Disciples III

[Xilren's Twin]

BIIF  Disciples 3

For this latest installment in the turn based strategy series Disciples, the biggest marketing blurb was its adoption of visually stunning 3D graphics compared to its 2D isometric predecessors.  Having just finished the human campaign, I can state I think the sacrifices they made in the rest of the game in the name of graphics makes D3 a case of one step forward, but two steps back.

If I had to pick one word to describe the overall feel of the game, that word would be “slow”.  Not that it technically runs slow, but rather the pacing, the sheer number of meaningless fights, the very limited number of actual meaningful choices you have to make in any given turn, even some of the interface choices, all left me with this “get on with it!” feeling which really detracted from the enjoyment.  The movement speed of the hero units on the map is ridiculously slow, and annoying in that you can’t adjust it (combat movement is also slow but at least that one you can adjust).  Loading a saved game, feels slow. Hell even the narration is slow.  Someone get these folks some caffeine stat!

I like the hex based combat area they added – having movement, obstacles, and power up hexes was a big improvement over their previous games’ two static rows.  Being able to use choke points, determining if it was better to rush across the map or let the enemy come to you, set up a defensive front while teleporting one of your units to the enemy rear, etc, that’s a plus.  Having any of your units be able to use your one shot magic runes, also nice.  Some of the special abilities you can get are very nice (my favorite was the “transform enemy unit into a peasant for 3 turns”). But…the AI is fairly brain dead when it comes to things like who is it going to attack and would often ignore severely hurt units to attack someone else who was just 1 hex closer to them.  This was easily exploitable in situations (mana node guardians primarily) where you could summon creatures repeatedly and as long as they were closer to the enemy, they would be the target.  Whereas when you were fighting against summoners, you knew it was far better to ignore the summoned mob and kill the caster, which would make the summoned being vanish.

Technically, I did have a couple of occasions where combat would glitch out (i.e. it’s the enemies turn but he’s not moving, or several of my units disappear) requiring a taskbar close, but they were rare, and since the game auto saves before every fight, not really much of a setback.  However, my son (14) managed to find some easily reproducible bugs just fooling around which allowed you do things like take your capital city guardian out of the city and into the map, or clone units and exceed the leadership rating (i.e. your leader can have 3 units in your troop stack, he managed to have 8).  Once he showed them to me his comment was “clearly they didn’t spend much time testing”.

I do like some of the new things they added, but they ripped out much of what I liked about the previous games so overall, I think it was a net loss.  I’ll put more details in the Disciples 3 thread.  At $40, if you are a hard core TBS fan or Disciples fan, I would still say get it, but if not, pass.