While I agree on the 3D, you're completely wrong about Kohan, Heroes of Might and Magic is the most obvious example though, three and four, urgh.
3 looked bad? 3?!?!? Is it even 3d? It looks 2d to me. In any case, the graphics in HoMM 3 are great.
I'm going to get mildly excited for this, buy it, and realize I still don't really like tactical battles in my 4X TBS games. Was Shadow Magic worth playing if you auto-resolved the vast majority of the combat?
The tactical battles are a big part of the appeal. And the AI was not great in determining the true value of a unit in auto-resolved combat. So no.
For me, the progression in graphics from AoW1 to AoW2 was from "pictures that clearly convey information to the player" to "pictures that our marketing department think are going to look great as screenshots in gaming magazines". AoW2 just makes it a lot harder to tell what's going on. The screenshot above leaves me reasonably hopeful that AoW3 is going to have graphics that are functional as well as beautiful, though. RE: MoM, it is not a, uh, shall we say, a carefully balanced strategy game, but it is a lot of fun and it's good at sparking your imagination with all the "cool stuff" that's packed into it. In boardgaming terms, if you imagine it on the scale from "Euro" to "Ameritrash", it's way out on the Ameritrash end and then beyond, because boardgames have limits that no computer game need respect.
In AoW I fought every battle that was lopsided against me with the goal of killing a higher tier enemy unit. Make 'em pay damn it, make 'em pay!
Compared to II? I think so. It went from crisp, colourful fantasy to a number of units (like the pikeman) moving to some duller more "realistic" look.
Go here to tell Steve Fawkner what you want from a Warlords 5 game. It's a post he put up late last year asking for player input.
Warlords 3:DLR is one of my favorite games ever. I skipped 4 because I heard it wasn't good. Is it worth playing?
You know even though I love HoMM 3 and think overall it was the best of the series, I have to agree with this.
This is yes and no for me, really loved the high-fantasy look of the strategic map in AoW 1 but almost go blind trying to see my units on the tactical map in that game, that's where I prefer AoW: SM graphics.
Yes, because fuck the Battlecry series. It never stuck for me, whereas Warlords II and III:DLR are the best.
I really can't buy that. Heroes III is a little less cartoony and more detailed to be certain, but I'm just not seeing "realistic", not like IV tried to be: HOMM II HOMM III HOMM IV All a matter of taste, to be sure, but III hardly looks like "ass" compared to II.
But it's a better game for this. It remains the only fantasy 4x where your hero's awesomness approached e.g. one of The Taken in the Black Company books (the Dominions pretenders are also fascinating, but it's a little bit different). There heroe's are outsized (not as much as those pretenders) in a really interesting way, but in a way nobody else in the genre does it. The AoW heroes are a different breed (e.g.). Now, I think it would have been cool if use of the crappier races boosted your final score, or something like that.
MOM had a scoreboard? My oldest nephew was juuuuuuust old enough to play MoM when it came out. My teenaged self was, of course, absolutely horrified at the suboptimal strategies he insisted on using because he thought they were cool (and equally amused at his "vit-terry-ann" pronounciation of "veteran"). Boy just loved himself some Lizardmen. He may have lost a whole lot of games, but as long as he got to produce a Dragon Turtle he was happy. I like to think that this steeled him in some way for the trials he has faced (and quite honorably, I might add) as an adult.
Is that a serious question? I can't tell. The scoreboard for 4x games was always an underrated feature, from Civ onward.
It is not. I have never cared, except to rub my brother's nose in how bad he is at HoMM, MoM, and Civ. So I guess I care a little bit. But not much. I honestly always thought that I had a better internal sense of how I had played any given game than the goofy-ass scoring algorithm did. Farming score once you're in the snowball phase is trivial in most of them since they're primarily pop/territory based, and god knows I have no desire to add any more tedium to stage 3 of a 4X.
In the future, please actually try to be creative with your snark/sarcasm, please. That effort sucked.
I'd like to thank this thread for finally motivating me to buy AoW: Shadow Magic from GOG and start playing it. Seems awesome so far! Also, it looks like Notch put up a bunch of money for the new game. I expect to see idiots around the internet complaining that he just did it to get attention and he should have spent that money on actually finishing Minecraft.
Yikes, AoW:SM is 10 years old. It has aged fairly well, but then again, there hasn't been much to compare it with lately.
I think it's mostly a matter of preference. Stylistically, the games were very similar. III switched to a more somber, muted color palette, whereas II had that intense, colorful look like something out of a medieval manuscript. I kind of prefered the look of II, all things being equal (especially the battlefields), but they were both good-looking games. HoMM II: HoMM III: HoMM II: HoMM III:
1. Large or adjustable font size...squinting is not fun. 2. Large(big big big) tactical battles. Big maps. I find the tactical battles in Homm, Aow, and Kings Bounty to be claustrophobic. So confined that maneuver was lost. 3. There is a certain fragility of success in AOW2. If you move to the wrong hex you are doomed. In a way it is more like a puzzle game. I would prefer a more living world with multiple, viable paths to victory.
See, I think the exact opposite. Every time they increased the battlefield size in HoMM, it was a mistake. It just made it take longer to move units from point A to point B, and harder to screen units with other units, which is really the key component of maneuvering strategy in HoMM. Pretty much the only thing that HoMM V got right was the battles--it tightened up the battlefield and also made some powerful units larger, and thus harder to maneuver, and the battle strategy was a lot more interesting as a result. Additionally, I don't like bi-level games (grand strategy with tactical battles) in which the tactical battles take forever to play out. These games play much better with compact battles that resolve quickly, IMHO.
I still remember the rage of my regular hotseat opponents the first time I successfully got dragons + Armageddon rolling in HOMMII. Those were some quickly resolved battles.
I dunno. I found HoMM battles simple and repetitive "Monster Stack" romps without enough going on to be worth the time it took to play them tactically. I'd rather either have something with a bit more space and scope for tactics, e.g. AoW, Total War, or something where battle is completely abstracted, e.g. Warlords. So I felt the small battlefields in HoMM were a glaring flaw, along with the one unit per creature type.
Legends of Eisenwald has taken this theory to the extreme. Every unit can move and engage in combat on the first turn of combat. Tactics are all about positioning and screening. The intention is for fast paced but tactical combat.
