Fallen Enchantress revisited

[Peter Huebner]

I posted here about Fallen Enchantress by Stardock a while back, when I
was only just getting into the game.

By now I have close to 150 hours of gameplay under my belt and I think I
have a slightly better idea what game features I am talking about.

The basic premises are mostly 4x bog standard ... resources, building
structures on them, goodie huts, heroes as well as troups make for a
nice rpg element.
Sadly, the game looks dull and drab, and I am talking about brightness
and colour here. From a couple of metres back off the monitor it's all
ochres and blacks, for the most part, and I struggle to see anything
unless I halve that distance. Ok, appearance, minor quibble really.

The thing is: they keep twiddling with it. Some is good - bug fixes like
the map generator now puts gold resources on the map, wild game, fruit
trees, bees ... but also they keep changing the mechanics, and I feel
not always for the better.
Someone asked me initially about the overpowered hero stacks. At that
point (just as I was getting started on the game) you could still build
viable hero stacks, but I found they did not do enough damage to take
down the really nasty monster armies like dragons. You had to mix them
up with troups.

The second to last time I played, they had not only nerfed the one
useful enchantment spell so it could only be cast ONCE per faction, they
had also introduced a bug so if you cancelled it you could not cast it
again. From the description, the spell should not stack, but be possible
to cast on each separate army at least.
The last time I played I found that one of my armies, about half troups
and half heros was not advancing in levels at all. So now they have
introduced a bug, or a nerf, that maybe divvies up xp or otherwise slows
hero advancement to the point where you still have a level 6 main hero
by the time you've settled half the map, researched 80% + of the tech
tree and you're barely able to cast the first fireball that has about as
much clout as a handful of wet snow.
The update before these two introduced a population requirement with
building the settler-units; since the settlers are also the units that
build resource harvesting outposts that almost slowed the game to a
standstill, because you simply could not generate enough of them to get
your empire started ... they have reversed that approach, but still ..
Was that a stampede by a committee?

Way, way, way too much fiddling with the gameplay mechanics yet. I don't
like to have my game play differently every time I want to fire it up,
not when the 'rebalancing' is as drastic as this.

What's more, I have encountered a passel of bugs in the special high
class enemy areas, the 'wildlands'. Rivers that aren't rivers for
purposes of building improvements, cities that are supposed to be
conquered but don't show as taken when they're taken, invisible monster
lairs that can't be found even in a square-by-square search, a supposed
settlement spot that doesn't show up at all etc etc. That sort of thing
makes a strategy game excruciatingly frustrating when you're trying a
new strategy and you're defeated by bugs and lousy design or beta
testing after you've gone thorugh several hours of building up an empire
that can actually tackle these areas. Because shit just doesn't work as
they said it would.

So all that is why I am back to playing Civ 4 and 5 at the moment for my
strategy fix. Enchantress is overall a very disappointing game
considering it's from the house of the makers of GalCiv. The potential
is there, the engine is nice, I just wish they'd iron out the bugs
before they keep messing with the gameplay -- and keep the fiddling
severity down, puhleeze. Not to mention *test before you auto-patch my
client*.

-P.

[Ross Ridge]

Peter Huebner <no....@this.address> wrote:
>So all that is why I am back to playing Civ 4 and 5 at the moment for my
>strategy fix. Enchantress is overall a very disappointing game
>considering it's from the house of the makers of GalCiv. The potential
>is there, the engine is nice, I just wish they'd iron out the bugs
>before they keep messing with the gameplay -- and keep the fiddling
>severity down, puhleeze. Not to mention *test before you auto-patch my
>client*.

Maybe they should consider how unbalanced Master of Magic was. It's the
game all 4X fantasy games get compared to and the game that still
generally considered the best of the genre.

Ross Ridge

--
l/ // Ross Ridge -- The Great HTMU
[oo][oo] rri...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca
-()-/()/ http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~rridge/
db //