra money if you have a pontiff (which requires an assload of cash to get) and you can still get some income from the town if it’s taken by an enemy (hardly worth it since converting the town takes money and time, thereby killing your momentum). It’s like paying into a savings plan, only your bank takes huge fees every time you make a deposit and it can be raided by the pope.

The wandering monsters summoned by breaking the seals can’t be relied on to do anything useful and they get chopped up piecemeal. The only good “summons” are the flagellants and templar since you can actually control them and they are blessed. Following the pattern of “pay to get screwed”, saints will run off with your blessed troops and get them killed.

Pretty much all the prayer spells are conversion or banishing based, so if your opponents are not necromancers or heavily human based then you are screwed. Hell, even if they are, a lot of the indeps roaming the map and guarding resource generators are non-human so you can get off to a glacially slow start unless there are weakly defended towns nearby.

The crusaders/inquisition will probably be irrelevant by the time you get the resources to summon them, they can attack your stuff, and they take stuff for themselves. The latter two points are perhaps historically consistent but a total pisser in game.

No crossbowmen. FFS, why not?

The faction is conceptually cool but practically unplayable. I’m thinking of the best you could hope for is to stack your opponents with necros/human based factions, get a bishop that has mass conversion + nothing but banish spells so he will be forced to cast conversion all the time, cranking up the bless bonuses (pray to El you don’t get a bunch of crappy ones!) and rely on templar/flagellants.

arrendek, the faction is indeed hilarious. It’s about the only thing it’s got going for it. Seeing a demonologist tear through your territory, slaying the archangels and harbingers that are stupidly wandering around (“stupid” is an actual trait they have), and then finding your capitol just got deserted because a saint walked off with 90% of your troops to dodder around in the middle of nowhere… it’s funny and rage inducing at the same time.

1605

I was mostly laughing at the fact that you get an apocalypse that kind of just ruins everyone’s day.

But what you just described is also hilarious. Kind of like a dwarf fortress “whoops, I’m screwed, that was awesome”. Although I’d definitely ragequit a game for that. :P

1606

It is one of the nations that needs some tactical play.

A) I check to see if other El’s are in the game, and nations which might use lots of banishable units (necro, demon, barbarian?)
B) if there are other El’s I spend on Favor and Devotion (summons and blesses) while letting them waste their resources opening the seals
C) I dont convert early in the game. For one thing its counter-productive untill the seals start opening

Later in the Game:
Converting in an enemies territory is very handy if you dont think you will hold the city. You get money from it even if he takes it back. And converting even a farm in his area wont give you much money but it can spawn some really nasty units of yours to wander around taking his stuff or keeping his armies busy

Once you have a Pontiff:
You get ALL the donations no matter who else is in the game.
Start Crusade can be called against any player even if you have not found them yet which creates large roving armies focused on that player.
Call the Inquisition will create large roving armies which concentrate on converting everyone that isnt converted yet. If you have the Pontiff you will get donations from even the independent cities still hidden in the map.

Oh I should mention that I like playing on really really large maps so on a small map and fast game then El might not be as fun YYMV

1607

Last day of the sale, and I’m still on the fence about it. Ah, this is not cool people.

1608

…You know…it’s pretty likely that this one will go on sale again.

My advice about game purchases…if you CAN walk away…walk away.

It’s not like the price is going to go UP over time. Look at some of the stuff on sale over at gog. If the game is any good at all, you will be able to buy it in the future for less.

1609

Its easily worth the sale price and then some. Its not perfect, but its pretty damned cool.

1610

The thought behind the factions is clever, but the game play is merely decent imho. I had as much fun reading Tom’s articles on the game as I did playing the game. Not bad for killing a bit of time, but you can do much better (and worse too - take From Dust for instance!).

1611

Sat in bed last night with my iPad. I was remoting into my HTPC to do some updates/cleanup and decided to install Steam, download CoE and see how it played.

It was a near perfect waste of 2 hours that I should have been sleeping. A little blurry and double clicking didn’t always work, but it played really well.

This game really needs an iOS conversion.

1612

Heehee. CoE3 is for people who dont want to destroy their lives by getting into Dom3. :)

And we joke about the iOS version in both forums. We get people in the Dom3 forum complaining that they miss midterms, dont do term papers, think about strategy at work, or on the subway and miss their stop. If it wasnt for the long hosting times people would fail to notice they had to eat and pee. Death by one-more-turn.
If there was a phone app version the worlds economy would end.

On the other hand… we did notice that Netbook features shows up after someone got Johan a netbook. So we joke about taking up a collection to get him an Android Phone.

1613

Additional note about iOS version…
Johan got a Raspberry PI.
So now CoE3 supports Raspberry PI. A $30 credit-card sized circuit board that can run a full copy of a Linux OS. Sick it in a hollowed out paperback, or a tupperware looking like your lunch or a snack, or just stick it in your shirt pocket. You can play CoE3 on the TV at work. :)

1614

Woah, that’s awesome. I just ordered a Raspberry Pi yesterday on a lark, with no idea what to do with it. Now you tell me my favourite game of 2012 will be available therefor? That’s a freakin’ BONUS.

1615

I saw a $30 tiny keyboard on Amazon that supported air mouse. I thought what a blast it would be to hook up to a freaking humongous TV screen and play by waving my hand in the air.

1616

Note on the Raspberry Pi version. It works, but just barely.

Make sure you run it with --simpgfx option added to command line to ensure that the mouse is responsive. I haven’t got sound working yet, but I didn’t try to hard either.

Still pretty cool to have COE3 on the pi sitting next to a bunch of Scummvm games. :)

Cheers

1617

Ooooh now Im itching to get the NEXT patch release.

14th January 2013

  • Mapediting: Triggers didn’t work with negative location values, fixed. Triggers with random locations will get a different trigger location each turn.

Ive built up a ton of maps and mods that dont quite work the way I want. But if the next patch does what I think then I will be able to release maps with better quests. And a mod that adds many of Dom3’s world events. Plus I am working on a mod to make extensive changes to the randomized maps just to make sure things dont get old. (yeah I know, old? But Ive been playing it much longer than anyone else)

Some of my efforts can be seen at www.coe-3.com forum

1618

gp, did they ever “finish” class modding?

I was wondering about their course of action … they started adding a lot of things early on, but last time I looked (been a while) still hadn’t made possible to replicate even the mechanics of the stock “races”.
I.e., things like the Dwarf-“replication”, or rituals you can only perform at certain tiles (Summon an Army on a Battlefield and stuff like that) … and some other things I can’t remember now.
Is that doable now or did they just abandon their effort at some point?

rezaf

1619

I dont know. My focus is mostly on maps. My excursion into “modding” so far is only about as deep as
event
endevent
which allows the map scenario triggers and events to be used in a mod instead of a map. They did add a map command around rituals

  • Modding: ritualevent, making it possible to trigger an event after a ritual.
    but I didnt really follow explanation. I even asked for an example, which Johan gave me, and I didnt follow it very well other than to get that it couldnt really by used as just a map command. It required a mod.

But the patches march ever onward. Keep an eye on it. And Ask him for what you want.

1620

Where would I do that gp, “ask him”?

While the patches are moving forward, improvements to moddability stopped in June last year.
I think it’d be cool if he “finished” class modding in a way that, as a tutorial, he could make a script (mod) where he clears ALL classes and then rebuilds them using the modding commands. This is still impossible.
I just wonder why the developer abandoned ship after covering most of the neccessary ground, that’s all.

rezaf