This is probably one of the biggest problems with the campaign. Each one is one faction vs itself, occasionally with minor differences. Combined with how long some of the campaigns can be and it magnifies some of the other flaws in the game.
Let's play Rise of Legends
- Thread starter mr_stibbons
- Start date
- Let's Play
Vennucci
- Location
- Canada
Welcome back to Rise of Legends. Today we'll be wrapping up the Vinci campaign, with the final assault on the city of Vennucci.
Prior to the assault, I take advantage of my plethora of army points to rejigger my forces a bit. That empty box in my old army had been bugging me, so I cut some basic units to shove in a newly upgraded juggernaut. My logic is that it's much easier to build up smaller units than more expensive units, so I should focus my army development on the more expensive units.
Now, since I also have a massive pile of wealth points, I throw them into military districts, under the logic that fully upgraded muskets are significantly more valuable than basic clockwork men. There's also an argument for merchant districts, because 100 wealth scales perfectly with your upgrades, but really the decision is arbitrary. If you've gotten this far and managed your economy well it's very hard to lose this battle.
Like the Dirsi prison mission, the assault on Vennucci lets us start with three hero units, not because this is a baseless mission, but just because it's a climactic end to the campaign. I agree with this choice on an aesthetic level, because with the Vinci campaign level caps, bringing in heroes isn't a very attractive choice. Since a final mission should have a bunch of hero units, just giving us a bunch of free heroes is the easiest way to get that objective accomplished.
Because it's been far too long since the doge has had a chance to use one of his beloved wunderwaffe against us (Does anyone remember the poor sky crusher?) he has anchored his defence of Vennucci around the Hammer, a cannon with rounds the size of a small house. This thing actually has tracks modelled if you look closely, which seems wildly optimistic at first glance. We shall see if the resources spent on the cannon were used wisely or not.
The assault starts right off the bat, we take our army and smash a nearby neutral city. This half of the map is a devestated ruin littered with broken vinci units, craters, and dead trees, a great way to set the atmosphere.
There are scattered enemy infantry units nearby, but they wisely retreat across the bridge to the city of Vennucci.
This decision leads to them being the first victims of the Doge's Hammer this battle. Seeing how demolition trucks failed to destroy the Ranconi bridge, he's decided to stop messing around.
This is the first, but will not be the last point where the game does some in-gameplay cinematics. I'll try to catch them as best I can, because they aren't always obvious.
Briefly stimied, I swing west to overrun a satellite city before it becomes a problem. However, there's no way across the gorge from here. After taking over, we head east.
In heading east, we come across our first signs of real resistance, and our first secondary objective for this map. The doge has foolishly left depots of hammer shells in a vulnerable location, and by destroying them we can prevent the gun from firing on us.
Now, there is a mechanic where Giacomo's demolition men can instantly blow up an ammo depot and most of it's guards, but I am choosing not to use this in favour of showing off a little.
You see, when upgraded to fusiliers, musket units get a third stance option-Assault. After a pile of upgrade points your musketeers finally get the ability to use the butts of their guns to punch people in the face. Which raises the question: why would you ever uses this ability? Sure the damage numbers look impressive, but going to melee range with fragile muskets is a hell of a price to pay. The secret is that assault is an anti-large attack-it represents musketeers clambering atop enemy tanks, prying open hatches and smashing vulnerable bits. In addition to make in juggernauts even more obsolete in vinci mirror matches, this also makes well microed musket blobs basically uncounterable. Air destroyers and clockwork spiders are soft counters, but I've shot down lots of air destroyers with muskets this campaign, and the trample resistance of assault fusiliers blunts the effectiveness of spiders.
This phenomenon isn't unique to musket units, and there are a couple units in the game where it's hard to figure out what exactly you are supposed to do to counter them. The inverse is also true, and I find it hard to figure out what the ideal targets are for some other units like clockwork men.
Anyhow, after take the other ammo dump and a relatively undefended city, we finally find a path north, directly towards the now ammoless hammer. Frankly, the hammer probably should be harder to disable, or the doge should be more proactive in using it. It's too easy to dodge. And yes, I did make another juggurnat, despite just calling them obsolete. There is a reason for this, and it's not that they're one of the more photogenic units in the faction.
You need these because the doge has taken the logical step of guarding one oversized war machine with another. This is the proper Land Leviathan, slightly bigger than the scavenger boss we fought at Monte Laguna and much nastier. We get a side quest to kill this thing, but you would have to go seriously out of your way to dodge it.
Despite that, it isn't a match for the army you have at this point. Multiple jugguernauts, assaulting fusiliers, three heroes and air destroyers trash it in short order. It does a number on assaulting musket units, but even one super unit isn't that powerful unsupported.
As you can see by the stat display, Leviathans work about the way you would think they would, with a ton of health and a brutal amount of siege damage. The bit about being best countered with other leviathans is both probably wrong, scary if that's how the designers thought the game actually worked and a textbook example of how useless the game is at explaining how unit matchups work. The actual best answer is to use heavy air units, and if that doesn't work throwing large amounts of anti large ground units is a good backup plan.
After bringing the monster to it's knees, we manage to take control of it. Well we would have, i missed the bloody trigger again You see, once you kill it, it switches to your colour, then giacomo plays a voice line, then the quest popup occurs. I used augmentation after the voice line finished, but before the quest popup, and thus the stupid leviathan just sat there useless.
Well, let that be a warning to you. After killing the leviathan there's very little other forces guarding the hammer, and we can swoop in and capture it.
So, how does one use a Hammer? This overcompensating monster has three types of shells loaded-shrapnel shells to shred units, explosive shells to blast apart buildings, and poison gas shells for area denial, all of which have damage numbers that are frankly ludicrous. Now, the shrapnel shell is generally the most useful, but each shot type has a separate long cool down timer, so you are forced to use them all if you want to maximize the value from the hammer.
Taking control of it, we get an objective to test out use the hammer on a blob of the doge's reinforcements. Not for any points, but just to watch the devastation.
In a rather silly anecdote, this site isn't a campaign exclusive one: there is a special 3v1 map that gives a player a Hammer, if you want to play a very abnormal game.
Problem is that I am a little slow off the mark, and everybody starts moving before the hammer round lands. We're going to have to deal with this blob of troops the old fashioned way.
It's a rough fight, and most of my infantry forces are wiped out in the fighting. Mostly because I forgot to take them off assault stance. Not having the leviathan also didn't help. But by blowing all the hero abilities on hand I am slowly able to grind out the mass of units the doge throws my way.
Doge guards can go into assault stance, but they don't seem to like using it, which lets me take advantage of the other use for juggernauts-running over infantry.
This ends up being a suitable epic final battle, as the initial surge of Vennucci troops are reinforced by freshly produced units from the central production facilities. I decide I need to respond in kind, queuing up my own reinforcements.I start moving toward buying air destroyers and juggernauts, mainly to reduce the amount of micro that production of cheaper units would entail.
The leviathan does get fixed up after the initial surge of troops is mostly beaten back. It's sadly not as good as the one you get in multiplayer-for one, it's got like a quarter of the normal health and you need to avoid losing it. It also only has one of it's normal abilities, devastator which launches one of it's frontal drills as a missile to do massive damage to a single target. In skirmish it can also shut itself down to heal, which would be super useful right now, or tunnel to any area on the map, making the whole unit a lot more splashy. Unspoken is it basically needs these abilities to work, since it would take ages to heal a leviathan to full with passive healing, and it doesn't fit in transports and needs an alternate way to cross chasms.
After breaking the enemy army, the doge hammer is used to break the very city it was made to defend. One explosive round does the job.
And that is that. Venncci has fallen, cut to cinematic.
VENNUCCI: A team of mianan soldiers pulls down a massive statue of the doge in the plaza outside vennucci while GIACOMO watches.
Enter LENORA, sultrily.
GIACOMO spitefully: Wish he were here to see it
LENORA: Pettruzzo?
GIACOMO, with the arrogance of a conqueror: The Doge! Where is he? Where's his army? A child could have won this battle.
Enter a corporal with a message.
CORPORAL, slightly unnerved by his lords ranting: My lord, general Carlini has requested that you come at once.
GIACOMO gesticulating wildly: Keep looking corporal. Search every house, every room, every corner. I don't intend to leave here without the doge of Vennucci.
Cut to the outskirts of Vennucci. CARLINI examines a massive set of tracks that have torn into the forest. GIACOMO dismounts from his walker.
GIACOMO: These look like tracks from the doge's hammer.
CARLINI: They are.
GIACOMO, realizing that he's leaving without the Doge of Vennucci: But, we captured it. When did . . .
CARLINI on the verge of panic: He built more than one, we captured a decoy. The real one is headed east. He drew us out, Giacomo.
Cut to a flyover of Vinci land. The path of the Doges Hammer makes no effort to deviate from its course to Miana. Forests are trampled and mountains sundered by the great machine. Mianan, flyers, air destroyers, and transport dirigibles swoop past.
GIACOMO: We have to reach Miana before it's too late.
I like this cutscene. It's short and does what it needs to do. I love the way Giacomo goes from an arrogant conqueror to a panicking boy as he realizes what the doge is doing. It's almost like a coded message from the developers: This was the easy part. A child could have beaten this campaign. Now the real game starts.
The actual final mission is okay: it's secretly very linear, but it does a good job of disguising that fact. There a ton of units, big toys to play with, and a big map to play on. However, if you've ground out upgrades and points the mission is going to be pretty easy, which is a shame. There's a definite tendency for the final maps of a campaign to fail to keep up with the progression systems, and they get overly easy.
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Desert's Edge
- Location
- Canada
Ok, so it might be difficult, be please read the following carefully.
OK?
HAHAHAHAHA
So, between this session and the last one, the doge has levelled Minana offscreen. Which isn't the best way to make the player give a damn. Not only that, but please keep in mind that we have literally never seen Miana, ever. The first mission is in another province. So rather than being a shocking tragedy, I feel nothing. Who cares about a city we've never seen being levelled. They should have levelled Pirata. We've at least seen the place.
I really hope that there was a mission in the ruins of Miana that got cut, because this level of hamfisted writing should have been obvious from the storyboard level. Why should we care about a city we have literally never seen?
Anyways. Instead of trying to rebuild, Giacomo is haring off after the doge into the Alin desert realm. Without planning, or taking supplies, or modifying his stuff. This has, predictably, gone poorly, and the introductory mission of the Alin campaign is us talking command a small Vinci force utterly lost in the desert.
This is actually reflected in the upcoming mission. Your clockwork men start with a permanent effect on them that does damage over time. This is slow enough that you can keep it under control with Giacomo's heal ability, but it encourages you to continue moving forward rather than hanging about.
A glimmer of hope comes when we meet a living face, a desert mystic. Giacomo is too genre savvy to fully trust him, but we don't have a great bargaining position here.
So, to get the Mystic's help, we need to retrieve a relic for him from some raiders. Along the way, we come across the sand circles under a currently unknown faction. We are instructed to destroy them, since they are basically the Alin barracks, they produce basic ground units. You will have to explore off the beaten track to catch all of them and complete the objectives.
You will also notice that my army got nerfed hard in the transition between campaigns. Last mission I had fully upgraded clockwork men and musketeers but now I am back to baseline clockwork men and grenadiers.
Another circle is just across the bridge, as we head towards our objectives, but we still haven't seen any enemy troops.
Just a bit of a ways south, we come across the raider camp. There's a pretty sizeable force of Alin units here in addition to a defensive tower, but with some use of your hero abilities it shouldn't take long to clear it out. There's also three of the seven sand circles here, but they won't produce anything. Feel free to use hero abilities to make this easier on yourself, especially Lenora's mind control.
After killing all the raiders, the Mystic shows up and takes control of the relic. At this point the damage over time on the clockwork men vanishes, either from a game trigger or the augmentation ability, which I think can clear passive effects.
As we follow the mystic, we will be quickly ambushed by the same raiders, they literally rise out of the sands to attack us. There's a lot of them, but Alin units aren't the same quality as Vinci units, so we have an edge in the melee.
Don't worry about them attacking the mystic, as he's virtually invincible. Giacomo will complain, but it would take almost a two solid minutes for them to hack him down.
And there's a second ambush right over here.
They use two units here, desert walkers, the basic Alin infantry unit with two swords, and the sand horror, the giant insect half in the ground, which is actually a neutral unit. It's a bit of waste when the unit's design is that cool.
Anyways, after a short trek the mystic comes to this little structure,
Where he turns into the hero we fought back in mission 2. And laughs manically about how this will be our doom.
And starts summoning an army to murder us.
The goal of the fight is to focus on the enemy hero. Once he's dead, it's mission success, while the rest of his troops just keep getting summoned. The little structure also starts shooting at you, but it has a ton of health and my force is a little depleted by this point. Just grin and bear it. Stunning and mind controlling the enemy can control them for a bit, but eventually you will get overwhelmed if you fight fair.
Soon enough, the raiders we had been fighting earlier show up to with a large force, and join our side. They certainly help control the masses of summons that get thrown out, but the AI won't prioritize the enemy hero.
Minor note, but this reveals the hidden circles of sand on the minimap. So if you missed them this time and really feel the need to get that missing hero point, you now know where they are.
Once the enemy hero's health drops to about 15% or so, he jumps off into an untargetable magic wind, and we are left, in a cutscene, to clean up the remaining minions with what we have left.
However, it seems Giacomo recognizes our rescuer.
