Friday coronation - Alexios I Komnenos is crowned!

[Nefaro]

We should probably have some COE3 live multiplayer games sometime.  Despite being turn-based, the turns don't take any time at all.

[Bison]

Hmm...I wonder how that works.  The turns are short but the games take awhile to play.  Well unless a horde of deer or moose overruns your Empire in the first few turns.

[Huw the Poo]

Starting location is key for the early game as I am learning.

Yeah, the game is very reliant on random starting conditions which is a touch irritating.  Fantastic game besides that, though!

[Bison]

Well I think I'm on the verge of winning my first game.  Right now I'm facing off against a couple of monster stacks from my largest rival.  Next time I load it up we should engage in the winner takes all battle.  One thing about the Troll King is that yes you have some big heavy hitters and Mum can call in a dragon or two to fight in your armies, but it's the dozens of goblin archers and footmen who chew up the ranks of your enemies.  I think my monster stack army has like 50+ archers which are pewpewing the enemy to submission 1-3 points of damage at a time while they focus their attacks on my giants and trolls.

[Bison]

Starting location is key for the early game as I am learning.

Yeah, the game is very reliant on random starting conditions which is a touch irritating.  Fantastic game besides that, though!

Hey man, I saw your in game message but my mac would let me out to say hi.  Hi  Huw!  I'm playing the Troll King.

[Huw the Poo]

Hey man, I saw your in game message but my mac would let me out to say hi.  Hi  Huw!  I'm playing the Troll King.

Ah, no worries mate.  The Linux client isn't particularly good for messaging yet either.

[Gusington]

How does CoE compare o Warlock? They sound similar.

[Nefaro]

How does CoE compare o Warlock? They sound similar.

Not all that similar.  There's no structure building or anything of that nature in COE3, you just capture stuff that was randomly placed on the map for income.  The real strength of it is the large variety of troops, and the different strengths of the nations.  Many of them have a specific resource that they get from specific terrain and can use those to summon fantastic monsters or essentially level-up their mages to be able to cast more powerful spells and summons.  Being made by the same people as Dominions 3, it has many of the same units.  It's simple turn-based game but all the content really makes it interesting in a quick playing beer & pretzels flavor.  I still fondly recall the time I managed to summon a Tartarian Spirit with my Necromancer 'class' or the big Carrion thing that grows stronger with each kill it makes.  Oh sweet rampage!  8)  The bestest mythological/fantasy units to be found in the genre, for sure.  If you feel like a fantasy strategy game with complicated game mechanics, this is a good cheap option and a nice 'lite' alternative to Dom3.

Here's a wiki with a listing of some of the Classes to be had in COE3, and the possible recruits & summoned units they can get (if you click on one):
http://coeiii.wikia.com/wiki/Classes

**************

I mentioned a multi-player game earlier because it seems to be rather popular (even relatively so on Steam for such a game) and only played via direct IP.  I don't think it lends itself to a PBEM format because each turn can be finished so quickly but there can be a lot of them.  Even with three our four armies wandering around, it usually only takes me 10-15 seconds to move them and do recruitment/summons.  It's watching the battles that takes time and I'm not sure how that's handled in multiplayer - it may just shoot straight to the results.

[MengJiao]

It's Friday again and the weekend is ahead!  The game playing goodies for me include Warlock and Civ IV BTS MP.  I'm looking for something else to AAR and should wrap up my current one sometime on Saturday.  So I'll be searching through my games to see what I can find.

  Don't really know what I'm going to be up to.  I'm expecting a new machine with roughly twice the power of my current i5 1 gig graphics set up and I'm kind of getting interested in Cliffs of Dover so I don't want to get sucked into say RoF or ARMAIII too much.

  So it might be a board game weekend, maybe with Easy Company getting driven out of Nuenen in Where Eagles Dare just because that won't be to hard to imagine.

   Working on the ends and outs of PQ-17's PQ-17 might be too much for me in my current state of imaginative absorbtion in  Cliffs of Dover.

I did succeed in not doing anything very interesting in the world of games.  The Son Bridge scenario (complete with Easy company all set to
rout out of Nuenen) was a bit too wasy to imagine so  I started working on a scenario that starts with the 101's drop north of Eindhoven and goes from there.  Hopefully figuring out when the Guards Armoured actually reached the area north of Eindhoven won't be too hard to fit into the scenario.

[Bison]

How does CoE compare o Warlock? They sound similar.

Not all that similar.  There's no structure building or anything of that nature in COE3, you just capture stuff that was randomly placed on the map for income.  The real strength of it is the large variety of troops, and the different strengths of the nations.  Many of them have a specific resource that they get from specific terrain and can use those to summon fantastic monsters or essentially level-up their mages to be able to cast more powerful spells and summons.  Being made by the same people as Dominions 3, it has many of the same units.  It's simple turn-based game but all the content really makes it interesting in a quick playing beer & pretzels flavor.  I still fondly recall the time I managed to summon a Tartarian Spirit with my Necromancer 'class' or the big Carrion thing that grows stronger with each kill it makes.  Oh sweet rampage!  8)  The bestest mythological/fantasy units to be found in the genre, for sure.  If you feel like a fantasy strategy game with complicated game mechanics, this is a good cheap option and a nice 'lite' alternative to Dom3.

Here's a wiki with a listing of some of the Classes to be had in COE3, and the possible recruits & summoned units they can get (if you click on one):
http://coeiii.wikia.com/wiki/Classes

**************

I mentioned a multi-player game earlier because it seems to be rather popular (even relatively so on Steam for such a game) and only played via direct IP.  I don't think it lends itself to a PBEM format because each turn can be finished so quickly but there can be a lot of them.  Even with three our four armies wandering around, it usually only takes me 10-15 seconds to move them and do recruitment/summons.  It's watching the battles that takes time and I'm not sure how that's handled in multiplayer - it may just shoot straight to the results.

One of the great features is that even though you might play the same race every game, the spells your casters know are randomized so you'll almost never end up with the exact same spells.  This really can adjust your strategy.  For example in the past Mum, my troll shaman, had a variety of summon spells like frogs, wolfs, great boars, but this game she has none and instead has one's like plague, fear, polymorph.  It really keeps the replayability very high.