Pacifist, ja sure... We support world peace .. with FIRE AND SWORD! A very limited free version might be a good idea, but I'd keep it separate from the full one; as opposed to turning the full one free with IAP unlock, that is.
Hahaha, it doesn't help that I chose grey elves and Ariel to play my current game, and, you know, "she cares for every living thing and her only enemies are the undead" Agreed, a separate version would be better!
My current game is 2 AI on second easiest difficult, 3 planes (undead, normal and paradise). Pretty sure both AI started on different planes b/c didn't see them until recently. When they decided that my cluster of cities would be an ideal focal point for a 3 way war... Doesn't help that I built one city right next to an undead portal, the one portal that sorc seems to have chosen as their staging ground. Fun times. I had a hard time with a few draconian neutrals, until I realised they fall like flies against crossbow men. By that time the AI had teched up and came at me with rune golems and rune siege whatevers. Such a great game.
I wouldn't be surprised when "every living thing" does not include Untermenschen like Orcs, Humans, or basically everyone who isn't a pointy-eared treehugger I really don't like Elves, mostly because they are always so cliche. The well-played ones I encountered (e.g. at LARPs) all lived in Racial Supremacy Lane right at the intersection with Arrogant Bastard Way. Silly joke: The pointy-ears ask the tree first if he is okay with providing the firewood to burn the heretics I even do that on purpose, build a town with the portal in direct reach; and then drop a huge army as garrison so I can encourage visitors to leave again soon What you can also do is station an army directly on the Portal. Not sure how this works exactly, but I had it a few times that I couldn't use a Portal because it said "blocked on the other side". Massive ranged firepower is the answer to almost everything Hint: 'Missile Immunity" really can ruin your day...
Hahaha love it! I had never thought about it that way, but it makes so much sense. I love those pointy-eared bastards, but I usually play them as morally superior goody-two-shoes, a bit like "Legolas". I see now that an "Elrond" kind of character is actually much more in line with how such a race would handle themselves. I need more DnD in my life, apparently, the only reason I actually understand the rules comes from playing NWN when that came out. Ok, excuse me now, while I go and find some heretics to roast
Universal unit information @doomtrader one thing I would like is to be able to long touch ANY unit portrait to view said unit's stats. I don't know if I'm doing it wrong, but I am unable to view the detail page of a summoned unit when viewing them on the spell book screen. If long pressing on a portrait is the method used to bring up the unit detail panel, it should be universal.
Minor manual isssue @doomtrader Page 25, the manual states "3. These are the spell’s properties. From top to bottom, left to right:", it then goes on to describe spell properties from left to right, top to bottom.
Is there a way for normal people to view an app's reviews in countries other than one's own? Edit: https://launchkit.io/reviews
@doomtrader - AI Issue While the Wizard AI is playing a lot better on offense, it is still falling short on city defense. In all the games that I have played the Wizard AI garrisons its cities with sword and spear type units - never ranged or magic ranged troops. This is even more interesting because on offense the AI knows how to build combined arms armies. The game is already a lot of fun and more challanging since v1.2. If you could fix the city defense garrison issue, Planar Conquest would be even better. Thanks again for all your hard work on this great game.
I noticed that as well. However, it doesn't happen will all AIs / Races. This looks like a pretty good garrison for ~turn 15. I don't have more in my own Capital, my main army's on the move already. I think the main problem is that it's pretty hard to teach the AI all those nasty tricks we humans can use, and when which one is appropriate; e.g. using Elf Druids to cast Acid Arrows on the tougher units, while the Archers soften up the weaker ones for finishing blows from a melee unit; or use battle summons as meatshields for the squishies.
