Incline Larian's Dragon Commander - Released

[Tolknaz]

I think the RTS part is less tedious than Space Rangers 2's (except for the very limited variety of map design, in SR2 there are many interesting maps)

Agreed, compared to other genrebenders, like SR2, the feel and the mechanics are fundamentally solid. The RTS part lacks ceratin RTS things, such as fog of war and proper skilltre, but it has tons of charm of its own, thanks to dragon form.

 

[Heresiarch]

What does the different difficulty settings do? Resource cheating? Only RTS? Also TBS? Wut?

 

[Zed]

Playing RTS style works until chapter 3 when AI goes crazy bananas with Warlocks. You cannot ignore dragon-mode and win. Sadly.

 

[Heresiarch]

I've found what's the differences are in the difficulties. On hard you can go dragon mode in 180 seconds (60 seconds more than normal), and enemies on the TBS board have WAY more units (Chapter 1 your neighbour country has an extra 2 hostile Hunters). AI wise doesn't seem to be any different (the AI of the game was already pretty good).

I guess that makes the game's higher difficulty fall into the AI resource cheating category, even though technically the player cheat much more (dragon mode). On the other hand this may force the player to use troops more carefully, as sitting idly for an extra 60 seconds while facing much more powerful enemies is a recipe of disaster.

The value of the cards and strategic buildings are also increased due to this. In my Normal playthrough, I've still hoarded 30 cards by the end of it as I hardly needed to use them at all. On Hard it seems I can't have this luxury as cards are critical in tipping the balance of force.

 

[BlackAdderBG]

I think the RTS part is less tedious than Space Rangers 2's

There is game with more tedious land combat than SR2?

 

[Kraszu]

How was SR2 tedious?

 

[Haba]

Playing RTS style works until chapter 3 when AI goes crazy bananas with Warlocks. You cannot ignore dragon-mode and win. Sadly.

Not really. I had to fight one fight in the beginning turn of Chapter 3 in Dragon Mode because the odds were against me. From that point on, with the wealth I'd amassed in Chapter 2... Juggernaut, juggernaut, juggernaut.

You can ignore dragon mode and autoresolve to victory

 

[Gold]

The failure of this game is something simple. It needs a real realitionship meter (and a lot more of) greater political and social simulation. remove all the rts and dragon bits and who knows. ie. Make a game of a future political leader making their pass through life.

 

[Gord]

Playing RTS style works until chapter 3 when AI goes crazy bananas with Warlocks. You cannot ignore dragon-mode and win. Sadly.

It already went crazy for me with them halfway through Chapter 2.
Warlocks are very effective for AI as they are a micro-heavy unit, something the AI is naturally good at.
They are cheap and massing their Rain of Death can knock out half your army if you aren't careful.
In principle it's easy to counter them e.g. in Dragon mode, but I still found it a pita.
They maybe should be nerfed a bit by reducing their range, the effectiveness/durability of the cloak, or adding a build-up for the damned Rain of Death.

What I'd also like to see are some actual missions outside of "destroy the enemy" in the RTS part. Larian could maybe couple them to General sub-plots or random story events.

As for cards, it was brought up a few times during the beta, but I don't remember any comments from Larian on it:
I think some possibility to trade cards would be great. Right now esp. for the dragon cards I almost never feel the need to use them, since I either have researched the skills, or don't use them anyway. Same goes for the "build unit x during one round" cards. Both are ok to good early on, but quickly become outdated.
Adding a building that lets you trade in unused cards for some new ones would be cool.
Something like "Pay three cards, choose a new one from the same type" or "Pay two, receive one random card (probably same type as well)".

 

[Stabbey]

What does the different difficulty settings do? Resource cheating? Only RTS? Also TBS? Wut?

The AI can use more abilities, and it's much more ruthless about attacking you when it has the advantage. It's very good with Teleport, Charm, Mustard Gas, and it can even launch Nukes - in pairs, to make them harder to shoot down.

Warlocks are a bit troublesome, as even the best non-Dragon counter counter of Immunity-shielded Hunters isn't that great at taking out Warlocks. One other possibility to try is to use Shamans to Charm them and drop the rain of fire on itself, although adding a 0.5-0.75 second delay between when the cloud of death appears and the meteors start to drop could help make them less annoying to fight. The caster would still get the advantage of free damage as the responder scrambles to move his units out of the way.

I made a suggestion on the Larian forums to add a "Transmute Card" functionality to the currently-useless Wizard tower to change 3 cards into a random card.

 

[flushfire]

IMO a comparison with SR2's planetary battles is a little unfair as it's almost just a minigame.

 

[Heresiarch]

This game made me bought both DKS and DD (I've played them both before of course but they were..."demo" versions). Man, just listening to the music in both of them instantly brought up all kinds of wonderful memories.

