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by laudablepuss 06/15/2005, 12:35pm PDT |
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FABIO wrote:
Really? I loved it for getting rid of all the crap that made the Age of Empires/Empire Earth game 80% about managing ten thousand workers on three dozen different resource patches around the map. RoN concentrated everything in your one or two main cities while still making it a good idea to expand. Brilliant!
The resources popping up only when you reached the right age to harvest them was bad? Really? Pretty much everyone seems to agree that was the ONE thing Civ3 did right.
Knowledge points were bad? Their existance made expanding mandatory, since you could only have one university per city.
Not having to constantly replant farms is bad?
I absolutely loved how RoN streamlined all the tedious resource management crap that plagues this sub genre. Idle workers that automatically go to work on their previous job once they've finished the current? Yes please.
The only thing that kept me from loving RoN totally was that it still held on to the braindead, impossible to control combat of the Empires games. It was all about who had more units. Telling siege weapons to fire on buildings was about as deep as the tactics got. Sure there were a couple units with special abilities, but beyond telling your general to "entrench" to get an armor bonus, how often did you see anyone actually using them online? Every online game I ever played was just siege engine pushes followed by city bombing followed by nuke fights.
Okay, enough. "Really? That's bad?" Yes. Let me tell you why (taking your points in no particular order).
First of all, I loved RON. When you say "the braindead combat of the Empires games" I assume you mean the Age of Empires games because that sentence makes zero sense if you meant the Empire Earth games. Empire Earth had intricate RPS systems and stupid individual units, so you had to direct your archers to shoot the swordguys, then tell them to run away from the javelineers. You might still call this braindead, but it's not like RON. In RON, taking control of your units just screws things up. They already know who they're supposed to be shooting. It's all about logistics in RON. Again, this is fun, but sometimes I want to get into the clickfest aspect too. Which is why I like Empire Earth and hate Empire Earth II. Now where am I going to go for non-RON Civ RPS games? I guess I can just fuck the hell off, okay, thanks.
Here's the problem with EEII boiled down to a single sentence: I don't want a new, crappier version of RON.
Second, you never ever ever ever ever had to replant farms in any game ever except the first Age of Empires game, as far as I know. So what the hell are you talking about? In Empire Earth, you built a big farm complex all at once that could handle eight workers and had a central gather point. Same with Empires:DotMW. But now EEII makes you build each individual patch and a warehouse seperately. So yes, that's bad. And when a patch gets destroyed by rampaging badguys, you have to rebuild it. Wanna know what you did in EE if part of your farm got killed? If the central point was still there, you just hit the "replant" button and it instantly regenerated. I liked those farms. (OOPS DID I SAY REPLANT I guess I lose.) Furthermore, in EEII you never need to build farms in the first place because the gather patches are infinite and gathering is faster than farming. Just like in real life? I don't know. Whatever.
The mines are infinite and like I said, I never had to go get more (after aquiring a handfull at the beginning). Mining was fast enough that I never ran into a problem producing units. So the impetus to expand took a big hit there. Bad. The deemphasis on resources went too far here and with the farms. Maybe if I shortened the unit creation time I could fix this!
One impetus to expand, though, is the 400 kinds of special resources. (As always, my criticism of this feature is also a criticism of RON.) You have no idea what the pile of rocks is next to your base, but just to be safe, you better own every pile of rocks. I have a hard time with using piles of rocks that I can't even identify as a stragic target for my poor little rock-throwing Samurai cavemen. I get that the designers needed to mark them on the map somehow so they don't get buildings put on them, but the fact that everyone knows what they are seems weird to me. Maybe there's a better way to implement them?
The good about Universities probably outweighs the bad, I suppose. Later in the game they make some sense. And it's the one and only thing encouraging a player in EEII to expand. So great. At least in EEII the knowlege mines only require three workers, although you keep having to check back because their capacity grows. I'm not sure knowlege mines are that great an addition to the game -- do we really need to explicitly identify where all the ideas and know-how come from? -- but I'm probably in the minority here.
I do like the Crowns idea in EEII. Each crown gives you: a commander unit (unless you alread have one) and a special power for the duration of your hold on that crown (a crown can only be held by one player at a time). But of the three kinds of commander unit, only the Millitary one is any good. Go figure. You get crowns mostly by researching. So research all the millitary techs as fast as you possibly can and get the millitary crown and the millitary guy. Repeat until you've crushed the other players. That's as far as I got in developing a strategy for that game.
Here's what kills me. Empires:DotMW was a fine, if flawed, attempt. It had lots of great ideas that could have been elaborated on in EEII. Instead it was dropped like a 1000 pound maggot. And now I have Thrones and Patriots II. Fuck that. |
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So anyway, Empire Earth II by laudablepuss 06/13/2005, 2:41pm PDT 
THIS FUCKING FORUM SHOULD LEARN HOW TO SPELL IRRELEVANT NT by FUCK 06/13/2005, 2:43pm PDT 
Your beef is with the English language by laudablepuss 06/13/2005, 2:49pm PDT 
MY BEEF IS WITH YOU, COCKSUCKER NT by laudablepuss 06/13/2005, 3:07pm PDT 
uh, ooops :( NT by laudablepuss 06/13/2005, 3:08pm PDT 
I hate myself! I think. by laudablepuss 06/13/2005, 3:12pm PDT 
Hillarious relevent! by laudablepuss 06/13/2005, 3:19pm PDT 
Another thing I hate by laudablepuss 06/13/2005, 2:46pm PDT 
The resource streamlining aspects in RoN was bad? by FABIO 06/14/2005, 9:55pm PDT 
Re: The resource streamlining aspects in RoN was bad? by laudablepuss 06/15/2005, 12:35pm PDT 
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