Have they announced their 3rd Kickstarter program yet?
I bought one evening when I was drunk and bored, and regretted it ever since.
I hope this is not a play to ask for more backing.
Relaunches are the new black.
-Todd
I didn’t even realize this had been released the first time.
I backed it on a whim expecting disappointment and apparently if I bother to install it now I’ll get what I expected. Always nice to have your expectations met, so I’ll maintain those expectations for the relaunch.
I told them a few months before release that the game needed at least a year’s more development and was dismissed by the developers and forum members (who said it only needed 6 more months at most). Idiots.
I doubt they had the money for one more year.
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I love that we can all agree that “Worlds of Magic is conceptually a truly great game.” Yeah, Wasteland, and you had nothing to do with that – the game was conceived by the people at Simtex over 20 years ago.
It is not even worth €5. It is a coaster.
So apparently, taking from the playbook they used for their WWII games, the geniuses behind WoM have decided to leave it unfinished, and created a new version with updated graphics and a different name.
At least they’re giving it away to everyone suckered into buying the previous title. As to the rest of you - caveat emptor.
One negative review so far but it’s a beauty.
[[IMG]http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/avatars/55/55f01a5ca50b6db0804923b018588113aeb5a58e.jpg[/IMG]](http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198007300752/) [Blackadar](http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198007300752/) [286 products in account](http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198007300752/games/?tab=all) [75 reviews](http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198007300752/recommended/) [[IMG]http://store.akamai.steamstatic.com/public/shared/images/userreviews/icon_thumbsDown_v6.png[/IMG] Not Recommended 2.1 hrs on record](http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198007300752/recommended/449300/) Posted: May 30 tl;dr version: Planar Conquest is probably the most uninspiring 4x game I can remember and I've been playing them since the original Civilization. I played the original Masters of Magic (and remember waiting for Microprose to send me a patch disk in the mail so it would work). This is no Masters of Magic.
Long version: I’ve held off commenting prior to now because I hoped PQ would get better prior to release after playing it in beta. I’m sad to say that it hasn’t. PQ may very well be - with the exception of Stardock’s original Elemental that didn’t work at all - the worst 4x game I’ve played in the last 25 years. I’m not trying to be mean or subscribe to hyperbole. It’s an informed, measured opinion and I simply can’t think of a more uninspiring, clunky 4x game than this.
First, there are the technical issues. It’s crashed on me multiple times through my limited play time. That’s on a new Windows 10 machine with entirely updated drivers. There are about 300 games in my library - I’ve tried about 30 on this machine thus far - and this one has been the only one to crash. I reported those to WI and perhaps they’ll get fixed.
Someone commented that if Mircroprose made a sequel to MoM in the 90s it would look like PQ. They’re right. The graphics are - and I’m not kidding - something I would have been disappointed in around the time of Civ 3. Here’s a sample screenshot with every setting on max:
I don’t find them appealing AT ALL and I actually quite liked the visual style of Worlds of Magic. This looks like a bad tablet game and it looks even worse in motion. The ground textures are muddled and bland. The units look blocky, generic and unintersting. The whole art style has taken a massive step back. The UI is quite ugly, click-heavy and obtrusive without actually being helpful. At least they added right and left clicks ot the UI finally.
Sounds and music are fine. Generic but acceptable.
The biggest issue is simply the gameplay. I asked Les - whom I have a lot of respect for - a simple question during beta. Why should I play this over AOW3? I really didn’t get much of an answer then and I haven’t found one since. The gameplay is exceptionally generic and bland. The prime limiting factor continues to be gold as it was in WoM. If you have enough gold all is fine. If you don’t, you lose. That makes things like city placement exceptionally boring - find the most gold or otherwise you can’t support your city to build the advanced units. City spam has been reduced somewhat from WoM with the 10 city soft cap but it’s still the prime way to advance. The buildings are generic. With all of these factors I don’t feel like I’m building an empire worth building.
I have yet to find any unusual, interesting spells to cast here. We’ve seen all of these before. Stoneskin. Fertile Soil. Bless. Repeat ad naseum. I don’t really feel that I’m advancing in power. I feel like I’m researching the same spells I’ve researched countless times from many games. And when you cast a spell, well…in a magic game I should get a rush out of casting spells. Except the spell animations are probably the dullest I’ve ever seen. There’s simply no way to adequate describe how bland they are. A little puff of red powder is supposed to convey a fire spell. Casting Fertile Soil results in…nothing. This is a cardinal sin of any magic game.
The tactical combat is miles less fun or interesting that AOW3 - it’s still line up on an empty field and have at it. The AI still seems to dumb in both the strategic and tactical apsect o fthe game. Diplomacy still seems to be exceptionally limited. Thus far I have not encountered even one unique gameplay aspect that’s been brought to the table. There’s nothing here that’s been done in a new or interesting way.
