Wednesday, August 10, 2011

GameLog 210 & 211

CivWorld (25h) - Beta version of Sid's facebook game. Finally a decent facebook game with no energy bar in sight! There are some mundane bubble popping features creeping in, but there's plenty of variety and a definite feeling of pulling together as a civ. Seems to have about a week-long game cycle, and it's quite intense at times. Better than grepo at the moment, but it might also be the shiny ...

Grepolis (18h) - 90th. Couple of organised battles, but losing ground to CivWorld in terms of maintenence time.

Elemental: War of Magic (10h) - Tried once again to see if the game is playable. Last patch made some odd design changes, but th lack of heroes in 2 games made me even madder. Booted it up on a whim ove rthe weekend and found that it had sorted it out somewhat. Heroes are back and I could get into the mid-game.

Allowing armies right off the bat has changed the game significantly (for the better) and even though heroes are still powerful, a 4 or 8 stack of peasants is now the main part of early armies rather than cannon fodder. It also leads to interesting choices of concentrating power into a single 8 stack unit for better tactical play, or diversifying a little more through 1-stack and 4-stack armies. 1-stack armies are a little useless now, and the interface is stuffed trying to produce them too. I'd dearly like to have single unit for scouting, so I hope the interface cludge is an oversight. The game feels more meater now with more item drops and WAY less health for all units making battles somewhat trickier.

VRKnight build still romps away with a couple of early city sweeps. I'm not keen on shelving a build that's still available on startup yet as there's been many other builds nerfed into oblivion by the changing face of this game.

I still have my cities being randomly called other city names in the game (indexing issue?), and some battles automatically resolving causing king deaths, but Greig doesn't seem to have either of these problems and no real mention of them on the forums means I might have something left over from the beta. Wiped the image and re-downloaded, but I still have these bugs. The city name thing really destroys confidence that ANY of the data being displayed is actually correct, but the autobattle thing is a deal-breaker. Only recourse is to save before every battle, and reload to try another battle first to try and get out of the autoresolve.


Terraria (8h) - Cam's multiplayer time.

Civ4: Colonization (8h) - Tried a single city challenge. Got a little stale, but seemed achievable.