I'm not quite sure why this mission exists. It's not terribly unique, it isn't familiarizing the player with Alin units or mechanics so its not a tutorial. It does help set the tone for the rest of the campaign, and introduce some characters, but surely there could be a better mission for it, one that actually lets you use some Alin units, rather than playing around with Vinci units. It's just a bit of an odd mission.
OK?
HAHAHAHAHA
So, between this session and the last one, the doge has levelled Minana offscreen. Which isn't the best way to make the player give a damn. Not only that, but please keep in mind that we have literally never seen Miana, ever. The first mission is in another province. So rather than being a shocking tragedy, I feel nothing. Who cares about a city we've never seen being levelled. They should have levelled Pirata. We've at least seen the place.
I really hope that there was a mission in the ruins of Miana that got cut, because this level of hamfisted writing should have been obvious from the storyboard level. Why should we care about a city we have literally never seen?
Anyways. Instead of trying to rebuild, Giacomo is haring off after the doge into the Alin desert realm. Without planning, or taking supplies, or modifying his stuff. This has, predictably, gone poorly, and the introductory mission of the Alin campaign is us talking command a small Vinci force utterly lost in the desert.
This is actually reflected in the upcoming mission. Your clockwork men start with a permanent effect on them that does damage over time. This is slow enough that you can keep it under control with Giacomo's heal ability, but it encourages you to continue moving forward rather than hanging about.
A glimmer of hope comes when we meet a living face, a desert mystic. Giacomo is too genre savvy to fully trust him, but we don't have a great bargaining position here.
So, to get the Mystic's help, we need to retrieve a relic for him from some raiders. Along the way, we come across the sand circles under a currently unknown faction. We are instructed to destroy them, since they are basically the Alin barracks, they produce basic ground units. You will have to explore off the beaten track to catch all of them and complete the objectives.
You will also notice that my army got nerfed hard in the transition between campaigns. Last mission I had fully upgraded clockwork men and musketeers but now I am back to baseline clockwork men and grenadiers.
Another circle is just across the bridge, as we head towards our objectives, but we still haven't seen any enemy troops.
Just a bit of a ways south, we come across the raider camp. There's a pretty sizeable force of Alin units here in addition to a defensive tower, but with some use of your hero abilities it shouldn't take long to clear it out. There's also three of the seven sand circles here, but they won't produce anything. Feel free to use hero abilities to make this easier on yourself, especially Lenora's mind control.
After killing all the raiders, the Mystic shows up and takes control of the relic. At this point the damage over time on the clockwork men vanishes, either from a game trigger or the augmentation ability, which I think can clear passive effects.
As we follow the mystic, we will be quickly ambushed by the same raiders, they literally rise out of the sands to attack us. There's a lot of them, but Alin units aren't the same quality as Vinci units, so we have an edge in the melee.
Don't worry about them attacking the mystic, as he's virtually invincible. Giacomo will complain, but it would take almost a two solid minutes for them to hack him down.
And there's a second ambush right over here.
They use two units here, desert walkers, the basic Alin infantry unit with two swords, and the sand horror, the giant insect half in the ground, which is actually a neutral unit. It's a bit of waste when the unit's design is that cool.
Anyways, after a short trek the mystic comes to this little structure,
Where he turns into the hero we fought back in mission 2. And laughs manically about how this will be our doom.
And starts summoning an army to murder us.
The goal of the fight is to focus on the enemy hero. Once he's dead, it's mission success, while the rest of his troops just keep getting summoned. The little structure also starts shooting at you, but it has a ton of health and my force is a little depleted by this point. Just grin and bear it. Stunning and mind controlling the enemy can control them for a bit, but eventually you will get overwhelmed if you fight fair.
Soon enough, the raiders we had been fighting earlier show up to with a large force, and join our side. They certainly help control the masses of summons that get thrown out, but the AI won't prioritize the enemy hero.
Minor note, but this reveals the hidden circles of sand on the minimap. So if you missed them this time and really feel the need to get that missing hero point, you now know where they are.
Once the enemy hero's health drops to about 15% or so, he jumps off into an untargetable magic wind, and we are left, in a cutscene, to clean up the remaining minions with what we have left.
However, it seems Giacomo recognizes our rescuer.
I'm not quite sure why this mission exists. It's not terribly unique, it isn't familiarizing the player with Alin units or mechanics so its not a tutorial. It does help set the tone for the rest of the campaign, and introduce some characters, but surely there could be a better mission for it, one that actually lets you use some Alin units, rather than playing around with Vinci units. It's just a bit of an odd mission.
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I kinda liked this mission though. Giacomo is such a flawed character, and his mix of arrogance and lust for vengeance is so quintessentially Italian it hurts. It shows that his people were following him to the death with shades of fanatic fervor ala Alexander or Napoleon.
While we might not care about Miana, they do.
While we might not care about Miana, they do.
- Location
- Attempting to cast animate object on a black hole.
Many of the re-skined units actually have a few changes to them. I think the Scavengers heal a little when a clockwork unit near them dies. Except for a handful of units, including basically all of the Fallen, most of them don't really change much except for messing up plans that involve sending the minimum amount of force necessary to do the job. As hard counters don't really matter much in the campaign outside of a few spots, and sending tons of units is often the default strategy, this basically makes almost all of the re-skins useless in the hands of the AI. The only really useful ones are the Fallen/Coatl ones, and the poison guy's minions.
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*delurks*
Rise of--RISE OF LEGENDS! Ahhhh! Oh man, this is on my list of favorite games ever! It certainly has its issues, including a weird and inconsistent plot, and a severe case of Xen Syndrome (in that the Vinci campaign has only two or three territories with no scripted mission, the Alin campaign has about half the missions as unscripted skirmishes, and in the Couatl campaign the majority of territories have no scripted missions), but it's just one of the most -creative- and tragically underdeveloped settings I've ever seen (also, are you serious? There are people who say that the steampunk Vinci faction--with steam-tanks, clockwork robots, Leonardo-inspired aircraft, and steam-powered mechanical spiders of both large and colossal sizes--isn't steampunk? What kind of fooky blockhead thinks -that-? It's practically tautological!). I even played the game all the way through (for the first time on Hard) as recently as last year (got my disk right on my desk right now, in fact), though interestingly I went for a very different strategy than you are which made my playthrough a HELL of a lot more difficult, namely, I spent the fewest Hero Points possible on all three of Giacomo, Lenora, and Carlini, because [spoilers], but as I progressed through the Vinci campaign, especially once I got into the Alin campaign, I was summoning every single Hero on my roster if the map in question permitted it.
I also rate the Heroes themselves quite differently. Not counting Giacomo himself (because that's too easy), my three favorite Heroes in descending order are Distruzio, Pulitore, and Andromolek (with Battaglion a close competitor). Yes, Distruzio is my Number-1 Favorite Hero in all of Rise Of Legends. Whereas Giacomo is a refined engineer with advanced materials, resources, and manpower support at his back, Distruzio is a scrappy kid who had to improvise with whatever he could find and build his own help. I also found his random-ability mechanic to be pretty funny, as it did lead to the catchphrase of "DAMMIT DISTRUZIO", because I always summoned him first whenever I could, took him with me on every limited-hero mission, and used his abilities as often as possible. The interesting thing is that Distruzio and Giacomo both have aoe Heal/Buff and aoe Damage/Debuff abilities as their first two abilities, but Distruzio's are INCREDIBLY stronger and have much larger areas...but yeah, he has a chance of using the "wrong one". Curiously, if he selects the -correct- grenade to throw, it affects only who it is supposed to: heal grenades affect only your guys and not the enemy, damage grenades affect only the enemy and not your guys. But if he grabs the wrong grenade, it affects -everyone-, your guys and the enemy, so the best way to use Distruzio's aoe abilities is when your guys are clumped up close with the enemy: make sure you set your zone down on as many friendlies and enemies as you can, in equal measure, so if Distruzio uses the wrong grenade, at least you'll get some benefit from it. Also, Distruzio uses such a funky cool-looking tank. But, gameplay-wise, the -best- part about Distruzio? Summoning him actually gives you two "Heroes" in one. Distruzio is paired with the transforming battle-robot Zeke. Zeke is -amazingly- useful. His Scout Form makes him so friggin FAST, and he's so tough, so he can fly right into enemy territory and survive unlike the fragile actual Scout Units, plus because of his speed it's easy to deploy Zeke to wherever he's needed. Zeke's Battle Form is a decent all-rounder that can handle gaggles of infantry, and can go toe-to-toe with most high-tier units. And if you need that City over there taken down -right now- and you don't have any heavy siege or Battaglion in the area, Siege Form's got your back. He is sooooo useful just for Scout Form and Battle Form alone, though.
Pulitore is also really cool because, even though he's a one-mission wonder, there's so much story hinted at for him. That and he just looks cool, with that steampunk breathing apparatus he built for himself because of his scarred lungs, and his chemical tank. Also, the higher-level Pulitore is, the more status debuff effects he makes your army flat-out -immune- to, up to and including Glass Corruption (but it only applies to every unit you have on the field at the moment Pulitore is summoned, units built afterwards do not get his Aegis buff, so he's often the Hero I summon last, despite liking him so much). There is only a -single- status effect I've seen that a level 5 Pulitore does not make your army immune to, and that's the Plague debuff from the Couatl Death Snakes, Death Spheres, and Czin.
And Andromolek. Even though Andromolek gets zero lines, only the vaguest characterization, and kinda lackluster abilities...the dude friggin -rides- an ARMORED GLASS SPIDER! That just looks so cool! And it's just awesome that he studies the 'forbidden' Glass Magic! Despite the fact that you have access to some Glass units from the beginning of the Alin campaign, waaaay before you obtain Andromolek, though he DOES let you construct Glass Spires so you can create Dark Walkers, Marids, and...I -think- Glass Scorpions. Dark Walkers on -your- side are incredibly good, way more useful than even the maximum-upgraded Alin infantry, simply because Dark Walkers are the only unit aside from Glass-themed Heroes that inflict the Glass Corruption maximum-HP-reducing debuff.
Battaglion is up there as well, as one of the few people of the Condottieri who has been familiarizing himself with technological principles. He looks pretty cool walking around with that huge cannon on his back, and his -abilities-! His maximum-upgraded Siege Shot just makes -entire cities- EXPLODE in one hit, it's amazing.
Also, despite not really being my favorite Hero, or being all that strong, I actually did grow to like Venza myself. True, her first, third, and ultimate abilities are "meh", but her -second- ability is quite useful in that it just passively ups all her combat stats as -well- as making her cost less in resources and -time- to summon (the first time at least, if she "dies" and you resummon her, she doesn't get the time-decrease). As said above, I never put points into Giacomo for the duration of the Vinci and Alin campaigns if I could avoid it, so in many missions when I'm up against an enemy Commander who rushes me with their Starting Army and Hero Unit, I'd be in serious trouble. Venza is very handy in a pinch because she's cheap to put on the field, and whereas other Commanders take a whole minute or two to summon, Venza summons in -seconds-, making her really useful when you -need- to stall the enemy -right now- and hold them off just long enough to build up your forces.
Anyway, I am really excited to keep reading this LP, I'm so happy to see someone else sharing this game with SV
*relurks*
Rise of--RISE OF LEGENDS! Ahhhh! Oh man, this is on my list of favorite games ever! It certainly has its issues, including a weird and inconsistent plot, and a severe case of Xen Syndrome (in that the Vinci campaign has only two or three territories with no scripted mission, the Alin campaign has about half the missions as unscripted skirmishes, and in the Couatl campaign the majority of territories have no scripted missions), but it's just one of the most -creative- and tragically underdeveloped settings I've ever seen (also, are you serious? There are people who say that the steampunk Vinci faction--with steam-tanks, clockwork robots, Leonardo-inspired aircraft, and steam-powered mechanical spiders of both large and colossal sizes--isn't steampunk? What kind of fooky blockhead thinks -that-? It's practically tautological!). I even played the game all the way through (for the first time on Hard) as recently as last year (got my disk right on my desk right now, in fact), though interestingly I went for a very different strategy than you are which made my playthrough a HELL of a lot more difficult, namely, I spent the fewest Hero Points possible on all three of Giacomo, Lenora, and Carlini, because [spoilers], but as I progressed through the Vinci campaign, especially once I got into the Alin campaign, I was summoning every single Hero on my roster if the map in question permitted it.
