This is the second part of my Earthquake mission write-up for Age of Wonders. Last time, I lost half an hour of game time due to my hero dying and autosave deciding to turn itself off for some reason. In this posting, we make up for those 30 minutes and see where it takes us next.Continue reading
Fiz is a brewing company “lite” simulation game in the style of many other similar games on the play store. The difference with Fiz is that it’s very well executed and much better suited for a tablet than any actual Kairosoft game I’ve seen. The thing is, it’s not made by Kairosoft.Continue reading
Age of Wonders was one of the earlier “spiritual successors” of Master of Magic, if I remember correctly. It had magic and heroes, units, tactical combat, a fantastic world and fun spells. It also had scenarios and a campaign. I remember it being far to difficult for me as a kid. After reading a Let’s Play on Something Awful, I got an itch and bought it on GOG.Continue reading
Master of Magic is a 4X game, so there’s no point in writing walkthrough reports. Instead, when I decide to play a match, I’ll write a report on the entire match. This time, we play as Freya of the High Men
Finally, it’s time! My powers are again strong enough for a physical presence on Arcanus. Horus was the one to destroy my body in the last epoch, but I can hardly be angry about it. After all, there has been plenty of times where I erased him out of existence as well.
In Master of Magic, the default town names are typically from the real world.
I dropped into existence near a High Men town of Denislin, so I guess they are the race I will be leading this time. I’ve been longing for some time with my own tribe, but men are men, be it civilized, whatever that means, or wild. I just hope the inability of my followers to raise and train fantastic creatures will not be an issue.
The humans proclaimed me their leader in the month of January of the year 1400.
I immediately sent out troops to explore the nearby areas, as the world has changed much, to the point of being completely unfamiliar to me. Within months, this decision bore fruits, as a unit of spear-men found books of magics in an abandoned tower, giving me access to research about the Earth Lore spell.
Earth Lore “scouts” the current map window, meaning all fog of war is removed from what you see on the current screen.
A few days later, I have reached an independent town of barbarians. It was being controlled by an uncooperative and brutal warlord, so the civilians have shown willingness to join my empire. I immediately started making preparations to conquer it.
There is no reason not to capture a neutral town. You get to lead more than one race, which offers variety.
Another such town was to the south. This always happens when a wizard is banished. Opportunists of less than noble intentions take up arms and grab power, causing the common folk to suffer under them. Luckily, this means that most of the time, the common folk is more than welcoming to the regime change that comes with a wizard returning.
The area around Denislin has proven to be extremely well suited for a wizard’s base of operations, with plenty of magical nodes unguarded and easy to tap into with the use of magical spirits.
A magical spirit can meld with a node to provide mana income to the wizard. The troops to the northeast are getting ready to take over Hannover.
It took me four years to raise an army, but if a wizard has anything, it’s time. In june of 1404, Hannover was part of Freya’s empire, thanks in part to a dwarven mountaineer called Brax. He heard I managed to overcome my banishment and came to offer his services as soon as he could. Soon after, a group of settlers left the now crowded Denislin to found a hamlet to the south. Months later, Liverpool was founded. The empire was growing already.
Heroes in Master of Magic vary in strength. Brax is one of the weaker ones, but he’s still useful.
Not everything was smooth, though. Soon enough, red banners were seen to the south of my empire. It seems another wizard’s banishment expired and this one was leading lizardmen. Whoever it was, though, they decided not to reveal their identity yet.
Even worse, only a year or so after it was founded, the hamlet of Liverpool was completely destroyed by a pack of demons. Brax was there, attempting to defended, but in the end, he was lost as well.
Words of this failure didn’t travel far, luckily, as soon another hero arrived to offer his services – Baghtru, the Orc warrior. This time, I decided I would do better.
This is another low level hero.
I made efforts to contact the wizard to the south and he was revealed to be Oberic. He did not seem friendly, so I would have to prepare for the worst. Luckily, it seems he has the sea to his back, so it will difficult for him to reinforce his units if it ever comes to war.
Each wizard has their own set of spell books and special powers.
Months went by and Oberic started his expansion towards my lands. I could not afford an enemy next door, so I decided to be the lesser person, for the safety of my people. I noticed one of his new hamlets was left undefended, so I sent a unit of pikemen to burn it to the ground. In the meantime, a large force of mine amassed next to his strongest city on my continent. He had shamen, but they were no match for my pikemen.
