OT: Starcraft II and Elemental

[Foodstamp]

Elemental is not living up to any of the hype. The modding beta starts tomorrow. Hopefully it will offer something, but they have already toned it down as well making it xml driven instead of python.

[WraithLord]

Originally Posted by DonCorazon

I pre-purchased Elemental, despite myself, after finding the Gal Civ game dry, like a mathmetician trying to describe jazz with algebra equations.

this really hits the
very well put

[Dimaz]

WL, to your first question, about other fantasy TBS games. There is one, Eador (www.eador.com), that I play for a year already. It was made by a small team (1 person made almost everything and some others helped with graphics and music I think), it's 2D, and it's really fun. Unfortunately, there is only Russian version so far. Author first distributed it himself, but now he has contract with some Russian publisher company and I think they're going to make a translation and release English version sooner or later, also they're going to make 3D version AFAIK. Unfortunately the game has lots of text that is hard to translate preserving original style, so the attempts for fan translations sort of failed.
About the gameplay: you play on random generated maps consisting of provinces. In the starting prov there's your castle where you can build buildings (more than 200 I think, they gradually appear in campaign) and buy units and heroes, and memorize spells. Each hero can lead up to 15 units, so the fight is maximum 16x16. Units have morale and fatigue stats as in dom3. The combat is turn-based, first one side then the other. The units and spells have different tiers; each hero has slots for some tier 1 units, less for tier 2 and so on, same with spells. Spells are recharged after battle. There are 2 resources, gold and magic crystals. All units and heroes collect exp in battles, the cap is lvl30. There are 4 basic classes of heroes and each class can dual on lvl 10 or remain the same (1-10: Warrior, Archer, Commander, Mage, 11-30: W-W, W-A, W-C, W-M, A-W, A-A, etc, where W-A and A-W are different classes). Units get upgrades on every levelup and also can receive a medal for some exceptional performance in battle (like dealing damage 3*own hp etc).
All provinces are owned by indies at start, and the farther the prov is from someone's cap, the stronger indies are. There are special sites in provinces, some of them are known from the beginning and some require searching. The guardians have the same distribution around the caps as indies. First ring has tier-1 units, second t2 etc. You can build guard in captured provinces and up to 3 buildings. Buildings can give some economic effect or allow to recruit units (forts) or other bonuses, guards, well, guard the province (you can have only 1 guard at a time).
OK, I think it's enough for now Overall, I really like it, and it costs only 10$ if you buy it directly from author as I did (don't know about publisher's price policy). Of course there are some problems here and there, but I definitely recommend it to everyone interested in MOM, HOMM, AOW style game.

[Natpy]

Eador is a nice game.

[WraithLord]

This Eador sounds real nice. The screenshots look cool as well. I hope they'll do an English version sometime.

[RadicalTurnip]

Nooo. Don't tell me this about Starcraft! See, I sorta' ignore WoW; so, to me, Blizzard is still this tiny niche company that doesn't have a lot of money, but find a style of game, and perfects it and combines all the awesomeness of other games within that style, and then releases a product like Diablo or Starcraft (heck, even Warcraft).

This sounds like I will have to face the fact that Blizzard got *huge* and seems to be succumbing the the money-hoggishness of most other huge companies.

I miss the Blizzard of yore.

[Dimaz]

I think you can even try to play Russian demo. Probably you won't understand the plot or random events, but you can still taste the combat system. BTW, I sort of learned English playing Star Control 2 in '93 on my 286, and I think Eador is the perfect way to learn a bit of Russian

[Natpy]

In Eador all text are open in txt files, so can be easy automatic pseudotranslated

[Folket]

I find that the campaign in Starcraft 2 is the best RTS single player I have played.

I only play on brutal difficulty (highest) and have to fight like an animal to win a scenario (I have so far not manage to win on my first try). Given that the scenarios are 20-30 min long it is really intensive and it does not feel bad when replaying after I have lost.

[Folket]

I downloaded a file called Eador_1.04.1_full.exe but it does not seem to work. I got to something that looks like a installation wizard and then click a button I think is next and then it gives me an error message in russian and exits.