You take my FRIDAY and I'll take yours too!

[airboy]

I'm playing Age of Wonders 3.

[JasonPratt]

Being too lazy to get Shandalar running again (though I feel that itch will need scratching in the future), but wanting more structure in my MTG card duels, I spent all my gametime Sunday going back to last year and picking up where I left off on playing both campaigns of Etherlords 2. I had already played and beaten the Vital/Synthet campaign years ago, but it had been long enough that I didn't remember all the plot points or necessarily how best to build various decks, and this way I could eventually create a save system that would allow me to play both factions I wanted (Life and Air basically) in the 'same' campaign sometime years from now.

And that was fun, even though most of the day I was slogging through one of the factions I don't like (Chaots).

I honestly don't know why Etherlords didn't take off better. The first game's mixture of strategic map control with fights played out by card battles didn't work well in practice (after the first few boards anyway), but the basic idea is still probably good, and the card battles themselves are tight -- as the (wandering adventure) sequel showed, making small but crucial improvements and adding new units, decks, and a significantly different (and lethal) fifth faction. The opposing decks that come with the game are (almost) all well-designed, and the AI is brutally efficient at using them, especially when paired with AI characters that are equally designed to exploit their decks strengths and weaknesses. The graphics are inventive and still hold up today. The voice acting is... highly variable (from quite good to dreadful), at least in English, but that can be fixed or just turned off. The series is available at GoG for around $6 each, though I kind of recommend skipping the first game and maybe going back for a less refined version of the card system to see how it pairs experimentally with a HoMMish map campaign. (I can't recall if either Ether is available at Steam and/or GG.)

[Nefaro]

The Etherlords series was great.  Especially Etherlords 2, although it had that damnable StarFarce DRM on the disks. 

I beta tested for those & recall seeing some of the input for another of their great titles, Silent Storm, in the beta forums.  Notably the request for which weapons & hardware players wanted to see included with it.  That's where the 'Panzerklein' nuttery took off, after the long laundry list of actual historical weapons.

Nival had some good stuff, back in the day. 

[MetalDog]

I spent a good ten hours over Saturday and Sunday playing CK2 as the King of Leon (sounds like I have next weeks band for the Friday thread already.)

[JasonPratt]

They went on to do at least one of the HoMM games, too. (5?)

At one point they were working on Etherlords 3, but then buzz on that died away.  :'(

Naturally, no Starforce on the GoG editions. :D Ether2 at least plays like a dream on my Win8.1 system. Which is no small claim, as the code was horribly optimized: the computer I owned at the time I bought either game couldn't run either one without slogging into a framerate slideshow so terrible I could barely quit the game.