This was a huge blow for Oberic, but he was not done yet. I decided to press on my advantage. The war was long, and there was weariness by the end of it, but in early fall of 1419, Oberic was no more. That is, he was banished again, and forced to stay away from Arcanus for the next several centuries. I pray that this does not happen to me. I’m sure there is at least one more wizard somewhere out there.
A wizard can return after a bunch of turns, if they have any towns left. Oberic didn’t have any.
At least I knew my continent was safe, though. At least, if you don’t count the various savage races inhabiting it.
My other rival, Merlin, was discovered to the east only weeks after Oberic was banished. He seemed friendlier, but I decided to keep my troops’ weapons sharp anyway, just in case. I know from personal experience how power hungry wizards can get.
I’m not sure if the wizards have personalities, but the flavor text definitely implies it.
What followed is a lengthy time of peace, but one where I was constantly expecting war, so I prepared. I built up my cities and made it my goal to form an order of paladins in my capital. A properly trained paladin has now equal in anything Merlin could ever muster up against me, so this knowledge I brought with me from my previous life was invaluable.
Then again, since Merlin was on a different continent and I made sure he wouldn’t be able to settle any cities close to my lands, I needed to prepare for sea combat as well. As illogical as it my seem, ships of any kind are not really suited for this type of war, at least, not compared to the dragon turtles my new lizardmen allies were raising. In parallel to the paladins, I started assembling an army of these creatures.
Of course, I also set out a call to any hero willing to offer his services, and the call was answered soon enough.
This is a pretty advanced screen for such an early game. I’m not sure if Civilization did it so well.
By spring of 1433, my army was nearly double in power to Merlin’s, and he was far behind in any other area.
I’m almost positive there wasn’t a screen like this in earlier Civ games.
The peace times were long and things were starting to get dull for an immortal wizard. Decades passed and Merlin seemed content to stay on his tiny island.
I turned my gaze towards Myrror, hoping to further my research and find new allies in this sister world to Arcanus. Secretly I also hopped I’d find out Merlin was expanding there, but he seems to have never even entered Myrror.
I liberated the few neutral cities I found there and started exploring ruins left behind by the old empires. This to lasted for years. My paladins and dragon turtles were getting more experienced and better trained, but they never got a chance to test their skills properly.
Then Merlin started summoning creatures.
He was definitely up to something. I cast a global enchantment to keep track of any important events and soon realized he was gathering an army of summoned creatures and calling every willing hero for help.
Battles are very tactical. Not even comparable to Civilization, really.
Not wanting for a surprise, I decided to beat him to the finish line. I gathered my well trained pack of dragon turtles, led by several of my strongest heroes and took one of his coastal towns within a week.
Winning a difficult fight earns the wizard fame. Losing loses fame. Fame attracts heroes and mercenaries.
As soon as I could, I connected this town to my capital with an earth gate. In hindsight, this may have been a tad risky, but I felt confident I would be able to defeat him before he could do any harm to me or my people.
The great wyrm is seriously overpowered.
He only had three cities left and every couple of months, one would fall to my paladins. With his capital blocking the way to one of his minor cities, I called in help by summoning a great wyrm and a colossus. Maintaining the presence of these magical creatures in Arcanus seriously compromised my ability to tap into magical sources, but I had so much power accumulated, I would be able to endure the draining for years to come. Of course, there was no need to wait for so long. Merlin’s capital fell within two weeks and his final city was conquered two months later.
A wizard is defeated only if he doesn’t have any cities left.
Having conquered both the worlds of Arcanus and Myrror, I and only I remain the one and true Master of Magic.
Winning a game rewards you with a nice animation.
I said there’d be less writing and more playing, but I honestly didn’t plan to write just two reports about Vandal Hearts. Still, this is exactly what happened. After about thirteen hours, Vandal Hearts is won.Continue reading
I’m thinking about further reducing the amount of articles I post. It’s getting to a point where I play through a big chunk of the game, have a hard time figuring out what to write about and then end up producing a lot of worthless padding. Vandal Hearts is where I’ll try a different approach. It’s a fun game for now, but it’s a very basic SRPG, so there isn’t much to write about if I leave out the story.
I’ve owned Warlock for a while now and played through a few games already, but never wrote about it for some reason. The problem is, I can either do a report, taking more time writing and taking screenshots than actually playing, or I can do what I’ll do in this post, write after I’ve played through a match and have trouble thinking of what to write about.
And now for something a bit different. I’ve spent a few hours today trying out the alpha version of Dwelvers. A completely inadequate description of Dwelvers would be “a Dungeon Keeper clone”. It’s quite different than your average carbon copy, though.Continue reading
This weekend, GOG.com struck again. There was the usual weekend sale and Constructor was heavily discounted. I bought it.
