Disciples III

[Sky]

How is this under the radar? Releasing on Steam on the 16th. For those not familiar, it's a darker-themed HoMaM with rpg elements.

[MournelitheCalix]

Thank you, Thank you, Thank you....


I absolutely loved Disciples 2, can't wait to get this new one.  I can't believe this went so long under the radar as it will either. 

[Rasix]

I could have sworn someone was talking about this a few months ago, but the search is coming up blank.

[Margalis]

I played the Demo of 2 and liked it quite a bit. From what I remember this is a bit different, I thought that D2 battles played out kind of like Ogre Battle and D3 is more direct unit control.

My one complaint in the demo would be the overall pace of battle, I played the evil dudes and one of their units took like ten seconds to trudge along every turn of battle.

[Musashi]

I just saw that on Steam.  Then I read the reviews.

[Xilren's Twin]

I know ill be getting this not only for myself, but one of my boys really liked Disciples I & II as well.  Looks like they focused mainly on 3d effects in this.  We'll see.

It's a euro take on a dark fantasy HoMM style game, with some notable differences.  In the previous ones, you pick from 1 of 4 races, and can have mutiple heros of different types (soilder, mage, scout), and each could have from 1-5 other troops with them depending on the hero's level.  Each troop is just a single unit with stats for hp, attack, hit %, special abilities etc, and they generally fall into warrior, mage, archer, healer types with some special units (mostly large size - take 2 spots - warrior types).  Battle is done on a small tactical grid, where unit speed determines turn order.  While there is no movement around the grid, you do have front and back ranks and you have to remove the front rank troops before being able to attack the back rank, at least with melee.  As your troops and hero battle, they all earn xp and you can level up your hero and troops.  Leveling up troops requires you to have built a higher level troop building in your capital and there are usually two paths of troop abilities you can take.  i.e. preists start with a single target heal.  when they level, you may elect to make them get a much stronger single target heal, or a lower power heal that affects all your troops in battle.

There are also some special hero types (rod planters and thieves) which are used to plant a flag to control terriroty (like next to a mana node or gold mine), or spy on enemy units/attempt to poison a stack/challenege stack leader to a duel.  I always found thieves very handy to soften up stacks before attacking.

You earn gold and mana per turn based on haveing mines, towns, and mana nodes in territory you control, and you can spend mana to research spells that you can use on the overland map.  These range from damage spells, to buffs, debuffs, 1 turn summon spells, healing, etc.  Heroes can get equipment of various types that can help some.  Most games, you will have a main hero and stack that you try to level as high as you can to complete some objective.  The campaign games were a pretty decent mix of map types and goals.

On the whole, i enjoyed them for what they are, but they are definately not as deep as HoMM. I tihnk a lot of the low reviews are probably from folks who never played the previous ones and went in expecting something different.

[Murgos]

I recall mentioning this a few months ago but at the time there was no release date.  I played a lot of Disciples 2.  I could see reviewers not 'getting it' but if it's like 2, it won't be super deep but it will have copious amounts of that sweet '1-more-turn' essence.

[Xilren's Twin]

Ah, they added a larger combat grid using hexes and movement this time.  From some of the reviews...

[/quote]For Disciples disciples, the most welcome aspect of the Renaissance renaissance has to be the revamped combat system. Gone is the old 12-square chessboard with its static pieces; in its place is a 117-cell hex-grid on which units can roam at will.
...
 When leaders level up, there are points to spend on attributes and new skills. Instead of a conventional tree, the latter are arranged on an irregular, maze-like grid (different for each class), meaning choices are far from simple.[/quote]

On the downside, they also ripped out the Undead and dwarves factions as a playable race.  Humans, Elves and Demons.  

[Paelos]

I've rarely seen reviews that vary so much about a game. I am wary about paying full price for anything when technical issues are listed as a downside.

[Sky]

I just installed Disciples 2, which I got during one of the steam sales. I played the original a long time ago and have the two others (Galleon and Elves) on steam. Love the art and feel. What I don't like is the fixed resolution, even though it gives me a whopping three choices 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024, the 1280x1024 is just 800x600 with a border for all but the world part of the game, and the graphics are miniscule. Nice to see more of the map, but I think I'm going to have to drop it back down to 800x600 to play on the tv 

[Musashi]

I'd highly recommend reading a review, or two, before committing your hard earned nerd dollars.

[Hayduke]

Yeesh what a disappointment.  I was wondering if this game would ever come out.  And getting rid of the dwarves and undead for the lame expansion pack elves seems like a dumb move.

[Sky]

I dunno, still sounds like a decent game that just needs to be played on a harder difficulty to overcome some AI issues. Not like I can afford a new (or at least just released) game, anyway. Steam xmas sale! Maybe I'll even have finish HoMaM V and the two King's Bounties by then...

[Speedy Cerviche]

Hmm never heard of this, I think I will try disciples 2 tho, it sounds exactly the the first Ogre Battle game (on SNES).

[Xilren's Twin]

I'd highly recommend reading a review, or two, before committing your hard earned nerd dollars.