I simply can’t find a reason to load up or play the game. Every single aspect of the game has been done, and done better, somewhere else. It has all the failings of WoM - a game with an attrocious Metacritic score and a sub-50% Steam score - all over again with (IMO) even worse graphics and a less friendly/attractive UI. There are no systems that have been improved IMO and too many things that just scream “this was dumbed down to make it work on an iPhone”.
Comparing it to AOW3 is like comparing your local pizzaria’s hand-crafted pie to the cardboard discount pizza you’d get in the frozen section of your supermarket.
Okay, dude, you convinced me.
At least Planar Conquest didn’t crash on my Windows 7 PC.
I took a quick look and the game setup and wizard creation tools seemed a lot easier to use and more robust. The game itself seemed a lot more colorful and I thought the artwork was better. Das Tactic has a 4-part AAR up, in which he seems to like the game play, but not some of the interface. Apparently a lot of the interface is an adaptation of the mobile version of the game.
I may just fire this up later and see if it really is new and improved.
Played 20 minutes of this and then bailed. It does seem like an improvement on Worlds of Magic but there was still enough clunk that I just didn’t feel like pressing on. Final straw that broke the camel’s back was moving my army on to a neutral dungeon with 2 units of werewolves and 1 swordsman and being told it was low threat, only to learn that it was actually impossible (Or near to it) because the werewolves have mundane damage resistance so even focusing all my fire on a single unit of the werewolves didn’t manage to kill it before my entire army was wiped. Even reloading and using auto resolve a couple times to see if low threat in that would get better results, and my army got wiped every time.
Was some other clunkiness going on too, like units marked with flight (Draconians) had their models shown standing on the ground, and the impact of flight in the game is to make the unit immune to being attacked by melee units. Fair enough. But melee units can still attack, so the enemy unit walked up to me and I had my swordsmen move up and attack, was told the enemy was immune, and then the enemy got a counterattack on the swordsmen. So I fell in to multiple newbie traps at once by thinking a unit that was visually standing on the ground wasn’t flying, and thinking that since I could attack a unit in melee I could potentially do damage. That’s something you could learn to work around if you really wanted to keep playing a game, but eh. EH.
I played 30-45 minutes of this – looked fine really, but the main world game map was just --ugh – after endless legends, that’s just not gonna work. I got it free --guess I musta kickstarted that mom thing – I guess I played enough Mom back in the day. And no --don’t guess my age.
That’s just how it works in MoM, though. You can fend off entire armies by turning one crap unit into werewolves. Still a tutorial failure, sure, but I actually find it endearing if the mechanics are so close to the original.
I played it back in the day too, and I am no especially old. Your statement sure makes me feel old though… but let’s just put it this way, I saw The Nice Guys this weekend, and I’ve heard from some they remember it differently… yeah I don’t have memories from any year in the 70s.
So I started a game “for real” this morning, medium map, normal difficulty, 3 planes, playing as High Men and using a pre-created Sorceress who specialized in Life (healing & buffs) magic. After 20 turns I saved with two major observations.
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Auto explore - AI is OK, making a bee-line for any goody chests in it’s sight. It ignores all other icons which is good and bad, because it ignored a “lost tribe” that gave me a population boost when it was landed on. My one niggle is that it tends to go for the coast first before working it’s way inland, and I would prefer it explore the area surrounding my first city before it did anything else. Of course, if it was me, I’d prefer to go to the beach, too.
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Casting spells (overland) - Here we have a big problem with the interface, especially for a game based on MoM. I started with a spell that doubled food production in any one city so I wanted to cast it ASAP in order to move a pop or 2 over to research or construction. First thing I discovered was that you can’t cast a spell directly onto the strategic map. Here’s what I had to do in order to cast the “Good Harvest” (or whatever it’s called) spell:
Click spell book
Click on Good Harvest
Wait a turn for the spell to be prepared (this is standard in most games of this nature, so I’m not counting it as a strike)
Click on either Save (prepared spells can be saved to be cast at a later time. I don’t know if there’s a time limit.) or Proceed
Select the target from a list of cities (Remember, at this point I only have one) The game then zooms to the city on the map where I have to
Select the target AGAIN from the list.
Select CAST (finally).
Did you count the clicks? I did. 6, not counting spell prep time. This should have been done in 3 - open book, cast or save spell, click on map. There’s no excuse for this
While auto-exploring a couple of my guys open chests that gave them XP. They’ve gone from Lev 1 to Lev 3, and I noticed that only by accident. There’s no notification when a unit hits a new level, or even what it does. I think their attack values have increased, but I can’t even say that for sure.
Taxes need to be better balanced. Starting out, increasing your tax rate by as little at .5 (the minimum) doubles unrest in your cities.