Grey Elf Summoner Game Report - Turn 35 Win A fast win with Grey Elves against 3 enemy Sorcerers on one Plane. Initial Setup: Pretty standard Summoning build: - Ascetic, Butcher, Tyrant, Mentor, Merchant - Augment 1, Mental 1 (for Fertile Soil and Tranquility), Summon 9, Summon Mastery, Summoner - Map size: Medium, Difficulty: Normal/Mageling, Resources: Lowest, Movespeed: High, Gamespeed: 4x. - I picked the Air Elemental as elemental summon this time. Starting Situation - I got Cyrrim the Learned as Hero. Pretty good, he’s a Caster and also provides 5 Research Points per turn. He only has 10 Mana, so I need to craft at least one +20 Mana item for his Spells, especially Sandblast (disables 1 unit’s ranged attacks, but can be resisted). - Capital: Max. Population 24, Food +69%, Production +30%, 2x Silver Ore = +4 Gold/Turn, 1x Fertile Soil = +1 Food/Turn. Pretty good. - I started out in the middle right of the map. - As usual, I summoned a few Magic Spirits for scouting. - After the Spirits, I cast Fertile Soil and Tranquility on my Capital. - I also sent the Pegasus Rider off to explore and grab chests for a few turns. - Having more Gold/turn, I built 2 Druids right away instead of 2 Archers. Moving out - Turn 5, I moved my whole army except the Glaiveguard out to clean a ruin or two. Farmer’s Market will be finished soon after. I’ll build 4 Archers and a Settler (when Pop reaches 7). - Turn 6, I discovered an enemy Sorcerer Unhallowed Capital to the NW of mine. I wasn’t 100% sure if my current mini-army could take them without losses, so I summoned 2 Harpies just in case. - On turn 10, I found an Inn with a Darkelf Settler to hire. I won’t really need a second/third town, but for fun I’ll take him anyways and put him on a nice +Production spot I found. - Come turn 11, I destroyed the Unhallowed Sorcerer’s town, losing only 1 Archer in the fight. One down, two to go. - If I didn’t have to cast something like Fertile Soil, I kept casting Harpies to further power my army. Onwards to victory - Turn 16, I got really lucky and got a 1200 Mana item from a dungeon. It was a Shield which Cyrrim cannot use. So I converted it and could stop worrying about Mana reserves till end of the game. - I switched all my Power output to Spellcraft, to get that increased a bit. - Also, I started crafting some small items for Cyrrim, like one Ring with +1 Spell DC (62 Mana, 3 Turns) and another with +10% Spell Damage (100 Mana, 4 Turns). - On Turn 19, I got a Highmen Engineer, Dwarven Warpriest, and Insect Slinger from an Inn. I sent the Engineer off to build a road between my 2 towns, the Warpriest to my Capital, and the Slinger to join my main army. - Turn 21, I took over the 2nd enemy Capital and razed his newly founded town. - Turn 25, Unrest in my Darkelf town increased enough that I had to buy them a Shrine & Temple. No problem, I had more than enough Gold. - I also got another Hero (Dorgan, Melee) before the end, but that didn’t make a difference anymore. - I found the last enemy Capital, and overran it without problems on turn 35. Mission accomplished. What do we learn from this game? - Plan to win a short game (<50 turns) with our Capital only. - Speed is important. Every turn that passes can mean another unit built by the enemy, too. - For short games, Summoning is an extreme gamechanger. We can effectively more than double our possible army strength; even more when we take combat summons into account. Even without those, the difference between 8 Elf Archers and 8 Archers plus 5 Harpies is obvious. - Also, we can completely ignore Research and Spellcraft, just dump all available Power into Mana. - Alchemist Trait does make an even bigger difference: If 100 Gold turn into 50 or 100 Mana means one Harpy difference for example. - We can pretty much ignore Dungeons completely. I only took out a few, none of which posed any real danger for my army. More importantly, they were all on the way to somewhere else, like a town I wanted to conquer. - Food bonus is more important than Production: as we almost exclusively produce low-tier units, we only need enough to get them out in one turn. NOTE ON PICKS: - Skip Merchant next time. Better to take e.g. Alchemist or more Spell picks. - Also, I'll drop Mentor for Archmage. The Hero was fun to have, but not necessary to win. - In these short games, we can go all out with the negative picks. The only one I'd skip is Opulent, the penalties are way too high for a short game and 2 Points gained. Prude and Heretic are fine: Pop growth doesn't matter much. And I only had 3 Shrines/Temples at the end - for Unrest control, not to gain Mana. That little bit doesn't matter when you get way more from transmuting Gold every turn.