I also rate the Heroes themselves quite differently. Not counting Giacomo himself (because that's too easy), my three favorite Heroes in descending order are Distruzio, Pulitore, and Andromolek (with Battaglion a close competitor). Yes, Distruzio is my Number-1 Favorite Hero in all of Rise Of Legends. Whereas Giacomo is a refined engineer with advanced materials, resources, and manpower support at his back, Distruzio is a scrappy kid who had to improvise with whatever he could find and build his own help. I also found his random-ability mechanic to be pretty funny, as it did lead to the catchphrase of "DAMMIT DISTRUZIO", because I always summoned him first whenever I could, took him with me on every limited-hero mission, and used his abilities as often as possible. The interesting thing is that Distruzio and Giacomo both have aoe Heal/Buff and aoe Damage/Debuff abilities as their first two abilities, but Distruzio's are INCREDIBLY stronger and have much larger areas...but yeah, he has a chance of using the "wrong one". Curiously, if he selects the -correct- grenade to throw, it affects only who it is supposed to: heal grenades affect only your guys and not the enemy, damage grenades affect only the enemy and not your guys. But if he grabs the wrong grenade, it affects -everyone-, your guys and the enemy, so the best way to use Distruzio's aoe abilities is when your guys are clumped up close with the enemy: make sure you set your zone down on as many friendlies and enemies as you can, in equal measure, so if Distruzio uses the wrong grenade, at least you'll get some benefit from it. Also, Distruzio uses such a funky cool-looking tank. But, gameplay-wise, the -best- part about Distruzio? Summoning him actually gives you two "Heroes" in one. Distruzio is paired with the transforming battle-robot Zeke. Zeke is -amazingly- useful. His Scout Form makes him so friggin FAST, and he's so tough, so he can fly right into enemy territory and survive unlike the fragile actual Scout Units, plus because of his speed it's easy to deploy Zeke to wherever he's needed. Zeke's Battle Form is a decent all-rounder that can handle gaggles of infantry, and can go toe-to-toe with most high-tier units. And if you need that City over there taken down -right now- and you don't have any heavy siege or Battaglion in the area, Siege Form's got your back. He is sooooo useful just for Scout Form and Battle Form alone, though.
Pulitore is also really cool because, even though he's a one-mission wonder, there's so much story hinted at for him. That and he just looks cool, with that steampunk breathing apparatus he built for himself because of his scarred lungs, and his chemical tank. Also, the higher-level Pulitore is, the more status debuff effects he makes your army flat-out -immune- to, up to and including Glass Corruption (but it only applies to every unit you have on the field at the moment Pulitore is summoned, units built afterwards do not get his Aegis buff, so he's often the Hero I summon last, despite liking him so much). There is only a -single- status effect I've seen that a level 5 Pulitore does not make your army immune to, and that's the Plague debuff from the Couatl Death Snakes, Death Spheres, and Czin.
And Andromolek. Even though Andromolek gets zero lines, only the vaguest characterization, and kinda lackluster abilities...the dude friggin -rides- an ARMORED GLASS SPIDER! That just looks so cool! And it's just awesome that he studies the 'forbidden' Glass Magic! Despite the fact that you have access to some Glass units from the beginning of the Alin campaign, waaaay before you obtain Andromolek, though he DOES let you construct Glass Spires so you can create Dark Walkers, Marids, and...I -think- Glass Scorpions. Dark Walkers on -your- side are incredibly good, way more useful than even the maximum-upgraded Alin infantry, simply because Dark Walkers are the only unit aside from Glass-themed Heroes that inflict the Glass Corruption maximum-HP-reducing debuff.
Battaglion is up there as well, as one of the few people of the Condottieri who has been familiarizing himself with technological principles. He looks pretty cool walking around with that huge cannon on his back, and his -abilities-! His maximum-upgraded Siege Shot just makes -entire cities- EXPLODE in one hit, it's amazing.
Also, despite not really being my favorite Hero, or being all that strong, I actually did grow to like Venza myself. True, her first, third, and ultimate abilities are "meh", but her -second- ability is quite useful in that it just passively ups all her combat stats as -well- as making her cost less in resources and -time- to summon (the first time at least, if she "dies" and you resummon her, she doesn't get the time-decrease). As said above, I never put points into Giacomo for the duration of the Vinci and Alin campaigns if I could avoid it, so in many missions when I'm up against an enemy Commander who rushes me with their Starting Army and Hero Unit, I'd be in serious trouble. Venza is very handy in a pinch because she's cheap to put on the field, and whereas other Commanders take a whole minute or two to summon, Venza summons in -seconds-, making her really useful when you -need- to stall the enemy -right now- and hold them off just long enough to build up your forces.
Anyway, I am really excited to keep reading this LP, I'm so happy to see someone else sharing this game with SV
*relurks*
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Well, presumably the kind of blockhead that knows the source of the word and why it's called 'punk'. Just like how Star Trek or Mass Effect aren't cyberpunk despite having a lot of high tech, the Vinci don't really meet the old definition of Steampunk just because they have steam and clockwork based technology. The confusion stems from how people have kinda made the punk part of the word meaningless.
Azar Harif
- Location
- Canada
Apologies for the delays, this is a long update.
This mission is one of my least favourite missions in the game. Not that it's bad to play, but because it's a lousy tutorial and because of it's misuse of game resources-both of the side quests could easily headline an entire mission, and I wouldn't be surprised if they threw them both in after other missions were scrapped. And lets not get started about how useless the tutorial is-dropping new players into a sandbox with the entire arsenal is not a good way to teach them how to play.
So, last time on Rise of Legends we were rescued from glass monsters by a mysterious lady. Lets take a look at her, shall we?
Arri is our first Alin hero, and her abilities are serviceable. The first turns on a damaging aura that ignites everyone around her, the second teleports her to a target and does a large chunk of damage, and often the first part of that is better than the second. The third is the real moneymaker-it temporarily summons a Rukh, the Alin equivalent of an air destroyer to attack the enemy, which will never not be a battle deciding move. Lastly, her fourth ability is just a big dumb AOE.
She also begins a trend that runs through all Alin heroes-rather than a passive buff, Arri provides some free units for every level past the first. Her actual passive is a bit more valuable-any melee units in your army get bonus damage while Arri is on the field.
CUTSCENE TIME
GIACOMO, CARLINI and LENORA walk through the halls of Azar Harif, capitol of the Alin kingdom, approaching a waiting ARRI.
Lenora: You seem to know your way around
Giacomo, technically true: I visited here
Carlini, calling his lord on his bullshit: Visited? Try: ran away. Took us four months to find him and we could barely drag him home.
Arri: Giacomo
Giacomo, staring at Arri: I liked it here
Lenora, jealous: I bet you did
Arri: Are you ready? We have little of the king's time
Lenora: I'm not going in.
Giacomo, taking Lenora aside: What?
Lenora, sorry, no can do: I can't repair my airships here. I've got one working flyer and I need to take it back to pirata for parts.
Giacomo wondering how this didn't come up earlier: But we need you.
Lenora, spite, then sweetness: Yeah well, you'll be fine . . . I'll catch up with you as soon as I can.
Giacomo: Ok. . . hurry back.
Cut to the audience chamber of the KING of Azar Harif.
King, kindly old uncle: Why have you come, young lord of Miana. I trust you do not bear bad news. We've had our share of that already.
Giacomo, formally: It is an honour to have this audience your higness, but I am afraid my news is indeed quite dire. My city, Miana was destroyed.
King tired: How many of your people survived?
Giacomo: None that I know of, aside from the men I brought here.
King: You have my deepest sympathies. You are, of course, allowed to stay within the safety of the city, for what it is worth in these dark times.
Giacomo: I'm afraid there's more. We came to warn you.
King: Warn me?
Giacomo: The army that destroyed my city? It came here into your city. Your people are in danger.
King to audience: Leave us. Tell me young lord. Do you know of the dark Alin?
Carlini, the brains of the operation: Those things we fought in Padonia.
Giacomo sticking foot in mouth: You're right. We fought raiders. They looked like Alin, but were made of dark glass. I thought the dark Alin were just a story . . .
King righteous anger: It is no story. It is no story that kills our people and destroys their villages, it is no story that eludes my army at every turn, it is no story that makes us prisoners in our own city.
Giacomo still an arrogant kid at heart: Your highness, tell me more about the dark Alin when did they attack you, where are they based?
King, story time: Nearly thirty generations ago, when the might of our people was unmatched, a Genie known as Sawu was corrupted by a strange talisman, one that fell from the sky. Under the influence of this talisman he created creatures of living glass, dark glass. And he used them to conquer the city of Mezekesh.
Cut to images of Sawu and the Dark Alin. Sawu's talisman is the same DEATH RAY the doge uses.
Giacomo: I've never heard of it.
King: It was once the mightiest city in our kingdom, and the most beautiful. Sawu could not be stopped. The most powerful mystics of that age banded together to destroy him, but the magic they used against him seemed to feed the talisman to which he was bound. He only grew stronger.
Carlini, cut the babble old man: But he was beaten somehow.
King: Mezekesh was abandoned, and the city, with Sawu at it's heart, was buried under a mile of desert sand. Since then, their have been rumour from time to time of Dark Alin rising from that cursed desert. But this is rumour no longer. In recent weeks the dark akin have returned and they grow stronger with each passing day. Something has awakened them
Giacomo, capable of seeing where this is going: And the Doge promised to stop them.
King tired again: Indeed. Until he succeeds we can only hope to endure these attacks
Giacomo pissed: Whatever the doge told you it was a lie. He's not here to save your kingdom He has some goal of his own.
King, bitter laughter: Of course he does. I have ruled for thirty seven years, young lord. I am no stranger to such things. But if he destroys our enemy while achieving this goal, how can I deny my people such a gift?
Giacomo: Tell us how to reach Mezekesh. The doge will betray you, I promise, we will not.
King, master of sick burns: You ask me for permission to commit suicide my friend. I do not have the power to deny you that.
Giacomo: It won't be suicide, not if you allow Arri to come with us.
King: That I can deny. I need Arri here. I must think of the safety of my people.
Arri, sick of being on guard duty: Your highness please
Guard, running into the chamber: We are under attack! Dark Alin in the city
King: You see now the the threat we face? (Remembering his manners) If you wish to seek your death in Mezekesh, go tonight. The desert will be more forgiving at night.
Ooohkay. There's a lot to unpack in this cutscene, and most of it is dodgy. Firstly yes Lenora did just leave the party in a thinly disguised fit of jealousy. We don't have access to her for the rest of the campaign. This has somehow made her useless romance plot even stupider than her just falling for Giacomo and doing nothing but flirting with him.
Secondly, yes the plot of the Alin campaign is two white guys showing up and competing to save the otherwise helpless brown people. Pretty close to textbook white man's burden/mighty whitey nonsense, and I wouldn't be offended if you didn't want to deal with the plot. There are mitigating factors, we'll be using Alin troops the entire time, and the arabian nights style setting doesn't have as much of a history with imperialism as other settings do. But that doesn't make it not annoying when you think about it. But I am going to press on with the game regardless, because it still has redeeming qualities, and the plot does take a backseat.
Ok. When we get back control we are thrown into the defence of Azar Harif. We have Giacomo, Arri, and a mix of clockwork men and desert walkers. The king also has a couple units of desert walkers and sand horrors, as well as a defence tower, which will help out. We'll need it, because the game is no longer playing around, as the dark alin will throw high tier units like glass golems at your under-powered force.
Now, one of the first things you will learn about the Alin is that desert walkers are absolutely not imperial musketeers. Not because they are obviously different units, or because one is a ranged unit and the other is not. The thing is that while imperial musketeers are an excellent well rounded unit that is a solid backbone for any Vinci army, desert walkers are glorified cannon fodder, and if you actually purchase they you know you're desperate. They have two stances, the default and whirling blades, which increases their damage, speed, but makes them take 25% more damage from all sources. The general rule of thumb is that if you want walkers to be your main force, they should be in whirling blades, but if they're just cannon fodder while your real army does damage, you might as well stay off it and keep them alive a little longer.
Though it might seem like the enemy force is overwhelming, the fight is doable. The assault isn't that long, so hero abilities can be spend wildly-though you will probably notice that unlike Vinci heroes, Alin heroes have a mana bar and you cannot just toss out all of her abilities like Giacomo can. If you are having trouble keep in mind that Azar Harif itself has a couple military districts, and can do decent damage, so pulling back to the city can be beneficial.
The next half of the mission starts when all the dark Alin on the map are killed. Due to the games dodgy pathfinding, there's a tendency for an infantry unit or two to get stuck overrun this area just out of sight. If you've killed everything else in sight and things aren't advancing, perhaps take a look around for stragglers.
Once the first assault has been fended off, the second part of this mission begins.
Whatever forces survived the defence of Azar Harif are blanked, and we start with Arri, Giacomo, one unit of desert walkers, a city and some basic economy units. Now we finally get the actual Alin tutorial.
The Alin differ from the Vinci in several ways, and the most obvious is the lack of the prototype factory that we were used to in the Vinci campaign. Instead of an industrial district that generates prototype points, we get a magus districts that grants us research points, and improves our heroes abilities a small bit. This leads to the fact that research labs, and all the quirky prototype buildings also don't exist.
There are tradeoffs for the lack of the fancy Vinci toys. The first is a set of research tracks with much more dramatic effects than the vinci ones. The first is Land lore-which in addition to increasing border radius and attrition damage also reveals the map for every level it increases by. Level one explores the whole map, clearing out black fog, level two reveals all relics and gives you vision to every neutral site, letting you monitor your opponents expansion, level three gives you vision to everything within your borders and the last level just flat out lets you see the whole map. The second power, vigor gives the same improvements to healing rates as the vinci equivelent, but also gives every unit a health increase and speeds building construction. The third, treasure, gives a small amount of timonium and wealth per level, and makes caravans more durable and faster, which makes site buyout costs go down faster. The last, evocation, levels up the national superpower and gives free units whenever production buildings are made.
The second tradeoff is that you have a larger lineup of units than the vinci, with eleven units to choose between instead of seven, giving you more options in a fight.
Our actual objective for the tutorial are pretty simple- build a sand circle (Alin Barracks), a sand spire (Alin defence tower) and capture a trading post site. It is in your best interest to not accomplish this simple task as soon as possible. Instead, faff about, take some extra cities, build troops and hunt down the two side objectives that are around to be discovered. You don't need a defence tower anytime soon, so just leave that part until you're ready to keep moving on.
