William Blake
13-10-2004, 07:50
Well, I finally got the game and played all day.
So far I’m pretty disappointed in single player campaign. The more I play the more my frustration builds up.
First of all, amazingly it’s really hard to find provinces and move between them using map or main view. I use province list to jump between them, but I lose big picture and it’s really hard to control your land. Maybe Scotland and England is ok, but then you are somewhere between Poland and Moscow its just pain to scroll the main view and find cities.
I can’t play on hard because I really want to fight battles, which is kinda half of the gameplay, but on hard you can’t pause main game while you fight, so it becomes UNMANAGEBLE. You fight for so long that you kingdom just float without any command, then I hear about 5-6 messages about “building has been built” or “enemy spoted” I can’t stay and fight or I trash my kingdom. “Hard” should be “unmanageable” I don’t want to leave fights for AI, don’t make me play on medium!
Even on slow speed I constantly have a feeling that something slips away. I don’t have time to read log at all, I don’t have time to think about buildings, practically after some time it became just a mess. I have a 2 dozens of provinces and I lost track of my buildings totally, half of my cities just don’t build anything because I’m busy catching enemy on my lands, on my right I have about 7-8 icons of building progress but I have no idea where the cities are and what I should build there. Occasionally I go through the list of provinces and make buy new buildings but again I don’t have time to manage my kingdom, I’m playing “cat and mouse game” with enemy and rebel armies all over the land. I’m very angry at it because I want to really control stuff and make decisions, not play click fest.
The game needs 1/10th of the slow speed setting, so people can practically freeze all the movement on map and read building descriptions, check what you have and what you need, read log and ANALYZE what happened. See where all armies are and think and calculate the moves. Now it’s TOO FAST on slow speed to think about details.
Second issue – the events, offers and such just collide together. I’m reading the offer from another kingdom and I can’t make a choice because my marshal is attacking someone and a new dialog totally covers the diplomatic dialog and I can’t do ****, but go to fight. And it goes on and on, if you are at war you constantly have to drop everything you do and go to fight. Several times I was practically caught clicking a button then the “I’ll lead” dialogs poped up, this is very frustrating and after a manual battle I had no idea where I was, but I remember that I didn’t do something. Anger.
The game should be auto-paused every time I have a dialog open!
A lot of game events go unnoticed. My marshals run out of food constantly, because I don’t have any message about food they have, why? Is it hard to notify me or you expect me to watch every single number? Why you can’t send me a message about mercenary camp, like you do on “enemy spotted”. Why I have to search the map of my provinces to find one? I’m mean come on, it’s not an action game, don’t force me examine every pixel of the map. In general a lot of things are hidden or hard to find by the way. I have 10 seconds to decide what special building should I buy - I have to go in the horrible kingdom advantage screen and examine TINY icons all other the screen to find out what do I need more leather or wax. Or you pop up the dialog about “I’ll lead the battle” and it totally covers the screen and you have no idea where it is and what armies are, so I have to lead every battle to find out what I have and what enemy has and if its nothing special to let AI fight.
And these battles… Man. Why are they so…. boring? COME ON!!!! You have such a nice system, so many units so advanced tactics, but it… well. I cant find a word, I’ll tell you what’s wrong though:
1) Once you have a strong army you never lose. I have several marshals with leadership 3 and dread 3, and that’s it. Enemy can’t stand a thing, they can’t approach ONE longbowmen unit and they run away. Then only I press them with cavalry they surrender completely in a second. So I practically never face a resistance, but I spend my time catching the enemy marshal.
Morale thing is totally messed up. You don’t fight battles you either come and hit enemy once and they flee or your army is SO scared that it flees without a fight. Totally boring and anti-fun. Morale should be an important factor, but it should be set depending on you battle performance not some stupid marshal skill or total number of soldiers enemy have comparing to yours. Armies should have near the same morale at the start of each battle, and morale should go down then you lose % of your men and gain morale for killing % of enemy men. Battle should be fought! If army can’t stand a couple of arrows it’s bull****.
2) I never buy or build new units. Well I did once and after that I practically never lose a unit, since gold is so abundant I refill my squads all the time. And enemy is never strong enough to kill my army. In general, its feels like battles do not matter, you can enter the battle, fight, enemy flees, gets in the city, refills. Same with your armies. Pretty pointless if its not a city.
On the other hand I hate amazingly stupid idea of fixed refill pricing. Why reinforcement of 1 soldier cost like a new unit? No, really why is that so? I say that refill should take less money, MORE population (population should be used!) and it should be progressive, refill of 99% unit should not be the same as 33% unit.
