Yes, raise land would be your best bet to get to a shard on an isolated island (boats could get your units to islands if they have a beach on them but that typically won’t help get to a shard. Boats are better for getting to islands with treasure on them.
Raise Land, huh? Guess I didn’t research enough of the magic tree since I didn’t see that one. Will look for it next time I’m wishing I had a boat!
Looking forward to playing a 1.4 game when I next have time to spend a few hours on it. The change log looks promising.
Yeah, its definitly packed full of good stuff. Brad did some amazing work on the AI to improve the casting of summoning spells in tactical. Once that got in I added new monsters abilities to a lot of the monsters to allow them to summon. My favorite is the Ritualist, he is a fairly weak caster and he has a summon spell that will take him a few rounds to get off. But if he does get it off he summons a Death Demon into the battle, one of our biggest and nastiest creatures.
The moral being, don’t leave casting Ritualists alone. Get your mages to counterspell them, or get some high movement units over their quickly to take them out before their spell goes off.
Made it through a Challenging game on a random map, and I was surprised at how easy it was. Previous playthroughs on lower difficulty were a lot harder. Maybe I’m just learning how things work, or maybe it was the Gilden faction I was playing, who seem pretty strong. Or maybe it has something to do with the random map, which had me pretty much isolated behind a couple of mountain ranges, so I never once was attacked by an AI player. By the time they found me, I’d built up to be quite a bit above them in power.
I was a little surprised when one of the AI players up and left; I’d gotten him down to one city and he basically took his ball and went home. City was gone and everything. Don’t think I’ve seen an AI do that in any other similar game.
Won by diplomacy again, which seems to be the easiest way. Might stop using that victory condition; on the other hand, it’s nice to have a way to win quickly once you get to the “clearly I’m going to win but it’ll take another 50 turns to play out” stage.
UI question - Is there a way to rearrange a large build queue? I can’t find a way to move around more than the first five tasks in a city queue. If I want something further down to be moved up, I have to delete stuff until it shows up in the first five.
I’m really beginning to dislike the fact that range on the tactical map has no impact on shooter units. The AI can run his ranged units back into a corner of the map and fire all the way across the screen at my mage/archer/whatever while my melee guys are stuck getting past their melee. I understand that’s a tactical problem to solve, but I don’t get why the ranged attacks don’t lose a little effectiveness when they’re shooting across an entire battlefield. The way this works makes heavily armored melee units so much better than ranged units that I don’t even bother building ranged guys or leveling up ranged heroes; they just get killed anyway, in any battle where the monsters have a significant ranged presence.
I’d say it was probably the map – being able to boom in LH is possibly even better than booming in other 4Xs because of how strongly the game rewards having fewer, better units.
Did you accept the AI’s surrender? I kinda love getting them to buckle, since you get their sovereign as a unit (with a nasty permanent wound, but they still almost certainly immediately become your second-best hero) with all their loot. Can’t remember if cities get immediately razed when that happens.
On the build queue – not that I’m aware of. Personally it doesn’t bother me since I tend to not make long queues anyway, but yeah – rejiggering a longer one has to be done through brute force deleting/re-adding stuff.
On ranged units – I have a high tolerance for game system > verisimilitude, so not losing effectiveness over the whole map doesn’t bother me as long as the overall system works, which I tend to think it does. Archers aren’t great, no…but they’re cheap as hell if you don’t armor them up. Mages are always awesome because elemental damage ignores armor. I tend to spend all my crystal on mages because they just tear through shit that gives my melees fits.
Gilden finding big tanky armored melees the most effective route is pretty much working as intended, though.
No surrender was offered in this case. I just got a pop-up saying basically “screw you guys, I’m going home” and they were gone. I seem to remember seeing an accept surrender option somewhere in the diplomacy screen, and it sounds cool enough to get their sovereign, but I’m not going to go in there every turn to see if it’s available.
Hah, I have not seen that. That’s kind of amusing, actually.
