|
Emperordaein posted:I am wondering, if you aren't going for speed runs, is it better to bunker down and build up defences first, or just focus on building as many soldiers as you can when you have a stable production line going? How much you want to prioritise them entirely depends on how threatening the enemy is. On a mission/difficulty where they're less aggressive, you might find they're completely unnecessary, but if the enemy are a real problem then you'll definitely need them. As for when to build them, you kind of need to do it in parallel to the rest of your army and economy. If you dedicate too much too early, you'll get outpaced and die, but if you leave it too late you might get attacked and die. The way I see it, you win and lose a game based on how good your army is. Defensive structures are just another (very important) tool in your production line. They're the part that turns a threatened production line into a stable one. If you're not speedrunning or doing something else similarly gimmicky, you never really want to completely focus on or ignore any part of your game.
|
#
?
Mar 15, 2017 18:36
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 11, 2024 18:11 |
|
|
On the truly brutal missions like Loki's Temples or Odin's Tower where the enemy is coming at you in continuous massive waves, I find the best approach is to build both fortresses and archers, but not bother with towers or other soldiers for a while. I'll show you my technique when we get to such chapters (unless I find a faster way to beat them), but with good micro and some manipulation of the AI you can take down vast numbers of enemies with very few casualties. My first successful completion of Loki's Temples on Titan was a three hour slog through a river of enemies. I consumed all the resources on 3/4 of the map and took hundreds of casualties, but I killed literally thousands of enemies and eventually wrecked their town and won. Later I found out you're supposed to do that mission by stealth.
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2017 22:15
|
|
|
Melth posted:My first successful completion of Loki's Temples on Titan was a three hour slog through a river of enemies. I consumed all the resources on 3/4 of the map and took hundreds of casualties, but I killed literally thousands of enemies and eventually wrecked their town and won. This is why I love this thread.
|
|
#
?
Mar 16, 2017 22:41
|
|
|
Thank goodness I finally caught up! I love AoM and I had considered doing an LP of it ages ago...but I could never be quite good enough to play Titan, so I just sort of abandoned it. I might have tried on a lower difficulty...but you're showing me why that wouldn't have been necessary. The Chinese are an interesting addition to AoM: on the one hand, their campaign is godawful and lazy and just full of holes. On the other hand, in the multiplayer they are downright terrifying. It's an odd mix that they'd be absolutely worthless in the campaign that introduces them but so valuable in the actual game itself. Nothing quite like those Vermillion Birds in the early days of the expansion (before they got nerfed). Also to the FE: Awakening talk: thank you. I have been struggling with my hate for Fire Emblem ever since Awakening came out and everyone lost their minds over it. I'm so glad to see another FE fan detests it as much as I do, but actually has the time and patience to say why!  Shine on, you crazy diamond!
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2017 16:18
|
|
|
UmbreonMessiah posted:Thank goodness I finally caught up! I love AoM and I had considered doing an LP of it ages ago...but I could never be quite good enough to play Titan, so I just sort of abandoned it. I might have tried on a lower difficulty...but you're showing me why that wouldn't have been necessary. I'm glad you like it so much! Yeah, the Chinese immediately struck me as likely to be OP. I mean for starters, the previous top-tier gods were usually the economic ones. Then they made the Chinese Nu Wa the best economic god of all. Free +10 pop just for building gardens? That's better than Isis's +9 for building the standard 3 town centers. 10% off all soldiers? That's WAY better than 10% off on upgrades. And faster favor generation too? And then she has access to minor gods granting MORE awesome economic bonuses like even cheaper human soldiers or even more favor and resources. A lot of their myth units are pretty lame, but they also have ones like the War Salamander which is the new gold standard of melee myth units. Or the initially broken and now merely hugely powerful Vermillion Birds which completely eclipse all previous air myth units. In fact, they have the best area of effect myth units in general. And then as I discussed they have 3x as many mounted units as anyone else, giving them a higher speed counter to every possible possible enemy force. Regarding Awakening, talking about it made me dig it out again and I'm now on chapter 19 of a Lunatic no children no grinding full party run. I actually have a somewhat higher opinion of it now. There are definitely aspects of the game which are horrible but there are some which are very good too. Like the story sucks and is