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WTF is... Impire

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Vast majority of his issues are resolved by proper strategy and runes/upgrades.

My favorite complaint is the comparison to Dungeon Keeper having an entrance: Bad news everyone, heroes didn't use one entrance in DK either. They busted through your wall, anywhere they can get to you.

The heroes will *always use the entrance* if you destroy the ladders. Every single time. With proper design you can completely prevent the ladders from ever being a problem with 1-2 patrolling units.

I've watched Total Biscuit's WTF's a lot, and while humorous, unfortunately they're usually about as accurate as the people who can't figure out basic game mechanics.
 
Scynix said:
Vast majority of his issues are resolved by proper strategy and runes/upgrades.

My favorite complaint is the comparison to Dungeon Keeper having an entrance: Bad news everyone, heroes didn't use one entrance in DK either. They busted through your wall, anywhere they can get to you.

The heroes will *always use the entrance* if you destroy the ladders. Every single time. With proper design you can completely prevent the ladders from ever being a problem with 1-2 patrolling units.

I've watched Total Biscuit's WTF's a lot, and while humorous, unfortunately they're usually about as accurate as the people who can't figure out basic game mechanics.
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I'm not entirely sure you watched this video with an unbiased approach. You have a history of defending the game, which is fine I'm a fan but it has issues that you cannot deny.

Now then, your claim that "vast majority of his issues are resolved by proper strategy and runes/upgrades" is not even remotely accurate.

A lot of his complaints about the game were the lack of customization of your dungeon, very poor AI for your units and no real option of managing your single units effectively. The mechanic of having to tell your minions to eat is an annoyance, you CAN get a rune or use the mascots to counter this but it's wasted points imo.

In addition the ladders system makes no sense, it's not a challenge it's a silly mechanic. I'm not particularly bothered by their existence but I can see why others would be. On that note I really do think hero parties need to be looked at got a group of 3 lvl 3 engineers earlier..that's just not fun.

He was wrong on a couple topics, I enjoy the overland raiding to me it gives the heroes reason to come down into your dungeon. I personally enjoy watching some of them as well especially after I've upgraded the unit so I can see how they look in the upgrades. But all in all his review was pretty accurate, the AI is BAD, healer units not healing causes you to waste time retraining which is frustrating. Heroes walking right by your "tank" units to the squishy ones defeats the purpose of even giving them roles to begin with. Yeah it can go after the healer but the tank should be able to at least try and stop the hero/enemy but they don't
 
Ironwarrior82 said:
Now then, your claim that "vast majority of his issues are resolved by proper strategy and runes/upgrades" is not even remotely accurate.

But all in all his review was pretty accurate, the AI is BAD, healer units not healing causes you to waste time retraining which is frustrating. Heroes walking right by your "tank" units to the squishy ones defeats the purpose of even giving them roles to begin with. Yeah it can go after the healer but the tank should be able to at least try and stop the hero/enemy but they don't
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So design your squads with that idea in mind. I've posted this before but I'll do it again, as it never seems to get read.
Tank Squads 1-2 : Champion, Overlord, Berserker, Priest (Bonuses include Stun Resistance, very handy)
DPS Squads 3-4 : Medusa, Scout, Warlock, Priest (Bonuses include extra damage)
Squad 5 doesn't really matter since I can roll everything with the first four squads.

This is not the "ideal" setup, it's just the setup I use, and I used game mechanics to do it. I very rarely (if ever) have to retrain or replace any members of these squads. Proper placement of the squads in combat also have an effect on their effectiveness (dumping a ranged squad into melee range with a bunch of engineers is a bad idea) but this is only ONE example of solving issues using the game mechanics/upgrades/proper strategy.

I use priests to restore squad health after the fight, not during. They always restore their respective assigned squad to full health between each fight, saving me sending them to eat. These squads almost NEVER eat. If I decide to use the aggressive runes I don't ever have to feed them. Do I think it's ok that they don't heal more in combat? No, not at all, but I also saw a problem and rectified it using game mechanics. You can to.

Please don't say I'm wrong if you haven't even tried. All games have issues, but having a knee jerk reaction to them does NOT fix the issues, and that's what the vast majority of the complaints on this forum (and even this video) are. Knee jerk reactions without any actual effort placed in the game itself.
 
An underused feature (and one TB has completely missed) is the patrol button. I've found it to solve most ladder "issues" on it's own if you set one-two squads to patrol, and every unit that's not in a squad. The game should really be more explicit when explaining the patrol/defend/follow buttons, because of all the "no AI" arguments and "ladders OP" shoutouts. I'm the first one to agree that the game has major issues and some missed opportunities when it comes to design, but the ladders really are manageable, and without them there would be no point in patrolling your dungeon - you'd always know were heroes are coming from, making it much less tense and much more boring! A proper auto-patrol and dungeon design deals with most ladders, you can deal with the few left in a timely manner no problem, and then you can prepare for the assault coming from the gate - having the heroes guaranteed to come from the gate is really something people would prefer?
 
Voodoo: I do not agree. Although you can lower the chance of heroes spawning from ladders with a lot of patroling non-squad units and patroling squad units, you can't predict wheter they would make it in time or won't. And because of that, you have to use teleport. And that makes good idea into bad mechanic.

