Melth posted:

And a mythology many of us are going to be less familiar with, though I knew some of it myself since I'm also a Chinese classics man. Well sort of. I've read a lot of the Chinese classics, but I don't actually like any of them.

Poil posted:

I really liked hydras in AoM, they're not great from the get go but they work wonderful on maps where the enemy spawns crap infantry from destroyed buildings.

Melth posted:

I mostly go Hades so I can get 3 divine archery upgrades (Ares, Apollo, Artemis) on top of his and then used maxed out Gastraphetes and Toxotes to kill everything.

The thing about Medusae is that there are a LOT of myth units with instant kills. Even counting only the ones like Medusae that also work on myth units there are Medusae, Mummies, Arguses, Lampades, and I think there might be a Chinese one I'm forgetting. Oh and Frost Giants are pretty close. And Perseus for heroes.

A lot of those myth units have shorter cooldowns on their instant kills or have extra range to them or extra perks like how the mummy turns the enemy into little guys who fight for you or the Lampades who make the enemy go crazy and attack their former troops.

Medusae (why do we call them that instead of gorgons anyway?) just don't standout too much from that crowd to me.

HannibalBarca posted:

Hannibal is cooler

Asehujiko posted:

The game of my childhood! I was never good enough at this or aoe2 to do the higher difficulties/online stuff on account on picking civs based on how cool their wonder looks and only building fancy looking castles populated by the best units(5 villagers per resource is plenty, right? Gotta save that population for all my minotaurs )

Orv posted:

Typically even in the most skimish-esque mission, enemy civs don't get god powers. Not as freely used, at-their-discretion ones anyway. Because of the story arc of the campaign, pretty much all god power use is scripted in some way or another. Most of them don't even get attributed to an enemy civ, just being fired off as a mission trigger. And in later missions, sometimes they're fired off... well, a fuckton. AoM has, for my money, one of the finest story RTS campaigns ever, even better than WC3 (fight me). But as a result of that, you never really just sit down and duke it out with a hands-off AI. The second mission of the AtlanteanGreek campaign, and a couple in the Atlantean campaign (I really need to get around to doing the Chinese campaign) are as close as you get to freely loving around until you go crush the enemy base. Almost every other mission has some direct opposition to your just sitting around, jacking off and building units. Not that that stopped me.

anilEhilated posted:

One thing I really wish they implemented given all the stupid hidden values is heroes having bonus damage against the mythological beasties they've slain in their stories. I mean, it would probably make the endangered species butcher-in-chief Heracles a tad OP but it'd fit the game perfectly.

Melth posted:

One thing I do know about Heka Gigantes is that all their terrain deformations can be instantly undone by building something on or near the spot.

anilEhilated posted:

Yeah, the campaign gets pretty wild as it goes on. It's a shame they didn't frame it that way - I can imagine Arkantos pulling a Baudolino and just telling someone about all the awesome poo poo he might have or might not have done over a beer somewhere. This way, someone who takes their history or mythology seriously miiiight pop a couple veins.

HannibalBarca posted:

Has anyone on SA kidnapped a woman to live with them in the basement, eventually reaching an agreement with the woman's mother for each of them to have her for six months at a time?

HannibalBarca posted:

that's fair

anilEhilated posted:

Fixed that. Anyhow, gamey strategies like that are why I never really got into RTS multiplayer - thankfully AoM has a good, long campaign for me to slowly turtle and linearly progress through.

Deadmeat5150 posted:

Please tell me you got video of that.

Poil posted:

That's incredible. And insane. Incredible insane.

Lunethex posted:

Reminds me of the archer hero in Myth: TFL. His flavor text was "... but it was ki'Angsi alone that stood up to the challenge and strung the giant's bow; the great yew shaft that no two other men could bend."

anilEhilated posted:

I said it before, it comes out of nowhere. There's no relation between the previous dialogue and Arkantos babbling about horses.
And it'd be so easy to just shoehorn it in by way Trojan cavalry or, hell, just having a riderless horse run past the camera, or mention that since the Trojans raided their stores they'd be reduced to eating their horses... Possibilities are endless here.

Glazius posted:

Whoa, dang. Are you going to have an underground adventure next?

Melth posted:

Also, the clearly dead character is recruitable in DLC later on for nonsense reasons.

Melth posted:

You mean you don't ship him with Athena?

Technowolf posted:

Melth posted:

His wife was killed by pirates. Possibly he had some other children who were killed (or maybe kidnapped or something) as well since the description says that the pirates 'killed his wife and left Kastor as his only heir'. That might just mean his wife is no longer an heir though.

And he's 44 while Kastor is 14 according to their descriptions.

Melth posted:

To be honest, I felt like the Atlanteans were kind of uninspired in terms of myth units. Just B-list Greek stuff that was terribly balanced or outright nonfuctional in some cases. Like satyrs. Those were complete trash and didn't even work as advertised. A lot of their god powers were pretty lame too, though there were definitely some cool ones mixed in.

my dad posted:

Some of the Atlantean units are conceptually really cool (automatons), but end up being wet farts in practice.

Melth posted:

Tremendously since the race has no other healing at all!

nth Term posted:

Which should really be called Catoblepas. The whole name mix-up originally comes from Dungeons and Dragons, and the RPGs based off of it.

wiegieman posted:

Norse actually have a separate gatherer that's better at mining gold and worse at everything else, just to pile more fiddliness on top of building with their infantry.

Melth posted:

Indeed, they don't really add much but nuisances to the game. That's true in most RTSes that have them that I can think of. As usual though, I think WC3 did something much better with them. The amount of strategy that went into various drop-point guarding tactics and base layouts and so forth in that game and the sheer number of raid tactics and counter tactics it created were remarkable.

Glazius posted:

What if all mythological struggles were periodically broken up for sportsball and kart racing, but nobody ever wrote it down because it all seemed so obvious after those Egyptian fellows spelled it out?

Melth posted:

Not sure I understand

Hunt11 posted:

I thought it was the losing team who got sacrificed.

Melth posted:

It might be hard to give them enough human unit variety. It was kind of a key plot point in history that they had no cavalry of any kind for starters. People have been talking for 15 years about wanting to add the Aztecs or the Celts or (before the expansion actually did it) the Chinese or some other favorite pet civ to this game though, so I'm sure someone has already thought of a solution for that.

In my opinion, a sixth group wouldn't really add much to the game. This may be because they had my two pet civilizations from the beginning. I also don't think there's really a lot of room for a sequel, but I would be delighted to see further refinements and rebalancing of what we already have and maybe a new side campaign or two like The Golden Gift.

Regarding the ball game, I have also heard it both ways. Kind of like whether defeated gladiators were killed if given a thumbs up or thumbs down. I hope someone can give us a definitive answer to those questions before 2028 when I can run for president and begin my reign of terror.