Tried to actually fight it a few times too, but was getting nowhere. FoD worked, just needed someone in front who could have its attention on him for a moment, sparing the wizard long enough for the cast, and just keep reloading till it roilled an 1. It still made its fort above the DC (I think it was 22 vs. 20?), but a critical fail is a critiical fail...

Would that be the final Undead level? Since you have the orc campaign after that too, but I never got to it because of that final undead level, after a few dozen tries, a few of them getting to under 1 min left, I think best was 26 sec if I remember right, but never just long enough...

Yeah my toughest fighters can also take max 2 or 3 direct hits from him before dying, so the only way to survive is constant micromanagement, making sure that if and when the the dragon focuses his attention to either of your melee fighters, make that character run away before getting hit (while the other fighter keeps hitting him). And if the dragon chooses to fight some spawned cannonfodder, let both melee fighters hit him.

Thank god for (auto)pause. I keep pausing the game like every 1-2 seconds with the spacebar to check what is the situation, who should attack and who should flee, are all the spellcasters currently casting anything (and if not, make them cast something useful) etc.

It is really just the two melee fighters that can do any significant damage to the dragon, and some of the wizard's spells cause some extra damage. My expert archer thief is totally useless in that fight, her +5 heavy crossbow shots are ineffective, and even if I give her a +5 short sword to be a third melee fighter, she seems to never hit the dragon. Bah humbug. Oh yeah and none of the spawned creatures can do any damage to the dragon either, and the dragon seems to kill them with one blow anyway. So they are just a distraction.

That is the go-to strategy for pretty much any boss/tough enemy in ID or BG. Once it begins attacking one of your characters, just run around until it switches targets. The original runner then begins attacking and the person now being focused begins to run. Repeat as many times as necessary.

Works on any enemy that only attacks in melee.

Yeah I found that last mission quite irritating and unfair, I think it was obvious the computer AI was cheating in that battle, being able to build a base very fast etc.

I was able to beat that mission (in the hardest level) by using some trick I read in some walkthrough. If I recall correctly, at the start of the mission train a team of those flying archers and hide them somewhere in the SE corner of the map. At the same time you try to defend your base normally.

Then at a certain point of the mission, you were supposed to destroy the buildings that the enemy was building with that flying archer team, and keep destroying those buildings while the enemy tries to rebuild them, also killing the builders themselves.

I don't recall quite clearly but i think timing was crucial, maybe you had to wait until the enemy had overrun your first or second base, or even time it so that you attack with that team WHILE the enemy was migrating from the first base to the second. Or something like that.

EDIT: So in essence I think you keep that attack team hidden in the SE corner of the map, until the enemy has overrun your first (human?) base and the acolytes start to build buildings. Your team is then at the back of the enemy forces, and while the main enemy forces keep attacking your remaining base(s), your assault team attacks the acolytes and the buildings from behind. If you succeed in killing all the acolytes and destroying the buildings, then the enemy forces are cut down significantly as the enemy base is not producing more. I just read some used a group of ballistae for the same trick, but I prefer the flying archers as they can flee faster if needed, back to the corner where the enemy doesn't see them.

It was tricky to get it to work, but if you succeeded, then the enemy would not send much of extra forces to your base anymore... until the timer was so low that the boss appears. You can't defend against it but (hopefully) he runs out of time while destroying your base.

Anyway, it was a letdown that I had to stoop to such tricks to win the mission, and it felt so clear the enemy was cheating in that mission. I liked e.g. the last mission of Starcraft so much better. It was quite challenging but never really felt unfair or near impossible, and it was quite interesting as you were running both a Terran and Protoss bases at different ends of the map.

Yeah I used that somewhere else too, usually it was my wizard or thief running around in circles while others were hitting the enemy/enemies, usually with ranged weapons.

In this battle much more micromanagement is needed as I try to contain the fight to that round "pedestal" (leading to the temple below), so that only my melee fighters and summoned enemies are there on the pedestal with the dragon, while the weaker spellcasters are further away not to be hit by acid attacks etc. There is much less space to run around in that pedestal and that is why I barely lost my fighter yesterday, as it got stuck between the dragon and one summoned creature while trying to run away from the dragon. The dragon hit the killing blow to my fighter, and right after that my paladin hit the killing blow to the dragon. If only...

