But, man this has so much chit in it. There's so much to do than in like MoM or AOW series. It comes with a 295 page printed spiral bound manual also. I am just amazed that such a small outfit like Shrapnel could put out such a finely made manual. Great bathroom library reading materail.
I've only just delved thru the tutorial attempting to get a reasonable grasp on the game before diving into a full scale war against TWENTY COMPUTER OPPONENTS. I don't know of another game that has that many opponents indvidually wrapped with nationals types, and personalities like aggressive, defensive and all things inbetween. 21 opponents that's more than Civilization IV has. It also in this version comes with a MAP GENERATOR, my favor aspect of games I buy nowadays. Some random element of maps and AI and random personalities. This game has it all.It's auto calc battles, but, you get to watch the battles and actually setup your forces and combat commands like in SPARTAN (another one of my favorite games). Spells galore over 600 of them and over 300 different units. Probably more as mods come out. The map looks simular to the AGEOD maps of BOA and ACW. And in this you get to recruit lots of units and commanders and mages and druids etc per turn instead of the traditional 1 unit per turn per city of most all other games of the like. Making the combat engine the way they did I can see playing this PBEM as it won't take a lifetime to playout one game. This engine was built around autocalc so the outcomes are reasonable and realistic compared to say the likes of RTW where you got rediculous outcomes when you had overwhelming odds vs your ai opponent and even lost.
The map generator will create maps based on number of players from small 10 provinces per player to medium 15 provinces per player to large 20 provinces per player. I like that, gives equal province amount possibilities to every player. Imagine a 21 player game you + 20 ai players on a large map. 420 provinces, man that's awesome. Even Warlords never had those kinds of possibilities for size of maps.
Initial reactions are this game is like MoM/AOW in that it's fantasy based and has loads of spells, from that point on it leaves those models to become origional in army size, map sizes and the battle engine as I said takes on the light of Spartan's battle engine. Just loads more men and spell casting ability and command orders before entering a battle.
It will take me days to really learn the nooks and crannies. I always start out on hard levels so I expect to get spanked by the ai a few times maybe a lot of times before I find the strategy that always beats it as per all ai's I've ever played against. Usually the he who gets there firstest with the mostest wins strategy always works. We shall see here if this is still so. I'll keep you informed.