In this case, i am happily "investing" my son's gaming cash so it's all good 
if it sucks ill get him something else.

[lac]

I've played this for a couple of evenings and it's entertaining for a bit if you are into the genre but it gets repetitive real quick. Both in combat, character and army/city building.

It also has a horrible saved game system. All saves of the three campaigns follow the exact same format 'act VII - generic name - turn 48', good luck guessing which one is your latest save considering you can only see the first 25 characters or so (have fun loading a save from an act with a 30 character name) and all 3 campaign saves are intermingled.

Character development is shite. Every two acts you find the 'holy knucklebone of whoa' which makes you hit for 147 instead of 145 or something that gives you 50 more hp. It changes nothing.

They gradually open up the building options every act so you can build a stronger version of your melee/mage/priest units. I guess it works as a teaser if you are into that thing but it doesn't change anything about the boring combat. Melee units melee, mages aoe, priest aoe heal and if you are feeling fancy you can read a scroll to heal a friend, summon a beast or blast an enemy. Every time, all the time.

It requires no tactics, no skill, no anything. Ever.

edit: I just realised, had they made this on facebook it would have been a huge hit.

[Xilren's Twin]

I've played this for a couple of evenings and it's entertaining for a bit if you are into the genre but it gets repetitive real quick. Both in combat, character and army/city building.It also has a horrible saved game system. All saves of the three campaigns follow the exact same format 'act VII - generic name - turn 48', good luck guessing which one is your latest save considering you can only see the first 25 characters or so (have fun loading a save from an act with a 30 character name) and all 3 campaign saves are intermingled. Character development is shite. Every two acts you find the 'holy knucklebone of whoa' which makes you hit for 147 instead of 145 or something that gives you 50 more hp. It changes nothing. They gradually open up the building options every act so you can build a stronger version of your melee/mage/priest units. I guess it works as a teaser if you are into that thing but it doesn't change anything about the boring combat. Melee units melee, mages aoe, priest aoe heal and if you are feeling fancy you can read a scroll to heal a friend, summon a beast or blast an enemy. Every time, all the time.
It requires no tactics, no skill, no anything. Ever.edit: I just realised, had they made this on facebook it would have been a huge hit.

<activating Bloodworth mode> 
I have also been playing for a few hours and tend to disagree with you.  It's basically Disciples 3DDDDDDDdddd... but thats what I was excpecting.  The differences so far have been positives and i tend to disagree with a lot of the knocks you gave it. Saved games? You do know you can name them whatever you like and that the load menu shows you the race icon for the campaign you are loading right?
The grid combat with movement has been a nice step forward; i definately have been using choke points and the power up hexes (double damage to melee, ranged, or magic) in my fights to max effectiveness, which is much improved compared to the first 2 Disciples games.  Character development has been again improved from previous games - yeah the 5 stats arent that exciting, but the skill point tile map does have some nice abilities in it, you just have to pick the route you want to take to get there.  For instance, the first skill i wanted that was relatively close to the center starting tile was a +1 Leadership one, so i used my initial skill points and my first level up to get that.  Yes i had to pick some skill i didnt reall want or need to get to that (+2 armon, +5 fire resistance) but being able to add another troop is not a minor thing.  Other longer path skills include stuff like revive a dead unit, whirlwind melee attack, extra attack, transform a target into a peasant for 3 turns, etc.  I'll see if i can post a pick of the skill layout later.  No technical issues so far playing at 1920x1080
At any rate, to me its worth $40; it may not be as good as HoMM but if you've exhausted those and Kings Bounty games, its a nice pickup.

[Xilren's Twin]

/deactivating Bloodworth mode.

lac, i owe you an apology.  You were certainly more right than i was.  After the new game glow wore off the annoyances built up. Attached is my BIIF and slightly extended review which tends to fit with your complaints...
--------------------------------------
BIIF write up

Ok, to expand on some of the above, the area that bugs me most is lack of meaningful choices.  Whether they intended to or not, it appears they have rendered large parts of their game meaningless yet left them in.  It’s just confusing why they would do some of this stuff.

Having finished one campaign and started the next, I have yet to find a situation where you would want to have more than one hero unit.  No shuttle heroes, no secondary map clearers, no backup troops.  There just doesn’t seem to be any benefit towards hiring another stack of troops and leader and trying to level them up instead of just doing every fight with your main guy. Which means that you have no trouble getting your units to the max level they can be in any given mission, and since your leader carries over from mission to mission, it’s not hard to gain enough levels to obtain every meaningful special ability you can get.  By the time I was on the last human mission, my leader could raise dead, whirlwind attack, double attack, remove debuffs, and transform enemy units into peasants.  He was also my best melee unit with a very high base damage and crit chance, high initative, and large movement range. So far doing the demon campaign, it looks like this will continue to be the case.

So if there’s no reason to have more than one troop stack or leader, it also makes things like the arms and armor merchants useless; they only sold items that other leader types could equip; you know, the leader types you didn’t actually need.  There was also very few merchants selling spells, potions, etc that you would ever actually need so overall, not much point having a bunch of shops on the map.