The first bonus objective can be found far, far to the south of your starting position. This is the floating castle. It flies, has a ton of health, has nasty defence guns, and needs to be captured. Taking it is a bit tricky-it takes damage as an air unit, so dedicated siege units are less effective than you'd think, and melee units are useless-though it can be stormed, so if you can keep a couple infantry alive you'll have a much easier time.
So what exactly am I using? Well, the guys riding manta rays are heartseekers- cheap dedicated anti air units. They take the place of clockwork men in the lineup, but obviously play differently. The smaller, red air unit is a fire elemental- it's a dedicated anti-large air unit, and being the only anti large unit the Alin have we're going to be using it heavily throughout the campaign. The last unit is a sand dragon, a rather odd heavy air unit. It can attack all targets and does slightly more to air units, while having a lot of health.
As you may have surmised from the impressive unit diversity being displayed, you no longer need to unlock units in the Alin campaign. Every unit is available from the very start, which is fine when you know what your doing, but incredibly overwhelming on your first time through.
After capturing and fixing up the castle, the next bonus objective is found to the northeast-Don Sclario and a band of condottieri wearing the doge's colours have set up shop, hoping to follow their master east. So we're going to give them a visit from the flying castle and the army we've built up so far, though the castle could probably do it solo.
Now you may be thinking that for a unit I said I never wanted to build, I have quite the force of desert walkers. Well, they get handed to you for free at an even higher rate than Vinci musketeers: you get one for free when you make a new barracks, and two for free when making military districts. A rush strategy could actually be quite viable in some early missions if you lean on the free infantry, but desert walkers have difficulty being relevant in later missions.
In addition to being a flying gun platform, the castle can spit out small batches of Alin units for a high wealth cost, themed around basic units, air units, or siege units. I never end up using these abilities because I am perfectly capable of making my own units.
Once the condottieri have been cleaned up, then we can finally build that sand spire to trigger the rest of the mission. It causes five glass lairs to spawn in a line across the middle of the map, which will start spawning Dark Alin. They also spread borders with rather aggressive attrition damage, which means that my entire army is more than a little out of position.
So our first priority is to get my army out of the fire, and the easiest way to do that is to take out this glass lair. Which means of course first clearing off the pile of dark alin units that have spawned. This will likely get bloody.
Now, while the mass of my army is being bogged down because the enemy base spawned on top them, the other three glass lairs are sending a bunch of units to attack my base. I have previously set up a glass citadel, the Alin equivalent of a steam fortress to hold off this assault, but it will take more than that to push back the dark Alin.
To try to survive, I take advantage of the Alin national power-summon army. This works exactly like it sounds-a bunch of units can be spawned anywhere you can see. Level one spawns two units of desert walkers, level two is what I'm using here, gives three infantry and a heartseeker, level three gives more infantry and a basic air unit, level four gives even more than that. It's much more reliable than industrial devastation, and tends to be better in the early game, but less useful at swinging large battles. This, combined with a glass citadel taking the brunt of the assualt, holds off the enemy rush long enough for me to get more units out and fly the floating castle over.
Once the initial rush has been fended off and the first glass lair is destroyed, it's time to get an army together that can actually take the fight to the dark alin. Firstly, supply units. The Alin use puzzle boxes as their supply and transport units instead of cargo dirigibles. These are land units that act as supply sources, but can be used to spawn temporary transport units called magic winds. It's a little clunkier than just using cargo dirigibles, but it mostly works.
The second thing we're going to need is glass cannons, the little glowing thing in the top right. This is the Alin dedicated siege unit, and works like the steam cannon: it does a ton of damage to buildings, but somehow becomes a peashooter when aimed at units.
Really the rest of the mission is't very difficult-just march south and blow up anything that's purple: once the initial rush is fended off it's pretty manageable and low key.
Arri is our first Alin hero, and her abilities are serviceable. The first turns on a damaging aura that ignites everyone around her, the second teleports her to a target and does a large chunk of damage, and often the first part of that is better than the second. The third is the real moneymaker-it temporarily summons a Rukh, the Alin equivalent of an air destroyer to attack the enemy, which will never not be a battle deciding move. Lastly, her fourth ability is just a big dumb AOE.
She also begins a trend that runs through all Alin heroes-rather than a passive buff, Arri provides some free units for every level past the first. Her actual passive is a bit more valuable-any melee units in your army get bonus damage while Arri is on the field.
CUTSCENE TIME
GIACOMO, CARLINI and LENORA walk through the halls of Azar Harif, capitol of the Alin kingdom, approaching a waiting ARRI.
Lenora: You seem to know your way around
Giacomo, technically true: I visited here
Carlini, calling his lord on his bullshit: Visited? Try: ran away. Took us four months to find him and we could barely drag him home.
Arri: Giacomo
Giacomo, staring at Arri: I liked it here
Lenora, jealous: I bet you did
Arri: Are you ready? We have little of the king's time
Lenora: I'm not going in.
Giacomo, taking Lenora aside: What?
Lenora, sorry, no can do: I can't repair my airships here. I've got one working flyer and I need to take it back to pirata for parts.
Giacomo wondering how this didn't come up earlier: But we need you.
Lenora, spite, then sweetness: Yeah well, you'll be fine . . . I'll catch up with you as soon as I can.
Giacomo: Ok. . . hurry back.
Cut to the audience chamber of the KING of Azar Harif.
King, kindly old uncle: Why have you come, young lord of Miana. I trust you do not bear bad news. We've had our share of that already.
Giacomo, formally: It is an honour to have this audience your higness, but I am afraid my news is indeed quite dire. My city, Miana was destroyed.
King tired: How many of your people survived?
Giacomo: None that I know of, aside from the men I brought here.
King: You have my deepest sympathies. You are, of course, allowed to stay within the safety of the city, for what it is worth in these dark times.
Giacomo: I'm afraid there's more. We came to warn you.
King: Warn me?
Giacomo: The army that destroyed my city? It came here into your city. Your people are in danger.
King to audience: Leave us. Tell me young lord. Do you know of the dark Alin?
Carlini, the brains of the operation: Those things we fought in Padonia.
Giacomo sticking foot in mouth: You're right. We fought raiders. They looked like Alin, but were made of dark glass. I thought the dark Alin were just a story . . .
King righteous anger: It is no story. It is no story that kills our people and destroys their villages, it is no story that eludes my army at every turn, it is no story that makes us prisoners in our own city.
Giacomo still an arrogant kid at heart: Your highness, tell me more about the dark Alin when did they attack you, where are they based?
King, story time: Nearly thirty generations ago, when the might of our people was unmatched, a Genie known as Sawu was corrupted by a strange talisman, one that fell from the sky. Under the influence of this talisman he created creatures of living glass, dark glass. And he used them to conquer the city of Mezekesh.
Cut to images of Sawu and the Dark Alin. Sawu's talisman is the same DEATH RAY the doge uses.
Giacomo: I've never heard of it.
King: It was once the mightiest city in our kingdom, and the most beautiful. Sawu could not be stopped. The most powerful mystics of that age banded together to destroy him, but the magic they used against him seemed to feed the talisman to which he was bound. He only grew stronger.
Carlini, cut the babble old man: But he was beaten somehow.
King: Mezekesh was abandoned, and the city, with Sawu at it's heart, was buried under a mile of desert sand. Since then, their have been rumour from time to time of Dark Alin rising from that cursed desert. But this is rumour no longer. In recent weeks the dark akin have returned and they grow stronger with each passing day. Something has awakened them
Giacomo, capable of seeing where this is going: And the Doge promised to stop them.
King tired again: Indeed. Until he succeeds we can only hope to endure these attacks
Giacomo pissed: Whatever the doge told you it was a lie. He's not here to save your kingdom He has some goal of his own.
King, bitter laughter: Of course he does. I have ruled for thirty seven years, young lord. I am no stranger to such things. But if he destroys our enemy while achieving this goal, how can I deny my people such a gift?
Giacomo: Tell us how to reach Mezekesh. The doge will betray you, I promise, we will not.
King, master of sick burns: You ask me for permission to commit suicide my friend. I do not have the power to deny you that.
Giacomo: It won't be suicide, not if you allow Arri to come with us.
King: That I can deny. I need Arri here. I must think of the safety of my people.
Arri, sick of being on guard duty: Your highness please
Guard, running into the chamber: We are under attack! Dark Alin in the city
King: You see now the the threat we face? (Remembering his manners) If you wish to seek your death in Mezekesh, go tonight. The desert will be more forgiving at night.
Ooohkay. There's a lot to unpack in this cutscene, and most of it is dodgy. Firstly yes Lenora did just leave the party in a thinly disguised fit of jealousy. We don't have access to her for the rest of the campaign. This has somehow made her useless romance plot even stupider than her just falling for Giacomo and doing nothing but flirting with him.
Secondly, yes the plot of the Alin campaign is two white guys showing up and competing to save the otherwise helpless brown people. Pretty close to textbook white man's burden/mighty whitey nonsense, and I wouldn't be offended if you didn't want to deal with the plot. There are mitigating factors, we'll be using Alin troops the entire time, and the arabian nights style setting doesn't have as much of a history with imperialism as other settings do. But that doesn't make it not annoying when you think about it. But I am going to press on with the game regardless, because it still has redeeming qualities, and the plot does take a backseat.
Ok. When we get back control we are thrown into the defence of Azar Harif. We have Giacomo, Arri, and a mix of clockwork men and desert walkers. The king also has a couple units of desert walkers and sand horrors, as well as a defence tower, which will help out. We'll need it, because the game is no longer playing around, as the dark alin will throw high tier units like glass golems at your under-powered force.
Now, one of the first things you will learn about the Alin is that desert walkers are absolutely not imperial musketeers. Not because they are obviously different units, or because one is a ranged unit and the other is not. The thing is that while imperial musketeers are an excellent well rounded unit that is a solid backbone for any Vinci army, desert walkers are glorified cannon fodder, and if you actually purchase they you know you're desperate. They have two stances, the default and whirling blades, which increases their damage, speed, but makes them take 25% more damage from all sources. The general rule of thumb is that if you want walkers to be your main force, they should be in whirling blades, but if they're just cannon fodder while your real army does damage, you might as well stay off it and keep them alive a little longer.
Though it might seem like the enemy force is overwhelming, the fight is doable. The assault isn't that long, so hero abilities can be spend wildly-though you will probably notice that unlike Vinci heroes, Alin heroes have a mana bar and you cannot just toss out all of her abilities like Giacomo can. If you are having trouble keep in mind that Azar Harif itself has a couple military districts, and can do decent damage, so pulling back to the city can be beneficial.
The next half of the mission starts when all the dark Alin on the map are killed. Due to the games dodgy pathfinding, there's a tendency for an infantry unit or two to get stuck overrun this area just out of sight. If you've killed everything else in sight and things aren't advancing, perhaps take a look around for stragglers.
Once the first assault has been fended off, the second part of this mission begins.
Whatever forces survived the defence of Azar Harif are blanked, and we start with Arri, Giacomo, one unit of desert walkers, a city and some basic economy units. Now we finally get the actual Alin tutorial.
The Alin differ from the Vinci in several ways, and the most obvious is the lack of the prototype factory that we were used to in the Vinci campaign. Instead of an industrial district that generates prototype points, we get a magus districts that grants us research points, and improves our heroes abilities a small bit. This leads to the fact that research labs, and all the quirky prototype buildings also don't exist.
There are tradeoffs for the lack of the fancy Vinci toys. The first is a set of research tracks with much more dramatic effects than the vinci ones. The first is Land lore-which in addition to increasing border radius and attrition damage also reveals the map for every level it increases by. Level one explores the whole map, clearing out black fog, level two reveals all relics and gives you vision to every neutral site, letting you monitor your opponents expansion, level three gives you vision to everything within your borders and the last level just flat out lets you see the whole map. The second power, vigor gives the same improvements to healing rates as the vinci equivelent, but also gives every unit a health increase and speeds building construction. The third, treasure, gives a small amount of timonium and wealth per level, and makes caravans more durable and faster, which makes site buyout costs go down faster. The last, evocation, levels up the national superpower and gives free units whenever production buildings are made.
The second tradeoff is that you have a larger lineup of units than the vinci, with eleven units to choose between instead of seven, giving you more options in a fight.
Our actual objective for the tutorial are pretty simple- build a sand circle (Alin Barracks), a sand spire (Alin defence tower) and capture a trading post site. It is in your best interest to not accomplish this simple task as soon as possible. Instead, faff about, take some extra cities, build troops and hunt down the two side objectives that are around to be discovered. You don't need a defence tower anytime soon, so just leave that part until you're ready to keep moving on.
The first bonus objective can be found far, far to the south of your starting position. This is the floating castle. It flies, has a ton of health, has nasty defence guns, and needs to be captured. Taking it is a bit tricky-it takes damage as an air unit, so dedicated siege units are less effective than you'd think, and melee units are useless-though it can be stormed, so if you can keep a couple infantry alive you'll have a much easier time.
So what exactly am I using? Well, the guys riding manta rays are heartseekers- cheap dedicated anti air units. They take the place of clockwork men in the lineup, but obviously play differently. The smaller, red air unit is a fire elemental- it's a dedicated anti-large air unit, and being the only anti large unit the Alin have we're going to be using it heavily throughout the campaign. The last unit is a sand dragon, a rather odd heavy air unit. It can attack all targets and does slightly more to air units, while having a lot of health.