EDIT: Also what seems to make this a bit special case is that the dragon seems to constantly switch targets too, to anyone who is attacking him. So he is not constantly trying to follow only one party member, but quite soon targets the one who is hitting his back. Then you need to switch back and forth after a few hits etc.

I think in that fight it doesn't make sense to run around the whole map away from the dragon anyway as it has that "perfect teleport" spell which it constantly uses to get to its target, it then he might also target the spellcasters.

I'll retry it today. I am confident though now that it can be done, which is all that matters.

The computer is cheating in the entire Warcraft III campaign since the beginning. They don't have to mine at all (they do it just so it looks like they have to). They also only deduct 1 gold from the gold mine instead of 10 so it never runs out. The AI has infinite resources and basically the entire campaign is brutally scripted (not just the last level). They also immediately replace any fallen buildings, always make the same, pre-determined attack group compositions etc.

As for the last mission. You could just memorize the order and structure of the incoming waves so you always know what is coming next. But you could do that in pretty much every single mission.

Small rant incoming.

Different individual skillsets which every human inheritly has makes this a fun discussion, because basically every human has unqiue traits. If we would and could quantify said skills into numbers it would make every individual stand out from another by the numbers. This means that every person is pretty unique. Not only that but its also very much on how taste forms and developes, as people trend to stick to games at large that people feel comfortable with, including games where they might hit a "skill wall".

For instance I'm super bad at games that require very good reaction but I'm proficient in playing single player FPS games and I never had problem with playing building games unlike many others who don't seem to get into them. I do like simulation games, though not the ones that very specifically require a good reaction time and extremly keen aware of ones surroundings, such as high-end car racing simulations where you have to throttle and switch gears manually while driving 140 mph. On the contraire I'm very good at puzzle games. Naturally I trend to enjoy the genres I have some affinity with without realizing even at a young age, which doesn't mean that you can't enjoy anything else, as you've stated. Kinda besides the point but I also feel that its often difficult to circumvent/transcent the skill-barrier of certain players without making the game becoming unfun. There are games that do this right, but this becomes more difficult the more complex the game is. Simulation games with a complex AI that have a lot of gameplay elements are more difficult to understand than a simple jump and run from the 80s that you can give accessablility options. In biology, Skills can be considered as a complex system of adapting to new situations, which ultimately is what games actually are and how the term genre defines them.

At any case, I'm writing this because of my complex set of skills I'm quite often hitting a "skill-wall" even to games I'm aceing through prior to hitting said wall. A huge amount of people hit these sort of walls all the time in games. Its not a huge issue and its fun finding ways to "trick" your own skillsets to think outside the box and perhaps even learn a new skill you thought you didn't had before.

As an example even if I'm bad at reacting to things and I'm not very aware of surroundings within a game while playing I am capable to play can play MOBAs, because I've learned to compensate reaction with foresight quite proficiently. So theres tons of nuance when it comes to explaining individuals skills, more than everyone would be willing to discuss I feel like. Skill dependant factors and the skills themselves seem to be intertwined depending on the genre, though it depends on the genre itself. Its a complex discussion that can only be discussed properly if we talk about a very specific genre. I came to an understanding that games can often be as individual as the players playing them because of ones unique set of skills and thus your affinity and taste to things.

Some alternatives to Cheat Engine:
* Using a hex editor on your save file. (Remember to back it up first!)
* If you're using Linux, scanmem and GameConqueror are also options
* You could probably even use TAS tools like Hourglass or libTAS, provided the game is compatible with the tool of choice

Yes, different players are good at different types of games. My favorite example of this is someone who is good at turn based games but can't play action games. Hence, said player will look for turn based games and will avoid action games.

