{"id":4160,"date":"2012-11-02T21:43:22","date_gmt":"2012-11-03T01:43:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/?p=4160"},"modified":"2012-11-02T21:45:01","modified_gmt":"2012-11-03T01:45:01","slug":"the-hostile-geography-of-fallen-enchantress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2012\/11\/02\/the-hostile-geography-of-fallen-enchantress\/","title":{"rendered":"The Hostile Geography of Fallen Enchantress"},"content":{"rendered":"

Exploration is one of the central ideas in any empire building game, and Fallen Enchantress<\/em> relies heavily on uncovering what resources and settlement locations are nearby. The problem with exploring is that things may follow you home.<\/p>\n

My scout was doing no harm, and in fact maybe a little good, when he moved outside the comfy radius of my capital city. He mapped the nearby forest and hills, found ancient battlefields and new sources of mana. Then he ran into an army of golems led by a guardian statue. This was a battle that he could not win. But it made the golem angry enough that he moved into my territory, started smacking things around and then, despite a full complement of spearmen and a hero or two, it captured my capital – my most productive and heavily armed city.<\/p>\n

Captured is the wrong term. Wilderness creatures do not capture cities. They destroy them. For all intents and purposes, this game was over. And not that many turns after the damned thing had started.<\/p>\n

This happens more often than I would like in Fallen Enchantress<\/em>, the sequel to 2010’s Elemental: War of Magic<\/em>. Make no mistake, Fallen Enchantress<\/em> is a good game, a strong game with a lot to recommend it. The game world is an interesting one with diverse factions and multiple routes to victory. The world map is well drawn and haunting, even if the character and unit portraits are still hideous. The research system makes more sense than it did in the original Elemental<\/em> and though the AI is completely at sea when it comes to army composition or battle tactics, it can build a strong lead in the early game and thereby pose a threat. <\/p>\n

Fallen Enchantress<\/em> often has major issues with the pacing and setup because the times of greatest tension and strategic failure are more likely to be in the opening fifty turns, that time when you should be getting things sorted for the larger battle to come over global domination. See, Fallen Enchantress<\/em> is absolutely not a game that encourages casual mapping of the territory. There are no Sacagaweas escorting you around danger until you find your Promised Land. Hell, there may be no promised land at all. Once you move even slightly out of your starting area, things get very dangerous, very quickly. There are great rewards in taming the frontier, but you will pile up a body count.<\/p>\n

As I think of games where exploration has both risk and reward (Seven Cities of Gold<\/em>, Conquest of the New World<\/em>, the Civilization<\/em> family, etc.), it’s hard to think of many that have a world as relentlessly hostile to all comers as the one in Fallen Enchantress<\/em>. Yes, the original Elemental<\/em> wasn’t particularly nice, but it had a lot of low level dangers and easy quests scattered around the map to level up your hero. Plus, Elemental<\/em> was much more generous with giving you places you could plop down a city – though even there cities were in danger of just disappearing when a roaming horde of monsters came by.<\/p>\n

The problem with this hostility is that many early and midgame setbacks, like losing a major city or having a small army killed by the dragon that just decides to walk around your borders, are the sort of thing that lead me to throw my hands up and quit. I really don’t mind much if I am at war and my enemy captures a city or ambushes an army and does some damage to it. This is part of how civilized nation fight and I have a chance to fight back. But there is an arbirtrariness in Wilderness Life that means some days the dragon is just content to huff and puff and go to sleep and other days wants to swallow your nation whole. Instead of making me want to push through the difficulty, the sneak attacks by monsters merely remind me that the next time that I play the game, I better clear out every single pit before I do anything silly. Like diplomacy. Or meeting other empires at all.<\/p>\n

It is all well and good to say that the faction diversity can help with this – some factions do have an easier time in the wilderness. But then you have to give up some other cool trait that another faction has. But it does mean that you need to come up with a strategy for using whatever bonuses your chosen faction has going for it. Until you can cross the map in peace, there is little point in thinking about the end game. This makes every empire’s strategy as distinct as the traits they must use to devise that plan.<\/p>\n

Though the thematically similar Warlock: Master of the Arcane<\/em> has some similar design ideas with wandering monsters and locations you can claim for producing specialized units, its bright colours and quickness at getting you into the real wars with real enemies make it quite different from what Fallen Enchantress<\/em> has achieved. In both games, the military incompetence of the AI in most cases means that the random assaults by wandering creatures are your true impediment to expansion, in Fallen Enchantress<\/em> the hostile world has both context and teeth.<\/p>\n

It’s a bit too much to say that Fallen Enchantress makes the map itself an enemy. Some of these dens of scum and villainy are great boons to those that clear and claim them. You cannot win holed up in a corner – at least not without taking quite a roundabout strategy – and the experience you can gain from even the occasional near fatal battle against an army of wargs makes everything stronger. This is a trial by fire, though, and one that makes the geography of the maps for Fallen Enchantress<\/em> the perfect embodiment of the world it claims to represent – one destroyed by chaos and one that must be rebuilt.<\/p>\n

Fallen Enchantress<\/em> is sort of the Dark Souls<\/em> of strategy gaming, I guess. There is great power out there and great wealth. If you’re really lucky in your map generation\/starting point roll then you could find what you need or learn the right skills to get through the first 100 turns easily. But there is a price to be paid for doing what the game commands you do. If it takes a city 13 turns to build a Fallen Legion squad, you feel the loss of every one of those turns when that squad goes down to an army that you cannot beat. Every scar and wound your hero recruits take is a reminder either of a battle well fought or of a foolish risk taken to explore that goodie chest.<\/p>\n

And, like Dark Souls<\/em>, I am quite sure that this difficulty is, to a degree, essential. It is central to the post-apocalyptic world building. It allows for new strategic thinking by remembering that a dragon big enough to eat you is also a buffer zone to enemy expansion. Despite losing cities to spiders and golems and having dragons cut a planned invasion short through burnination, I never take steps to reduce the risk or the frequency of these risks (though I can adjust them in the game setup easily.)<\/p>\n

Fallen Enchantress<\/em> may tease you with riches, but it never lets up on reminding you that this universe is one of unrelenting hostility and a broken world. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Exploration is one of the central ideas in any empire building game, and Fallen Enchantress relies heavily on uncovering what resources and settlement locations are nearby. The problem with exploring is that things may follow you home. My scout was doing no harm, and in fact maybe a little good, when he moved outside the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[9,38],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-156","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4160"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4160"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4160\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4162,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4160\/revisions\/4162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}