Sorry if this is a repost.
The screenshots look amazing, and so does the in game video.
I heard that it won’t install unless you have WinXP and a processor with SSE2, however. I don’t know how true that is.
Do you have a better link? That just links to a bunch of ads, as far as I can tell.
There’s a typo in your link. Here’s the correct one. I normally wouldn’t make this kind of correction, but I hate those nasty little ‘link’ sites that pop up when it should be a 404.
Off to download the demo…
I’m running it on XP with an AMD Barton and it’s running fine, my mate is running it on a lower speed Barton and a hardware warning came up saying it may not run properly, but that’s more to do with his old graphics card.
It’s quite a good game, about the same as AoK IMHO, it’s not fantastic but it’s better than Age of Mythology.
There’s more emphasis on ranged attacks now (with guns being much more common) but there don’t seem to be many different units to train. This may be just because it’s the demo, but in the barracks there are only 4 different units (for the Brits anyway there’s longbow, pikeman and musketeer, with the Spanish you also get a skirmisher). The armour/weaponry improvements also seem a bit limited.
The 2 other people who bought Ground Control 2 will be familier with the biggest differences to the rest of the series - the trading posts and home city supplies. Trading posts are buildings that you control and a cart/wagon/train will come along and drop off resources or XP. You get XP for the trading posts or killing things and these can be used to buy special cards from your home city. These cards are either upgrades or units for free.
All in all, having just played the demo, it’s worth buying but not until it drops in price.
Ah balls, forgot to mention the bugs in the demo -
the native American units often don’t show up on the screen, even though they are on the mini-map and you paid for them (if you ally with the Indians you can buy units and upgrades from them).
the priests walk around horizontally (as if they’re lying down) all the time. They go the right way up to heal (which is a pain the ass to do now) then go back to being horizontal.
There are a few more but I forget what they are.
Yeah, I noticed those bugs, too. The priest thing is funny at least, but the Native American bug is just annoying. My first game, it worked fine, but then after that I haven’t been able to get any NA units to work. I also get weird blocky shadows throughout the viewing field unless I go down to minimal graphic quality, and I have a pretty good graphics card.
Overall not bad, but it doesn’t feel very much like AOE to me, what with XP, cards and decks, etc. I don’t seem to have any deck building abilities yet, not sure if that’s just the demo’s limitations or if I don’t have enough experience.
Priests’ healing is sort of frustrating; grouping priests doesn’t work well - there should be an option, or upgrade, that allows only one of them to have to wait to heal again – just like in AOE 2, you could upgrade so only one of them would have to rest to convert.
One of the things that is nice off the bat is the explorer. Treasure hunting is kind of fun, and it’s a lot better than that stupid relic thing from AOE 2. Explorers are kind of funny, though – they don’t really die, but just lie around a really long time until they’re fully healed and then some, and get back up. I managed to kill the enemy’s explorer early on when he was near my settlement, watching him roll around on the ground for a good long while, and killed him once more when he finally got back up. Hee!
I have to agree on this one, I don’t see it being worth $50, but I’ll probably buy it once it drops in price.
I think it’s because there is no model included in the demo for those units. You can build up to some other special cards at times, like the German mercenaries card, and that does the same thing.
Your opponent could’ve ransomed back their explorer by paying 100 coin to you. If you get your explorer ‘killed’, you can buy him back from the town centre for 100 coin which gets paid to your opponent. I have no idea if the amount of coin changes with level and to be honest I’m not really sure why the explorer is so important as they don’t do anything a villager can’t.
They’re fast, make good scouts, and some of them have extremely nice special abilities.
Nice, although the nearly half gig download takes a while even with high speed DSL.
Has anyone figured out keyboard shortcuts? A few from AOE2 work (period and comma being the most useful), but many don’t.
Selcet a villager and press E to build a house.
That’s all I know to be honest. Does anyone knwo how to get the troops to act defensively and just stand there? Whenever I set a group to defend, the pikeman run halfway across the map to build that stupid square thing and end up getting shot a lot.
Alright, downloading the demo as we speak.
I never played AoE 1 or 2, but played and loved Age of Mythlology (will there ever be a sequel to this?) So hopefully I will enjoy this.
There are a bunch of keyboard shortcuts listed in the Readme file…
I haven’t played either of the AOE’s for a LONG time, so I am having a hard time figuring out the game…
I’ll probably have to wait for the full version so I get an instruction book and tutorial.