Moreover, if the city can’t build lets say Hobilars, you CAN”T refill a Hobilars squad there. Isn’t that logical? I got some merc feudal knights at very start and I own everything around, and at every city that doesn’t even have a training grounds refills them so I continue the ownage of AI peasant armies.
3) Enemy battle AI is strange to say at least. Sometimes he flees with 99% of his army, but if you really got him, the lonely marshal will run all around the battle map for half an hour.
Enemy armies not only can, but mostly do skip your wide open and unguarded cities and go burn farms and monasteries. Now that’s a stupidity. I understand that they don’t want to take chances storming your army in the city, but moving in circles around totally empty city with a full army…
Or take enemy army composition for an instance - these hordes of peasants, always 360 men. Not funny really. If you want to spawn a weak army – spawn 3 units of peasants, if you need more strength then give them some decent units. Why you never spawn like 3 cavalry army or 2 archers and a peasants for a rebels. All enemy armies are the same, once you leave an army stronger then “full house” of peasants it will totally secure your provinces from rebels.
It really kills the interest of the game to see dozens of practically same enemy armies over and over again. It becomes a routine to intercept and kill them.
4) Sieges are very poorly designed. I played both quick battle siege and stormed a lot of cities in the campaign. They are very boring to be honest. It’s a very little space inside the castle, hard to move your units, hard to see. Enemy never really defends the walls and gates. Since every unit can break the gates, you don’t need any battering rams or catapults to get in.
On the other hand towers that shoot arrows on themselves are pretty stupid, maybe they should shoot arrows only if there is a unit on them? I mean come on, enemy has 1 unit of guards but all his towers shoot all the way, so I have to crash the towers so I can get in without losses and win with an horde against one enemy unit. Are you testing my patience? Because it is all about patience, not fun, not neat tactics, just move this here, shoot, wait, shoot here, get in.
Why siege machines have unlimited ammunition?! I can ruin every single piece of walls and towers with one catapult. So practically you need only one, everything else is just to do it faster. It’s lame design. They should have very limited ammo that can’t be refilled in the battle, so I have to choose what to break, and I could ran out of ammo and don’t break the big corner tower at all, so I have to retreat.
Gates should stand like 50 times longer if attacked by regular units. 50 times I tell ya. Battering rams should really make it fast, so they would be needed. Now they don’t. You also don’t need laddermen at all. Totally useless, because peasants will break the gates faster then laddermen get to the walls.
Also, I don’t really really understand why AI never uses the keep. They have so few units, place them on the keep it will be hell of a defense, but no, they will roam around the city to get slain one by one. Also I think that the goal of siege is the city, not the marshal, so the marshal can die, but the battle is won then you “flag” the keep. Make a “flag the keep” to be condition of the siege, and make ai to DEFEND it.
And pretty please remove most of the buildings inside the city, you can’t possibly organize any really organized fight, your units just stuck all the time. Also I would personally make only “half of the circle of castle walls” to be shown on the battlefield. I mean you don’t really need walls all around, but they take a lot of space, make it like half a circle in a corner of a map, so you will have more space to play with.
That would be all for my first impression. Not to mention 2 SUPER annoying things:
- My stupid king was married by my decision at very young age on some princes and he doesn’t got any children, not one. And he died and HALF of MY eastern Europe was lost. And I can tell you that there is NO way I’m gonna capture them all back, I’ll just start a new game. I don’t remember when I was so angry on a computer game, and I played everything from Defender of the Crown if you know what I mean. Never did a game **** with players like that, I played all day long and it’s all for nothing because of some random number generator. I did everything right and it failed totally. Anger.
- A fortified camp not only shoot at its own men in a battle, which is far as I know a know bug, but also on strategic view enemy fortified camp FIRES at your army on campaign map and hits on a hell of a distance. Now that hit the roof of stupidity, honestly. No city can do that, no huge stone walls and high towers and what are not, but temporary wooden camp shoots like dozens km away! Oh come on, you gotta be kidding me. I was just moving through, there was a rebel camp with some advanced marshal, by the time I noticed that my army suffers huge losses moving just near it, half of my men were killed, and the other half was killed because I had no choice but to move away, but I was too close, so I marched under the fire for some time. And it was luck I noticed it at all, since no message pops up or sound…. man, its not an anger its pure rage.
The game has a huge potential and tons of nice stuff, but you need a huge patch to fix all annoying **** and make it enjoyable.
