Some thoughts from about 30 hours of gameplay: Negative/Cons: - Unhelpful interface. - AI cheats like mad. Okay, all 4X Civ clone AIs cheat, but I don't think this one is playing the same game as me. - The AI turn can get very slow. - The AI strategy for some wizards includes *large scale* city spamming. - The Myrran plane is brown everything. It's hard to identify the features. - I may have missed something, but I couldn't get any extra spell books. I loved hunting for those in MoM. The designers seem to have something against making your wizard a generalist as a strategy.- Modern MoM clones may allow you interesting features like casting a few spells while you have nothing else to do and stockpiling them for use later. Nothing like that is in this game. - I was surprised when an AI wizard started 'summoning' non-magical units in the middle of a battle. I don't ever recall that in a MoM clone and I don't think the particular AI wizard shouldn't have had that type of spell available. Perhaps I really missed something and you can do it, too. Positive/Pros: + by this time (Feb 24), seems to be generally bug free. + Combat outcomes generally seemed reasonable. One minor weird point is that you know if a unit is killed before the animation of an attack finishes, because no damage bubble pops up if they die. + The game is fairly true to original the MoM,
Well, it's still in dev, so it may improve. I was smitten with the game at first, but the infatuation didn't last. My first problem with it is the wide variability of tiles from one playthrough to the next and, if you accidentally start a new game as I did, tiles that were commonplace previously become rarities, for no obvious reason. My second problem is that, if I try to maximise my score (I always do), the game world ends up looking like someone has thrown a large plate of spaghetti into the air and let it fall to the floor any way it likes. The game is presented as offering a more pleasing world than Carcassonne, where it's fine to build a circular road that connects with nothing else whatsoever, but you end up making equally unrealistic placements in DR. The core problem is that the game doesn't quite work as a pleasant jaunt to make a world that looks good, or as a high score challenge, and it's definitely not a settlement-builder, either. Add in other niggles that other people have already mentioned, like the lack of an option to cancel the last tile placed by mistake, the lack of more tiles offering flexibility, like tunnels, level crossings, etc. There are too many tiles that serve very little useful purpose. Also, it could do with different tile sets, e.g. industrial, modern, futuristic, etc. I'm also unhappy that with a top end games PC from a few years back, I get stuttering that causes me to misplace tiles sometimes and that constantly changing my view of the game world gets very intrusive as my map grows in size. I don't begrudge my in-dev investment and I wish the devs well, but I want more.
Well, I last played a few hours of MOO2 during an in-between-games spell a few weeks ago, but this game has spoiled MOO2 forever for me, except as a very occasional nostalgia trip. There is amazing depth in this game. It's a true 4X in the sense that every X matters and rewards you for paying attention to it. For example, exploration, which is a feature I love in both TBS 4Xs and RPGs, has two separate elements which continue to throw up extra benefits for your persistence. I'm no lover of micromanagement, either, but it isn't a chore in this game because it's about managing a lot of factors a little bit, rather than building 100 granaries, 100 libraries, etc. The tech trees look overwhelming at first, but aren't really that difficult (but don't miss the stuff off the right side of the screen(!), and mostly fit very well with the rest of the game and enhance your empire-building strategy very nicely. It's true that there's a huge amount of detail in the GUI and you have to examine the GUI carefully. There's no manual or tutorial at the moment, so you'll find a learning curve where you're asking questions like: wait, how do I move population between colonies? But give it 20 hours or so to learn all that stuff and you've got a very rich experience ahead of you, and it's all actually very intuitive and satisfying to play Oh, performance: pleasant (but not quite full pro) graphics, occasional short signals from my powerful system that it's busy, but 100% stable and zero bugs that I've noticed so far. No music without the DLC, which I plan to buy, as I think the devs deserve it.
Bought this elsewhere before it was on GOG. Not a bad RPG, as far as it goes, but the vanilla game without DLCs is short, especially if you're used to large open worlds in the Bethesda style. This one lasts about 30 hours per playthrough, even if you're a completist, must open that door, must see what's in that container, type, like me. This seriously limits replayability. Added to that, there are a series of pinch points you have to go through to get from one map section to another, so it has a more linear feel than it needed to have. Btw, the 30 hour point is not just my feeling; I saw a whole subreddit topic about it.
Based on first game in the trilogy: Positive: The remastering is good. Cheerful, cartoony graphics, excellent automap and ingenious minimap (you can toggle on or off), in-game manual, customisation options. Negative: Engine mimics original game, even when not in legacy mode, so you mostly only have one option - step forward, and you can go from one random encounter straight to another before you even move. Of course, you can't see the enemies coming, it's that old school. You also can't camp or rest or regain health or magic by praying at altars or whatever in the dungeons (as far as I've ever got), so you have to keep running (or rather fighting you way) back to the start, about four times every game world day. It's also boring that I got to level 8 or 9 and all my non-mages were no better equipped than they were at the start. The mages get plenty of new spells, so the game feels really unbalanced between magic and the rest. Worst of all is the primitive level-up system which means you will often get a really bad dice roll, like a tank fighter getting plus one - yes, one - HP out of a possible 15. Try playing a level 50 paladin with 60 HP or so HPs - if you accept the dice rolls, you could do. So you inevitably end up scumming the level-ups - save and reload for every character in your party, every level, until you get at least a reasonable dice roll. The game always felt like a hard slog and I never lasted long with it, even in the 1980s. Now I can only play it for half an hour at a time, with the thought in the back of my mind, I wish there were some mods for it.
