Warlock 2: The Exiled

[Misconnected]

What's the story with getting heroes? I find that I either get one or two for the whole game or there's a dozen lining up.

Heroes can be freed from lairs and gotten as quest rewards.

They'll also show up at semi-random and offer their services for pay. This happens with intervals of 33'ish turns (they might come earlier, but not later... I think).

 

[Vagiel]

Actually they might be on to something with this focus on neutral spawns. Ofcourse a good AI is preferable but if you can't do that right getting neutral enemies and other things like events can keep the game interesting even late game. An empire building that has you dealing mainly with neutral enemies trying to reach various objectives without other players sounds interesting if done well.

 

[Metro]

PvE is where the first game stood out (given the crappy opponent AI) so it's not surprising the sequel is the same. Warlock was essentially turn-based Majesty. Looks like the sequel has shaped up to be the same.

 

[muds_animal_friend]

An empire building that has you dealing mainly with neutral enemies trying to reach various objectives without other players sounds interesting if done well.

Elemental: Fallen Enchantress' scenarios, wildlands and quests is the closest implementation I can think of but you did specify "done well" so we can eliminate that.


My favorite PvE in a 4x is Sword of the Stars grand menaces. Watching the locust grand menace eat the Tarkas alive and then launch a splinter fleet in my direction while I was bogged down in a two front war with the Moragii and Hivers was one of my greatest fffuuu moments in gaming.

 

[Torrasque01]

My favorite PvE in a 4x is Sword of the Stars grand menaces. Watching the locust grand menace eat the Tarkas alive and then launch a splinter fleet in my direction while I was bogged down in a two front war with the Moragii and Hivers was one of my greatest fffuuu moments in gaming.

Don't forget End of Flesh scenario. 4chan vs Skynet on /tg/ was incredible.

 

[Markman]

While I do like little maps that you teleport into it gets a bit of a chore keeping track whats going on on each plane. The Ogre hero I got is pretty good at taking over towns but otherwise its needed a big all out attack to take over em, especially the bigger ones. Also giant fucking turtles, lol.
Have no flying units but theres a separated tile from the plane that I cant get to that keeps spawning annoying archers next to my town every other turn. Dunno how they can teleport. Bug, I think.
Fun game, moar actiony that AoW thats for sure. Theres always some shit going on.

 

[Monocause]

While I do like little maps that you teleport into it gets a bit of a chore keeping track whats going on on each plane. The Ogre hero I got is pretty good at taking over towns but otherwise its needed a big all out attack to take over em, especially the bigger ones. Also giant fucking turtles, lol.
Have no flying units but theres a separated tile from the plane that I cant get to that keeps spawning annoying archers next to my town every other turn. Dunno how they can teleport. Bug, I think.
Fun game, moar actiony that AoW thats for sure. Theres always some shit going on.

If a tile with a monster hut is already occupied by a monster, the spawn happens on the nearest unoccupied tile.

There's quite a few things you can do about this. A limited flight enchantment is rather early in the tech tree, you can learn to summon rainbow dragons fairly quickly, elves have flying ships, monsters and undead (i think) have bats, svart prospectors start with a summon crows spell. You're only boned if you're playing humans or planewalkers, but even then flight summons/enchantments aren't difficult or exhausting to get.

 

[anus_pounder]

While I do like little maps that you teleport into it gets a bit of a chore keeping track whats going on on each plane. The Ogre hero I got is pretty good at taking over towns but otherwise its needed a big all out attack to take over em, especially the bigger ones. Also giant fucking turtles, lol.
Have no flying units but theres a separated tile from the plane that I cant get to that keeps spawning annoying archers next to my town every other turn. Dunno how they can teleport. Bug, I think.
Fun game, moar actiony that AoW thats for sure. Theres always some shit going on.

I envy the fact that you got a ogre hero at all. I recruited the weakest healer hero around turn 30 or so and now over a hundred laters I'm yet to see another hero available for recruitment...

 

[Markman]

While I do like little maps that you teleport into it gets a bit of a chore keeping track whats going on on each plane. The Ogre hero I got is pretty good at taking over towns but otherwise its needed a big all out attack to take over em, especially the bigger ones. Also giant fucking turtles, lol.
Have no flying units but theres a separated tile from the plane that I cant get to that keeps spawning annoying archers next to my town every other turn. Dunno how they can teleport. Bug, I think.
Fun game, moar actiony that AoW thats for sure. Theres always some shit going on.

I envy the fact that you got a ogre hero at all. I recruited the weakest healer hero around turn 30 or so and now over a hundred laters I'm yet to see another hero available for recruitment...