full of holes and cheesiness and the villains are completely flat. I might well rank it as the worst FE story ever, because at least the early boring ones had the excuse of bad technology. FE6 gives it some stiff competition though (Replaying that one for my max ranking LP last year made me loathe it more than ever). The characters are all silly and boring and underdeveloped, and as a result the times when the game tries to be serious fall on their faces (bad writing is a problem there too). Having every single character survive after being clearly killed in cinematics is also ridiculous, but fortunately you can pretend that doesn't happen if you avoid all the DLC. The worst of those is definitely Emmeryn. We see her fall to her death right in front of Chrom and Lissa, who are horrified that she died and they couldn't save her. And since she's clearly dead, they leave the body rather than trying to get away with her. The villain comments how funny it was to see her splat and talks about mounting her head as a trophy. Also she fell right in front of a group of undead monsters single-mindedly tasked with killing her and her whole bloodline and nothing was done to stop them. Yet somehow she survives? No, that's stupid. The time travel nonsense doesn't even make sense on its own terms and the characters' stories contradict themselves on basic points. The setting development is also worse than nothing. There are like 3 countries per continent and they all have one trait. Ylisse: good guys worshipping good god. Plegia: bad guys worshipping bad god. Even the recruitable Plegians are mustache-twirling villains. Regna Ferox: stupid barbarians. Valm: actually these guys don't even have one trait, they're just a completely generic enemy country. Chong'sin: also no traits, they're just vaguely east-Asian. Roseanne: silly pompous people, but this country doesn't even exist anymore. They keep trying to say this is the Akaneia setting from FE 1, 2, 3, 11, and 12 but they repeatedly and stupidly contradict those games in really basic ways. Like inserting this new evil god Grima and saying Marth fought him when Marth did no such thing. Actually they also contradict themselves, sometimes saying Marth fought him and sometimes a descendant of Marth. Either way it makes zero sense for Grima to have been on the loose in Marth's time but no one to have mentioned him. Or trying to say the volcano in Valentia is where the dark god Duma from FE2 lived. Uh uh. It was a plot point that he lived and died in the north part of the continent a thousand miles away. Furthermore, the entire point of the ending of FE2 was that Duma and Mila are from then on worshipped together. Or they apparently thought the sub-humans in FE9 and 10 were so good that they had to shoehorn them into Awakening too. We're told that the 'Taguel' have been around forever and helped out Marth and so forth. Uh uh. There was never so much as a mention of these shapeshifting guys existing in any Akaneia games. So Awakening flatly contradicts the previous games repeatedly and frankly it makes more sense to just think of it as its own setting which coincidentally happens to have a guy named Marth in the distant past. I liked the generic, undeveloped world of Akaneia better than this self-contradictory mess. A lot of the fundamental game mechanics are stupidly implemented, like being able to freely traipse about the map and do sidequests right in the middle of a battle. For example, after mission 9 you're making a desperate escape attempt from the Plegian army when a random sidequest unlocks across the map. It has no plot bearing whatsoever, and then after beating it you can go back to the main story and resume your panicked escape as if only minutes had passed since the end of mission 9. Drama and suspension of disbelief both take Aethers to the face on a regular basis like that. Freely shopping in enemy territory is also silly as well as, in my opinion, a bad game mechanic since it removes most of the need to conserve weapons and money carefully. FE7 was great about that strategic aspect but no FE since has had it, which annoys me. The child characters break the game in half even without a serious attempt to minmax them. They're also completely unnecessary to the plot, as even the developers showed they were aware by sticking them in sidequests. Pair up undermines both the need for and the possibility of using formations and strategy. Second Seals make it trivial to have a single super unit eat all the enemies on ever map with the player just skipping their turn until all enemies are gone. The vast number of ways damage can vary randomly make combat unpredictable. Criticals and missing make the early game unforgivably luck-based. Spawn-moving reinforcements have never been acceptable and have also been never used as brutally and unfairly as they are here. And yeah the costumes are horrifying. Also, the colors are ugly. Can we please go back to the beautiful color schemes of 7 and 9? I hate the washed out 8 and 11 and 13 palette. The music is also pretty bad for this series. There's not a single piece I actually want to listen to outside this game. Not that it's bad in absolute terms, just FE has had