I finally finished my first game last night. It was on a the Karrazan’s Fist map on Easy with one Empire and one Kingdom as AIs. It ended up being me as Tarth and then Gilden and the Oracle chick with the spiders - Ceresa and the Empire of Resoln. I set it up with one Kingdom that I could hopefully ally with easily so that it would be a bit easier for my first game.
I was holding my own in the power ratings the first half of the game and then Resoln ran away in power. I think she kept finding locations to settle after I pretty much gave up and she was churning out more armies and finding more heroes than I. I will have to explore better next time.
Gilden ended up being my ally and I eventually declared war on the Empire of Resoln after I allied with Gilden. I was way behind in power at this point, but I wanted to advance the game and see how I would do, win or lose, at that point. The AI made a nice strike attack in two locations, but I was fortunate to have just enough troops and city defenders to hold them off. One city they almost took and sieged (attacked) two times was my military city and I was just cranking out (rushing) high end defensive units and archers each turn and barely holding them off til one of my hero led armies could arrive. Man, it sure costs a lot of crystal to make some units - I will have to prioritize gaining that resource earlier next time.
After I held off Resoln’s initial charge, it was mostly just systematically taking each city and pushing her back until she had one left. Each of these battles was far from easy, but my experienced armies were able to take them down one at a time.
Some comments and observations:
At first when the main channeler and heroes died and kept appearing again, it was just mildly annoying. By the time I had sieged and taken city number 7 of 8 and had to fight all 6 of her heroes each time, it got a little frustrating. I understand they gain afflictions and wounds, but they were still eating me up pretty good and casting powerful spells. I agree that your main channeler starting hero should probably come back no matter what, but when 6 heroes keep coming back, it gets a bit much. Perhaps there is a mechanic that could be used to either limit or prevent them coming back so quickly. Dominions 3 comes to mind on what happens when your pretender dies. You need to dedicate many turns of your priests doing a “call god” action to bring them back. Perhaps it could tie to some building you have that allows you to call the heroes back and/or use up a resource of some sort - like crystal or mana or something - to bring back your extra heroes. That way when you have a bad die roll or misjudge a fight, you can get a good hero back. But, you won’t be able to keep getting them back over and over again almost for free. Just a thought, anyway. Perhaps they were being hurt by afflictions more than I realized.
I also experienced some minor annoyances, but perhaps some were working as intended. One that bothered me a bit was having an army with map move 2 and 4 units in it. If they were one moving army and then at the end of 2 moves, I would hope that the 4 move units would be able to break off and continue on, but they could not. Even if I broke them off at the beginning of the turn, they all were still stuck with map move 2 for the turn. This is a little different from most other games of the type that I recall, and caught me off guard. I also ran into a few strange behaviors late in the game, but couldn’t quite put my finger on them specifically. Things like enemy armies seeming to appear out of nowhere and losing movement points of armies and having trouble taking and razing enemy towers and improvements. Some of those may be me just not understanding how they work, though :).
Overall, though, a thoroughly improved game in almost every aspect compared to the earlier versions and release of WoM. I actually finished my first game and will play more soon and that is unusual for me for games of the type. I still only played 1 Civ V game so far, even though I really enjoyed that too. Looking forward to see the improvements and expansions you guys come up with.
Ugh! This was actually going to be a short post, heh
