Same here, the diplomacy part of the game just ruined it for me at the time, so it’s good to hear it’s improved with the 1.5 patch.
And I see all the DLC for Legendary Heroes is on sale for 50% off at Gamersgate right now, I think it’s time to pick those up and try out the game again.
I more or less agree as well. The late game has always (FE + LH, and WoM for that matter) been something walkthrough once you get your stack going–the AI just isn’t capable of putting a good stack together. For my money, the AI does better in LH, and the monsters are harder (and just better) in LH, so a game of LH is better for longer than FE.
If I were to guess, robc04, I would say that the honeymoon period for LH was rather a bump to the honeymoon period for FE as a whole–which is (for me, at least) quite a long one because FE/LH is quite a good game. Round these parts I guess they call it the Chick Parabola, so maybe LH gave the parabola another hump (a quartic, I guess). I might also add that I feel the same way about, say, Master of Magic–MoM also doesn’t hold my interest for more than one game every year or so.
FWIW, I quite enjoy making custom units, both here and in GalCiv. I suppose you could handicap yourself by only playing with prefab units (probably after getting a huge unit mod), which may make the game more challenging (which maybe you need).
Same here. I spend probably an unusual amount of time creating and tweaking my custom units.
Heh, I have definitely played GalCiv2 games where I design an awesome battleship, call it something like a “Snake-class starcruiser”, name each new ship after a different species of snake (HMS Anaconda, HMS Copperhead, etc), and then design a new one only when I run out of snake species (regardless of the progress of technology in the intervening time). I figure it simulates something like bureaucratic military procurement.
That is awesome. Somewhere along the line I lost the ability to entertain myself in games in this manner. I need to figure out how to get it back.
I think the reason GalCiv2 grabbed me, as far as custom units is concerned, and FH didn’t is due to the fashion aspect. There is a lot more you can do to make a ship feel cool and customized. The base ships and equipment (lasers, shields, colony pods, etc.) provide you a frame, but with all the “fashion” add ons for the ships, you could make them look like almost anything you wanted. Contrast that to FH, where your customization is really just the items themselves and maybe a hat and cape. It’s not a game flaw, it’s just a concept flaw between building a ship verses equiping an archer.
I think the custom ships worked better in GC2 than the custom units do it in FE/LH. It’s one of the problems of Stardock’s fantasy title.
I agree that the custom ships worked better, but I still liked the custom units quite a bit. I actually felt that that feature wasn’t used to its fullest, for a few reasons. The differences between the various weapons and armors wasn’t enough, and things like horses and accessories just didn’t make that much of a difference, or were always good to do if you could afford it. (To fix these complaints I think the combat would have to be tweaked, e.g. to have a real infantry vs cavalry divide, to rework the balance w.r.t. archery, etc.) There was also a big missed opportunity with constructed/weird units, e.g. golems, juggernauts, etc. How on earth can you have golems in your game, a unit customization mechanic in your game, and have only a couple options for golems?! (I know game balance, etc, but you can already break the game with heroes, magic, etc, so just have a bunch of pre-made ones for the AI to use.)
If it makes you feel any better, those complaints are not unknown or unacknowledged internally ;) I think if you look at what Derek was able to do with EWOM -> FE -> LH, you get an idea of where Stardock’s head is at as far as any forthcoming strategy games that may or may not be in development.
I’m really curious how the next LH game is going to impact things, being very asymmetric between players and AI. It’s not going to happen, but I really wonder if one could make a 4X ToME style game.
Many of the changes I heard sounded interesting, and they’re the direction I kinda wanted LH to go. (Not saying I was dissatisfied with LH)
I wonder if an AI more based on pure heuristics could be a good tie to fantasy TBS. Instead of fixed strategies, it would be able of examining concrete problems, and then run the entire roost of units and spells to search one with the specific attributes it needs to solve that problem. Example: I’m attacked for this particular player that is using lots of water elementals, read the attributes of that army, notice that on average they have a high vulnerability to fire, then use fire spells or troops with fire attacks.