Dont think Im more than a hundred turns in, Im still fighting with tier 1 units that are still pretty tough but those new elf archers Im fighting against are like twice as strong.Playing as human. Got 3 heroes, an ogre, goblin archer and a knight. Forts help me with independents, they do decent damage so far and take a while to wreck. Had a nice random quest where 2 big ass dragons spawned and started instagibbing my archers and rogues.
Also had some magedude appear and tells me he's gonna fuck me up unless I show him a spell he doesnt know yet.

And a final nail in the coffin by the warp gate I get to answer 3 questions and get the last one wrong and a big ass fucking wolf appears with 120 hp and 60 attack damage. My heroes are at about 40-50 hp with 15-25 damage. Dont know if Im gonna get out of this with my heroes alive, but if I do I want a quadra level up.

 

[Raghar]

You are fucked up anyway. That mage was serious.

 

[Markman]

You are fucked up anyway. That mage was serious.

 

[Raghar]

That's what I like on complex strategy games. It doesn't matter how great you are player, when RNG totally fuck you, you are in unwinable situation. However when AIs are not ganging on you and are attacking each other and not the weakest player, aka totally fucked up player, it's occasionally even recoverable.
Dungeon crawl is similar. When RNG has its day...

 

[anus_pounder]

While I do like little maps that you teleport into it gets a bit of a chore keeping track whats going on on each plane. The Ogre hero I got is pretty good at taking over towns but otherwise its needed a big all out attack to take over em, especially the bigger ones. Also giant fucking turtles, lol.
Have no flying units but theres a separated tile from the plane that I cant get to that keeps spawning annoying archers next to my town every other turn. Dunno how they can teleport. Bug, I think.
Fun game, moar actiony that AoW thats for sure. Theres always some shit going on.

I envy the fact that you got a ogre hero at all. I recruited the weakest healer hero around turn 30 or so and now over a hundred laters I'm yet to see another hero available for recruitment...

Dont think Im more than a hundred turns in, Im still fighting with tier 1 units that are still pretty tough but those new elf archers Im fighting against are like twice as strong.Playing as human. Got 3 heroes, an ogre, goblin archer and a knight. Forts help me with independents, they do decent damage so far and take a while to wreck. Had a nice random quest where 2 big ass dragons spawned and started instagibbing my archers and rogues.
Also had some magedude appear and tells me he's gonna fuck me up unless I show him a spell he doesnt know yet.

And a final nail in the coffin by the warp gate I get to answer 3 questions and get the last one wrong and a big ass fucking wolf appears with 120 hp and 60 attack damage. My heroes are at about 40-50 hp with 15-25 damage. Dont know if Im gonna get out of this with my heroes alive, but if I do I want a quadra level up.

The mage is a terraformer and, generally speaking, he WILL fuck you up by submerging all your city developments in water. Sometimes you get lucky and instead he'll turn your city tiles into fertile land, but mostly its submerging your cities all the way.

The next mage after him is very easy. Just spawns a bunch of gates with Stage 2 Melee units. (warning, these units are very resistant to archers. Not much melee armor though)

Elves are p.cool. Started the game with a custom mage, elven archer and elven village. Elven archer was shooting down fools like no tomorrow. Low health was a problem but if they got first strike they could take down stage 2 units as well. Then I upgraded them (for 700 gold) to Elven Sharpshooters. Health is still stage 2esque at 36/36, but attack with all the upgrades I gave them is around 80.

 

[Genma:TheDestroyer]

The stupid demon wolf actually helped me out in my first game. I trusted one of the other mages to stay docile for awhile because we'd been happily trading back and forth and obliterating neutral spawns on a desert plane. It wasn't until I noticed that he had around twenty units clustered nearby my new city that I realized there might be trouble.



Sure enough, war.....right after I'd answered wrong and gotten the wolf. Who proceeded to ignore me and go through the horde like it was a big bucket of bellyburgers.


Left me with enough time to call in reinforcements and then bombard the fuck out of that thing when it got done and was weakened.

 

[Markman]

Lawl, this game.Picked up the game from yesterday. I might have been playing a bit too fast cause I got 3 worlds for myself, 4th Im waging war against another mage, 5th is guarded by a big bad wolf and 6th is this Shadow world I got into. Also those random spawns started happening with vampires and skellies.

Piece of cake for my 12hp archers. lol

Im gonna do a restart and take it a bit more slowly cause I cant see me taking on this cause the strongest unit I got is a 55 hp minotaur.
Not gonna go human this time fosho.

 

[anus_pounder]

Lawl, this game.Picked up the game from yesterday. I might have been playing a bit too fast cause I got 3 worlds for myself, 4th Im waging war against another mage, 5th is guarded by a big bad wolf and 6th is this Shadow world I got into. Also those random spawns started happening with vampires and skellies.

Piece of cake for my 12hp archers. lol

Im gonna do a restart and take it a bit more slowly cause I cant see me taking on this cause the strongest unit I got is a 55 hp minotaur.
Not gonna go human this time fosho.

