Thoughts on the Game:
I love the game. I loved the panzer general series, having played pg1, pg2, and people's general all the way through the entire campaign, often more than once. I'ved also played ag and fg, though not the entire way through. I do love wargames of all different sorts though, having played through most of the close combat series to completion. I also played king's bounty back in the day (though never got into the later homm). So fantasy wars really fit into a fantasy wargaming niche for me. That being said, I'm a fairly broad gamer, having put in a year altogether in 3 different mmorpgs, playing in clan fps competitively (paradigm shift hehe, we own battlefield, I'm retired now though), as well as enjoying rts and games like moo...so quite a variety lol.
I've played through the entire Orc Campaign on hard (getting mostly golds, a few silvers, and 2 bronzes)...Yes it took some time to figure out what units worked, more on this later.
I'm about halfway through the Human Campaign on hard.
Thoughts on Orc Units:
I was having problems dealing with hard as you need to maintain your experienced units. This often means having resilient (defense or escape ability) units else when half of your force is green for a new late campaign mission you are screwed or in save-reload city for every turn of the battle.
However, I found that Battle Orcs are a perfect mainstay unit. Get them shooting protection at lvl 1 and cavalry protection at lvl 2 and they are beasts. Trolls work too but they get shooting protection at lvl 5 and are vunerable to the slayer perk. Battle Orcs are cheap, so get tons of them up and running before encountering hordes of human cavalry later on.
I also found Goblin Bombardiers (forgot the name) are awesome. Great for softening up any unit. At lvl 2 they get shooting protection and can be used to kill archer units.
When you eventually get pteradon riders you also will want to use these.
So basically, an elite force of battle orcs, with 2xbombadiers, 2xpteradons, and of course elite heros carried the Orc Hard Campaign Day [Be sure to item stack your units, not your heros]. You don't really need archers, since you have your hexars and your airforce to take care of that stuff. You don't really need skirmishers since your air can scout. Your orcs move slow on weird terrain, but the main threat of the humans come from the cavalry, so it was usually worse for the human cavarly than it was for me to deal with a difficult terrian map...And Battle orcs' hard target ability makes skirmishers kind of bounce off.
Thoughts on the Human Campaign:
I'm still trying to find a nice mainstay core. However, he sky rider or eagles are awesome for the same reasons you want an orc airforce -- projection power, they can kill archers in pairs or kill units on rivers. It seems that humans favor cavalry, but I think it will require much more unit mixing than orcs because you still have to deal with taking cities and cavalry is poor for that.
Thoughts on the Game:
Great game. However, a few of the units could be tweaked. My perspective may be skewed since I started playing the game on hard and only really extensive studied orc units, but the costs/stats on some of the unit types needs to be tweaked...for example while skirmishers are great, they are too fragile imho when you just can just use air instead. Maybe bump them up to 15 strength for the foot skirmishers. Or perhaps this is an issue that detecting invis is too easy between all the abilities/artifacts/air scouting and distances involved. Also, light infantry did not seem to have that much of a role except to move faster through bad terrain, and as such it seemed a bit overpriced for only that ability (or perhaps keep the price the same but add many of the skirmisher abilies sans the skirmisher attack). I also particularly disliked the fact that activating some of the unit abilities (not spells) precluded an attack that turn...yet it would stay in effect till next turn allowing for an attack w/ the ability...it would be better if it lasted only one turn but allowed for an attack.
I'll also second what others have said about the AI. It could be better. I didn't notice anything exceptionally bad tactically, but it would play poorly strategically. I noticed that groups of enemies on the map would only activate once they saw my units, so maybe its something to do with this. This was exceptionally noticeable on hard as hard has like 30+ units you destroy in the later mission...and usually you did it with less than 5 losses of your own...that in itself probably says something could get better with the AI. But compared to other hex based war games, its not bad at all...but this could be related to the strategic activiation problem I mentioned above.
However, I especially enjoy the cutscenes, the plot, and the varied objectives. Compared to all of the above mentioned wargames, these definitely take the cake!
But in any case, can't wait till I get to the Allied Campaign!
|