 

[Metro]

Well, I played the game some. Very meh so far. The writing is... OK. The mechanics are... OK. The visuals are... OK. Let's see what happens.

FTL

The very issue with FTL is that it has way too little content (and as such, suffers from lack of replayability when its genre is all about that). Honestly, I get why everybody praises FTL so much; it's core mechanics are soooooooooooooooooooooo tiiiiiiiiiiiight. It just has way too little content to take advantage from that.

Seriously, I fucking loved the mechanics but I couldn't bear to play the game more than 7 or 8 hours, and if I pick it up again I get bored instantly because I've already seen all the content and know how 80% of my playthrough will turn out no matter what happens.

I agree with this assessment of FTL (although I got around 20 hours out of it and might return), of course it's also a $10 budget/indie title so the amount of content it delivers is good for the price. I didn't hit the wall until multiple failed attempts at the final 'boss.' Too luck based in terms of what upgrades you stumble across.

 

[Gurkog]

Angry Joe may be gay, but his review is pretty decent.

 

[Heresiarch]

Playing chapter 3 but got pretty sick of the "IT'S NOT POSSIBLE COMMANDER x100" glitch. Patch 1.0.33 supposedly fixed that but my GOG version doesn't have this patch yet despite Larian sent it in 5 days ago. Also noticed that Larian is beta testing the 1.0.40 patch that improves the strategic and RTS AI among other fixes.

I'm in turn 45 but the game's politics/general/waifu events keep coming in. The awesome, memorable voiceactings, high quality writing and all the miniplots with surprising C&C were so nicely done that absolutely amazed me. The supposedly sucky RTS is growing on me as well, which may have to do with I'm an old time RTS player. The most difficult part in the beginning is figuring out what the hell all these steampunk spiderbots do and learning how to use them. But once you get a hang of the troops' properties, the RTS become very manageable as you'll know what troops can counter what. The scissor-paper-rock context is quite straightforward here, compared to real RTS. Yet the different skills of all the troops succeed in spicing up the game without making it too complicated.

Chapter 3 is way more difficult than 2 because the enemies are powerbuffed and attack from all directions. The RTS AI is as stated by many very capable here, they won't hesitate to use all kinds of special abilities to decimate my whole army in seconds. The AI is also keen at producing units to counter my current unit composition. This is probably one of the few RTS that has a dynamic unit production preference. For me, the most difficult thing is to survive until my dragon comes out, as in hard difficulty you must wait for one more minute until the spawn time and the AI is ruthless in rushing. But when I do pull off the dragon, and consequently reverse the situation (with a lot of twitchy controls of course, as the dragon action part is not exactly a walk in the park), it really do make me feel "epic".

I can't wait until Larian release newer patches so I can replay the thing, but this time with the Undead wife and trying to be as evil to my advisors and generals as possible.

However, before a second playthrough, I must satisfy my Divinity lust by playing DD or DKS. However I'm completely torn between them, everytime I start DD for half an hour I feel the urge to go play DKS, and vise versa.


edit: ok I just beat the Chapter 3 within 50 minutes. Apparently it's easy and RTS is simply not necessary at all. Just auto resolve with help of Mercenary cards and it's a breeze.

 

[Tigranes]

I just picked my wife, Dwarven, to accompany my flagrant push for authoritarian theocracy. The AI seems brokenly dumb on Hard: in one chapter 1 map, beginning with superior forces, it swarmed the neutral build points while I left the game unpaused. I restarted and made a run for them, and despite having clearly superior numbers and quality they let me take it all... then split their forces to attack me with only half.

I still don't see how anybody can say writing is great. Its not bad and it's cute, but there certainly are no bits you can laugh to or really mull over yet. Ill keep going with it, but not with much enthusiasm.

 

[Stabbey]

The 1.40 AI may actually be even smarter. It's nasty in Act 3. It actually sent a fleet of bomber balloons at me which were cloaked by a Zeppelin so I didn't see them coming in time. I've seen it use most abilities, and use them really well.

There can be a huge difference between auto-resolving and fighting a battle yourself - even bigger if your popularity with a race is very, very low. I invaded an island with a lot of forces, had an overwhelming advantage on paper, and had a 75% chance to win. But I started out badly outnumbered with few units because I was so unpopular that I couldn't field more than 150 Supply of units at a time. The AI was under no such restriction and my forces got wiped out under sheer weight of numbers.

 

[Gord]

I'm starting to regret that I have chosen GOG for my copy of DC - they still haven't released the patch although Larian allegedly send it to GOG almost a week ago.

 

[Crooked Bee]

I hate saying this, but so far I find this game to be really boring, and definitely not worth the $40 that I paid for it. It's really got nothing going for it in my view -- everything about it is pretty much mediocre.

