OT, Stardock's MOM influenced game news

[Jazzepi]

I've played Fantasy Wars. I didn't find the single player campaign terribly interesting. Most of what you do is racing against the clock to try to complete the campaign to get the "gold -> silver -> bronze" award which is invariably some unit or item or an amount of gold that you can add to your stock pile.

I played it on hard, and found the gold absolutely impossible to get, so I stopped trying. When you stop trying for the gold, the game becomes very boring. Since a unit takes two types of damage, one where you can only heal by "buying" the units in the squad that were lost, and the other which is the hitpoints of those units in the squad. When a squad rests, they get all those hitpoints back, but no additional units (you have to spend gold to rebuild those additional units).

Because your units carry over from one campaign mission to the next, the game devolves into "rest -> attack -> rest -> attack" moving as slowly forward as possible so that you don't lose anyone. The enemy almost always has overwhelming forces in the later campaigns, and you have to be careful not to "agro" the enemies in certain towns who won't come after you unless you reveal them.

Also, many enemies in towns who are inside the town walls WILL NOT leave those towns at all. They simply stand there. If you have a town that is long and narrow, you can attack the enemy on one end, and his friends will just watch you gang-bang him with three guys without assisting. Rinse, wash, and repeat. They will attack from inside of the fortress, but this is silly when you consider it's almost always tons of meele guys and maybe 1-2 archer units.

All in all I found the game interesting at first, but then when I realized how boorish the gameplay was going to become, I just stopped playing.

Also, the spells are uninteresting. They mostly just do damage, debuff people, buff your people, or heal. With different shapes of the casting radius and levels of damage/healing/de/buffing according to the spell, the magic is just... well, it's BORING. Magic in Dominions 3 is very interesting and diverse, in that game there's no difference between the spells, really.

Jazzepi

[Twan]

Jazzepi said:
The enemy almost always has overwhelming forces in the later campaigns, and you have to be careful not to "agro" the enemies in certain towns who won't come after you unless you reveal them.

Yes I forget to emphasize on this. FW is not only a clone of FG, it's a game using the FG rules without its AI. It's why there is no skirmish mode : they simply didn't have programmed a general AI, just some scripts for each scenario to make ennemies act when you move close to them.

[B0rsuk]

Twan said:
Yes I forget to emphasize on this. FW is not only a clone of FG, it's a game using the FG rules without its AI. It's why there is no skirmish mode : they simply didn't have programmed a general AI, just some scripts for each scenario to make ennemies act when you move close to them.

That system (figures per squad) sounds awful lot like Master of Magic. I've finished most of Fantasy General (in Dosbox, without sound - it was fun anyway) and their figures/power system strongly reminded me of MOM.
Initially I thought MOM's figure system is a bit awkward (for example it's a bit too simplified in some places), but they certainly got 1 thing right. You can simply heal "dead" figures and aren't discouraged from attacking.

I've been thinking about writing this kind of game (Python, PyGame) myself, and have lots of ideas to use. But I'd most probably limit it to just combat. It's complex enough as it is. Some ideas I have:
- more even damage distribution among figures. In pure MOM system, only 1 figure can be wounded. This limits a bit healing spells and other very interesting effects.
- flying and walking creatures should be able to share a square. Blocking castle gate with a flyer is silly
- very limited direct damage spells. Direct damage is overused and boring. I would compensate by greatly expanding other branches of magic.
(...)

[WraithLord]

B0rsuk said:
...

I've been thinking about writing this kind of game (Python, PyGame) myself, and have lots of ideas to use. But I'd most probably limit it to just combat. It's complex enough as it is. Some ideas I have:
- more even damage distribution among figures. In pure MOM system, only 1 figure can be wounded. This limits a bit healing spells and other very interesting effects.
- flying and walking creatures should be able to share a square. Blocking castle gate with a flyer is silly
- very limited direct damage spells. Direct damage is overused and boring. I would compensate by greatly expanding other branches of magic.
(...)

You should probably check magic master project.

I was toying with a similar idea for a few years now, even went so far as to learn python pygame (by writing small games). However, RL + Dominions kind of take up all my time.