As you may have surmised from the impressive unit diversity being displayed, you no longer need to unlock units in the Alin campaign. Every unit is available from the very start, which is fine when you know what your doing, but incredibly overwhelming on your first time through.
After capturing and fixing up the castle, the next bonus objective is found to the northeast-Don Sclario and a band of condottieri wearing the doge's colours have set up shop, hoping to follow their master east. So we're going to give them a visit from the flying castle and the army we've built up so far, though the castle could probably do it solo.
Now you may be thinking that for a unit I said I never wanted to build, I have quite the force of desert walkers. Well, they get handed to you for free at an even higher rate than Vinci musketeers: you get one for free when you make a new barracks, and two for free when making military districts. A rush strategy could actually be quite viable in some early missions if you lean on the free infantry, but desert walkers have difficulty being relevant in later missions.
In addition to being a flying gun platform, the castle can spit out small batches of Alin units for a high wealth cost, themed around basic units, air units, or siege units. I never end up using these abilities because I am perfectly capable of making my own units.
Once the condottieri have been cleaned up, then we can finally build that sand spire to trigger the rest of the mission. It causes five glass lairs to spawn in a line across the middle of the map, which will start spawning Dark Alin. They also spread borders with rather aggressive attrition damage, which means that my entire army is more than a little out of position.
So our first priority is to get my army out of the fire, and the easiest way to do that is to take out this glass lair. Which means of course first clearing off the pile of dark alin units that have spawned. This will likely get bloody.
Now, while the mass of my army is being bogged down because the enemy base spawned on top them, the other three glass lairs are sending a bunch of units to attack my base. I have previously set up a glass citadel, the Alin equivalent of a steam fortress to hold off this assault, but it will take more than that to push back the dark Alin.
To try to survive, I take advantage of the Alin national power-summon army. This works exactly like it sounds-a bunch of units can be spawned anywhere you can see. Level one spawns two units of desert walkers, level two is what I'm using here, gives three infantry and a heartseeker, level three gives more infantry and a basic air unit, level four gives even more than that. It's much more reliable than industrial devastation, and tends to be better in the early game, but less useful at swinging large battles. This, combined with a glass citadel taking the brunt of the assualt, holds off the enemy rush long enough for me to get more units out and fly the floating castle over.
Once the initial rush has been fended off and the first glass lair is destroyed, it's time to get an army together that can actually take the fight to the dark alin. Firstly, supply units. The Alin use puzzle boxes as their supply and transport units instead of cargo dirigibles. These are land units that act as supply sources, but can be used to spawn temporary transport units called magic winds. It's a little clunkier than just using cargo dirigibles, but it mostly works.
The second thing we're going to need is glass cannons, the little glowing thing in the top right. This is the Alin dedicated siege unit, and works like the steam cannon: it does a ton of damage to buildings, but somehow becomes a peashooter when aimed at units.
Really the rest of the mission is't very difficult-just march south and blow up anything that's purple: once the initial rush is fended off it's pretty manageable and low key.
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Bright Lands
- Location
- Canada
Ok, so last time I mentioned we had access to the entire Alin arsenal from the start, so what are we doing instead of upgrading and unlocking units?
Welcome to the Alin upgrade tree, one of three pages. Or, two and a half, since the glass options are much more spartan. Basically, instead of upgrading specific units, we have a variety of general upgrades and a couple unit specific ones that only change special abilities.
All Alin units have an element: basic units are sand, air units are fire, and siege units are glass, the combination of the two other elements. Each element has a chain attack and armour upgrades for one element of our forces, and the tree is rounded out by army wide upgrades, unlocking special abilities for units and economic upgrades.
Now, since there is a ton more things to get than the vinci tech tree, filling it out by the end of the campaign is much harder without grinding. General priorities are the stat buffs first, then economic bonuses, and then, with a couple exceptions, the unit specific upgrades. I start off with the questionable decision to upgrade the attack power of fire units with my first two points, because it will be a few missions before I am in position to get more research points, and the Alin tend to lean on their air force in this campaign.
The next thing on the list is picking up Giacomo's ultimate ability: everybody in a very large area is completely invincible for almost half a minute. This is pretty much your ace in the hole for this campaign: the cool down is so long that it is hard to use it more than once in a mission, but you always have the ability to use it, and it can let you do impossible things.
Ok. This time round we're doing a little exploring for important information. Information like "Where the hell is Mezekesh in the first place, and how do we get through a mile of desert sand?". The king was going to explain this, but we missed that chance when we ran off with a good amount of his army and his top commander.
Since we've found a bunch of dark Alin prowling these ruins in the middle of nowhere, we're pretty sure that something useful could be found here.
This is one of those start with three heroes missions. This is going to establish a trend for this campaign-lots of baseless or near baseless missions where you bring in heroes at the start. It fits the genre shift we've undergone from a historicallish war drama to a high fantasy adventure story. Since Lenora has left us we're brining Arri along with our trusty friend Carlini.
You'll also notice we have three clockwork men with us, despite the fact that clockwork men are Vinci units. This is actually a bit of mercy from the developers: normally Giacomo has a passive ability which increases the health of clockwork units. That would obviously be useless in the Alin campaign, so once his model switches over to desert Giacomo that ability get's replaced with spawning a clockwork man for each level past the first. Sadly clockwork men aren't effected by any upgrades we pick up, so they'll be outdated as the campaign goes on, but at this point every body is valuable.
After fighting through a cursory ambush, we come across a a party of scholars. They say that most of the Dark Alin have head into the ruins, and left their home base unguarded. What an astounding opportunity.
This also triggers a small sidequest-ten relics have spawned all over the map and we need to collect them all. The map for this mission is tiny, so this is a piece of cake: if you want to make it really easy you can always use Giacomo's free research points to get level 2 land lore and see them all. Really you might as well use it as an excuse to let cool downs tick down while you send a fast unit like an Afreet around to collect them all.
Once that's been done, it's pretty easy to knock over the small amount of guards on the enemy city, as promised. Turns out this may have not been the best move. A massive pile of dark Alin start swarming out of the ruins with the intent to crush us.
Also, somewhere between the achieving this quest and the side quest Arri does find something useful: the names of the two main architects of Mezekesh's seal. Damanhur and Dahkla, a pair of genies who should still be alive today. Sadly, where we can find these two is still a bit of an open question.
To defeat the Dark Alin here, we need to find and kill three of the generic Dark Alin heroes. Simple but difficult-we have a small amount of resources and time to prepare for the engagement and they'll have to be spent very carefully. I went with a rather standard build of a few military districts on the city and a fire circle with some air units and then went on the attack. I mean, theoretically you could try to hold them off on the defence, but the majority of your army is melee, and the enemy spawns will continue for several minutes. You will have a much easier time if you cut the mission short by chasing down all three genies.
It doesn't take long until thing start going south. I blew my super armour charge earlier in the mission, and while I'm engaging the second genie my forces get worn down.
And then things get really bad when the Dark Terror starts.
The Dark Terror is one of the more frustrating mechanics in this campaign. It's sort of the national power of the Dark Alin, only sort of because they tend to not use it in skirmish maps which makes me suspect that it only occurs at scripted moments in non skirmish missions. It lasts for two minutes or so, and while it's up your units take ruinous attrition damage while in enemy or neutral territory, and the Dark Alin become more aggressive and may spawn extra units. Again, may because they already cheat on economics and spawn free units from their hero units, and it's hard to tell where the troops are coming from.
Since I have no supply units, the massive attrition damage wipes out the majority of my army, leaving my heroes to hold the line as my limited economy tries to fund a defence
The defence is futile. The Dark Alin throw piles on units at you without hesitation, and what little forces I have are wiped out. Game over.
Welcome to the Alin campaign. The game is now not afraid of being hard.
After another ultimately doomed attempt at this mission, the third time reveals a workable strategy-making this glass citadel right at the edge of your territory once you capture the city. The damage output of the citadel trivializes the first genie who spawn right beside it.
It still provided some fires support for the second genie, where I pop Giacomo's super armour. I'll admit that the only reason this power is so effective is the AI's inability to recognize the futility in attacking invincible troops, but since the AI is that dumb Giacomo's ultimate ability is basically a free win of any given fight.
Even with all these tricks, my army is being bled dry by the time I clean up the enemies spawned by the second hero. I should have just enough to keep going though.
By the defeat of the final enemy hero, the only things standing are my hero and some air units that were hanging back from the fighting. The dark terror starts a few seconds later.
Welcome to the Alin upgrade tree, one of three pages. Or, two and a half, since the glass options are much more spartan. Basically, instead of upgrading specific units, we have a variety of general upgrades and a couple unit specific ones that only change special abilities.
All Alin units have an element: basic units are sand, air units are fire, and siege units are glass, the combination of the two other elements. Each element has a chain attack and armour upgrades for one element of our forces, and the tree is rounded out by army wide upgrades, unlocking special abilities for units and economic upgrades.
Now, since there is a ton more things to get than the vinci tech tree, filling it out by the end of the campaign is much harder without grinding. General priorities are the stat buffs first, then economic bonuses, and then, with a couple exceptions, the unit specific upgrades. I start off with the questionable decision to upgrade the attack power of fire units with my first two points, because it will be a few missions before I am in position to get more research points, and the Alin tend to lean on their air force in this campaign.
The next thing on the list is picking up Giacomo's ultimate ability: everybody in a very large area is completely invincible for almost half a minute. This is pretty much your ace in the hole for this campaign: the cool down is so long that it is hard to use it more than once in a mission, but you always have the ability to use it, and it can let you do impossible things.
Ok. This time round we're doing a little exploring for important information. Information like "Where the hell is Mezekesh in the first place, and how do we get through a mile of desert sand?". The king was going to explain this, but we missed that chance when we ran off with a good amount of his army and his top commander.
Since we've found a bunch of dark Alin prowling these ruins in the middle of nowhere, we're pretty sure that something useful could be found here.
This is one of those start with three heroes missions. This is going to establish a trend for this campaign-lots of baseless or near baseless missions where you bring in heroes at the start. It fits the genre shift we've undergone from a historicallish war drama to a high fantasy adventure story. Since Lenora has left us we're brining Arri along with our trusty friend Carlini.
You'll also notice we have three clockwork men with us, despite the fact that clockwork men are Vinci units. This is actually a bit of mercy from the developers: normally Giacomo has a passive ability which increases the health of clockwork units. That would obviously be useless in the Alin campaign, so once his model switches over to desert Giacomo that ability get's replaced with spawning a clockwork man for each level past the first. Sadly clockwork men aren't effected by any upgrades we pick up, so they'll be outdated as the campaign goes on, but at this point every body is valuable.
After fighting through a cursory ambush, we come across a a party of scholars. They say that most of the Dark Alin have head into the ruins, and left their home base unguarded. What an astounding opportunity.
This also triggers a small sidequest-ten relics have spawned all over the map and we need to collect them all. The map for this mission is tiny, so this is a piece of cake: if you want to make it really easy you can always use Giacomo's free research points to get level 2 land lore and see them all. Really you might as well use it as an excuse to let cool downs tick down while you send a fast unit like an Afreet around to collect them all.
Once that's been done, it's pretty easy to knock over the small amount of guards on the enemy city, as promised. Turns out this may have not been the best move. A massive pile of dark Alin start swarming out of the ruins with the intent to crush us.
Also, somewhere between the achieving this quest and the side quest Arri does find something useful: the names of the two main architects of Mezekesh's seal. Damanhur and Dahkla, a pair of genies who should still be alive today. Sadly, where we can find these two is still a bit of an open question.
To defeat the Dark Alin here, we need to find and kill three of the generic Dark Alin heroes. Simple but difficult-we have a small amount of resources and time to prepare for the engagement and they'll have to be spent very carefully. I went with a rather standard build of a few military districts on the city and a fire circle with some air units and then went on the attack. I mean, theoretically you could try to hold them off on the defence, but the majority of your army is melee, and the enemy spawns will continue for several minutes. You will have a much easier time if you cut the mission short by chasing down all three genies.
It doesn't take long until thing start going south. I blew my super armour charge earlier in the mission, and while I'm engaging the second genie my forces get worn down.
And then things get really bad when the Dark Terror starts.
The Dark Terror is one of the more frustrating mechanics in this campaign. It's sort of the national power of the Dark Alin, only sort of because they tend to not use it in skirmish maps which makes me suspect that it only occurs at scripted moments in non skirmish missions. It lasts for two minutes or so, and while it's up your units take ruinous attrition damage while in enemy or neutral territory, and the Dark Alin become more aggressive and may spawn extra units. Again, may because they already cheat on economics and spawn free units from their hero units, and it's hard to tell where the troops are coming from.
Since I have no supply units, the massive attrition damage wipes out the majority of my army, leaving my heroes to hold the line as my limited economy tries to fund a defence
The defence is futile. The Dark Alin throw piles on units at you without hesitation, and what little forces I have are wiped out. Game over.
Welcome to the Alin campaign. The game is now not afraid of being hard.
After another ultimately doomed attempt at this mission, the third time reveals a workable strategy-making this glass citadel right at the edge of your territory once you capture the city. The damage output of the citadel trivializes the first genie who spawn right beside it.