It’s a simulation game built to frustrate you, to put it shortly. The frustration is of the type that makes you want to play more, though, so this isn’t exactly a bad thing.
It’s a game on a low scale, which means the city you build is nowhere near SimCity levels. Instead, you buy housing blocks with each having room for a few homes at a time. You focus on making your tenants happy, keeping their homes in working order and dealing with the enemy faction(s).
Constructor was released on the PC and the PlayStation and I actually owned the game on the PlayStation as a kid. I think I might even have the box somewhere. Back then, the concept of a PC was completely alien to me, but somehow, I understood Constructor would be easier to play with a mouse, so I kept nagging my big sister until she bought me one.
The thing is, you don’t have much room for a mouse when you’re gaming in front of a TV; so while the controls in Constructor definitely were better with a PlayStation mouse, the ergonomics of the whole thing was very questionable.
Eventually, if I remember correctly, I think I’ve completely given up on playing the game with the mouse. The thing I very clearly remember is that I played Constructor extensively, in spite of my lack of understanding or skill with the game.
While the game was downloading (my Internet isn’t great), I actually entertained the idea that it would be different this time; that it would be enjoyment of the easy kind, the one where you could just relax and play. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
It’s the exact same frustrating, but fun experience, boosted by the fact that the controls have aged badly and you know they can be done better these days.
Outside perhaps the first few minutes of the game, and even that part is questionable, there isn’t a moment of peace, especially if you play with computer players. There’s constantly some trouble going on. Your tenants are complaining, the opposing players are sabotaging you or your houses and buildings simply spontaneously combust.
Even when none of that happens, the council suddenly decided to give you an optional mission with the two options being “do the mission” and “game over”.
But the question is was how well Constructor aged, right? Well, it didn’t age too badly. The problem is, the resolution is fixed to a low value and low and the mouse behaves weirdly, probably because of the resolution. Once you get used to that, though, it plays great, as long as Constructor is the type of game you’d want to play.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
There’s no real campaign you progress through in Constructor.
At the start, you create a game. Based on difficulty, you have a selection of available maps, with only one map available in easy mode, which is the mode you should be playing at first.
The game creation scren.
So you pick a difficulty, a map and a victory condition. There are four victory condition and a fifth non-condition:
Keep in mind, I have yet to win a single game of Constructor. Heck, I have yet to even get remotely close.
So I picked my poison, and I started in the southeast, where the green player starts. The world map is a grid of estates. You buy estates from the council and then you get to build your buildings on your estates. There’s slightly more to it than that, but that’s what matters at the start.
The world map for the easy world.
Before building anything else, you need a saw mill to get wood, so I build that.
You need a work gang consisting of a foreman and workers at the site to actually build.
Once the saw mill is built, it’s time to build the first level of homes. Residential buildings are split into five levels, each intended to house the same level of tenants. You only start out with level one tenants and once the saw mill is built, you only get to build level one houses, so that’s that.
You can only build each one house a limited amount of times, so you are forced to progress up the ranks eventually.
Each level of tenants has two tenant types. One is usually meant for paying rent, while the other breeds faster.
Breeds? Yup! You start out with a bunch of tenants, but after about 2-3000 days of living in your house, they die. The only way to get more is to breed them. Basically, each level of tenants can do four things. One will always be to pay rent.
For level one tenants, the other three choices are to have a type of baby. Their babies can be set to become level one tenants, workers or level 2 tenants, provided you equip their house with a computer.
For the second level tenants, they can breed into more level 2 tenants (faster than the level 1 tenants would), police officers or level 3 tenants. The list progresses along the same line all the way to the top.
Higher level tenants pay more, but they have shorter life spans and they breed more slowly, so there’s always a reason to hold low level tenants.
So I built my saw mill, and I built two of the cheapest shacks, renting them to one of each of the two tenants. I take my time and then the computer builds a house on my estate.
Yup, they get to do that. If you buy an estate, you better be prepared to fill it up as quickly as possible, because the land will be taken over otherwise. Heck, even the council demands you have at least 90% of land coverage during their periodic inspections.
The thing is, you also better have tenants to fill those houses you’ve built, because if you don’t, bad things will happen. The empty homes can get infested, or they eventually burn down, in both of which cases the neighbors start complaining.
They can also be taken over by enemy undesirables which is another aspect of the game I’ll talk about in a moment.