A “counter finder”, if you want to say it like that. Big armies of cheap troops? damaging spells with big aoe. Flying units? Archers. Lots of archers? Some kind of air shield or wind guard, or use fast units like cavalry. Etc
Of course, better said than done! I can imagine the implementation of a system like this in the context of a gaming AI that needs also to expand, recruit armies, attack places, etc, being super complex.
I can’t name any off the top of my head, but there have been a number of games which basically used this approach and they come with their own set of “problems”.
Thing is, no human player can ever match the amount of minmaxing an AI coded to be able to do this will engage in. And an AI is unrelentless and never gets bored.
So you end up with the situation that you predictably always run into the hardest counters for your units.
Where a human player might accept slight disadvantages in order to save himself the trouble of disbanding his entire army and building a new army with slightly better fire attack (or something), possibly requiring him to retool half his cities and change worker allocations everywhere and so on and so forth, the AI won’t mind doing that one bit. Every couple of turns, if need be.
Like I said, I can’t tell names, but there definately have been games I quit out of frustration about this very approach.
So it’s not all black and white, at least imo.
rezaf
Uh, the only one I can think it did that, it’s Empire Earth. The AI was pretty good and you could see how it adapted to whatever you were throwing at, and over ages.
But I can’t think anything else, and none in the genre of fantasy TBS, of course.
Just identifying what’s is the correct counter to a situation is way harder you may believe. It can be unit X, but first the AI have to recruit them before, maybe make some buildings before to be available, make an army of them, and then move it to the correct position. And in that time maybe it isn’t worth it to use that unit X, because now the menace is Y so the AI have to estimate how much to bet in that tactic.
Maybe it’s a spell, but does he have the correct magic school? Does he have mages in the zone? Does he have enough mana? Should he change magic research to aim for it? Does that class with other strategic goals?
Even the same spell can be useful or not depending of very subtle variations, or you can have several spells with mostly the same effect but choosing the right one can be very complex. Like, is the enemy good at resisting magic? Does he have counter magic to protect their units? Is the “target” army composed of a few tough units or a horde of weak ones? Does the AI have friendly units nearby? An Armageddon battle spell can be considered a good counter in a battle, but is the AI smart enough to know it should be used with only a few friendly units in battle? Etc etc
Gamersgate hasFallen stuff on sale now, including LH for $13.60. DLC on sale also.
I’m tempted, never having played any of the Elemental games. But I’m leaning toward waiting for AoW3. Decisions, decisions…
I’d get it, 13$ is the price of a pizza and FE/LH is better than that, and lasts longer, and isn’t as unhealthy ;) (except in the US where a Pizza is a vegetable, or so I’ve heard :-D http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/pizza-still-a-vegetable-for-u-s-schools-1.1089258 )
I should probably grab LH myself, feel like I’ve gotten all I can out of FE for now.
Edit:
Seems like it sells for 40$ in the stardock store.
Pizza isn’t healthy??!!
I was as surprised as you when I googled it.
I’d like to see an AI that knows the player’s preferences in this regard before the game begins, so they would be somewhat more likely to prepare for what the player will throw (but not always or that would get predictable) Maybe with Steam Cloud this could be done on an aggregate scale, but I’d love to see the AI try to hard counter me. It’s so easy to hard counter AI sometimes.
I’d like to see them make it easier to make and add custom AIs, or AI strategy preferences. I remember some other games, maybe Kohan was one?, let people add custom AIs by just putting together the proper file and dropping it in the game’s folder. That let players make and share their own AIs that were actually better than the base ones. It would also mean that if there were some dominant strategies that players noticed, the AI could be set to actually use them.
Sorian did absolutely superb work modding the Supreme Commander AI, running his mod was a big improvement over the stock AI. This lead to him getting hired at Gas Powered Games and producing an excellent AI with Supreme Commander 2, which is probably the best AI I’ve personally encountered in a RTS (best, not perfect. :)).
So yea, I fully agree with making AI as moddable as possible. The user community at large has far more time and resources to work on it than developers do, especially post-launch. The best ideas can be incorporated in future patches.