So far I’m pretty disappointed in single player campaign. The more I play the more my frustration builds up.
First of all, amazingly it’s really hard to find provinces and move between them using map or main view. I use province list to jump between them, but I lose big picture and it’s really hard to control your land. Maybe Scotland and England is ok, but then you are somewhere between Poland and Moscow its just pain to scroll the main view and find cities.
I can’t play on hard because I really want to fight battles, which is kinda half of the gameplay, but on hard you can’t pause main game while you fight, so it becomes UNMANAGEBLE. You fight for so long that you kingdom just float without any command, then I hear about 5-6 messages about “building has been built” or “enemy spoted” I can’t stay and fight or I trash my kingdom. “Hard” should be “unmanageable” I don’t want to leave fights for AI, don’t make me play on medium!
Even on slow speed I constantly have a feeling that something slips away. I don’t have time to read log at all, I don’t have time to think about buildings, practically after some time it became just a mess. I have a 2 dozens of provinces and I lost track of my buildings totally, half of my cities just don’t build anything because I’m busy catching enemy on my lands, on my right I have about 7-8 icons of building progress but I have no idea where the cities are and what I should build there. Occasionally I go through the list of provinces and make buy new buildings but again I don’t have time to manage my kingdom, I’m playing “cat and mouse game” with enemy and rebel armies all over the land. I’m very angry at it because I want to really control stuff and make decisions, not play click fest.
The game needs 1/10th of the slow speed setting, so people can practically freeze all the movement on map and read building descriptions, check what you have and what you need, read log and ANALYZE what happened. See where all armies are and think and calculate the moves. Now it’s TOO FAST on slow speed to think about details.
Second issue – the events, offers and such just collide together. I’m reading the offer from another kingdom and I can’t make a choice because my marshal is attacking someone and a new dialog totally covers the diplomatic dialog and I can’t do ****, but go to fight. And it goes on and on, if you are at war you constantly have to drop everything you do and go to fight. Several times I was practically caught clicking a button then the “I’ll lead” dialogs poped up, this is very frustrating and after a manual battle I had no idea where I was, but I remember that I didn’t do something. Anger.
The game should be auto-paused every time I have a dialog open!
A lot of game events go unnoticed. My marshals run out of food constantly, because I don’t have any message about food they have, why? Is it hard to notify me or you expect me to watch every single number? Why you can’t send me a message about mercenary camp, like you do on “enemy spotted”. Why I have to search the map of my provinces to find one? I’m mean come on, it’s not an action game, don’t force me examine every pixel of the map. In general a lot of things are hidden or hard to find by the way. I have 10 seconds to decide what special building should I buy - I have to go in the horrible kingdom advantage screen and examine TINY icons all other the screen to find out what do I need more leather or wax. Or you pop up the dialog about “I’ll lead the battle” and it totally covers the screen and you have no idea where it is and what armies are, so I have to lead every battle to find out what I have and what enemy has and if its nothing special to let AI fight.
And these battles… Man. Why are they so…. boring? COME ON!!!! You have such a nice system, so many units so advanced tactics, but it… well. I cant find a word, I’ll tell you what’s wrong though:
1) Once you have a strong army you never lose. I have several marshals with leadership 3 and dread 3, and that’s it. Enemy can’t stand a thing, they can’t approach ONE longbowmen unit and they run away. Then only I press them with cavalry they surrender completely in a second. So I practically never face a resistance, but I spend my time catching the enemy marshal.
Morale thing is totally messed up. You don’t fight battles you either come and hit enemy once and they flee or your army is SO scared that it flees without a fight. Totally boring and anti-fun. Morale should be an important factor, but it should be set depending on you battle performance not some stupid marshal skill or total number of soldiers enemy have comparing to yours. Armies should have near the same morale at the start of each battle, and morale should go down then you lose % of your men and gain morale for killing % of enemy men. Battle should be fought! If army can’t stand a couple of arrows it’s bull****.
2) I never buy or build new units. Well I did once and after that I practically never lose a unit, since gold is so abundant I refill my squads all the time. And enemy is never strong enough to kill my army. In general, its feels like battles do not matter, you can enter the battle, fight, enemy flees, gets in the city, refills. Same with your armies. Pretty pointless if its not a city.
On the other hand I hate amazingly stupid idea of fixed refill pricing. Why reinforcement of 1 soldier cost like a new unit? No, really why is that so? I say that refill should take less money, MORE population (population should be used!) and it should be progressive, refill of 99% unit should not be the same as 33% unit.
