A lot of the changes in Legendary Heroes are the stuff of solid patchwork. Lots of rebalancing, tuning, interface improvements, and supposed improvements to the AI. I say supposed, because I still get the sense that the AI players don’t quite understand the importance of grabbing land and keeping a strong army together. But they play by the rules and there’s plenty of challenge to be had, unlike many other strategy games with AI shortcomings.
I couldn't get into Fallen Enchantress, but maybe this expansion is worth getting after all. I don't suppose they've considered actually implementing multiplayer yet?
Legendary heroes is a slap in the face to falken enchantres players who betad a game without being told it was just a beta for LH, then are asked to pay again for the product of their efforts. Supporting this game sends the message that you dont need to rekease finished products and customers are free testing labor pool
I am not overly familiar with Fall from Heaven 2, but I would say Fallen Enchantress on the whole is closer to Warlock. In terms of the sophistication of its city management it is quite similar to Warlock. The tech tree is very much like that of Civ 5 (tho you have to make hard choices between military, economic, and magical techs as you will not be able to advance down all trees). The combat is akin to the grid based tactical combat you find in games like Heroes of Might and Magic 6, but here your heroes are also units on the battle field. Each race has a decent set of unique units and flavor lending to decent replayability (tho not, I find, civ levels of replayability).
I like FE better than Warlock, which also didn't work for me. I got about 30 hours out of the base FE, and just got back into it again with the expansion. Definitely worth checking out if you can get it on sale at your digital distribution outlet of choice.
Considering this game was designed by the guy who made Fall from Heaven, and considering the in-depth empire management, it's got a lot in common with Fall from Heaven. I think any FFH fan would really like it.
I rarely put in the time required to appreciate a strategy game's nuances, but at least I can enjoy these games vicariously through these reviews.
It's been particularly fun watching Elemental evolve from a disappointing initial release to a solid game one sequel and one expansion pack later.
Corrections: "When a unit attacks matter[s]." "so it can’t lends [sic] it[s] bonus to an adjacent attacker." "And all this also mean[s]" "It was one of my favorite things about Fallen Enchantress['] awesome city system" "you can to grab it pronto."
The lack of multiplayer is what keeps me from being interested in these games, even though I own them all because I bought Elemental, and I love Kael. I haven't even looked at Fallen Enchantress because it's not multiplayer. I also think their reasoning for not including it is complete BS, especially considering the first Elemental game was multiplayer and used the -same- damn combat system.
The reason for not having multiplayer is that tactical battles aren't coded for it. They don't want to have multiplayer without tactical battles and they don't want to pull the resources off of other projects to rewrite tactical combat for multiplayer. The first reason there is in direct response to WOM players because the original had multiplayer without tactical battles and players hated it. In the original game's multiplayer tactical batters were ALL auto-resolved.
As others have said, there are integral parts of the design that don't lend themselves to multiplayer. The pacing is one example. So much of the early game is carving your place out of the hostile wilderness, which involves A LOT of fighting against monsters and NPCs. This would mean dramatically different starting conditions for each of the players and it could also mean a lack of player interaction for quite some time. And, as others have mentioned, the tactical battles. I also can't imagine that it's balanced well for multiplayer, which is a whole other type of work than the single-player tuning.
I can understand your disappointment, but like Stardock's GalCiv series, this was made from the ground up as a single-player game. I hope you won't let the lack of multiplayer dissuade you from a really good strategy game.
really really late reply but is GalCiv a good series?
I've always loved Stardock games, Stellar Frontier, SOASE, and recently I got this for 10 bucks (still getting into it). I heard GC 3 is coming out too.
Not sure where to put this exactly so I decided to necro this years old thread and put it here.
After playing the HOMM4 campaigns again for a while (and enjoying them a lot) I was in the mood for something along the same lines, but what? Then I realized it had been years since I took FE for a spin. So I pulled it out and blew the dust off. It holds up pretty nicely.
I’d never made a custom faction before and I’d never messed around much with designing units so this time I decided I’d get into all that. Man, what an eye opener. It’s been a blast to play.
I made a custom Altar race of men with death worship so that I could have access to the Altar henchmen and death magic combo. I’d never played with henchmen before. They are basically champions that you can design and train like normal units for a cost of a combination of money and fame.
You level and equip them just like champions except that they don’t count as an XP penalty when they’re in your army. This is huge when your realize that you can create a Commander henchman and pick all the Training traits that give 10% XP gain to the army they’re in for each trait in the tree. That’s about a 60% XP boost in total. It’s all quite insane but insanely fun.
So, I’m enjoying this more than I ever did before. Most of the big bugs are gone at this point. There are some exceptions, the major one being that if you load a save even once when you are playing, the territory borders disappear from the screen and map. You have to restart the game to get them back. Not too terrible but I’m amazed they never fixed that. It must have something to do with memory in their custom engine and they just couldn’t fix it.
I’ve only had a few random crashes in 3 days of solid playing which means it’s now pretty stable. No real other issues, which is pretty darn good considering where it once was. I often wonder just how good the game would have been if they’re just chosen to go with using the Unreal Engine instead of building their own.
I’m absolutely convinced that FE is the best game Stardock has ever made. Nothing they’ve made since is better. I hope they come to their senses after their Star Control game is done and give us a proper Legendary Heroes 2.
Funny you would necro this. I was looking through my backlog and came across FE, which I remember Tom saying nice things about. But in Steam, I see both a Fallen Enchantress with map pack DLC, and a Fallen Enchantress Legendary Heroes.
The store page for Fallen Enchantress is gone and in the discussion boards is a sticky message at the top from Stardock saying FE is retired, and that they hope you’ll continue adventuring with FE Legendary Heroes.
So what’s the deal? Can I play FE first or is it skippable and should I go straight to FE Legendary Heroes?
Legendary Heroes is by far (very far) the superior version of the game and you should go straight to that, imo.
Note that some of the death worship stuff I described above probably requires “The Dead World” DLC. I have that DLC plus the Map Pack and the Quest Pack DLC. Those are the 3 I’d recommend getting for sure if you don’t have them already.
This one popped up in some reading and it looks like there are ton of mods that may have improved/changed the game in meaningful and (potentially) positive ways.
I see Stardock is having a sale on most of their games. You can get FE Legendary Heroes for about $11 or even cheaper with other games if you buy the Legends pack. I’m not really interested in any of the other games. Is it worth playing just on its own? You can get the DLC for a larger price but that puts it out of my price range. Maybe I should just watch a Lets Play on Youtube instead.
It’s basically a fine TBS fantasy game with a fairly unique/distinctive visual style (albeit maybe not one everyone loves) and a heavy focus on questing mechanics with a party of heroes. I don’t know if it is necessarily a better game than AoW3 or Endless Legend, but if you’ve already played those to satisfaction, it’s a good third option.
IMO Sorcerer King, for all its imperfections, is a far more interesting take on the idea from Stardock (and is the next evolution in their use of the Elemental engine), almost getting near the point of being “Star Control as a tactical fantasy TBS,” though it obviously falls short in lots of ways.
FE Legendary Heroes is probably my favorite game of theirs. It has it’s weak points, like the battles are more simplistic than say, Age of Wonders 3 - but it doesn’t mean they’re bad. Have you played AoW3? If not I’d recommend that one - especially if you like a bit meatier battles. FE does have more involved city management - so that may sway you one way or the other too. In fact, I like the way the cities ‘level up’.
I disagree with Armando in that Sorcerer King got old very fast with me. It is much more simplistic (which may be a plus for some), but I found it much more repetitive too.
