The MP will be IGOUGO, which should mean the same as asynchronous. We are planning to add push notification to that.
AI Army Strength and Composition @4XGames: It does take the AI a bit - 16 stacks started to appear around turn 125 - but it can definitely do good in both the offense and defense army department. On the offense, it attacked one of my Undead-only armies with ~6 Clerics in its 16-stack: nasty fight, AI kept casting appropriate spells like Disrupt Undead. Lost half my - admittedly cheap - army of Archers and Huecuvas there. Comparing by production value of the units, it still was a great victory for my side, though. And I encountered this when conquering an enemy town (see screenshot). Note how at least on paper the AI forces are vastly superior to mine. Still, I only lost 5 units in this battle. Battles like this show how important movement is, and how hard it is to defend against a determined assault backed by powerful spells. The Orc Manslayers are so slow, I shot down several before they even reached me. Against faster moving units like Unhallowed Lancers, or units with high-powered AoE Spells (like Draconian Elementalists), I would would not have stood a chance. First thing I did was have a Huecuva cast Darkness, then throw a high-powered Icestorm into their midst, taking out several chaff like Raiders right away. The Huecuvas took out the Skalds in round 1, after that it was just mop-up. At first, I did not think I can win this fight, especially because my first attempt where I cast Guiding Wind (no range penalty for Archers) instead of Icestorm was a total disaster. Same goes for the Cleric-army fight: my first idea was to cast Benediction, so my Undead can resist the Disrupt Undead spell. Didn't make much of a difference, I got slaughtered. Second try, I dropped a high-powered Icestorm on the enemy army, doing enough damage that I could take out 3 Clerics in round 1. That made a huge difference, and the fight was a lot easier. The Icestorm on the Orcs did enough damage that I just managed to kill all the chaff before the Manslayers reached my lines. I even ran out of ammunition for the Archers and Huecuvas, first time this happened. When they were in Melee range, I put uninjured units up as blockers, and took out any Manslayer that was next to a wounded unit with priority. Losing only 1 Huecuvas and 4 Archers in that battle was quite the feat, I dare say
So does that $20 IAP give you all those IAP or do you need to buy those other IAP too for the full game?
That one gives you the full unlock: all Races, Units, Planes. @doomtrader: The description for that could be a bit more explicit, it should clearly state that it unlocks everything. While you can infer it from "gives you all Starter Packs", it is not 100% clear that it's a full unlock of all currently existing content.
[QUESTION] Which armour can Ranger Heroes use? The manual says "Rangers can use all armour". However, at least Adalas can only use up to Chainmail, and not e.g. a Heavy Plate. Which actually makes more sense to me, a forest-crawler in full plate is a bit silly
On the overland map, hit the Spyglass button in the bottom menu bar (see manual p.17). Then tap on any tile - e.g. the location of your town - and it will show you the max. population. Note: 25 pop is the absolute unmodified maximum. There is a Spell that increases the max by another 2, but I cannot recall its name or School right now. @doomtrader: the manual only says "10. Surveyor -" for the Spyglass, the actual explanation is missing.
Thank you very much. It was so obvious that I overlooked it. By the way what happens if you build a city on a feature that is not conquered?
Thanks Edwin! Do you mean building a town on a Dungeon that still has monsters in it? Never tried that, interesting idea. I'd think that should not be possible logically. Give it a shot and let us know how it goes?
Oh... that's what the surveyor reference is! I joined the Wastelands Forum; hopeful that some Planar Conquest content will be added soon. It is sort of dominated by WoM folks, so don't mind having a conversation home here focused on PC (for the time being). But, over on the forum, MedievalNerd created a spreadsheet of spells for WoM, assuming that it's close to PC spells (as far as I can tell), and he created a Google Docs link: link Over time, might not be a bad idea to include a link in the Manual PDF that points to such a spreadsheet which contains that latest changes/updates.
And dead at turn 150. Overrun by Draconians (both other Sorc and Neutral). I never seemed to be able to get off the ground. Fights, even Low Threat fights, could easily kill 1 or 2 units. Growth was pretty stunted, building units was also slow. Things learned: More Ranged. It rules the roost with tactical combat. By the time I really got a grasp on that, the game was all but over. It was pretty close to obscene how easy some of the fights got when I had a solid stock of ranged units. Destruction + Protection was actually pretty good. Keeping the troops alive and burning down the enemies was satisfying..when everything didn't save immediately. I need to be more aggressive on city creation. I need to raze cities to the ground as the Myrodants. The Unrest penalty really screwed me. I need to build more units, focusing on ranged. Bugs: (I will provide screenshots if needed). Unrest marker was set to 49999% when I took over an Orc town on the Fire Plane and garrisoned it. When I moved the garrison off, it changed to 32.5% Combat Log scrolling is basically impossible, as the combat log area doesn't accurately capture the touch event, so the whole screen moves, if a unit is under it the touch will select the unit etc. UI Improvement: When the combat log is open, please push the text up over the + button, as the first 1/4 to 1/3 of the lowest combat messages were covered by it.