@Nullzone, I will keep looking for more balanced AI wizard defensive forces, your snapshot gives me hope. Things the AI wizards do well: 1. Build and use offensive armies effectively. 2. Unlike in some other fantasy 4X games I have played, the AI wizards fight among themselves. 3. The AI wizards make reasonable trade offers and refuse bad trades. 4'.The AI wizards do a good job of cleaning up the independent cities - to tne point the independent forces are no longer a threat. 5. They back stab well. When I am tied down fighting a war against one of them, often another will attack me too. I have seen a couple of cases in which the AI wizards forces defeat the defenders of a node but then do not build a siphon. Have you seen this behavior? Overall one of the better AI's.
I finally took the plunge! I probably won't have time to play until tonight and am debating if I'd rather do so on my 6s Plus or my first gen iPad Air.
Units Disappearing? I have been playing a game for over 100 turns (I like to explore a bit and do not go for fast wins). I perodically check each of my 6 cities to make sure everything is OK. The last two turns I checked and my defensive units are disappearing in all of my cities. I started with 8 units in each city and now I have only 1 or 2 per city. I am not currently at war with abyone. No enchantments are listed on any of my cities. None of my cities have been attacked by independents. I have plenty of food, cash, and mana. @Nullzone have you ever seen this happen? If not can you think of a cause? If this is a bug it is the first serious one that I have seen.
@4X: re units disappearing: I actually had it worse in several games: almost all my towns - except 1 or 2 - and their units disappeared. When only units disappeared, it always hit only my Magic Spirits; everyone else was spared. Happened maybe 5 times. In one of those games, when I reloaded it to check which ones to send to Wastelands, I suddenly had 20 towns again, and all had a Polnish-looking first and last name; guess that was one of the Wastelands guys, but I forgot to take a screenshot I can only speculate that some weird debugging code or such got forgotten somewhere and occasionally jumps out with "Surprise!" I only started 3 games with the new v1.2 version, and didn't encounter this again till now. If you still have the save, send it to Wastelands. A few pages back, doomtrader posted that you have to put "sendSaves" in front of the save name. Better check, I am not sure about the exact format. And I didn't hear back from them yet, if my saves arrived on their side.
DLC finally bought! Now to find out what the rest of the races are like Parser work: I'm running into Keyword name problems (mainly gaze, some of the others I bet are not what I think that are ) so I sent a PM off to doom trader and Edwin_Mamuszko to get clarification Output thus far - note I'm not managing to catch everything right now. I'm still working through it one piece at a time. If you have any comments, let me know.
Thank you @nullzone for taking the time to document this. This is exactly the type of thing I need to learn the game. Key milestones, strategies, expected/unexpected outcomes, and on-the-fly adjustments. And why. I hope you (and others) can create and share these types of game reports (perhaps a separate thread?). Will be interested to see others as I continue to learn and improve. Awesome roadmap to follow when trying new types of games.
Ah, glad to know more of us are still around. My first micro-computer was a Franklin, dual boot into either C/PM or Apple II compatible (1983?); but had access to a mini-computer since 1979 where I became a Dungeon/Zork fan. So many great games came out during that time too (hitchhiker's guide, planetfall, etc...), but really glad that I'm discovering Master of Magic for the first time through Planar Conquest. I have Age of Wonders on my wishlist on Steam, so will eventually get to it as well. I'm really looking forward to the Steam version of Planar Conquest too, but absolutely tickled being able to play on my iDevices.
While the AI may never be perfect, once(/if/when) async multi-player hits with an integrated player ranking system, my guess is that single-player AI will become a non-issue for most. And I'd be willing to pay extra for this add-on.