It still provided some fires support for the second genie, where I pop Giacomo's super armour. I'll admit that the only reason this power is so effective is the AI's inability to recognize the futility in attacking invincible troops, but since the AI is that dumb Giacomo's ultimate ability is basically a free win of any given fight.
Even with all these tricks, my army is being bled dry by the time I clean up the enemies spawned by the second hero. I should have just enough to keep going though.
By the defeat of the final enemy hero, the only things standing are my hero and some air units that were hanging back from the fighting. The dark terror starts a few seconds later.
The problem though, is that this level of difficulty isn't clearly signposted, and that this isn't "the hard option". All of the first three options for missions of the Alin campaign are some of the hardest missions in the campaign, possibly the game, which is an odd failure of balance. One very difficult mission available early on is a reasonable option if clearly signposted.
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Southern Dunes
- Location
- Canada
Welcome back to Rise of Legends. Last time we got a plan and a couple of economy points to get the old palace district economy up and running. This time we're headed to the southern dunes, to intercept the wave of enemy armies slowly advancing towards Azar Harif.
When we get there we find a friendly looking settlement of refugees, fleeing the advance of the Dark Alin. On the bright side, they found the one region in the entire desert that doesn't have any dark Alin in it, so props to them. On the other had, the reason there's no Dark Alin is because the area is infested with salamanders.
Soon after the mission starts night falls, and the salamanders start their assault. Night works similar to the dark terror, in that attrition damage becomes absurd if you leave the boundaries of the city and piles of salamanders spawn in to attack you and the desert militia.
The militia control a single defence tower, a hero who is virtually invincible at least on the first night, and a few units of renamed desert walkers who slowly respawn as they're killed. They will need some help to not get wiped off the map on hard mode, since they have issues with damage output.
The plan for defence is pretty simple-fight fire with fire. And by fire- I mean fire units. No variety of salamander has any form of anti air at all and a large air force is the most efficient way to hold back the salamander attacks.
Now, as much as we'd like to keep our allies on the field, it's even more important to keep this mine intact so we don't run out of timonium. Don't be fooled by the little defence gun the mine uses, it does terrible damage without upgrades.
The salamanders themselves are a rather strange unit. They come in several stages of their life cycle. The youngest, juveniles, have a comically low thirty hitpoints, which mean they die like flies but they still do decent damage so focus on clearing them out first. Then their are young salamaders, which are surprisingly rare on this mission, and is the basic form of salamander that can be built as an Alin unit. They are in the same weight class as scorpions and glass spiders, being generally a decent choice against any ground target. With a relatively cheap upgrade the production option gets replaced with adult salamanders, bigger, longer ranged, slower and more damage. Oddly, this is one of the only upgrades in the game which doesn't apply to existing units, and the new adult salamanders are noticeably more expensive. So it's like replacing one production option with a new unit.
Anyways, after three minutes of trying to fight walking flamethrowers with swords (An endeavour which is not terribly successful) the sun starts to rise, with a slow transition to daylight. It's a cool trick, letting the player know the attack is almost over.
After night rises for the first time we get a bonus objective and our actual victory condition. Our primary victory condition is to find and destroy three salamander queens out in the desert somewhere. However, if we upgrade the refugee settlement to a great city with two palace districts, the refugee leader will join us full time as a hero. Oh, and we need to do this in the seven or so minutes before darkness falls again or the offer is void.
While a reasonable objective, it does seem a little odd that we are literally turning this dinky refugee camp into a grand city in the course of twelve hours or so in universe time. Which translates into seven minutes game time so I should probably stop complaining.
Accomplishing the side quest is going to take 1225 timonium plus however much we spend on making more mines and miners, so we'll be focusing on that ahead of taking on any of the salamder queens for now.
It's not a bad idea to send a cursory flight around the desert to try and hunt for relics to speed up the process, especially if you sprung for land lore 2. While you're there, there are a pair of unguarded Oasis sites which can be captured to spread territory into the desert.
Our new hero is Belisari, a manta riding swordswoman. She starts with two abilities and a passive: the first is a heal over time effect, the second calls a pair of heartseekers, while her passive greatly increases her melee damage. Not terribly exciting but also not very complicated. She does the usual Alin hero thing of providing free units, in this case adult salamanders, which are the nastiest free unit you can get from any hero. The raw force she offers makes up for her less than exciting abilities to a degree.
Now, since air units cost almost all wealth, I've managed to build up a significant army of them while making the city, and I have just enough time to go fight a salamander queen before night falls.
Now, salamander queens are stationary unit/building thing unique to this mission, have far too much health and damage output and critically do have an anti air attack, so they can't be cheesed like the attacks can. Super armour still makes this first attack relatively painless.
On the second night, the salamanders pull out the big guns. This is an elder salamander, the third upgrade of salamander and the Alin equivalent to a juggernaut (Glass golems are in a slightly lower weight class, have a non useless AA attack, and are terrible in heavy duels so they don't count.). Super slow, super tough, and with a flamethrower that has both surprisingly long range and does pretty nasty damage to all ground targets, has an AOE, and lights targets on fire. These things are one of the primary reasons that the juggernaut isn't a useless unit, it's just useless in Vinci mirrors.
Because I don't want to throw away my infantry on mass, I detach my air units to try and break this assault. By the time it's done, the militia's defence tower is destroyed. It's no a big loss, as I've got the troops and economy to hold the entire defence by myself.
While the air units are up in the north the ground units hold the eastern front, and generally do pretty poorly. My heroes are mostly out of abilities and frankly I get distracted, micro badly and am a terrible general. Pretty much everything on this front gets incinerated.
The northern front is held by the air unit task force which had been sent to take out the elder. They unsurprisingly do a great job.
Anyways, once the night is over, said air unit taskforce gets into hunting salamander queens. The first one is in the north and goes down pretty easily.
The second is in the centre of the desert, and while my forces are a little beaten down, super armour covers a multitude of tactical sins.
BTW, you do need to kill every salamander on the map, not just the three queens. So don't move on until everything is dead, unless you enjoy hunting down missing salamanders.
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Shining Desert
- Location
- Canada
So, after the usual purchasing of upgrades and building merchant districts, it comes time to move around. The start is a little slower, because the map is covered with single magus districts that do nothing when you capture them save for making it more expensive to build valuable districts. My move this update is to take the shining desert that has been newly captured by the dark Alin. Why, because if I lose the bright lands, I lose the ability to build a palace district next turn.
As you may have noticed, the naming convention for territories has changed. In the Vinci campaign everything has a proper name in faux italian. In the Alin campaing, the territories eschew proper nouns in favour of more poetic, descriptive names. I like it, and it reinforces the genre shift from political drama to high fantasy adventure.
This is our first skirmish map of the campaign, but as I don't have an overwhelming army at this point it's actually an interesting mission. I feel I may have cheated you guys of some excitement last campaign by leaving most of them for the mid to late game.
Our first stop is to start expanding to another city-the guards are light and Giacomo provides a crucial advantage.
You may also notice that our desert walkers are now throwing things. They're supposed to have crossbows, but the animation budget was a little tight so instead they have thrown blades. This is the result of the glass bolts upgrade, which replaces the basic attack stance with a more damaging ranged attack. This is one of the key early upgrades, since it significantly improves the combat ability of desert walkers and lets them attack air units when necessary. In multiplayer, walkers with this upgrade beat unupgraded musketeers one on one, and since walkers are much more accessible than muskets once it has been researched the Alin get a short stage of running rampant. Sadly, the next upgrade in it's chain is a virtually useless stealth ability, and walkers are going to eventually fall off in usability.
Since the first attack goes so well, we're going to continue to the next city in the line.
As you can see in the minimap, this map is divided in two by large mountains, leaving three defensible narrow chokepoints between the halves of the map. This is the last city on 'our' side, and the enemy border spread implies they've taken all the cities on their side.
Land lore 2 shows it's worth here, let me see not only that the enemy is attacking this site in the southernmost chokepoint, but also their army composition. It's one of the more important techs if you can reach it early for the amount of information it gives during the expansion phase. Their hero is low on mana, and I have a suspicion that the two golems are temporary summons, so I can probably defeat this army.
As I expected, in a few seconds the Dark Alin launch an attack through the southern chokepoint. Bringing in some scorpions and a salamander that I have been building up while going on a conquest spree gives me the extra troops I need to be able to match the Dark Alin. Super armour and fighting in my territory gives me the edge to crush them.
Or so I thought. It seems the enemy has split their forces, and a nonzero amount of them are running rampart in my base. Everyone (save for the air units that had drifted out of frame when I started issuing panicked orders) rushes north, and I get ready for the real fight.
By the time my troops arrive I'm down to one miner and the mine is half dead. But, I think I'm getting the upper hand here, even as my micro abilities start to suffer. Attrition damage is doing it's work, and the enemy army is heavy on anti-air heart seekers.
Though casualties are heavy, the dark Alin start to flee after their leader falls and I have just enough of an advantage to consider chasing them.
There's a small amount of resistance as I advance into enemy territory towards their capitol. The AI is actually using trees for cover, which is a mechanic I always forget about because armies in this game take up so much space that keeping them in the trees is futile effort.
The plan to push for he capitol gets derailed as a stream of enemy units slowly draws the battle north and I start to lose confidence in the size of my army. Instead we're going to take this northmost city as beached while my troops heal and I build reinforcements.
I get a bit of scare when these dark walkers charge in while I'm capping the city, but there isn't another dark Alin army waiting in the wings.
As you may have noticed in early updates, many Alin units light people on fire when they hit them. This does about one point of damage per second, and more serves to confuse people about the actual effectiveness of Alin units.
Instead, the Dark Alin are launching probing attacks at the other side of my empire. They're not getting anywhere against ta city with military districts and a glass citadel, and I'd be much more scared if these units were trying to hit my northern army, which is pretty worn down.
They also laugh an unimpressive air raid on my mine again, but my own air force is more than enough to fend it off.
But, time passes, reinforcements are mustered, and I can once again go on the offensive. My army is largely in my air force and infantry, and I'm relying on a rare second charge of super armour to blow through the defences set up by the dark Alin.
I have, reluctantly, sunk more points into demolition team, which is what is causing that massive explosion in the centre of the screen-the animation seems to be glitched, and the explosion repeats for two or three seconds after going off. I needed it to push Giacomo up to level five, but it seems to be much more effective than it's previous level, so maybe the power just starts slow. Still not as effective as it looks, sadly, but it doesn't feel like a waste of time to even activated the ability anymore.
Of course, this whole affair would be going much smoother if my troops could stop shooting at enemy miners instead of enemy troops. Stupid AI.
While it takes a bit of brute force, the enemy capitol falls. Oddly, unlike the vinci skirmish maps the Alin ones end once you take the enemy capitol, regardless of what other cities the enemy might hold. I think this is a bug, because the written objective says to take all the cities. I'm not going to complain to loudly, because playing chase with the AI as it retreated to other cities was always a pain in the ass.
This mission is a good representation of why I like the idea of throwing skirmish maps into the game- they offer a change of pace and require you to be more dynamic and think for yourself. However, I'm only having fun because I can't steamroll the dark Alin with my starting troops, which is a bit of a problem.
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It's almost a pity that the damage isn't higher, but I can already imagine what would happen, especially with Afreets. There's probably a balance that could be struck, but it might have been another thing that ended up dropped.
It's also helpful that the map is appropriately sized: this is a two person map. The issue in the Vinci campaign is that the maps are larger multiplayer ones, which get kinda tedious to play through. Eventually you can get similar results with some of the later Alin maps.
Honestly, the biggest issue is that the skirmish missions ended up being repeated so much that it can feel like the scripted campaign missions are the exception, and as you pointed out as your army grows they become less and less interesting. This game would really benefit from the AI growing in strength during the campaign to some degree. You might need to rewrite some of the story to have this make sense, but the story could really have used some tune-ups, especially this and the Coutl campaign.
Cold Sands
- Location
- Canada
Ok, after our little skirmish, the situation has changed. The first thing you'll notice is that the rest of the dark Alin are now burning down the defences of the southern dunes. I could waste my turn moving my army their to provoke a fight, but I really don't want to play back to back skirmish maps. So instead we're moving to the Cold Sands, the neutral territory besides the Southern Dunes.
The other interesting thing is that the enemy hero that we fought last mission hasn't been pushed back-he's just destroyed. This is a change to the Alin campaign which mainly serves to justify the fact that the dark Alin will rush you with three armies at the start of the campaign, and there lack of a capitol to attack to get rid of them. If you had to push back the armies like in the vinci campaign, it would be a damn long game, constantly juggling three armies across the long map. Instead, the enemy armies are wiped out to respawn later, so progress is less frustrating.
This mission is going to be the dreaded escort mission. Vinci trader units spawn one at a time, and we have to drag them to the other side of the map.
We don't get a base for this mission, which complicates things. We're also on a time limit until a sandstorm wipes everything out. To compensate we get a to pick to extra heroes and get a special bonus hero-Marco the vinci trader. He mostly worked like a lower level version of Giacomo, sharing his heal and stun abilities, but we can't let him die. Realistically, if heroes are dropping you've probably lost anyway, so spending effort on keeping him alive is usually unnecessary.
Unsurprisingly, we get ambushed almost immediately. The dark Alin just teleport in on top of us, so we don't even get the luxury of seeing them coming, hitting them pre-emptively, or attacking the base where they are made.