AI Army Strength and Composition @Nullzone, thank you for your comments on the AI units on offense and defense. Since our last exchange, I have been looking at this topic more as well. In one recent game (around turn 200) I looked at the AI defense of each of its cities. Using save reloads so I could use the same assualt army each time, I tried to take each city. Here are my observations: 1. Each city had a full 16 unit defense force (plus milita) 2. There were a lot more than 10 Cities per AI wizard. 3. If the city was Grey Elf it would have a few ranged units but most would be high end melee units. 4. All other races had all melee units - often 16 of the same unit. 5. My 16 mixed unit field army (4 ranged magic, 8 archer types, 3 melee, 1 hero) had a great deal of trouble taking any of these cities. The wizard AI used very good spell selection and my archer units would sometimes run out of arrows and be overrun. 6. If the AI had used more magic and regular units I would have suffered a much higher loss rate. When the AI goes on the offensive it tends to swamp my cities with 16 unit combined arms stacks. If the first stack did not overwhelm my defense the next one would.
After over a month staying on the hot games list, PC is getting a little TA recognition in the form of the Monday Updates post by Shaun
@athros: Yes, ranged rules, all the way to endgame. When the Archers get too weak, I switch to higher-tier Mage units. However, some high-end melee units like Unhallowed Lancers or Drac Doomdrakes are also brutally effective. Looks like I have to put a melee-only Orc game on my list, to see how that goes Can you post your game setup? I'm curious what I can get out of it. When I played Insects, I even had the Tyrant perk. Unrest still wasn't a problem, just needs more garrison units - and Tranquility spell if you want to have it a bit easier. Army spam is always a good idea Never really looked at the combat log before, so I cannot comment on it. @Mintdragon: I joined the Wastelands forum too, but didn't have time to post a link to the thread here and the guides, maybe tomorrow. @4X: Can you post a few example armies, so we can get a better picture? Even on highest difficulty, I didn't have any real problems with running over anything I encounter; provided I bring at least somewhat appropriate units (e.g. 16 Ghouls vs. 16 Arbalests isn't the best idea ever). Would love to see an AI with 10+ towns. In my games till now, it never got that far. Multiple 16-stacks attacking my towns I haven't seen at all yet. Most of the time, they trickle in as mini-armies with way too low unit count (e.g. 5-10) to pose any challenge. But then I am only around turn 150, and pretty much just busy with mopping up UPDATE: Could it be that the AI just takes a lot longer than a human to really gear up? @doomtrader: Can you provide some info what you expect an aggressive AI Sorc to have, say, around turn 24,50,100,150,200? Also, I strongly suspect that the AI picks units for some "unit value" (like piece value in Chess), and not for what its "real worth" is. E.g. Grayelf Archers (best example) are way more deadly than their stats and costs hint at. As a lot of the high-end units are melee, this would explain the behaviour. @Dethredus: Finally, high time for that! Thanks for the heads up, will go take a look now. UPDATE: awh, disappointing was hoping for more. High time TA does a full review.
@Nullzone, I was not being very clear with that last post. Not every AI player builds multiple 16 stack armies and sends them after me. Nor does every AI player build 10 plus towns. However, some of them do. I have to admit that I have not been keeping track of which AI player is at a high level of being aggressive and which is not. I wii try to do so in the future. I like to play with 3 large planes and 6 AI oponents on Medium difficulty and independents set to common. Under those circumstances often one AI player wants to form an alliance or at least have a non aggression pact. Two or three are indifferent and the others are aggressive. Given enough time (and I like long games) the aggressive AI player(s) will go after me with very large armies. The number of cities they will build varies a lot but the more aggressive ones seem to build and/or takeover more. I tend to have only one large offensive army. This is usually dictated by finances. The more aggressive AI players tend to have multiple large armies and are sometimes good at coordinating them. I don't know how they afford their large armies but I can say that when I do succeed in taking over their towns they are well developed. So I see a lot of variety in AI players levels of aggression. Some games no one wants to fight while in others several of them think they are Rome and I am Carthage. The AI independents, however, are always aggressive. If I am on a plane alone, they become a huge problem unless I take out all of their cities. If there are several Ai players on the plane I am on, we usually get the independants under control reasonably quickly.
I posted the majority of it above. I believe I was at Mageling difficulty and 3 Opponents. I wish I could send you the save from Turn 1! Unrest was a problem in the "Not Insect" cities. Destruction and Protection were the spell circles - I didn't see Tranquility. I'll play with taxes more - I tend to leave them low. I started reading the combat log when everything I was facing saved everytime I threw a spell at them.
@athros - yes, the combat log is a little wombatty. I figured it would get cleaned up at some point, but it was a little un-nerving trying to figure out how to scroll up/down, which one is the top, all the while your battle ground is swinging up and down.