amazing music before and so merely being pretty good is a huge step down. Having said that, I was blown away by how much effort was put into this game. No FE other than 7 shows anywhere near as much polish and craftsmanship. There are just vast amounts of totally optional content, dozens of nifty features that didn't need to be in the game, huge numbers of allusions and references to previous FEs to please old fans, a really streamlined and convenient and intelligent interface, and I could go on. Actually I will go on. In no particular order. Finally a good system for checking enemy ranges both individually and in total which doesn't deliberately mislead you. Huge numbers of new items, 90% of which will never be seen in a given playthrough. Huge numbers of supports. Granted, most of them are lousy because the characters are lousy, but at least there are big numbers of them. Large swaths of the dialogue redone to reflect player choices like whether Chrom married the avatar or someone else. Every character has bunches of unique dialogue for every random event. Random conversations between every pair of characters. Every character has unique buying and selling dialogue! Multiple different animations for attacking, dodging, counterattacking, attacking again, critting, using various weapons, doing a pair up attack at any phase of combat, blocking, etc. And multiple lines of dialogue for every character doing each of these things. Movable battle cameras with pausing and slow motion and other features. Cool backgrounds which are actually often unique stage by stage. Different weapon models. Weapons actually rebalanced so that each type has some unique options. Every character has unique comments about their level ups depending on whether they were awesome, great, good, bad, or bad because they already capped everything. Every character has unique comments on changing class/promoting. Bunches of voiced dialogue snippets (albeit some of them poorly used). There are also some really great gameplay features and changes. Forging is a lot more viable and interesting than ever before. TONS of replayability courtesy of reclassing, different random drops, different random merchants, more viable characters than party slots, and other things meaning you can play with different toys every time. For the first time since FE8 promotion items are actually scarce in a way which is intelligent and matters. The new reclass system is broken but it's still vastly better than all previous FE reclass systems and way more fun too. Huge amounts of character customizability in some ways which are actually fun. The avatar in particular is delightfully easy to shape into whatever kind of unit you most want more of. Each weapon type actually has some unique features and options. The weapon triangle is actually turned against the player for the first time in the series. Pair ups let a shrewd player do some really clever maneuvers and tricks, maybe even more than rescuing did. I do really miss rescuing though. That shouldn't have been removed (though I understand why it was). Money is actually well-balanced where you have to work hard to get all the treasures and will be in a financial crunch if you don't, while if you do then you can get some nice toys but still can't get everything you want. There are some fairly well-done skills which let you earn more money or conserve it, but there are tradeoffs to those. Speaking of such things, the skills system is actually fairly well done. True, way too many are luck based. But it's not compeltely luck based and stupid like in FE10 and most previous FEs. A lot of the items add new strategic and tactical possibilities. For the first time, having separate magic and strength stats doesn't feel completely pointless. They got rid of the pointless and boring wind vs. fire vs. thunder triangle (though I do kind of miss light vs. anima vs dark and also each element being useful against one variety of sub-human). Weapon skill levels are well-balanced to matter but not be horribly restrictive. There are no longer 4 separate kinds of cavaliers, knights, and mages each wielding only one weapon type for no reason. Promotion choices are not trivially clear-cut the way they were in FE8. Counter weapons are useful and powerful in both player and enemy hands (honestly too strong in enemy hands because the enemy cheats to have impossibly powerful weapons on the higher difficulties, but that's a separate issue). There are some bad gameplay features and changes too of course, but I've already gone on longer than I wanted. Another thing I realized is that the game succeeded at being the kind of game it tried to be. I kept hating it for failing at being serious, but it didn't really try to be serious. It's aimed at kids, which is why the villains are cartoonish and all the supports are silly jokes about candy-obssessed thieves and invisible knights and giggly murderers making puns. It tried to be kid and beginner-friendly and it succeeded. When I stopped looking for character development and complexity, I actually found some of it funny. It's not really the kind of game I'm into, but I will concede that it does a good job of being the kind of game it is.