I'd argue you're doing alright? Shadow, lava and elemental (at least these 3) worlds always have lolwut neutrals no matter what and if you're playing exiled mode the neutral spawns will gradually keep getting stronger and stronger. I've heard tell that at some point you're looking at golden dragons and the like spawning all over the place every few turns. Which actually makes exiled mode more challenging than sandbox.

 

[muds_animal_friend]

Yes, when you get to the final shard you'll be fighting hordes of shadow dragons and the like. I was playing on self-imposed ironman challenging and went in with my three surviving heroes, two gold dragons, two elven archers, a mage, and a healer -- everyone except my ogre hero was dead within two turns. Red dragons also start spawning all over your own territory as trash mobs.

 

[Genma:TheDestroyer]

Stumbled into a lava plane right before Ainadra (Mirror Ardania) full of Bonelord looking guys with 150+ HP and 50-65 attack power.


One thing I do have going for me is regen. If you don't finish off my troops they're likely going to heal to full health next turn. Trolls start at 8+, and I've given them every enchantment, town upgrade and skill that boosts it. Combined with their obscene cumulative resistances Trolls are actually more effective than Rainbow Dragons at being damage soaks. They just don't care about your attacks.

 

[Markman]

I feel sad now that I didnt played the first one but it seems this one is like first but upgraded so no big loss there. Shame that the game just sat there in the Steam library for like a year and I barely looked at it.
Bit of a downside of having 600+ games on Steam.

I'm starting to get a hang of it now, there's something in the game I cant put my finger on, its like the game is always trying to fuck you up and wont give you time to breathe. You cant turtle in this game, always have to move around and defend or take over some city/lair and random events just up the challenge like it wasnt high already. But it feels good when you clear that what it seemed like a impossible obstacle.
Started a new game, Sandbox mode, skipped Exiled this time, picked everything on normal and it created quite large maps with only 3 worlds and 3 other mages.
Im barely turn 20 and I got 2 independent turtles knocking on my capital, random events spawned invisible assassins that needed both my heroes and spell intervention. Luckily the mage I met on the same plane accepted peace for now. Im trying to plan out a better building order so I can get better units faster, elementals and turtles are a bit too much for my low level army, even my ogre hero got his ass whooped by a fire elemental. I mean, the game just loves to kick my ass. I love it.

 

[kris]

Yes, when you get to the final shard you'll be fighting hordes of shadow dragons and the like. I was playing on self-imposed ironman challenging and went in with my three surviving heroes, two gold dragons, two elven archers, a mage, and a healer -- everyone except my ogre hero was dead within two turns. Red dragons also start spawning all over your own territory as trash mobs.

Shadow dragons are tough, but then I got units immune to spirit damage and things changed.

 

[cvv]

stuff

Yep, seconding that.

Not to start any flamewars but I gotta admit, I was looking forward to AoW3 a lot while I was a bit "meh" about W2. Now thouth, I'm having an absolute blast with Warlock while I can't seem to get into AoW3 for some reason.

 

[muds_animal_friend]

Gotta second that sentiment. I took a day off work to play AoW and ending up putting in four hours work anyway just to take a break from the dull grind of the AoW campaign. It should be the other way around. There's a sense of lulzy high fantasy fun in Warlock 2 that I'm just not feeling from AoW III at the moment. I'm definitely going to take a look at the Warlock editor when it's released; some well designed PvE scenarios or custom campaigns would be great.

 

[cvv]

Gotta second that sentiment. I took a day off work to play AoW and ending up putting in four hours work anyway just to take a break from the dull grind of the AoW campaign.

Yeah, I can't put my finger on why AoW3 is such a bummer though. I think the main reason is the game is a bit uninspired, it does everything all right but adds absolutely nothing new or exciting. Maybe Triumph played it way too safe.

While Warlock is a great sum of very flawed parts, AoW3 seems so far as a humdrum sum of the best parts the SRPG have offered in the past 20 years.

 

[sser]

Gotta second that sentiment. I took a day off work to play AoW and ending up putting in four hours work anyway just to take a break from the dull grind of the AoW campaign.

Yeah, I can't put my finger on why AoW3 is such a bummer though. I think the main reason is the game is a bit uninspired, it does everything all right but adds absolutely nothing new or exciting. Maybe Triumph played it way too safe.

While Warlock is a great sum of very flawed parts, AoW3 seems so far as a humdrum sum of the best parts the SRPG have offered in the past 20 years.

Warlock wasn't particularly inspiring when it first came out, either. I already enjoy AoW3, but I have full faith that through continual support it is going to get a lot better.

 

[Galdred]

I'm still undecided on this one (I mean, Full price + the 12 DLC that Paradox will be churning out is quite a big entry price at 0% discount). Is it better than Warlock 1 + Armageddon? The Unity mode seems to offer the same PvE centric challenge, which was the main strength of Warlock 1+DLC.