Sorcerer King: Asymmetrical 4X

I know the GOG version doesn’t have Steam Workshop integration, but does it support the Quest Editor?

The quest editor that folks have mentioned a couple of times now could easily provide significant replayability. I know I, for one, plan to attempt to implement my Dream-Vision of Fantasy Star Control in SK:R rather than making my own fantasy TBS engine from scratch, now. With enough support from dedicated modders (and other Stardock games have had some pretty incredible modders), it could be really awesome!

2 CTDs within the first 10 minutes of play. Ouch. First was an invalid cell call in the middle of a combat when I right-clicked attack with a hypnotized taranturala. Second was when I attempted to quick-save right after a really tough fight that also might have ended the turn. Real bummer.

Maybe try re-validate your files? I’ve got about 2.5 hours under my belt and no crashes or issues here.

Loving the first couple of hours I put into this so far. Can’t wait to dive back in tomorrow.

Did you get prompted for a crash report?

I really like this game and want it to succeed, so here are some tips for new players:

First off, if you are a reader of this site, I would probably recommend playing on Hard. I mean, learn the game on Normal, but play the game on Hard when you feel like you get what’s going on.

So, what are your objectives?

Your primary win conditions are to either 1. Kill the Sorcerer King, 2. Build the Tower of Mastery, or 3. Cast the Spell of Ascension.

The Sorcerer King’s victory conditions are: 1. Destroy all of your towns or 2. Destroy enough crystals to Ascend.

Crystals grant you mana, which is needed for research AND to power up your leader as well as to use crafting and cast spells. Crystals are also used by your opponent for his primary win condition.Therefore, Sorcerer King is really all about capturing, controlling, and defending crystals. You should therefore be continually striving to expand your realm and grab new crystals to protect and nurture.

However, the existence of questing and allies complicates this somewhat. See, you WANT your army conquering crystals, but you also need to be exploring to discover new crafting components, new treasures, more experience, and other such things to empower your heroes. Additionally, you very much need the help of other minor factions, but their quests can draw you far away from the acquisition/defense of those crystals. Balancing accomplishing these things with the protection of crystals is the heart of the game. Also note that the SK is continually getting stronger as time goes by, so you need to likewise be rising in power to match him.

This is just a start, I will try to get more in-depth later.

I want to take a moment here and answer a question I bet a lot of people are asking.

What makes Sorcerer King special? Well, I can think of a couple things.

First: Sorcerer King is a role-playing Strategy Game

I mean this in multiple senses of the word: Firstly, it is role-playing in the general internet based sense- you choose from among multiple sovereigns with very different powers, you have heroes who level up and can select abilities from diverse tech trees, and can even craft and equip items to every single unit in your army if you want to. And yet, all the crafting and enchanting is totally optional. If you want to invest your time and resources elsewhere, you don’t have to do it, but if you want to make Carlos the Bear your very own special little armored and enchanted snowflake, go ahead and do so. It it also role-playing in the traditional sense, which is quite a surprise! When you explore the map you frequently find yourself on quests and the choices you make on quests affect your leader’s personality, which in turn can lead to different choices and surprises later. While not a major part of a game, this is still really enjoyable and I am glad they added it in there- seeing the kinds of things you can do if you’re say, a Coward, can be pretty entertaining!

Second: This is probably the biggest thing for me. At least on Hard level and above, the Sorcerer King is PLAYING TO WIN. He has the initiative and is constantly acting to bring about the end of the world. Taking action and thwarting him while readying yourself for a final showdown is at the heart of the game.

For a lot of people, 4X games are this relaxing exercise in kicking back with a mixed drink and ruminating over how great you are while peaceably building up a massive empire. The Sorcerer King has no patience for that bullshit. He is out there and he is wrecking havoc and if you do not get your shit together and fight you are done. Moreso than almost any other strategy game, this one feels to me like I am really struggling- constantly struggling- against an all-powerful enemy and the clock is always ticking. This is a totally different tone than I am used to with 4X games, and I love it.

Huh, I’ve burned out on most 4X games, but you might have just sold me on this one.

Son, you’re talking about the official Quarter-to-Three Game of the Year for 2016*, here!

* (on mine and Alstein’s lists only)

I should add one other aspect of “role-playing”. Your interactions with the Sorcerer King, as well as your choices on the strategic map, affect the Sorcerer King’s disposition towards you.