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2017 23:04
|
|
|
quote:Later I found out you're supposed to do that mission by stealth. Loki's Temples? There's only one way into the enemy base and one way out. How exactly does this translate to 'by stealth'? I ask this having beaten that on normal recently. Does he get Underworld Passage or something?
|
|
#
?
Mar 18, 2017 20:40
|
|
|
Bloodly posted:Loki's Temples? There's only one way into the enemy base and one way out. How exactly does this translate to 'by stealth'? I ask this having beaten that on normal recently. Does he get Underworld Passage or something? See the trick is that the enemy will not attack Brokk or Eitri as long as you don't attack first. Well Einherjar and Walking Woods will but nothing else. And those guys are slow. So you don't even need to bother building a base, though it could speed things up a bit. Just turn some dwarves into ulfsarks and bring the rest along to fight too. With smart troop distribution you can tear down their outer walls unopposed, ninja Brokk and Eitri though while your other guys tear down select temples to get Undermine, use those god powers to destroy the other walls in the way, and effortlessly run Brokk and Eitri up to the boar. If you don't have the micro to manage that, you could do a hybrid strat where you fight for a while to build up a base, break the outer walls, and make a distraction and then proceed to slip Brokk and Eitri through with all your powers to do the same thing. It's pretty cool. Too bad the game does not so much as hint in any way, shape or form that Brokk and Eitri will not be attacked (and in fact goes out of their way to make you think they WILL be by making sure the first enemies you see are Einherjar who go for them). Melth fucked around with this message at 20:07 on Mar 19, 2017 |
|
#
?
Mar 19, 2017 00:03
|
|
|
Do the units sounding off actually speak Greek? They had individual languages in Age of Empires 2.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2017 19:46
|
|
|
Next chapter is up! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Al7rt-TBSZ8
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2017 19:54
|
|
|
Samovar posted:Do the units sounding off actually speak Greek? They had individual languages in Age of Empires 2. Anyway, Egypt upcoming. They have some good missions but in my opinion are the single most boring faction to play as which makes for a rather unlucky combination with the fact the missions start getting seriously long here (possible speedrunning shenanigans aside). anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Mar 27, 2017 |
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2017 20:52
|
|
|
anilEhilated posted:whether they're actual languages or gibberish is anyone's guess. Both are true wrt the Greeks. I remember talking to a friend with a classical education and knows some modern Greek as well as ancient, that the Greek units do actually say words in the language, although it's very likely modern Greek, and they don't make much sense. Like, the villagers for instance just say things like "woodcutter" when you send them to cut wood, and I think some of the barks for executing orders are, like, not what a human would answer to commands but ehh. It's not a very elegant solution, and they probably could've done better, but in the end I guess they banked on the fact very few people would know, or care. Other cultures, no clue. Beyond the Atlanteans being 100% made up.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2017 21:47
|
|
|
Hey, fences are serious obstacles.  Personally I like to play as Egypt, even though the slow trickle of faith is kinda annoying.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2017 21:48
|
|
|
They really turned up the shade's lighting effects for the re-release.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2017 23:32
|
|
|
http://ageofempires.wikia.com/wiki/Greeks_(Age_of_Mythology) http://ageofempires.wikia.com/wiki/Egyptians_(Age_of_Mythology) http://ageofempires.wikia.com/wiki/Norse_(Age_of_Mythology)#Language_.28Icelandic.29 http://ageofempires.wikia.com/wiki/Chinese_(Age_of_Mythology)#Language_.28Icelandic.29 If you scroll down to 'Languages' on these pages you will find the translations of the stuff the units say. Basically there's no grammar to it; they just say some kind of word vaguely related to the kind of order they were given. There's apparently some argument about the Atlanteans with some people saying they recognize a few of the words from Greek or Latin, but there's no organized language page for them.
|
|
#
?
