The Worlds of Magic Thread - It's out... sorta

[DakaSha]

WoM crowd mad they didnt get that coveted 5/10 instead of the abysmal 2/10

 

[cvv]

Blaming reviewers... do we need to ressort to this? Xenonauts had pretty good reviews and it is a TBS and a remake of original game...
The people who made WoM need to put their acts together, quick. I have seen this sort of argumentation when buggy Elemental was released ("they don't understand us TBS gamers blah blah"). Not good enough.


For me, the worst part is, when bugs are finally fixed (IF they are fixed one day), when new promised DLC is addded, they most probably won't have time and money to make a decent AI... Same old story.

I'm not blaming reviewers, just saying this particular review is a sloppy trash.

As for the AI, I guess it's not an easy problem. First, I've never played a game with a really good AI. Not even a relatively big devs with piles of money like Firaxis can pull off a truly good AI. And the job is that much harder for a small indie studio. But I'd be perfectly happy with an AI that isn't completely braindead like it was in Warlock 2 or Disciples 3.

(Then again the original MoM AI wasn't exactly HAL9000 either, just saying).

 

[Dim]

Yeah that review has a bunch more wtf moments. If YOU want to play a game with the best AI in a 4x every look no further than C-Evo's Seti ai.

 

[panzertoter]

I just bought this and i think that it has potential. But because of crash once every 15 minutes, it's hard to say more.

 

[DakaSha]

thats like if you buy a car that blows up once you put the key into the ignition, and then claim it has potential

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

So instead of one-liners and shocking revelations that mainstream reviewers don't have a clue can someone post some broader impressions? I don't necessarily mean bugs, but stuff like races, city development, magic and how the game handles generally compared to classic and moderns fantasy 4X?

 

[mastroego]

Blaming reviewers... do we need to ressort to this?

It's just THE ONE reviews that's totally bonkers.
2 is a vote that, to me at least, means: "no one could ever ever spend a minute playing this game". Which isn't the case since there several happy players with hundreds of hours on it already.

Second, it lists as "flaws" features that are practically pulled straight from MoM without mentioning the fact that the game was funded as a de-facto MoM's sequel.
So, this particular reviewer is effectively not doing his job.

The people who made WoM need to put their acts together, quick. I have seen this sort of argumentation when buggy Elemental was released ("they don't understand us TBS gamers blah blah"). Not good enough.

I was there for Elemental.
I didn't defend that, its flaws imho were more fundamental and too tied to its design (still, the "third release" managed to be a decent game).

 

[kyrub]

(Then again the original MoM AI wasn't exactly HAL9000 either, just saying).

Yeah, at least there's one thing the sequel copied without faults

On the subject of AIs, there are the mediocre AIs, then there are the bad ones, then the abysmal ones. Saying no AI you have seen is very good can make one overlook the massive differences in between these sorts. Believe me, with the schedule those guys have setup (so many bugs, so many DLC) we are heading somewhere betweeen bad and abysmal, probably closer to the latter (hope I am wrong). Good AI in a complex Civ-like game (and MoM is quite complex Civ-like title) needs a lot of things. It's not just a cream on the cake, as many players casually think. I have seen the AI code in Alpha Centauri, which many think is relatively bad, and it is brutally complex.

I refuse to be content with "no complany makes a good AI". We are in 21st century, the computing power is on another planet to the time when MoM was created, the graphics are remade in 3D and zooming cameras, but the AIs remain prehistoric. Or worse. It's time to change it. Why is in this thread cited C-evo as a prime example of good AI, when it is a non-commercial project and the AI was made by an amateur? Why were the guys who got hands on Jagged Alliance 2 source code able to improve its AI significantly? Why could I do a similar thing with Alpha Centauri even without the source code? - I have met a proffessor of AI programming, and he claims that with small investments, the modern companies could easily make very solid AIs. It is not hard at all, says an expert, so what are the excuses? (I am looking forward to the sequel of Master of Orion 1 the proffessor decided to support with AI programming by the way - that could become a benchmark for commercial AIs).

