AW:
headless-cripple am 12.02.2008 18:08 schrieb:
glaub nicht, dass ich mir den titel kaufen werde - jowood hat's sichs mit der g3-aktion ziemlich verschie**en, man darf aber nicht vergessen, dass sie auch für titel wie spellforce verantwortlich sind, und spellforce ist sicherlich einer ihrer besseren titel gewesen
I didn't like Spellforce1 much, because it's RTS part was quite small and quite kitschy. I like Spellforce2 much more although the RTS-part is still way too small, but I found the adventure part (one could also call it the Diablo-like part) was very interesting. But I don't like having to earn experience points and having to distribute them over heroes and redistribute weapons depending on the map etc.
As regards 'Fate of Hellas': I bought it for 20 euro instead of 32 euro, but at the moment I didn't realize that it was the stand-alone add-on of Sparta. I didn't like the Sparta demo, because it was way to adventure-like. But this game is quite a pure RTS game in the good tradition of Warcraft 2 and Age of Empires etc. but with modern 3D-graphics.
I recognize the graphics and other aspects from earlier Jowood/Bluebyte games like Settlers 5 and Spellforce and I don't mind because they are usually improving over time.
Luckily there are only a few heroes and they don't require much micromanagement.
The building phase is modest with only three resources: gold, food and wood as it should
be: A RTS shouldn't pretend to simulate everything in the real world, but just a well choozen abstraction of it.
I have only played the first map yet and the enemy kept attacking me relentlesly (whilst I was building) and being new at the game and having no idea what the rest of the map looked like it's hard to determine a good strategy. Only after a couple of attempts I managed to win. The problem the first time is, as with any good RTS, that you don't know if you should first build civilian things and military things later and if you should explore. There are no defensive towers or turrets so after the first failed attempt I tried speer-traps, but that didn't work. Then I tried building wooden walls (shown in the menu as palisades) and I managed to defend my city with those at the second (major) attempt. Main problem is to determine how much territory you need to claim to be able to build a viable city within the walls but not take too big a risk of being attacked before the walls are finished. Another problem is that I ran out of gold in my first attempt and you need to travel quite a bit to the east to conquer another gold mine and there are a lot of enemies along the way, so you have to split your army and that is never a good thing. To be able to travel fast with your main forces across the map you need to breed horses first and micromanage the seating arrangements on the horses.
The user interface isn't very brilliant anyway as with many games from 'new' countries. It's not bad, but in certain regards it's quite frustrating because it's not explained well enough. For example, you can send out serfs to collect weapons that the killed enemy soldiers have left behind, but I still don't understand the mechanism exactly...
The main problem is that those Russian (and others, Asian are even
worse) developers loved the original games and try to make something
very similar or rather exactly the same, but more modern, but that they
are forced to add new elements and then they lack the innovative skills
of a Blizzard to fully integrate the new ideas with the old stuff.
And then there are the walls: Instead of explaining how wall-building works which is quite a new phenomenon they explain once again how to select a single person and a group and how to attack enemies. Luckely it works quite a lot like in other games like Settlers 5 (or 6?). You first build a wall and then you build extensions to it like entrances for soldiers to climb upon the wall, gates and higher towers. The problem however is that because of the fog of war, you have no idea from where to where you should build a wall! And you can only build upto the fog or war even when you have scouted the area earlier or you want to build a wall as far as possible in a certain direction. This requires a lot of micromanagement which I
hate. One of my favorite games is still Settlers 2 where you could send out scouts who would permanently lift he fog of war.
And of course there are the usual AI problems like serfs and soldiers having themselves slaughtered because they follow explicit or implicit orders too strictly. When I order troops to go to a far away location I don't mean they shouldn't defend themselves! Let their leader decide if he wants to march on, attack or retreat! I would if I were the leader of such a party.
Anyway, when you, like me, like games like these, you could buy it for say 20 euro or you could wait until it's really low budget or you could wait until it's the Vollversion on the PC-Games DVD in about two years.
When I bought it, I already felt that it should have been 15 euro and I still think so, but it was my 50'th birthday that day and after 50 years of living very frugal I thought I deserved that extra-5 euro threat.