Mar 28, 2017 02:53
|
|
|
A mad escape from every underworld at once sounds like a neater idea than it turned out to be in practice, it seems.
|
|
#
?
Mar 29, 2017 01:03
|
|
|
Those Underworld Centaurs were clearly trying to kidnap themselves some wives. They're trapped because, well, trying to steal your wife from Hades is a real bad idea.
|
|
#
?
Mar 29, 2017 02:33
|
|
|
Smiling Knight posted:Those Underworld Centaurs were clearly trying to kidnap themselves some wives. They're trapped because, well, trying to steal your wife from Hades is a real bad idea. Pshaw! Theseus and Perithous are hardly a representative sample! As a sidenote, for some reason Plutarch decided to include a de-mythologized version of that story with Pluto as just some really rich guy who just threw them in a dungeon in his Parallel Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans.
|
|
#
?
Mar 29, 2017 15:10
|
|
|
Does anyone know any games that feature speech in some sort of dead language (besides maybe bits of Latin)? The only ones I can think of are Civ 4-6, and while the quality of the acting varies judging from the languages I can understand at least a bit, they're still the only games with, say, Sumerian voice acting that I'm aware of.
|
|
#
?
Mar 30, 2017 17:35
|
|
|
Episode 11 (and the Egyptian tutorial) are done! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRr18tZeJZk
|
|
#
?
Apr 10, 2017 18:29
|
|
|
Can't believe it never occured to me to just wall off one of the passes as opposed to running around like an idiot between the three entrances and gradually falling back. This mission is a fantastic introduction to how absolutely godawful Egyptian units are after playing as the Greeks. e: ...Is that a loving son of Osiris? Titan really pulls no punches. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Apr 10, 2017 |
|
#
?
Apr 10, 2017 18:43
|
|
|
anilEhilated posted:e: ...Is that a loving son of Osiris? Titan really pulls no punches.
|
|
#
?
Apr 10, 2017 19:12
|
|
|
Yeah, I was going to talk about that but didn't want too many spoilers. I think if you take too long then they actually send a second Son of Osiris after you.
|
|
#
?
Apr 10, 2017 19:15
|
|
|
Fun fact: You can draw out the krakens in mission 10 one by one and have then intercepted by heroes standing on the shore to keep your ships alive. If you preserve your fleet this way, a bunch of leviathans will eventually spawn behind you and eat them anyway.
|
|
#
?
Apr 10, 2017 19:29
|
|
|
Asehujiko posted:Fun fact: You can draw out the krakens in mission 10 one by one and have then intercepted by heroes standing on the shore to keep your ships alive. If you preserve your fleet this way, a bunch of leviathans will eventually spawn behind you and eat them anyway. Yeah, I even tried shenanigans like leaving Chiron behind to see if I could intercept the leviathans too or prevent them from spawning, but there's really no way to do it.
|
|
#
?
Apr 10, 2017 19:58
|
|
|
Poil posted:Yes, and fighting for Set too. Which makes no sense whatsoever. Screw you dad!
|
|
#
?
Apr 10, 2017 23:21
|
|
|
Jaysus that Son of Osiris. I was not expecting Titan to get that brutal on these limited deployment missions. Also, they seemed to have removed a unit sent at you on Moderate The Scarabs Who I suppose wouldn't be as big a threat as the more numerous Catapults. One note about the former unit is that having one absolutely saved my rear end on the Final Mission of Fall of the Trident When playing as the Egyptians, I really only stuck to Axemen and Slingers. Spearmen never felt like they had much of a use to me. I like them for their Resource gathering abilities, but their human soldiers feel pretty weak. Also, what's your policy on spoilers regarding future units?
|
|
#
?