It's the players who need to raise theri voice. When the level of AI will be added as a component of standard reviews, then we will see a change, I guess.

 

[Norfleet]

I think the common thread in good AIs is that all of them emerge after a HOW TO PLAY THE GAME has been set. My experience with fighting developers is that developers frequently have no idea how to play the game. Since the developer doesn't understand how to play his own game, he can't write a good rule-based AI, which is how AIs are typically written, as neural-net learning AIs and Monte Carlo AIs tend to be very expensive computationally. Since a rule-based AI requires that the writer actually understand the game, and developers don't understand the game, the AI always sucks.

 

[cvv]

How do you mean developers can't play their own games?

 

[Norfleet]

I mean that, nearly without exception, they are terrible players. You'd think that knowing every single rule about the game because they wrote it would make them good at it, and that is generally the popular perception, and certainly the result when *I* write the game, but for some deeply inscrutable reason, MOST developers of games are actually terrible at their own game. I often get mistaken for a developer by being actually good at the game, people ask me "Are you a dev?"...but having fought actual devs in the game, they're almost always terrible at it, mediocre players at best. So it stands to reason that a developer writing a rule-based AI for a game he doesn't know how to play is going to create a dumb AI, as creating a decent rule-based AI requires expert knowledge (whereas more computationally expensive alternatives like neural net and Monte Carlo require no knowledge of the game).

 

[panzertoter]

thats like if you buy a car that blows up once you put the key into the ignition, and then claim it has potential

Nobody died because of ctd's.

 

[Executr]

I recently read some discussion about how devs approach AI. Most would develop it after they've set the gameplay rules and mechanics, while the best approach would be developing both alongside at the same time.
Now I don't know if it's correct or not as I'm not a developer/programmer, but it seems rational to think that way.

Still, you gotta wonder why AI in games decades old like XCOM or MoO2 are seemingly more competent than the AI of most recent strategy games.

 

[DakaSha]

thats like if you buy a car that blows up once you put the key into the ignition, and then claim it has potential

Nobody died because of ctd's.

 

[Dim]

Cevo ! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W07WoLzaEK4 Civ-evo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnPxY3ei2ZM

 

[covr]

I've bought boxed edition yesterday, it costs less then a $20 in Poland so it was a p.good deal. Nothing fancy in the box though, some on-line codes for digital goodies like spellbook and artbook. Does the game really have over than 400 spells? It is hard to believe after my 45 minutes long gameplay.
You've probably got hundreds bugs and tweaks do fix, but here's my initial impressions (latest ver.of game-1.0.15):

-Art & graphic & music is good for what it is. Textures, models, some of the interface elements are really good for a low budget game (like main menu, starting a new game menu, etc.). Spell effects are not terrible. Music is epic and I was surprised that it was composed by a girl. She's not very pretty, so no fapping for me. At least she is not fat!

-Some interface & UI elements are shit and unfinished, and it cripples whole game presentation. Look at this

1 - there's an indicator about some resource on this tile. But when I move my mouse pointer on that icon... just nothing happens. There should be some kind of a tooltip. Information about resource appears when you highlight exact tile. But with isometric/fixed view like this, it is really hard to check on further tiles: there are getting smaller are covered by some trees/mountains, etc. Also, those resource indicators are floating somewhere in space and sometimes I didn't fucking know to which tile there are connected.
2 - Can anybody see the borders of that city? WTF?
3 - Why so much spare, unused area? What is the purpose of those two big, ugly, brown squares on the left and right side of the map?
- On town menu (too lazy to get a screen) building and training buttons are much too small, might be hard to find when you are playing this game for a first time. Also, building descriptions are hard to read: again, font much too small. Some descriptions are too long and game cuts them, probably with bigger font game is going to cut even more text, so that menu needs urgent revamp. There is somewhere the same problem with spell descriptions. And FYI my screen resolution is 1366x768, so it's most common for laptops and notebooks.
-Audio/Video menu: V-sync: there is 0, 1 and 2 option. I've always though that this could be only on and off. hoverdog, does option 1 or 2 fully enables v-sync?

