Bay 12 Games Forum

my two cents:

medieval has a greater unit selection, more interesting abilities for special characters (spies, merchants, etc..), the jihad/crusade mechanism is nice, castles and citadels are awesome, multiple recruitment slots are useful and free upkeep slots help a bit too

on the other hand, battle maps feel pretty generic and uninteresting, hovering the mouse on the unit you need on each city to find out when the first one will become available sucks, AI cheating when a faction is down to a couple of territories gets boring and adds noting gameplay wise, battles are quite arcadey, AI features tied to game difficulty means you won't see interesting stuff happening unless you also give them game bonuses too. also, lot of feature badly developed or missing when compared to the first medieval (no oil gates, map forts broken, other stuff too)


rome as a nicer campaign map, with better thought starting points for factions that keep each faction interesting and fun to play and better control points for strategic placement of armies, you can recruit any unit as long as you can pay them, balancing taxes is harder and city can lose money, maintaining order on larger cities is harder and require to actually plan out build orders, you can't build everything so you need to make decision and take commitment on strategies, influencing the campaign on long term and actually adding to replay value, army upkeep and retraining costs actually have game consequence so you'll find yourself use more of militia as front lines to avoid losing high value units.


on the other hand, roman factions are quite overpowered, it may be quite unfun to fight them on very hard with lame factions; AI is quite crude when it comes to attacking, a lot of features are just hidden and no one tells you about them (blockades nets you money, I think. maybe. can't remember if it was a mod or something), economy is badly broken (two nations with two region each trading generates way more income than a four nation state not trading, meaning that when you're big enough and no one want to trade you your economy is screwed)

and lot of other things

Quote from: Nilik on January 10, 2012, 11:12:05 pm

So has anyone here actually made it to the Mun, landed intact and then made it off the Mun and back to Kerbin intact?

Yep. Want to see the rocket I did it in?

me too! (even on standard parts)
I've recorded some failures and navigation instructions there http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=3961.msg44263#msg44263 (it's using nova silisko mod due to landing legs and being nicer in screenshots)

it's pretty easy once you have a craft that is consistently flying so you can predict its trajectory.

In my campaign with the third age mod the free people of eriador are pretty busy fornicating. My two full stacks of generals are lolling all over orcs.

I have almost no other unit. The recruitment turn limiter is awful. Mousehovering to know when I can build a unit is pretty boring, so I'm abusing the generals spawn rate.

Same apply when you get the flying suite and the guided missile in xcom. Rainin death without even disembarking is plenty of fun

double handling?

I agree with everything you said 

the tiered resource system is not to be scrapped, it is nice to have something different to be balanced and such in a game, instead of the mindless "build bigger x" of other game resource systems (which is, by coincidence, the problem with star ruler units).

it could use some help in balancing it. most game have 'resource converters' that get from one resource to another at a fixed rate with some conversion loss. those are turned on and off by the player or automatically in time of need. add it, and it would be easy enough to manage the economy (no single metal shortage draining up all the chain) and to know with some anticipation that something is wrong (converters activity light flashing up)


basing on the in game form of the current resources, 'recyclers' would be an appropriate name for those converters.

One thing I never liked about X-com and I hope they solve in this game, is that the alien tactics feel heads-on retarded. No one invading Earth would start by dropping a few light units hither and thither (except for scouting parties maybe, but then they should be attacking military complexes and not civilian areas). They would start by shoving regiments of Chrysalids down your throat. Any self-respecting force would have control over Earth in a matter of hours. Maybe the first few missions would be against scouting parties, but by the 5th mission you should realy be expecting orbital bombardments instead of laser fire.

There was an almost reasonable in game explanation: they started slowly because they are avoiding a frontal assault with military forces that allegedly vastly outnember them.

After they meet xcom resistence, they ally with earth nations creating alien bases. That is only possible because they did not went on a killing spree

I think the Police and Military should be there with a focus on containing the Aliens and getting Civilians evacuated from the attack area. That could actually provide a useful game mechanic, where you provide covering fire to help get Civilians out to the areas protected by Police or Military, and try to keep those non-X-Com forces alive so they can provide protection for the Civilians as they flee.

there were multiple faction dynamics like these in the third installment, apocalypse. (never managed to play it thoroughly, I hated the graphics.)