Apr 10, 2017 23:42
|
|
|
I think Melth just did the mission too fast for the Scarabs to show up, I don't recall seeing them this soon on any difficulty.
|
|
#
?
Apr 10, 2017 23:56
|
|
|
Emperordaein posted:Jaysus that Son of Osiris. I was not expecting Titan to get that brutal on these limited deployment missions. Also, they seemed to have removed a unit sent at you on Moderate The Scarabs Who I suppose wouldn't be as big a threat as the more numerous Catapults. One note about the former unit is that having one absolutely saved my rear end on the Final Mission of Fall of the Trident Their early game human soldiers do suck, but then you build a Migdol Stronghold. 
|
|
#
?
Apr 11, 2017 03:01
|
|
|
SirSamVimes posted:Their early game human soldiers do suck, but then you build a Migdol Stronghold. Indeed! This is the reason I never build any of their barracks units if I can avoid it. Well that plus they're worthlessly specialized in a campaign where the enemy virtually never uses one-unit masses.
|
|
#
?
Apr 11, 2017 05:15
|
|
|
Egypt doesn't use soldiers to defend, they use towers and walls.
|
|
#
?
Apr 11, 2017 08:01
|
|
|
wiegieman posted:Egypt doesn't use soldiers to defend, they use
|
|
#
?
Apr 11, 2017 14:31
|
|
|
And Migdols. Spamming Migdols. Migdols everywhere. No such thing as too many Migdols. I love how they managed to reflect the Egyptian penchant for building humongous piles of bricks everywhere in a gameplay mechanic. Faith? Build it. Army? Well, it all comes out of one building so why the hell not have them everywhere. Defense? Oh, and they shoot. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 14:50 on Apr 11, 2017 |
|
#
?
Apr 11, 2017 14:42
|
|
|
anilEhilated posted:And Migdols. Spamming Migdols. Migdols everywhere. No such thing as too many Migdols. They also tried to do things like have the norse do amphibious attacks by making their longships be superior to all other arrow ships and also be uniquely capable of carrying troops. Other than that all ships in the game are basically identical.
|
|
#
?
Apr 11, 2017 20:16
|
|
|
The Egyptian campaign also varies up who the patron god is a lot, between Isis and Ra. Set may be a jerk, but worth noting that like Hades, in the original mythology he wasn't evil. The Titans expansion alludes to it in a way, Set is your patron during the Egyptian mission there.
|
|
#
?
Apr 11, 2017 23:43
|
|
|
IIRC you even get Set as a patron during one of the Fall of the Trident missions.
|
|
#
?
Apr 12, 2017 00:48
|
|
|
SirSamVimes posted:IIRC you even get Set as a patron during one of the Fall of the Trident missions. You do, but I mean you play as all the enemy gods at least once. Usually with no explanation. Set gets no real characterization in AoM. We don't even get an indication of why he'd benefit from Gargarensis's plan or anything, he's just called 'the dark god' and that's it. Heck, the Egyptian enemies like Kamos often worship Ra instead and Ra is conspicuously NEVER mentioned throughout the whole thing.
|
|
#
?
Apr 12, 2017 01:48
|
|
|
Cheap heroes and they heal? What's the balancing factor on Egyptian priests?
|
|
#
?
Apr 12, 2017 06:28
|
|
|
Glazius posted:Cheap heroes and they heal? What's the balancing factor on Egyptian priests? They're terrible against human units, and rather slow.
|
|
#
?
Apr 12, 2017 06:32
|
|
|
Only the Greeks get their unique heroes. All the other civilizations have some kind of generic hero. This can be both good and bad, depending on what you're up against, but the campaign will tend to have your story heroes in addition to what you can build.
|
|
#
?
Apr 12, 2017 07:04
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 11, 2024 18:11 |
|
|
Glazius posted:Cheap heroes and they heal? What's the balancing factor on Egyptian priests? e: Okay, I do give them a lot of poo poo but they probably are the best at dealing with myth units. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 14:05 on Apr 12, 2017 |
|
#
?
Apr 12, 2017 14:03
|
|