Moreover, if the city can’t build lets say Hobilars, you CAN”T refill a Hobilars squad there. Isn’t that logical? I got some merc feudal knights at very start and I own everything around, and at every city that doesn’t even have a training grounds refills them so I continue the ownage of AI peasant armies.
3) Enemy battle AI is strange to say at least. Sometimes he flees with 99% of his army, but if you really got him, the lonely marshal will run all around the battle map for half an hour.
Enemy armies not only can, but mostly do skip your wide open and unguarded cities and go burn farms and monasteries. Now that’s a stupidity. I understand that they don’t want to take chances storming your army in the city, but moving in circles around totally empty city with a full army…
Or take enemy army composition for an instance - these hordes of peasants, always 360 men. Not funny really. If you want to spawn a weak army – spawn 3 units of peasants, if you need more strength then give them some decent units. Why you never spawn like 3 cavalry army or 2 archers and a peasants for a rebels. All enemy armies are the same, once you leave an army stronger then “full house” of peasants it will totally secure your provinces from rebels.
It really kills the interest of the game to see dozens of practically same enemy armies over and over again. It becomes a routine to intercept and kill them.
4) Sieges are very poorly designed. I played both quick battle siege and stormed a lot of cities in the campaign. They are very boring to be honest. It’s a very little space inside the castle, hard to move your units, hard to see. Enemy never really defends the walls and gates. Since every unit can break the gates, you don’t need any battering rams or catapults to get in.
On the other hand towers that shoot arrows on themselves are pretty stupid, maybe they should shoot arrows only if there is a unit on them? I mean come on, enemy has 1 unit of guards but all his towers shoot all the way, so I have to crash the towers so I can get in without losses and win with an horde against one enemy unit. Are you testing my patience? Because it is all about patience, not fun, not neat tactics, just move this here, shoot, wait, shoot here, get in.
Why siege machines have unlimited ammunition?! I can ruin every single piece of walls and towers with one catapult. So practically you need only one, everything else is just to do it faster. It’s lame design. They should have very limited ammo that can’t be refilled in the battle, so I have to choose what to break, and I could ran out of ammo and don’t break the big corner tower at all, so I have to retreat.
Gates should stand like 50 times longer if attacked by regular units. 50 times I tell ya. Battering rams should really make it fast, so they would be needed. Now they don’t. You also don’t need laddermen at all. Totally useless, because peasants will break the gates faster then laddermen get to the walls.
Also, I don’t really really understand why AI never uses the keep. They have so few units, place them on the keep it will be hell of a defense, but no, they will roam around the city to get slain one by one. Also I think that the goal of siege is the city, not the marshal, so the marshal can die, but the battle is won then you “flag” the keep. Make a “flag the keep” to be condition of the siege, and make ai to DEFEND it.
And pretty please remove most of the buildings inside the city, you can’t possibly organize any really organized fight, your units just stuck all the time. Also I would personally make only “half of the circle of castle walls” to be shown on the battlefield. I mean you don’t really need walls all around, but they take a lot of space, make it like half a circle in a corner of a map, so you will have more space to play with.
That would be all for my first impression. Not to mention 2 SUPER annoying things:
- My stupid king was married by my decision at very young age on some princes and he doesn’t got any children, not one. And he died and HALF of MY eastern Europe was lost. And I can tell you that there is NO way I’m gonna capture them all back, I’ll just start a new game. I don’t remember when I was so angry on a computer game, and I played everything from Defender of the Crown if you know what I mean. Never did a game **** with players like that, I played all day long and it’s all for nothing because of some random number generator. I did everything right and it failed totally. Anger.
- A fortified camp not only shoot at its own men in a battle, which is far as I know a know bug, but also on strategic view enemy fortified camp FIRES at your army on campaign map and hits on a hell of a distance. Now that hit the roof of stupidity, honestly. No city can do that, no huge stone walls and high towers and what are not, but temporary wooden camp shoots like dozens km away! Oh come on, you gotta be kidding me. I was just moving through, there was a rebel camp with some advanced marshal, by the time I noticed that my army suffers huge losses moving just near it, half of my men were killed, and the other half was killed because I had no choice but to move away, but I was too close, so I marched under the fire for some time. And it was luck I noticed it at all, since no message pops up or sound…. man, its not an anger its pure rage.
The game has a huge potential and tons of nice stuff, but you need a huge patch to fix all annoying **** and make it enjoyable.