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Originally posted by General Ludd
I summarized it in my earlier post.
Ploding gameplay - With few buildings to build and little else to do in the game, the gameplay revolves around slowly collecting resources and slowly churning out units, so that they can quickly die.
Micromanagement - You are required to harvest a large variety of resources, and have to manually tell each worker to do so (and you'll often have 60 or more workers, not to mention all the replacements for those who are killed or those who deplete their resource). There is a map where you can quickly assing workers but it doesn't show you where the idle workers are or allow you to decide which one goes to the job, so it's not very practical unless you are working in only one territory. You also need to manually garrison certain buildings to make use of them, such as universities and temples.
Abstracted epochs - The epochs are no longer ages, and have no specific theme to them. Instead, they are sorted into abstract groups with epochs 1-5 being "bronze age" 6-10 being "middle age, ect... There is no steady advancement through history, but instead periods of stagnation with sudden jumps. The units remain the same throughout many of the epochs aswell - for example, each civ has three uniqiue units - one for each of the first three groupings of epochs, meaning that through the span of the game they only upgrade that line of unit 3 times. There is also no longer a stone age, which was one of the few novel things about the first game.
Horrible map generator - Few choices in the land forms you can make. the choices, as I remember them, are:
"Large Islands" where the world is made up a couple circular-shaped islands that have been quartered like a pie-chart into different regions.
"continents" which is basically the same, only with more irregular shaped and larger landmasses.
"inland" which is just all land
"Pangaea" which is also all land, but with a trivial amount of water that borders the map
"mediteranean" which is the the reverse of Pangaea (there are not even any islands in the middle, just a huge amount of water that hogs up two thirds of the map)
You also get the choices of selecting how mountainous and forested it is, and how many rivers there are. Choosing a map to be "mountainous" means that there will be one mountain plopped down somewhere. Choosing it to be heavily forested means that there actually are forests and not just the odd tree randomly scattered around the map. And "many" rivers often ends up meaning only one, sometimes two and maybe even a half a river that doesn't have a begining or end and is basically just a lake.
And then, of course, there is the inept AI. I don't think it cheats as heavily as the first game, atleast not with average settings (although it does, atleast, have the annoying habbit of claiming a second territory before the player even has time to discover one, let alone build a town there), but I almost wish it did cheat, because it's ****ing useless. It sends it's workers to be past enemy fortifications like lemmings, it builds up an initial army and then flounders around unable to do anything if it's destroyed (usually because it's busy commiting suicide somewhere) and it doesn't come remotely close to keeping up in technology, as my example above shows.
I summarized it in my earlier post.
Ploding gameplay - With few buildings to build and little else to do in the game, the gameplay revolves around slowly collecting resources and slowly churning out units, so that they can quickly die.
Micromanagement - You are required to harvest a large variety of resources, and have to manually tell each worker to do so (and you'll often have 60 or more workers, not to mention all the replacements for those who are killed or those who deplete their resource). There is a map where you can quickly assing workers but it doesn't show you where the idle workers are or allow you to decide which one goes to the job, so it's not very practical unless you are working in only one territory. You also need to manually garrison certain buildings to make use of them, such as universities and temples.
Abstracted epochs - The epochs are no longer ages, and have no specific theme to them. Instead, they are sorted into abstract groups with epochs 1-5 being "bronze age" 6-10 being "middle age, ect... There is no steady advancement through history, but instead periods of stagnation with sudden jumps. The units remain the same throughout many of the epochs aswell - for example, each civ has three uniqiue units - one for each of the first three groupings of epochs, meaning that through the span of the game they only upgrade that line of unit 3 times. There is also no longer a stone age, which was one of the few novel things about the first game.
Horrible map generator - Few choices in the land forms you can make. the choices, as I remember them, are:
"Large Islands" where the world is made up a couple circular-shaped islands that have been quartered like a pie-chart into different regions.
"continents" which is basically the same, only with more irregular shaped and larger landmasses.
"inland" which is just all land
"Pangaea" which is also all land, but with a trivial amount of water that borders the map
"mediteranean" which is the the reverse of Pangaea (there are not even any islands in the middle, just a huge amount of water that hogs up two thirds of the map)
You also get the choices of selecting how mountainous and forested it is, and how many rivers there are. Choosing a map to be "mountainous" means that there will be one mountain plopped down somewhere. Choosing it to be heavily forested means that there actually are forests and not just the odd tree randomly scattered around the map. And "many" rivers often ends up meaning only one, sometimes two and maybe even a half a river that doesn't have a begining or end and is basically just a lake.
And then, of course, there is the inept AI. I don't think it cheats as heavily as the first game, atleast not with average settings (although it does, atleast, have the annoying habbit of claiming a second territory before the player even has time to discover one, let alone build a town there), but I almost wish it did cheat, because it's ****ing useless. It sends it's workers to be past enemy fortifications like lemmings, it builds up an initial army and then flounders around unable to do anything if it's destroyed (usually because it's busy commiting suicide somewhere) and it doesn't come remotely close to keeping up in technology, as my example above shows.
I am on the other hand encourage by most of these things you find offensive and as a shortcoming I find fun to have to control these elements
I do agree that they die very quickly to the ai
I also agree the map generator is less than desirable but havent really taken time to work with it.
I saw your post but didnt realize we viewed them from differing angles
I do thank you General for clarifying these issues
I agree that this is not a first person shooter from a fixed position but more a thinking person's and a plodding persons game
Gramps
A plodding person's game is right, atleast.
awn of the Modern World and RON as well as RON:T&P..all seem very similiar with limited distinctions
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