I also bought the original elemental, and were really sad at how bad it was. A year later, I got an email from stardock where they apologized for the shit elemental, and said they remade the game to be good and provided me with a free DL link :) yay for registering your stardock games at their homepage, and yay for stardock themselves :D
I agree, mages are definitely immensely powerful, wether its the summons or just the horrid wail aoe from a branch in the summon tree. in a late game, it did 66 dmg to everything, and suddenly the vastly superior gilden armies i was facing turned into 3-4 turns annihillation regardless of my troop quality -_- there is a hard counter to mages though, lots of archers. Because I am dumb, I went to war against Tarth (the archer empire) with Resoln, I couldn't even get one good spell off, ever
most probably know this already, but if your rating is much higher than your opponents, you can drastically shorten, or nullify the mopup by demanding surrender from your enemies :)
levelling heroes helps alot if you give them their own army. if you have 2-3 heroes in one army, they will get very little xp each since they all want a big piece of the pie. with one per army, they get xp extremely fast, so you could just throw your heroes in one army later when they are a bit more powerful
[quote who="Azunai_" reply="3" id="3450629"] there are other examples of mega events etc. that completely shake the playing field - like a dreadnought invasion in gal civ half your cities flipping to AI control in one of the Call to Poer civ clones, but all of that stuff feels artificial and is - of course - very "unfair" to the player. [/quote] if you mean the rebel event in galciv 2 where a large number of planets flip and turn rogue, that
[quote who="Apheirox" reply="5" id="3430839"] The problem isn't just that the AI can't play the faction. The faction can't be played well by a human player, either. It's a really interesting idea that wasn't executed properly - the faction is too gimped to be able to stand up to the other factions' much higher growth rates. Having practically no growth for the first 100 turns or so of the game is a death sentence - yes, there indeed appears to be a second meaning
[quote who="Ericridge" reply="2" id="3450416"] Consulates, use them. Its heck alot better to build a consulate than have a level 1 village until the end of times. me [/quote] How do those consulates work? "immigrate to an undead city today, get rid of excess flesh! the most effective dietary cure known to man!" :P haha, made undying female pikemen at start, at midgame i got 3 more armor rating on them and killed epic strength stuff no p
ah, the male skeletons are useless, while the female ones are kinda imba ^.^
age of wonders 1 was awesome, great fun. the sequel had glaring, atrocious lack of AI, but still got a few hours of fun out of it i guess. Although AoW 3 is on my watchlist, there's no way I'm preordering it before I know for sure its actually half decent or better in the AI department -_- *remembers running a lone unit in and out of a town with towers to make the enemy attackers run endlessly back and forth with his whole melee army until the tower killed them
Got the dlc today, and was excited to try them out, but is it just me or do they have nothing going for them? You can build 2 cities, then you're screwed unless you manage to sneak-grab enemy cities since even if you find a fair amount of human monster npcs, you wont be getting enough growth for another pioneer. If you're lucky you find 2+ deathshards within grabbable range of the two cities, which makes it slightly bearable if you can stock enough mana to get the growth buffs on the