When you interact with him, which usually happens at his whim, you have multiple options- you can try to take a low profile or even gain aid from him, but at the cost of hastening his power growth. Alternately, you can refuse the much needed aid. However, the growth of your empire and some actions (seizing crystals, attacking his raiding parties or lieutenants, hitting his citadels and especially building cities) antagonize the Sorcerer King, and can direct threat towards you. Essentially, threat symbolizes how much heat you bring down on yourself. But! Forces marching against YOU aren’t attacking Crystals. So, when you are keeping a low profile you are gathering strength and mustering resources, but your enemy is systematically destroying the precious crystals. When you choose to develop more openly, the crystals have a better chance of surviving, but that attention is instead directed at YOU! If you wish, you can remain confined to a single city the whole game and avoid the Sorcerer King’s forces, putting all of your effort into developing an elite force of heroes to seize the keys to the Sorcerer King’s citadel and strike at his heart before he realizes the danger he’s in. Alternately, you can expand without secrecy and find yourself in open war with the seemingly unending legions of darkness. It’s up to you!

Also worth noting that the questlines were, in large part, written by Cracked staffer, Chris Bucholz! So, there’s a healthy amount of fantasy-comedy sprinkled in amongst the rat-slaying and bauble-fetching. While most of the quests in the base game (haven’t played Rivals just yet) are fairly simple affairs of 2 or maybe 3 steps (and even the quests involved with “recruiting” the minor civs scattered around the map usually aren’t too onerous), the levity really helps keep it fresh, and there’s a lot of variety available in there.

I do really enjoy the minor-civ-recruiting feature, which definitely has a Star Control feel to it, but perhaps because the game relies on random generation and replay and isn’t nearly as pre-plotted as StarCon2 or 3 were, they feel a little generic, and you mostly interact with all of them in more or less the same way. It’s something I really wish there was just a bit more personality and uniqueness sprinkled into, as I think it’d really heighten an interesting portion of the game further.

No. During the 2nd crash I ended up with a corrupted quick-save. I stupidly didn’t save a copy of it, as it got written over during my next quick-save. I updated my video drivers and turned off auto-turns and had no more crashes during the next 2 hours.

So I’m a little baffled by Rivals. I just played my first game on normal difficulty, large map. I was making slow progress up from the small island where I spawned to a larger island nearby. I had maybe four cities, maybe five controlled shards. About 60 turns in, I’d let mana pile up for a while, so I thought I’d fire off a few Ascendancy spells just to burn some off and see what what would happen. I cast four of them and the game ended – “SK beaten! You win!”

So is it supposed to work that way? I’d only encountered one other minor nation and barely uncovered a fraction of the map. I’d actually been looking forward to fighting my way up towards the SK. Guess not.

I know it wasn’t my brilliant play. I made a number of dumb early mistakes and wasted a bunch of time futzing around.

But is that it?

You can win by getting enough mana.

Probably needs to be a limit on that spell of once per turn.

I also think the Ascendancy victory probably needs to be tuned for larger maps. Otherwise, what I did accidentally (turtle in one corner and gather enough mana for an insta-win) becomes the most viable (albeit most boring) strategy.

I’m starting to wonder if something went wrong in my game in terms of the SK’s original spawn location. I just noticed I got the “Every Shard is Sacred” achievement, meaning I won without the SK having destroyed a single shard through 60+ turns. There were repeated “SK is destroying a shard!” warnings from early on, but he never seems to have actually finished one off. Really weird.

They put out a hot patch with some updates. :)

  • Changed the Ascension Rules so you have to have 75% of the Orb for victory (used to be 2/3).
  • Fixed the Tactical Camera to respect the ‘Auto Select Next Unit’ option. If you have that turned off, the camera will no longer try to center the screen on your guys
  • Fixed several spots in text where the game was incorrectly mentioning the Doomsday Counter.
  • Fixed some text in the Campaign that assumed the player was a human.
  • Swapped Tooltips for ‘Auto Station Units’ and ‘Auto Upgrade Outposts’.
  • Fixed an issue where unsubscribing to workshop items outside of the game would crash the first time you launched the game.

Updates (9/26)

  • More powerful units are better at resisting charm.
  • Shard shrines all produce 3 magic. Before the Kingdom did 5 and the others did 2.
  • White wolf now requires a horse to train (yum).

Brad put out a dev journal today for Rivals with some updates. :)

http://steamcommunity.com/app/496730/discussions/0/350543389014900024/

We have a Sorcerer King dev stream coming up today at 2pm ET. :)

I did that, too, recently, but ultimately got pummelled by the Sorcerer King’s forces once I hit the target. Defeated one lieutenant on my way to the “game over” screen. I think it would have been better to explore more, level up my sovereign (and assorted units) more, etc.