The third ability Marco has on offer is bribe, which mind controls the dark Alin. How this works on malicious glass constructs is questionable, but it's undeniably useful, since unlike Lenora's ability, there's no limit on the amount of units you can steal with Marco. I mean, aside from the practical limit in the amount of times bribery's cool down can occur before the mission's time limit expires.
Quickly enough we get to the end of trail-the map is really quite small. When the truck reaches the flag, Marco's associates give us an extra pair of clockwork men as thanks, and we get a side quest to retrieve some of the goods taken earlier by the dark Alin.
As I said, the map isn't large, and there's really only one place the stolen goods could be hiding. The guard is pretty significant, and time is ticking down, but we can take them.
Clearing out the guards completes the quest, and grants us a trio of clockwork men and clockwork spiders. It makes sense-weaponry is probably in high demand in a city under siege. While we are distracted the second trader spawns. It's generally pretty safe as long as you don't move it.
Our little expedition revealed a shortcut to the destination, which is probably necessary to make up for lost time. This shortcut turns into a close quarters brawl when the obligatory ambush comes. The, when my entire army is invincible, the brawl turns into a slaughter.
The traders a pretty tough, and the dark Alin aren't single minded about killing them, so I just have the truck make a break for it as the second wave of dark Alin spawns atop my army.
After the dark Alin are cleaned out, the third and final trader spawns, which gets the same orders to make a break for it. There's enough forces here handle whatever happens.
Shortly after I deliver the last trader, the Dark Terror starts, which is a wonderfully sadisitic pice of game design for anyone who was lagging behind-you have no territory and have to pay army points for a supply unit. If your slow, you have finish the mission with you army falling apart around you.
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- Location
- Europe
It's not even on GOG.
Southern Dunes 2
- Location
- Canada
So, due to my laziness and refusal to play multiple skirmish maps in a row, I may have let the innocent colony of refugees fleeing the dark Alin to get conquered by the dark Alin. Oops. Lets go fix that little problem.
So because of the pile of free army points I got from the last territory, I'm able to add a Ruhk to my army. This is the aforementioned Alin heavy ground attack air unit. Rucks are like a bizarre cross between a dragon and phoenix, and they attack by dive bombing the enemy, exploding on contact with ground, and the reincarnating seconds later. (Despite this being a logical feature, I am quite confident that the Ruhk is not invincible when reincarnating.) Compared to air destroyers, they lose unimportant things like the ability to attack other air units and being able to attack at range for even more health and damage.
This is a bigger map than the previous skirmish level, and they've also cranked up the number of guards on neutral sites by an incredible amount. However, hitting them all with a stun before the attacking lets me advance along the usual city conquering path.
The first few minutes of the level are the usual use of our now quite large army to take all the neutral cities we can reach.
That can reach part is important, because once we get out first land lore power we discover that the map has a ruddy great chasm down the middle of it, cutting us off from the Dark Alin side.
So, after securing most of the cities on my half, I send a little aerial expedition to stir things up on the dark Alin half of the map. This runs into disproportionate resistance despite my reasonable expectation that there wouldn't be lots of troops by the Dark Alin starting city. So, we drop a summoned army to distract the Dark Alin and bail.
After running my pack of air units back, we try an alternative strategy of attack. There's a little used trick we can do-Alin production buildings can be built in neutral territory at a little markup. So rather than fiddling about with puzzle boxes let's just set up production on the other side of the chasm.
You can also build these in enemy territory, but doing this leaves you vulnerable to attrition damage on your buildings. You can leave a supply unit behind with your production or you can get an upgrade that turns sand circles into supply units.
Ok, so technically we could have just take the nearby site and then set up production, but whatever, I'm showing off to a degree. I also make a puzzle box and start shipping giacomo and most of my land forces over.
Of course, while I've been fiddling about making buildings on the other died of the chasm and moving my army there, the Dark Alin have done the same thing, and I'm virtually defenceless when they drop an army on my side.
So, while I'm losing ground on my side most of the army I shipped over starts attacking anyway, because fiddling with magic winds is a pain. All the air unit I can wrangle get tossed back over to do damage control and I start making troops on my side to hold the dark Alin off.
It doesn't take long to take out most of the attacking army, but the enemy makes things a little difficult by buying out some of the sites on my side of the map as reinforcements. I'm not sure where they are getting the wealth, but I'm going to do the same thing to deny the enemies more reinforcements.
While that's going on, the Dark Alin are going their own counterattack, and they're doing a pretty good job of it, wiping out most of my infantry and pushing me back to my little foothold. So the air force gets yet another order to run across the map and bail out the army before it gets hopelessly wiped out. This also means that retaking the city and site the Dark Alin hold on my side is being shelved until this front is sorted out.
Of course, just as my foothold on the enemy side gets it's feet under it, another airdrop shows up on my side. At this point I defiantly throw my hands up, toss a buch of units at this fore, and then go back to planning by conquest of the Dark Alin.
Surprisingly, the assault force is handled without much trouble, and I can finally start making progress in taking Dark Alin cities.
I also finally get the chance to take the city on my side that i've been containing for the entire mission.
At this point, the death ball is capable of rolling at full speed. The dark Alin are a little to foolish to fall back and marshall a large enough force to fight back, and I've brought in enough high quality units to sweep aside the dribs and drabs they have.
I'm making rather heavy use of glass golems this mission. It's not that I am a great fan of the unit, but because there are only so many wealth sinks for the Alin, and I'd already either ramped those units a lot or have no interest in using them.
I've also got Arri's ultimate power online. It's a little underwhelming, just being a big dumb AOE blast, and it doesn't even look particularly impressive.
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*delurks*
Gotta comment on this. Incorrect.
The entire special feature about the Alin Circle of Sand, Circle of Fire, and Circle of Glass unit-production buildings, is that they are immune to attrition. While Vinci and Coatle cannot build any structures whatsoever outside their own territory border (and their buildings suffer attrition damage if you construct them and then borders change), Alin can build their Circle structures in neutral or enemy territory at a markup, as you said, but in enemy territory the attrition does -not- destroy the Circles. That's the point of the Alin. Get a Fire Scout unit into enemy territory, or research Land Lore to maximum, to gain vision of a patch of enemy territory that they -don't- have vision on (as Alin are the only ones who get the ability of permanent vision within their borders, everyone else has to manually scout even their own territory), slap down some Circles, and then build an army right inside enemy territory and surprise them from behind. The units constructed by the Circles are not immune to attrition, however, which is what the Circle of Sand upgrade to gain a supply aura is for.
That said, this tactic isn't as useful in the campaign because, well...as mentioned, since you're fighting Alin enemies, they have the ability to Land Lore as well and notice your Circles when they get plunked down unless you do an early rush before they have Land Lore III, so it's more meant to be a multiplayer tactic against non-Alin enemies. And the reason why all three campaigns have you primarily fighting only a subfaction of the "race" you are using (Vinci vs Vinci, Alin vs Alin, Couatl vs Couatl) is something that you find out if you -do- play a skirmish map with bots or multiplayer; the city-capturing mechanic makes different-race matchups much more difficult. Whoever captures a neutral city first permanently ruins it for any race that is not them. Not counting Palace Districts, there are three districts to build and all three races share two of them: Military and Economy(Merchant for Vinci/Alin, Reactor for Couatl). Every race has a third district type that is unique to them, however, and if you capture a city that was previously owned by a race other than yourself, you cannot build your unique district on that city, you can only continue with Military and Economy. Multiplayer skirmish thus heavily incentivizes rushing to grab up as many neutral cities as you can first, even if you can't hold them in the midgame.
Heh, that got a little more wordy than I expected...though much of that wasn't actually directed at you, @mr_stibbons , but rather at any potential readers who aren't aware of RoL's deeper mechanics.
*relurks*
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That only works assuming bad map and scenario design. Even in Skirmish mode against the AI you can have maps large enough that the city capturing mechanic doesn't really come up as a serious limiting factor. Or just look at either of the two Alin skirmishes we've seen this campaign: neither of them really would be harmed if the Dark Alin were another faction.
The single faction nature of the campaign is a flaw, and one that doesn't need to be there.
Meeting Grounds
- Location
- Canada
So, our strategic situation has certainly moved in a positive direction, economy is going online, and two of the enemy armies that were threatening us have been defeated. Research is coming along much more slowly though, really just picking up a couple of generic statistical upgrades.
Now, we have two options here-first try to intercept the enemy army that's currently beating up the fortifications of the cold sands, or head back to pick off the last independent territory, the meeting grounds. We're going to do the second option, not because I want to grind points (which I do, because the Alin tech tree is like twice the size of the Vinci one), but because getting back there at any other point will be a pain, so I'm just going to get it out of the way now.
The premise for this mission is that we are forced into an alliance with a group of deserters from the doge's army, to defend a magical Oasis. We haven't see anything of the doge since we entered the desert, so it's probably worth reminding the player that he's supposed to be around. The oasis on the other hand, is a total plot contrivance, and isn't even terribly useful in game.
So, we have a new hero, Pulitore, the leader of this band of deserters, and chemical warfare specialist (Please ignore that the only use of poison gas in the Vinci arsenal is on the hammer and it's miniaturized multiplayer version). He has a poison gas area denial attack, a passive upping his damage, and damage aura. Despite really cool design and concept, I don't find him terribly effective to use, and his passive effects of providing ongoing effect resistance and boosting the effect of poison units are situational at best.
However, more interesting is the way this mission works. We are controlling two armies at once, Pulitore's Vinci in blue, and Giacomo's Alin in red. Each side has their own resources, which can be traded using the diplomacy interface and their own territory. The reason to do this is that the building interfaces and research tracks for a faction aren't actually tied to anything: they're arbitrary global powers that exist because of the faction you are playing as. So just giving us a bunch of vinci buildings wouldn't really be like playing with both sides at once (It would, however, be a much saner design). To switch control of the sides, just click the blue buttons at the top right or any of the other sides units.
Our actual objective is a defence mission. The dark Alin will attack down three roads towards us, and are trying to capture the super oasis site in the middle of the map. After enough time, this Oasis will magically purge all the Dark Alin. And no, we are never going to try to copy or reuse this magic Oasis again. These dark Alin are just walking in from the edges of the map, so we can't do the traditional lets play maneuver of sacking the enemy base during the defence mission.
We also quickly get a secondary objective to capture three berserker camps, which are type of site and neutral units that we haven't seen before. The berserker riders are roughly scorpion like melee units, while the berserker infantry are impressively weak infantry units which have a ranged AA attack for an inexplicable reason.
Because bigger and tougher riders are ground attack only, I send a task force of air units to grab all the camps as fast as I can. When captured, the camps will produce a stream of berserker infantry units for free. Which, well, berserker infantry are terrible, but free units are quite good.
By the time the camps are captured I've gotten to the point where I am absolutely sick of the control scheme. The main place it starts to break down is if you want to throw a pile of units at a single problem, because if you use the old drag select to grab a bunch of units at a problem, you can only select units from one side. Then you have to switch sides and select everything from the other side. This is really annoying to handle, especially in relatively high intensity mission like this one.
It's an interesting thing that Pullitore gives us an insight into the doge's vinci subfaction. You have no access to air units or clockwork men, and make doge guards and doge walkers instead of musketeers and juggernauts. It is slightly frustrating however, since there really isn't anything that excess wealth can be sunk into besides funnelling it to the Alin, which involves fiddling with the diplomacy interface.
Things get pretty bad, mostly because of the difficult in co-ordinating the battle, while everyone is up north, this citadel that was holding this path starts being overwhelmed.
And releases a whole pile units and siege to charge into my undefended Alin city. This is one of those times when I'd like to throw all the units holding the northern pass down here, but then the goddam interface gets in the way.
Then, to make a difficult situation unwinnable, a glass dragon shows up in the last minute of the mission. Glass dragons are the Alin master unit, like the land leviathan, and generally have too much health, too much damage, and being hilariously expensive, especially if you get all the relevant upgrades. It have two AOE attacks and a self heal ability. Once again, the game suggests countering it with a leviathan. Which is stupid, since I cannot make leviathans, leviathans cost so much money and take so long to build that if one of these knocks on your door you'll be down half of your territory before you can make one, and because glass dragons can actually beat leviathans because they can heal themselves without shutting down, leviathan having to use it's weaker AA attack, and since the written stats of glass dragons are a filthy lie because they're effected by the vigour techs and the glass line attack and health bonuses. If you get all of those, and the actual upgrade to elder glass dragons, the dragon is unambiguously the most powerful single unit in the game.
Of course, if you had been able to handle the dodgy interface, you could probably slay a dragon. Which is why there are two.
However, if you aren't totally dead, you should have enough troops around to hold off the two dragons long enough for the final seconds to tick down.
But really, just giving our normal Alin army a Vinci barracks and a steam fortress at the start, and scrap this little system. I'm not against experimental mechanics, but this is defiantly a failure.
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- Pronouns
- He/Him
Your suffering is delicious.
Nest of Dragons and Cold Sands 2
- Location
- Canada
With the successes in the meeting grounds, we get a chance to upgrade our army a little, with yet more air units. Why? Because realistically I can squeeze some extra performance by focusing on a specific part of the army to upgrade. I've sprung for the second level of fire attack tech.
So, now we're going to be taking back the cold sands, and putting an end to the last Dark Alin army in this half of the desert. From here on, we can move to the back sections of the Alin Campaign.
This is another skirmish map that we've played before, but it's not the same one as the last time we retook a territory. Instead it's the first skirmish map we played, desert heat.