I’ve never liked distance not impacting accuracy either.
I haven’t played FE:LH in a while. I really liked FE a lot, but for some reason by the time I got to FE:LH the magic wore off. LH is a better game than vanilla FE so I’m not sure why this happened.
For what its worth, ranged units not affected by distance bugs me too. Their ability to shoot through any obstacle (that’s a true statement, right?) is also annoying. The AI used to constantly paralyze (I think that was the spell) the archers too, but that didn’t affect their ranged attack since they didn’t have to move. It’s details like that that gradually build up to decrease the fun. I haven’t played it since the last several patches, so maybe some of the things are cleaned up.
Yep, I understand tactical battles are intentionally not a central part of the game and are intended to be quick affairs, but I feel you could still add some more depth to them (such as the aforementioned distance calculation on ranged attacks) without slowing them down or making them overly fiddly. I do enjoy LH but I feel that the tactical battles and the game as a whole needs more meat on its bones to move it from “good” to “great”.
ineffablebob: Depending on what you’re facing you can re-kit your ranged troops to some extent. For example, once I was facing a buttload of archers from… Pariden? and they wiped the floor with one of my armies. I designed new dodge-based archers (with skills and the magic belts, iirc) and completely turned it around. It was actually pretty awesome (now if only the AI could counter-react). Sometimes that doesn’t work, though, like against an army of shrills or whatever (or if you don’t have enough crystals, or this, or that…).
I agree the surrendering is a little weird. Sometimes they surrender to the conqueror, sometimes to an ally, and sometimes they disappear. It actually sounds great on paper, I think, but when it happens (any one of them, actually) it’s always a little jarring.
I have been playing it since the 1.4 patch and I must say I am NOT impressed by this improved AI. It is still building cities in stupid spots; It seems that if a spot is available, the AI MUST build a city there.
On the good side, once I became more powerful then various AI players they have never declared war on me. In the old system you could be 2x or 10x as strong as them and they would regularly declare war on you. They AI army composition seems slightly better and I no longer see entire armies of pioneers running around.
I think once I am done with this game, I may uninstall it. It just isn’t a challenge and thus not really fun anymore.
I find the best challenge comes from Challenging world & Challenging Ai and the lower scale of enemies per map size, e.g. a Standard 4-8 map with 3-4 enemies. That gives the A.I. plenty of time to level up and spam a whole load of cities before you get close enough to have borders.
The A.I. tactic seems to be spamming cities and units as fast as possible, rather than intelligence. So giving it that space makes for a better game. In cramped conditions, the A.I. is pretty woeful.
I use a very large world, I think it is the largest. The AI is on the hardest difficulty as well. The only real challenge is the early game. Once you get established and you are able to make decent troops, you have essentially won the game. It just may take a bunch of turns to take the AI out. I once thought that maybe it was the fact that I was playing the kingdom faction and was using healing a lot, so I started a empire game, using juggernauts instead. It was a bit more difficult, but I still trounced the AI just the same. Again the issue was the early game, but mid and late game were not a challenge.
That has more or less been my experience pretty frequently. Sometimes I’ll get an AI player that puts up a competent mid-game fight (e.g. the powerful archer-armies I mentioned upthread somewhere) but I rarely get a chance to break out the endgame toys but for the steamrolling and the occasional epic quest (which can usually be handled by heroes at that point). I really love the various game systems, though, which makes the lack of anything worthwhile to wack with my uber-armies all the more frustrating. (Disclaimer: I don’t usually play too far above challenging, should probably up that.)
Well, I think I’m done with this one for a while. Got stomped three times trying Hard level games, then on my fourth try was doing well when the game started crashing. At least it didn’t freeze up my machine this time, but I can’t play more than three or four turns before I get the dreaded “encountered an error and needs to close” popup. A little Googling shows that a lot of other folks have had errors similar to the ones in my debug.err, which looks something like this after each crash:
Debug Message: GFX-THREAD WARNING: Function marked as gfx thread only is being used in a different thread in file: e:\lh-elemental\Kumquat3D\Source\Renderer\Direct3D9\D3D9GFXBuffer.cpp line: 189.
