Caltrops - Elemental: War of Magic





	[quote name="fabio"]The tutorial completely breaks if you save and try to reload. All units, quests, and scripts disappear. Not that it matters. The tutorial only covers FOUND A CITY, MOVE, PICK UP ITEM, MOVE ONTO MONSTER. It was 2 hours of a regular game wondering why I wasn't getting any new units before I discovered that there was an Alpha Centauri unit builder I had to use! This was mentioned nowhere! I never got into Master of Magic. Never played it back in the day, and couldn't get into it recently off of GOG because it seemed like there were at least 4 games now that do the same thing better, and I got bored of Warlock which everyone says is the spiritual successor. So there's no MoM nostalgia or frame of reference here. I wouldn't call it a terrible game, but it's like they started at Fall From Heaven 2 and gave up all the refined Civ 4 features in order to bring you MoM tactical combat. Or if you played Warlock, then it's like they just replaced the Civ 5 combat with MoM's. If the tactical combat is by far the most important feature for you then you might enjoy it. But the strategic portion is such a huge step back from FFH2 and Civ 4. There are no more easy to understand numbers or icons. Everything has 2 to 4 steps of conversation to go through. Increased city growth doesn't lead to more tiles worked but a bonus every level. New levels are reached when you amass enough food but you're capped at some food number based on your food yield every turn. City growth is a number based on X percentage of surplus food. The only yield tile that matters is the one your city is on, and each grain yield is converted into X food yield per turn based on building bonuses as is production points based on mineral tile yield. So you only harvest the yield on the one tile your city lies on, but you can use settler units to place outposts with a 1 border influence range to expand your borders and claim resources which then go to the closest city, sort of like those resource collector units in Alpha Centauri. Only about 5% of the tiles in the game have any grain yield at all so you're hard limited to city placement. Here's what's bugging me though, as far as I can tell, once your border covers a land, any grain/material yield it had goes away. So it seems like you want to intentionally keep your cities from expanding their zones of control so future city sites don't get swallowed up? That's can't be right. Biggest disappointment: it's either a testament to how great the Civ 4 engine was or how poor the effort put into Fallen Enchantress was that this game doesn't even have a fraction of the unique features Fall From Heaven 2 had. No more good/neutral/evil system (something about kingdom and empire factions it doesn't explain), no more armageddon counter, no more wildly unique factions (factions here just get a couple minor different stat boosts). I dunno. Maybe a MoM veteran can tell me I'm playing it wrong. I'll try it some more but so far it's just making me want to go play FFH2 again.[/quote]