-AI & gameplay. Game forces you to spam cities really early. I know it is a MoM successor, but it's a shitty way to play. AI starts spamming settlers much too early, overall settlers are too cheap. My suggestion is to increase price of a settler unit and modify AI a little bit, because in my first game after 20-30 turns I was surrounded by an enemy cities. And I was playing on a small map with only one opponent
-Probably an add-on idea, but there should be some building that increases your control zone, even only for a few, selected tiles. It could improve gameplay vastly, and also reduce cities spamming.

-Animation&sounds. Obviously they are under heavy development. Battle sounds are the worst I've ever heard in a computer game. Some are silent/normal, some are motherfucking loud as shit. Like that battle roar, that sounds exactly as vomiting - too loud and distorted. Probably a placeholder, though. Animations are completely out of sync with effects and sounds. Also not good, but I don't mind.

-Overall, game has super potential, but requires an enormous amount of work. It's not very fun to play WoM at this moment. Games like these are selling for many years, but only if they've got support and some expansions every 1-2 years. If you play your cards right, you could increase your sales vastly. But if you're going to sell some DLC/add-ons, and the game is still going to be buggy and unfinished, then nobody is going to buy that. Even me.

 

[Dickie]

-Probably an add-on idea, but there should be some building that increases your control zone, even only for a few, selected tiles. It could improve gameplay vastly, and also reduce cities spamming.

Just as an FYI, there's a spell that does this called Tamed Frontiers and it's Earth/Augmentation 6. It increases the town radius by 1 and is a huge boon. Sadly, doesn't stop cities being dropped right next to yours. It just means that the town radii will overlap even more. Also, I believe this is currently the only way to increase the town radius.

I think that if they increased the minimum distance between towns by one more tile, it'd help out this game a lot. I wonder if that can be modded. For some reason, I really don't like that towns can be placed so close together that they are working the same tiles, even without Tamed Frontiers. It just seems wrong, since I've never played another game like that.

 

[Dim]

Do what Dominions did. ctrl+number saves queue including everything to a #. press # when mouse over queue to copy saved queue to current queue.

 

[covr]

Do what Dominions did. ctrl+number saves queue including everything to a #. press # when mouse over queue to copy saved queue to current queue.

I don't understand what you've said.

 

[Dim]

I mean the devs should add that functionality. You know from Dom4? and allow it to be used from the cities list.

 

[covr]

After a week I've played this game a little bit more. It seems that I can't scroll map via mouse properly. When the mouse pointer touches lower or upper edge of the screen - map is scrolling fine. But it won't work with left and right side of the screen. The screen just won't move. And scrolling by using arrow keys isn't convenient.
I can't also proceed to the next turn when any unit is selected, which is incredibly dumb.
But the game is noticeably faster and more stable than before.

 

[Incantatar]

The game still isn't on GOG. I wonder if it's too unfinished for them.

 

[cvv]

The game still isn't on GOG. I wonder if it's too unfinished for them.

Yeah, I've been waiting for them to release it since I don't buy full priced games from Steam.

I guess they have some bad experience with buggy games that needed a lot of frequent patching. I can only imagine the butthurt people are pouring on them due to their super crappy patching "system". I myself participated in the pouring twice, for Eador and Wasteland 2, because it always took so much longer for a patch to arrive to GoG than Steam and sometimes it even broke the game (W2).

I really hope the Galaxy client comes soon because in this day and age, when releasing games in an alpha state is a standard, the old GoG delivery method is not up to snuff anymore.

 

[mastroego]

On the other hand, it's "Good OLD Games".
It makes sense if they wait at least for the game to have stabilized a little...

 

[m_s0]

On the other hand, it's "Good OLD Games".
It makes sense if they wait at least for the game to have stabilized a little...

Actually, it's just 'GOG.com' now. Kinda like MTV dropping the whole 'Music Television' thing.