So, you need to buy land to keep up with the enemy, you need to have money and workers to build homes on the land, and you need to breed enough tenants to fill empty houses, breed more tenants AND pay enough rent to keep you afloat.
That’s what I tried to do and failed.
I built the two cheapest shacks and made one of them into level one tenant breeders, while the other family was paying rent.
Then the computer took some of my land, so I had to buy another estate. There, I built the two other shacks, and this unlocked the cement factory. This is how you progress through the buildings.
The cement factory creates cement, which allows you to build level two buildings, including the gadget factory, for tools like the computer I already mentioned and decorations such as trees. As soon as the gadget factory became available for building, the complaints started pouring in.
As soon as you have the cement factory, the requests start coming.
The tenants want trees in their garden.
The complaints are another system that keeps you busy. Tenants complain about a lot of stuff, such as the above lack of trees, the wrong fence around their yard, the quality of their rooms, their rent, etc. Each of these needs to be handled, or you get black marks, which affect how the council deals with you and can make you outright lose the game.
Complaints vary and increase in frequency as you climb up the tiers.
So I built the cement factory and the gadget factory on the new estate and started delivering trees. I also bought a computer for one of the breeders and made them create a level 2 tenant, because I unlocked level 2 houses.
My money was going down and the computer opponent was doing just fine.
You have your workers and your foremen, who simply lead the workers, and then you have your repairmen. I didn’t figure out the repairmen properly. You can manually assign them to repair buildings, or you can send them on patrol, but I guess you need to somehow assign a patrol area, because my houses started catching fire faster than I could send staff to maintain them.
Also, the two repairmen you start with aren’t even close to being enough. The only way to get more is to convert three workers into a repairman, which means you need level one tenants to breed like rabbits.
Of course, this means more houses, more tenants, more complaints, more gadget delivery, more things to maintain and an even faster trip towards the game over screen.
But the complexity is far from over.
The computer started sending thieves at me, so I built a Pawn Shop of my own.
Undesirables are special buildings which the tenants don’t like, but allow you to do some evil stuff to your enemy. The first two are the Hippy Commune and the Pawn Shop.
Just to give an idea of how much the tenants don’t like it, building a Hippy Commune on an estate requires you to upgrade the bathrooms of every home on that estate within the time limit or bad things happen.
More often than not, you defend your own buldings instead of taking over the enemies’.
In any case, the Hippy Commune gives you a hippy and the Pawn Shop gives you a thief. The thief can, of course, steal stuff, while the hippy can do a variety of things.
For instance, you can start a house party, which causes everyone nearby to dance and not work. They can also take over empty houses, stopping the enemy from renting them or basically do anything but destroy them. They can picket production buildings, starving the enemy of resources. Lastly, they can deal with an enemy hippy.
In any case, the computer started sending it’s thief on me, so I got a mission to deal with him. At this point, I figured out how to take over buildings.
Your foreman can be sent to take over any enemy building by slowly removing the fence from it. Once it’s done, the building is yours and in case of the thief, the mission to get rid of him is completed, so that’s how I avoided the game over screen for the time being.
The thing is, the computer keeps sending the undesirables at you, so you have to build the police HQ eventually, which means you also need to devote level two tenants to breed police officers. Naturally, there are additional costs involved and even more micro-management, what with having to assign police to each estate individually.
I made the HQ and I bred a few officers, but the game got away from me, so I ran out of both tenants and officers after a while.
It’s difficult. There’s no denying it. It’s also fun and addictive, but it’s difficult and definitely not for everyone.
The residential house screen. Take a look at tenant happiness. That’s actually high for me.
I lost my first game after reaching level 3 tenants. Things got away from me, houses started burning down, and I got a few missions I wasn’t able to handle in time, so I got sacked. I’ve started a few more games since, and I do slightly better every time, but eventually, the game is simply too difficult to manage for me.
This is where you order in gadgets for a house. The tenant picks these up, but only if you have them in stock.
I even abandoned the game a few times, starting a new one.
The thing is, as I’m writing this right now, all I think about is when I’ll be able to play Constructor some more, so it’s definitely fun and engaging. I’d even compare it with the Dwarf Fortress type of hard, at least based on how Dwarf Fortress was described to me, since I never played it myself.
So I’m off to play some more Constructor.
Over the past several weeks, I’ve been investing an average of an hour daily into DOTA2. I suck at it, but I somehow managed not to get completely destroyed by the infamous community. Since there’s nothing else I can write about, I’ll share my experiences.