DebugMessage: Error flipping back buffer to primary buffer.
DebugMessage: An invalid parameter was passed to the returning function
Those search results dated all the way from 2010 to last month, and none of them have an actual solution - most don’t even have a guess at the cause. I’m sure there’s things I could try, but I’m having fun playing Hearthstone and I want to get back into Path of Exile (now that it’s officially released). I’d rather spend my time on games I can play rather than troubleshooting, so FE:LH is going on the “maybe someday I’ll try it again” stack.
Just to be clear, I’m not discounting the point you’re making but I do have a question: is this much different than other TBS game, such as Civlization? In Civ5 I find the only challenging part is the early game where an AI may be able to defeat me solely through the sheer numbers it’s given due to difficulty bonuses. Once I’m an established by the mid-game it’s pretty much a given that I’m going to win the game. Do you find this to be the case for you in other TBS games as well and if so is there something that Legendary Heroes does or doesn’t do that makes the problem stand out more so than other TBS games?
In many other TBS games events, coalitions, new strategies or other things can make the middle part of the game change dramatically. There’s enough variables to create an ebb-and-flow, at least through 2/3rds of the game. The endgame in most TBS games are the same in that it’s a predetermined outcome though exceptions do exist. For example in Civ you might be trying to get a space ship out before your opponent wins the culture victory. I’ve fought some big conflicts in Heroes towards the endgame that was for all the marbles. I’m not claiming that most TBS games play out this way, but the variables exist to create these situations at least some of the time
In my experience when it comes to the FE series (and that’s over 50 hours of game play between FE and FE:LH), after 50-100 turns the outcome is predetermined. If I can survive that long it’s over. The AI isn’t smart enough to beat me in a battle, they can’t outproduce me nor are they smart enough to beeline for the only other achievable victory condition (the spell of mastery). The tools aren’t there for anyone (the player or AI) to create a diplomatic victory and if someone can do the main quest they’re already strong enough to take over the world. Again, in my experience, FE falls quite flat after the exploration and expanding phases are done. There’s just not enough to exploit, so it boils down to a dull game of extermination against an AI that’s incapable of properly fighting back. I have never had the game challenge me during the middle or endgame. Usually the largest challenge is getting rid of the bigger monster groups that are in my way of getting to the AI players.
And we have a new DLC pack out - Dead World. :)
This features:
-A brand new faction: the Empire of the Dead, led by the nefarious sorcerer Morrigan the Risen. Undead ignore food, growing their population by building cemetaries and mausoleums and by reanimating slain foes
-New spells for undead casters – summon a powerful but temporary army, feed on the lifeforce of friendly units in battle, and more
-New undead empire fully implemented in faction/army creators – design your own skeletal and spectral troops
-New custom map: The Dead World
-New Hellknight monsters – powerful mounted undead knights with enchanted gear
-New Risen Brood monsters – skeletal undead half-spider monstrosities
Full info - http://forums.elementalgame.com/449629/page/1/
I wouldn’t go as far as Granath–I think most/all other TBS do suffer from this to an extent. The Civs/SMAC will usually have me end-turning for a while at the end, though sometimes I do get into a victory race (which I’ll agree is much less frequent in LH). Games like Heroes (of Might and Magic, I’m assuming) are a bit different because they are much more of a “play the map” type thing (in my experience) but I do certainly remember having some all-the-marbles battles with AI players because frequently once you destroyed the stacks rebuilding was impossible, so there was tension there.
For LH, I usually have a good amount of fun in the mid-game (say, by the time you get chain armor or just after getting plate), clearing the last of the non-epic monster groups and establishing dominance over the AI. But it’s alas too rare for the AI to be able to recover once I’ve defeated it’s main stacks. Granted that’s a tough proposition even for a player, but usually you can string something together with resurrected heroes and newly produced units.