In the same way, there didn’t seem to be any need at all for the thief leader unit, which was a big departure from past titles.  In D1 and D2, you had to build a special building to unlock the Thief, and they could doing things like spy on dungeons to see what mobs were in them, spy on enemy stacks to see their makeup, attempt to poison a stack (damage to each unit), and even challenge a stack leader to a one on one duel.  They were very useful and most games I would have multiple thieves accompanying my leader and exploring the map.  While D3 you still have to build the thief building to unlock them, they don’t appear to be anything more than a normal crappy melee leader unit now.  Unless I totally missed something, they now serve zero purpose.

The rod planter leaders are also gone.  In there place are ownership nodes scattered all over the map.  They always have a mob standing next to them you must fight (or are owned by an opposing race), and capturing one gives your race control over the area surrounding it, which usually includes either a gold mine, stone quarry, or mana node.  It also puts a node guardian on it that will level up over time.  The human guardians were basically statues that magic attack all, and as they level they unlock abilities to use a regen spell, or summon living armor or golems.  This means the few times enemy race units attack my nodes, I could use the “summon a mob every turn method” to keep them at a distance and eventually whittle them away.

Usually, you can capture enough mana nodes to be generating more mana per turn than a level 1 spell costs, so mid game and on you could basically cast a spell every turn.  This usually was either the base 250 damage to a stack spell, or 250 healing spell.  There seem to be very little reason to research, let alone use, all the other spells.  In past games it was not uncommon for me to use summon spells to soften up magic resistant targets, or buff and debuff spells.  Never needed them here.

Almost every fight leaves an item as loot, and most are the single shot runes.  But again, there seemed little reason to use them in combat, so by the end of most missions, I had a ton.  The most common thing I used them for is selling them for gold to push building construction earlier, but even that didn’t seem necessary.  About the only fights I used several runes were dragon fights, just b/c they had such high resistances to everything my mages could throw they had to use runes or stand around doing nothing.  There are also potions which could give buffs to stats or resistances for a number of turns (never used any), permanent stat buff potions, healing/raise dead potions, and the occasional ring/orb/talisman/other piece of equipment your leader could use that gave stat buffs like “+3 Dex, +1 movement, +15 fire resist”.  Generally I only found 1 item per mission that was actually better than what I already had.  The leader interface for showing your inventory is a two column list you have to scroll through and is idiotic.  Why are they showing me one shot runes you can’t use in your leader inventory equip screen?  Why no filter buttons?  Having to click scroll right 10 times just to get to the latest thing you picked up was annoying.

In the old games, you controlled more territory with both your rod planters, and also by capturing neutral towns.  While you can capture towns in D3, again, doesn’t seem to be a compelling reason to do so.  They don’t seem to provide any real advantage to having them, nor disadvantage if you pass them up.  Since you aren’t recruiting thieves or more heroes or rod planters, you probably won’t need to heal up in them, nor protect local gold/mana resources with troops in them, and they don’t bring their own bonus gold or mana, why capture towns, let alone upgrade them?  There were actually a few towns that were tougher fights than most end fights but if they didn’t appear worth the effort, I generally would leave them alone.  I also had a town or two I controlled get taken back by the enemy race, but again, it had such little impact on the game I just started putting a single level 1 fighter in towns and that’s it.  If they fell, so what?

In the same way, there didn’t seem to be much incentive to explore the map.  Just following the one path to the target objective brings you by so many monsters (too many really), nodes, shops, dungeons, healing fountains, etc that you had plenty of gold/items and xp to level your guys on.  Why go haring off into the unrevealed sections of the map, especially when you already have that “this game is dragging on” feeling?  Maybe there were cool spells or awesome artifacts out there somewhere, but I never felt like I needed anything like that.

Dropping the playable races from 5 to 3 also smacks of a sacrifice to get the 3d version done.  Since most of the dwarf and undead units do exist in the game, about the only thing that would be missing is the 3D city models (and campaigns and whatnot).  The fact that there are death and mountain mana nodes on the map you can’t use tells me they started to include them, then ripped them later.  They could make an appearance in an expansion, but still disappointing.

I am hopeful that the demon campaign will be different enough to hold my interest, but I don’t think the lack of healing units is going to make that much impact if I still get the sheer number of healing runes and potions I got as a human.  We shall see.  I also doubt the Elves will play different enough from the humans to even want to start that one.

Overall, it’s too bad I cannot give it a glowing recommendation.  I am a disciples fan and was predisposed to like this game based on past experiences.  But adding the muddy palette 3d graphics just didn’t add nearly as much as they either intentionally took away, or rendered impotent.  I am damning the thing with faint praise, which sadly says it all.   The whole thing just makes me want the next HoMM game all the more.

[NiX]

You could have linked to your BIIF and just had your extended comments in a "Extended" section of it. WALL OF TEXT.

[Xilren's Twin]

You could have linked to your BIIF and just had your extended comments in a "Extended" section of it. WALL OF TEXT.

Good idea; modified.  I should have realized in the age of twiter, less is more 

[Sky]

Ouch.

Thanks for the write-up, XT.