Aw well, I'll just hope my $40 do their part in improving Original Sin. 'Cause that's one game I'm really looking forward to.

 

[Grunker]

I hate saying this, but so far I find this game to be really boring, and definitely not worth the $40 that I paid for it.

I got my copy for free, otherwise I definetely would be raging. It is not - in any universe - worth $40. It's a pretty and ambitious game. Unfortunately ambition and success are not synonyms.

 

[Brzęczyszczykiewicz]

I liked it, but how to put it, it could really profit from its own kickstarter for additional content like Original Sin.

 

[MicoSelva]

I hate saying this, but so far I find this game to be really boring, and definitely not worth the $40 that I paid for it. It's really got nothing going for it in my view -- everything about it is pretty much mediocre.

Aw well, I'll just hope my $40 do their part in improving Original Sin. 'Cause that's one game I'm really looking forward to.

Did you miss Swen saying that the game is for boys, not girls?

 

[Metro]

I don't want Larian to fail but this title was poorly designed. If OS looks solid the closer we get to release then it'll be a D1P for me... in rubles.

 

[Gord]

I don't know, I like it so far.
I'm still not a particularly huge fan of the implementation of the RTS part into the campaign, but since late chapter 2 and esp chapter 3, it has started to grow on me a bit more - getting more, diverse units and abilities makes for sometimes nice strategies and nasty surprises.
Next time I start a new game I'm going to experiment a bit with the custom campaign settings to adjust the RTS unit production more to my liking.
That aside my biggest gripes are minor balancing issues (as in: could be fixed easily), nothing major.
The C&C has more influence than I initially thought, too. While individual events have a small impact usually, they still add up over time. I have a huge malus to luck now, since I usually decide against the undead faction and the gods routinely cursed my blasphemic ass.
Also it has simply charm. The characters, writing and decisions are often so over-the-top, it's a great parody of real-life politics and morals.

Definitely not poorly designed, imho, although it has a few rough edges.

 

[Stabbey]

If you don't like the RTS, this game is actually better than pretty much every other game at letting you change the rules of how the game plays. I've tried and it really makes a big difference. Granted, a lot of that is only for the Custom and Multiplayer campaigns, but maybe if we ask Larian nicely enough, they'll let us change the rules in the Story Campaign as well.

I have some suggestions for people who don't like some of the RTS aspects. This can't fix every complaint, but it can probably improve the experience for some of you at least.


"The AI is too good and too hard."
It sounds like you might want to lower the difficulty or the game speed (+ or – keys in RTS mode). There's no shame in that, the game is pretty tough to jump into.


"The combat is just a bunch of blobs smashing into each other."
It sounds to me like you need to increase the difficulty level. The RTS AI is pretty smart and aggressive. On higher difficulties, it uses abilities better. In a battle with roughly even odds to win, try going up against a Hard AI with just a clump of unmicroed units. Mindless play will get you soundly beaten.


"The Dragon is too overpowered."
I admittedly can’t do much about that, but maybe adjusting the Custom Campaign settings could help. Increase the Dragon spawn cost and the respawn cooldown time, to make the use of the Dragon more costly, especially in death. This won’t affect you much if you can and do stay in Dragon form all the time, but it’s all I can suggest.


"There are too many units, micro is impossible." / "Units from the World Map aren’t very important."
The Custom Campaign settings let you change some settings. If you increase the Recruit Multiplier to 2, Units and Buildings will cost twice as much to produce in RTS mode. That slows production down tremendously and makes the units you bring in from the world map (or Mercenary cards) tremendously more important. You should probably also increase the Dragon spawn cost to 40 to match the double cost as well – fewer units means a more powerful Dragon. If you use the double-cost settings, I recommend increasing your Starting Recruits (I use 70 - 30 for a Battle forge, 40 for a second Recruitment Center).

Alternatively, halving the Recruitment Center income from 4 to 2 should have a similar effect as doubling the costs. The difference is halving the income won’t affect the benefit you get from Emporium-granted “Start with 100-500 Recruits” cards.


"I want to play as the Dragon in every match." / "I want to play as the Dragon more in RTS mode."
The Custom Campaign settings can help with that as well. You can allow the Dragon to play an unlimited number of RTS battles per turn. You can also reduce the Dragon spawn timers and spawn cost if you want to maximize your time as a Dragon. Of course, reducing the cost too much will make it too easy, but that’s your choice.


"All those custom campaign settings might sound okay, but we can’t use those in the story campaign."
Yes, you’re absolutely right. I also want the option to use at least some of the custom campaign settings in the story campaign, and I hope Larian will let us use those settings (If only in a “Custom” difficulty mode.) If you agree, join your voice with mine to ask Larian for custom gameplay settings in the Story Campaign.