Majesty 2 – The Royal Feat
I picked up fantasy kingdom sim Majesty 2 a while back, and though I found the tutorial and first few missions fairly easy, I ran into a bit of a brick wall at The Royal Feat. In order to prove my worth to the people of Ardania, I must perform a Royal Feat: that is, kill Rafnir, the oldest and most cunning of dragons! As Rafnir is nearly invulnerable, thanks to various magic, I also have to seek out a witch and do her bidding so that she will remove this protection.
My Sean Connery sound-alike advisor said that Rafnir would attack if he sees my flag.. but I found him marauding through my kingdom on day 2, before any of my buildings were even completed and certainly before I’d set any flags!
On this first visit, Rafnir informed me that he didn’t come here to eat my underfed heroes. Well, as I didn’t have any buildings yet, I didn’t even have any heroes! Before he flew away again, he blasted away the progress I had made on my Ranger’s Guild..
Sins of a Dark Age
Ironclad, creator of Sins of a Solar Empire, have recently announced their second game: Sins of a Dark Age!
Sins of a Dark Age is a team-based RTS hybrid, with teams consisting of one Commander and a group of Heroes, who face enemy teams or co-operate against AI in a variety of scenarios. Players can choose to take on the role of either Commander or one of the Heroes, with the Commander overseeing the battle while the Heroes take on the enemy on the front line.
Dragons and Giants
Skyrim, Skyrim, Skyrim.. I’ve played nothing but this all weekend!
I was going to take a break for some Minecraft, since the new version is out and I wanted to work on my project.. but the CraftBukkit server itself has yet to be upgraded from 1.8. I really should have checked on this before updating my client.. but I didn’t.. and now I either wait for the update, or go and backdate Minecraft to 1.8 again.. yeah.
Laziness won out this time, and I went back into Skyrim..
I was rather chuffed when my power attack caused my character to climb on the dragon’s head! For some reason, I get an error from Steam when I try to upload this screenshot.. or the one of me balancing on tiptoes on his head as he dies..
Yesterday’s explorations took me to a Dwemer dungeon.. I loved the look of this place, though to be honest I loved the previous Dwemer ruins and dungeons too 🙂
Various other explorations brought me face-to-face with some giants. I say face-to-face.. face-to-crotch would be more appropriate!
The one I met on the road didn’t seem to have any interest in attacking me, whether by glitch or design.. but I got into a very tough fight with one later. At this point I’m finding a nice variation in the strength of enemies, with the Giant being a decent threat, but wolves and bandits being easy meat 🙂
HOARD
A friend bought us all HOARD this weekend, as a 4-pack on Steam. Yay! 🙂
HOARD is a mix of action and strategy, developed by indie team Big Sandwich Games, where each player takes on the role of a dragon in a table-top style medieval kingdom with farms, towns, princesses and knights..
Every dragon needs treasure, and this is obtained through burning down farms or towns, intercepting wagons full of tithes, and capturing and ransoming princesses.
The game has a co-op mode, which allows friends to work together to gather as much treasure as possible in one shared hoard, but you can also play competitively.. this can mean racing them to the treasure, or actively trying to get in their way or kill them! Killing another dragon forces them to drop their treasure and flee straight back to their hoard, where they are unable to move while they regenerate health.. a great opportunity to steal the dropped treasure 😉
At the beginning of each game, your dragon only has weak abilities, but as you gather more treasure you are able to spend points and upgrade your dragon’s speed, fire-breathing capability, carrying capacity and damage resistance. I prefer to improve the speed of my dragon, as well as fire-breathing, but I think this could change depending on the map and game mode.
Upgrades cost more at each level, so you need to gather more and more gold to keep upgrading. The kingdom also improves over time, with towns becoming larger and producing archers, who will fire on you. If you do enough damage to a town you can scare them enough that they ‘belong’ to you, and send you tithes.. a nice way of gathering money automatically 🙂
During a competitive game, you will need to keep an eye on ‘your’ towns, as other dragons will want to take them over.. either by damaging the town enough to turn its loyalty to them, or by destroying the town centre and resetting the town’s loyalty. Giants also appear in the kingdom.. they will attack towns they come across unless suitably distracted.. say with some fiery breath.. 😉
There are also small towers around the map, which spawn knights. The knights will attack you if you pass by, and if you capture a princess, all the knights in the vicinity will come to try and rescue her! I found the knights were best avoided until you had levelled up a little, as they are rather strong and can kill you easily if you stray too close. As the kingdom grows, the towers become keeps, with more knights being spawned.. increasing the danger but also the reward, as the ransom value goes up with the level of the keep!
Another danger comes from the mage towers, which fire bolts at nearby dragons: destroying one of these reveals a large gem which is worth a lot of gold, but slows the dragon and makes you vulnerable to attack while carrying it. I found the upgraded towers harder to destroy, as one mistake in avoiding the bolts means death.. and as the bolts can travel a long way, I sometimes got killed by a bolt set off by another dragon!
On all the maps, there are a variety of power-ups, which appear at regular intervals. These can give you stronger firebreath, icy breath, or allow you to shoot fireballs.. another increases your speed, while the last is maybe a little evil, allowing a player to steal from another dragon’s hoard.. aside from the obvious exchange of gold, this has the added advantage of resetting the victim’s score multiplier!
As well as the Treasure game modes, there is “Princess Rush”, where you need to capture the most princesses to win, and a survival mode, which I’ve not tried yet.