Could be cool to make several gates on map and tie them to kingdom map with raids. The more you raid, the more heroes come, you have several "locations" to raid due to heroes gates (in those predefined rooms, there are already ladders, so why won't use them? You could extend the usability of Prison etc. by allowing minions to capture heroes during raid or make whole resource-gathering dependet on capturing and extracting heroes (maybe with a small buff)
 
Except you DO have control over what space is available for them build ladders, which in turn means you DO have control over "whether they'll make it in time or not". If you're finding your patrols aren't making it, you need to change your design. It's your strategy that's flawed. Voodoo is still correct.
 
Scynix: you are again incorrect. You don't have precise control over what space is available. And the graphics is sometimes unclear, wheter you can build on that space or not (as only room shows greenish if both area is clear and is connected to room/hallway, no partially red, as that you need move two pixels left, isnt available). And as you can't change your design "on the run", with fixed sizes of rooms and unable to destroy and build rooms elsewhere, everything is quite hard. And you can't control paths, so random nature of patrols (as I mentioned before) makes it hard. You can't plan ahead, as placing blueprint of each room and design dungeon with max. efficiency. So you could finish dungeon with some needed hall in corner of your dungeon where no patrol would (because of random nature) and where 3 ladders could spawn.

So, lets summarize. Unless you make perfect dungeon, that you can sufficiently plan only by plaing the same map over again again again again again (as in each mission, there are neutral rooms etc.), you are screwed by need of teleporting squads towards ladders.

So unless you are some sort of supermacist that can control nature of randomness and you have no problem playing roulette and controling the spin and you consider this realy easy, in which case you have to admit that most humans (if you count still as human) don't have such power. Otherwise, you should stop saying such a rubbish.
 
Dealing with 1-2 ladders instead of 4 manually isn't such a big deal you make it out to be. I agree - if you do nothing, and there are 4 ladders with each wave of heroes it gets irritating. I try design the dungeons to be as corridor-light as possible, while keeping up with the DEC requirements to make them as mean as possible. And honestly I wouldn't like my auto-patrolling teams to deal with all ladders, because then I would have a game with much less to do - with ladders spawning as they do I have to:

-Design dungeons and assign units to make ladders more manageable.
-Keep an eye out for ladders they missed.
-If I don't get there in time, from time to time fight enemies elsewhere, or hope my throneroom-treasure pit-brewery + traps combination works well enough to slow them down sufficiently.

So this means that ladder randomness creates more uncertainty (which creates more tension), forces me to manage my troops and building more. If I had just the randomness of four directions, it would be just a game of optimisiation like Sim City (which is a fine game, but different genre).
 
I understand your point is:

Do you wanna deal with upcoming heroes yourself? Or do you wanna design your dungeon to do that?

For the first aspect, the game doesn't have enough depth there. You can't micro with units enough, your units have too little abilities (such as Baal spells) etc. to make this aspect fun.

If the fun aims in designing dungeon so you could withstand attacks... than you have to little tools there too.

How would I describe it...

Imagine some shooter-like game as Tyrian, Xenon (or something), Raptor, Space invaders...
Than imagine tower defense game.

In one, you are killing whole lot of unis yourself and have vast ammount of arsenal to unleash destruction.
In second type, you have a lot of different towers, upgradable, with a lot of special abilities.

There are lot of games that mix this in some way. Like lot of W3 etc. Tower Defense maps, where you had hero, who build or could fight those waves of enemies.
But in Impire... both of those ways aren't fleshed enough. You just have to periodically divert your attention to teleport your one or two squad to places, where there is noone to destroy ladders. Thats all you have to do.

Great improvement would be, if the ladders would be fleshed, apart of the classic "level scaling". Imagine ladders as attack squads of heroes after you have raided certain parts of overworld. Imagine overworld belonging to kingdoms, factions. You are defeating those factions, weakening them. Such as monsters are trying to kill you in Majesty. Imagine raiding them, weakening kingdoms. You could either raid them all the time, so none or few heroes would try to attack you (from that faction), but kingdom wouldn't have time to accumulate mutch whealth, or you could let them rise, improve their economy and gain more money from raids.

This would instantly flesh out the overworld, give decent skirmish, make great connection to Majesty (imagine designing maps and factions BY majesty missions!) and give you reason and nice control over ladders.
 
And again, colombo, you are incorrect.

You're simply not using what you have available correctly. I apologize, there's just no way we can explain it any simpler.
 
If you need an "argument" re-read our posts. You don't provide any counterargument, you just say "you're wrong and I'm right". Sine that's all you ever say, guess what? I apologize, but YOU'RE wrong. Take a class in debate.
 
you can only customize your dungeon to a verry little degree. Especially in the campaign since most of the of the rooms are pre-built for you and you cannot even destroy them.
90% of the time I am playing tetris with where can I put that room. Its like a house with an already in build : kitchen bathroom, and living room sure you can move some things around the kitchen but other then you can
only build around the pre-built things. Now I would have been totaly fine with the fact that dungeon customization is very limited, if the RTS part of the game had depth. but sadly it does not.
 
Scynix said:
If you need an "argument" re-read our posts. You don't provide any counterargument, you just say "you're wrong and I'm right". Sine that's all you ever say, guess what? I apologize, but YOU'RE wrong. Take a class in debate.
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You'd catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

Now this fly is buzzing off. Wow what an ascerbic and arrogant fellow.
 
Saw his "WTF..." on the game. Typically I think TB is far to lenient when he tests games, but in this case I think he was spot on.

I want to like this game, but in its current state, between its bugs and strange design, I simply cannot. :sad:
 
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