However, the pendulum has defiantly swung towards steamrolling in the skirmish maps. I don't have quite the strength of army that previously allowed for steamrolling, but the significant amount of power and support offered by a max level Giacomo compensates. After tossing down a couple military districts and buying a puzzle box I'm ready to go charging at the enemy.
Case in point: a powerful dark Alin army can be smashed through with a judicious use of super armour after more resistance than expected is encountered.
And the battle is decided as what's left over pushes through to the enemy capitol. Not having to wipe out all the enemy cites really smooths out the whole process.
Anyway, since that was short so let's keep going. We just crushed the last enemy army on the map, but in response the dark Alin respawn one of their armies back in the back of their territory. Obviously we wouldn't be able to just roam free on the map, so now that the initial three armies were defeated, they'll respawn one by one every couple of turns. This generally results in a much lower pressure on the strategic map as long as you knock over the enemy armies every now and then, just like in the last campaign when you could defeat the two puppets.
In the meantime, I'm starting to get up the basis of the technology tree, with added defences for ground units and our first economic tech, cutting 5% off the cost of all my units. I'm only picking up the extra sand upgrades now because I had been focusing on fire upgrades due the the usefulness of air spam to my general plans.
Our target this time is the Nest of Dragons. It's a slightly unusual area in that it gives you hero points like a major objective would, but is just a normal territory. I am curious if this used to be a major objective, or if they just wanted to add a milestone territory to prevent the campaign from feeling too much like a slog through and endless desert.
Well, technically the campaign is a slog through a desert, and the general scarcity of wealth points and being so far from your objectives does support the feeling.
The premise of this mission is that the Dark Alin have overrun the nest of sand dragons and the are corrupting the dragons there into glass dragons. We are here to stop the madness so we don't have to deal with any more of the monsters. Step one is to establish a base, and free the alpha dragon.
We get to pick three heroes for this mission, and I take along Arri and Belisarri. Belissarri because I am a massive fan of salamanders but am having a hard time justifying sinking research into their upgrades when they cannot be added to my starting army. I suppose it's too complicated to deal with a unit that changes power so dramatically with upgrades, but it's a shame that I wish they could have cleared up with more time.
Anyway, with my starting army bloated by free walkers and salamanders, it's easy enough to steamroll the guards around the first city on the map, and free Thuran the sky inferno. Thuran is not quite as dangerous as a glass dragon, but he's still a monster of a unit. Or would be if he was at full health. We can't let Thuran die, and eight hundred health is far from unkillable, so your dreams or rampaging around with a giant dragon are going to be put on hold.
After that objective is completed, a cutscene triggers telling us that there are more dragons to free. We have a time limit to free them all before they turn into glass dragons and kill us all. (You do not get a chance to fight off a bunch of glass dragons: you just lose).
The cutscene also lets our starting mine spawn in without you noticing. It's a strange trend that the game will never make you build the first mine yourself, you always start with it. If you have to capture your first city, the mine will generally spawn during a cutscene.
This is yet another a part of the Alin campaign where having focused on your air force helps, since the captured dragons are on an impassible cliff. Taking Thuran and the air units that were part of my starting army you can breeze past the afreet guards and break the frozen dragons out in short order.
One thing you don't want to fight is the glass dragon that's floating around the cliffside. Just run, and break out the dragons as quickly as possible, the dragon doesn't tend to chase you.
One other problem that you are going to run into is the population cap. You only have once city to make military districts at, and sand dragons are a big, pop heavy units. Getting four of them for free is going to throw you over the population limit, and you'll be forced to build three or more military districts at your home to make any more units at all. You can stretch this by taking the oasis site near your first city.
I want the extra population space because frankly I'm not a fan of sand dragons. For their cost and size they just don't have the damage output-fire elementals do about the same damage despite being much cheaper, and they even have a more useful anti large specialty. Dragons also suffer from being sand units, because for an unexplained reason the sand attack upgrade boosts melee attack more than ranged attacks, so upgrades will result in sand dragons actually falling behind in damage compared to fire elementals.
My air units get back to my home just as a dark terror starts up, which is why I was racing to get the dragons free-being caught all the way out on the cliffside during the dark terror is a dangerous place to be.
At this point a glass dragon knocks on our door. I believe this is actually a separate dragon from the one guarding the cliffside, but I don't have any screenshot truth.
I manage to defeat the dragon by having Giacomo do most of the tanking, and then having the free dragons and the pile of desert walkers I've picked up from building so many military districts.
Once that dragon is slain and the dark terror ends, we can begin the assault on the final base of the dark Alin.
Yeah, this map is actually super small. It does make a bit of sense in that the dragon nest shouldn't be a wide open plain.
There are a large amount of fortifications around the final city, but you should be able to crush them with the amount of free units and hero powers you have available.
I just ignore most of the fortifications and knock down the city first, then mop up while the city gets captured.
The mission ends with an ominous cutscene where Giacomo looks at empty nests and speculates about how many dragons were corrupted before we showed up.
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Yeah, this mission is really undone by clunky controls. It's really hard to manage both factions well, so I was continually ending up with surplus materials for the Vinci, while I never had enough for the Alin. And moving armies was always complicated: I ended up segregating my forces completely, which worked, but felt somewhat out of theme. If they had kept the two factions, but allowed for unified control over the armies it would have been much better(even if the economy would have been a bit clunky).
FYI, this part is repeated.
It would also be better if
Giacomo's statement had any impact on the game. But I don't think the enemy AI ever makes Glass Dragons outside of scripted missions. And I think you've already covered the two scripted missions where it does show up; this mission and the previous Alin/Vinci affair.
Also, I think this the flaws of this scenario are indicative of the flaws of the campaign. The Scripted missions can be nice, but often times the scripted part is really short, and eventually you stop getting many scripted missions as all. On the other hand, the skirmish missions quickly become a joke, if at times ones that take awhile to complete. Personally, I think the skirmish part is the biggest issue. The idea of using skirmishes to essentially pad out a campaign isn't really a bad idea, and even missions that are somewhat scripted and then enter into a more traditional skirmish could be good (and to be somewhat fair I think some missions do handle this better than others). Meanwhile, scripted missions being short does mean that the devs can try more things, both because they're not spending too much time on missions and also because if something doesn't work for a given player it's not like the player is stuck for a huge amount of time on a mission they don't get.
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Fool's Path
- Location
- Canada
Welp, we're over the first milestone in the Alin campaign, and we celebrate by adding a glass golem to our forces. This also is basically as much as I can add do to lack of room. I mean, I can fit in another unit of desert walkers, or swap out the afreet for something bigger, but there's no major upgrades in our future Thus, I'm going to make a quick beeline for the closest major objective to get more room.
There's only one province between us and the deepest desert, and it ever so helpfully has an enemy army in it. Thus we can keep the dark Alin population under control while executing our plan.
Also, notice how all the provinces we can see have science points as a reward? it seems to be a nice way to reinforce the lack of resources available in the desert, but also helps with the massive tech tree.
The fools path is another generic skirmish map, and thus the pace is going to be fast. The map is both reasonably sized and fairly open, and would be a fair map if it was early in the campaign. However, it's rammed near one of the objectives about as far away from the start as possible, so it turns into filler.
Now, though I do try to not rush down the map, we inadvertently run into the Dark Alin army, and end up crushing them with a combination of superior abilities and higher unit quality.
And when the enemy army is pretty much wiped out after a short spat of invincible violence, it's really hard to resist the temptation to charge at their city and crush them.
I may have a rushing problem after doing LP's. It's the optimal strategy, but is it really fun? Should I draw these games out?
Well, whatever I decide for the future (the far future, because I've got six missions of backlogged pictures), this little map is getting ended now. It really isn't interesting enough to devote any more text or images to.
After that formality, yet another army spawns-right at the Deepest Desert, where I was going anywhere. Which is good, since if it spawned in other half of the map, I'd probably lose a bunch of territory. Or possibly bad, because I'd still like to grind points a bit.
Anyway, see you in twenty minutes or so with the first objective of the Alin campaign. I'd love to do two missions in one post, but image limits are a thing.
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Deepest Desert
- Location
- Canada
So the premise for this mission is rather interesting. The sand warden, the giant guy who is half bug, is under siege by the dark Alin, and has lost it a little. So we need to first defeat the Dark Alin before they can defeat Dakhla, and then beat the tar out of Dakhla until he snaps out of his battle frenzy.
So as is usual, we have to walk in and take over a neutral city to start the game. In a cool bit of worldbuilding, rather than the usual neutral guards the city is guarded by sand horrors, the burrowing giant insects that we last saw in the first two missions. It gives the impression that this so remote that the cites are basically abandoned, the only inhabitants being wild monster. SPOILERS: this territory is right next to Mezekesh, so it may make sense that the are is uninhabited-everyone fled when Mezekesh was overrun and buried.
In other news, I did end up swapping out the Afreet in my starting army, for a glass cannon, because glass circles are expensive with the mandatory glass citadel tax and I want to end missions even faster with some dedicated siege support.
To reinforce this message of desolation, all of the neutral cities and sites on the map cannot be bought out for any price. Or possibly it's because the designers don't want you to play with sand horrors, because they are't designed to do some things. Like cross bridges while burrowing-that would probably look weird.
Don't worry. We will eventually get the chance to use sand horrors, I promise you.
Speaking of bridges-this bridge. After getting everything set up, we're going to poke around the enemy city before they have a reasonable chance to damage Dhaka. In the process, we may accidentally provoke some salamanders.
We discover that the dark Alin have a pretty significant army built up, and so we pull in the best dominance in the game-summon Thuran. Thuran doesn't have an unlimited lifespan, but he does have all his health, which makes him an excellent distraction as the rest of my forces advance, and he can take a chunk out of the Dark Alin in the time he's here.
With the usual discharge of all of Giacomo's abilities, the dark Alin on this little spit of land are wiped out, and their city soon follows.
They still have an outpost outside my base, but it's a good start.
So, I immediately get to work crushing the dark Alin outpost near my base. The glass cannon manages to do work on the fortifications while everything else is consumed in a bloody melee. I may have laughed this assault pre-maturely. My rushing habit is betraying me.
The melee basically wipes my entire army, though I manage to demolish all of the dark Alin buildings before attempting to pull back. All I need to do is clean up these last few units, and I'll never have to deal with the Dark Alin for the rest of this mission.
I'm forced to resort to pumping out desert walkers to prevent the Dark Alin from counterattacking into my base or finishing off Giacomo. I just need basically anything that can fight to tip the scales.
It's enough to finish off the stragglers, and the dark Alin are wiped from the face of the map, removing the timer from this mission.
This gives us time to investigate our only side objective on this map-robbing Dakhla blind. I can't imagine that this is going to help us win his trust, though it may help if all we're planning on is forcing him to co-operate.
The treasure is guarded by a massive pack of sand horrors, which would be difficult to handle if they had an anti air attack. So a tiny force of air units spends a few minutes shooting fish in a barrel.
It turns out that despite being undeground, you can still light sand horrors on fire, which gives us the random bonfires where they are burning to death.
BTW, if you are ever confused on this mission pressing shift reveals the health bars of all units onscreen. This revealing the normally unseeable sand horrors because they aren't actually a stealth unit. They just have no model until they attack, which serves as stealth if you aren't paying attention. You can also hover your mouse around an area where you think horrors are to see if you can select anything, but that's less effective.
Unfortunately, Dakhla isn't going to be a passive opponent. A massive force of sand horrors and salamanders stomps the former Dark Alin city.
And then that entire army rolls over and dies without me being anywhere near them. Huh.
Guess those were all summons. Welp, lets go pick that city back up then.
So, pretty much as soon as everything gets re established, another wave of summons come over and kill the remainder of my land army.
So I basically give up making land units. Lets just throw a pile of air units toward the the enemy, since most of his forces don't have an anti air attack.
The only real problem is Dahkla himself. The ability he uses heroes an area control whirlwind, doing damage and knock back to anything that ends up in it. He has several others that he doesn't use before he dies. I feel this is running problem with the AI-they don't discharge their hero abilities as fast as possible when shit has clearly hit the fan. It makes them a little easier to beat in big fights than they could be..
But enough air units can focus on him, and then all that's left is to wrap up the rest of the units and defences which don't have anything to attack but virtually unkillable hero units and totally expendable desert walkers.
Once these two towers fall, there's a message warning you that Dakhla's first layer of defences has fallen. Now, if the Dark Alin had done this that would be a helpful warning that we need to get a move on and kill them. As it is, it's a little annoying, and probably wouldn't have shown up in a more polished game.
Our actual objective is to take over the sand citadel, a giant site which, as far as I can tell, doesn't actually do anything. At the very least, it doesn't do anything on this mission because when we take it over there isn't anything do with it in the few seconds before the game recognizes that we've completed all the objectives. It does't even shoot at us, despite looking like a giant glass citadel.
Dakhla will actually respawn if you take to long killing his stuff, which is probably for the best because if the Dark Alin get lucky the game doesn't become massively harder.
And that's that. One objective down, one ancient genie . . . negotiated with, and we're halfway to Mezekesh. (We're actually right next door, but we've got to around a ruddy great mountain to get the other key.) Dakhla will not be joining us right now though. He is, presumably trying to rebuild his treasure hoard when we spent half of it trying to overthrow his defences.
Or maybe he's planning on getting revenge for us storming his tower and taking his treasure.
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