This is fine, except that some developers have made a game that is, for the most part, turn based, but then has an action segment that is mandatory (or that gates optional turn based content), at which point the rest of the game is inaccessible to that player, even though said player would enjoy the content if they had access to it.

(Of course, turn based versus action is just an example; one could extend this to other pairs of game types, and this is why I consider it poor design to include genre-inappropriate segments in games.)

Yeah, thats what I was implying by stating to "quantify" things. You can determine what you can do *well* as a game designer within a respective genre.

As multiple genres in one game exist, in order to do things right you also have to know and understand what amount of genres work well with each other. Of course you have to determine how those numbers are valued and how they coorelate to the enjoyment to the game in regards to the player/playerbase.

I also suspect it depends on the culture the player grows up with as well. Europeans trend to prefer games that try something. Examples that come to my mind are simulators like Star Citizen or the upcoming new Flight Sim from Microsoft, or even crossbreeds of multiple games like Star Control 2 or the 1998 Battlezone remake (IMHO a good blend between RTS and action-game/FPS). However, these games are difficult to cater to a mass market due to conformities and are usually of experimental and janky nature instead of games that cater to a wider audience but perform very well, usually because the "formula" of what made these games work are known more widely, but also because console games trend to be less simulation-y than games on the PC market.

Just putting a fps inside a turn based strategy doesn't work of course, but I feel like that you can make something out of this, depending on how you mix multiple genres together. In a way, what you've describing sounds a lot like Total War gameseries but instead of FPS its RTS. I'm fairly sure that you can make a action game from the RTS formula (Mount and Blade is doing this but as a Third Person Action Adventure/Strategy genremix) and that blend it within a similar style as Total War is doing it. All of this really depends on how the TBS part of the game is played. All of these games can be played/enjoyed by people who're not super skilled in these games. Though I have to say that due to their nature they're not super-popular like any famous main-stream console games, partially for the reasons I've decribed.

It would be better if you name the game you're talking about. I know you're talking about a specific game in mind but it also reads like you mean "any" game that mixes games together and its a little confusing because there are games that mix genres together really well.

EDIT: Sorry if I type a lot, hope its not a bother :>!

Yay I just killed the Icewind Dale 2 dragon.

It's a very difficult mission on hard sure, but you don't have to stoop to such levels to beat it. I've managed twice to beat it 'normally' on hard without using any tactics that could be deemed exploitative. You just have to make sure that the human and orc bases last a little over 15 minutes each. Slowing down game speed to micro properly when necessary helps a lot here:
using a single druid of the claw to buff damage; a couple druids of the talon to incapacitate the more dangerous enemies; microing some 'treants' behind the enemy advance to take out meat wagons; moving troops in and out of battle to avoid unnecessary losses; healing troll priests and moon wells; reinforcing the next base in the middle of it all.
A sufficiently skilled player can do all of the above at normal speed, but I had to slow down the speed to manage all of those things at the same time.

Personally I adore the WC3 campaign. Apart from the lesser Frozen Throne campaign I can't think of anything else like it. (Perhaps DoW:Dark Crusade) Which makes this recent Reforged mess all the more tragic.
Gratz :) I'm hoping to finish IW2 myself one day, as part of a large project to finish all the infinity engine games chronologically. Unfortunately for IW2 in this regard is that the formidable BG2 is next on the list...

Can't think of anything specific at the moment, but in general I hate a lot of ending segements of games because the ramp up the challenge right when you are ready for the game to be over. Played Halo Reach recently for example and at the end it just throws these endless waves of tough enemies at you for multiple segments in a row. The problem wasn't the difficulty itself really, it was that I was ready for the game to end right when it became its most annoying. I guess the point is a "big climax" like a movie, but I don't think it works for games.

What do you mean your jRPG shouldn't spontaneously have boss battles that are rhythm game QTEs? (I think that was FF13-2. My husband quit as soon as he encountered one of those, and I never bothered to start.)

Cliff racers constantly bombarding me in morrowind killed it for me. Really enjoyed the game and that world till then. Never was able to fully immerse myself in the game after that.

Second one is endless space. I love strategy games, including the other endless games, and can figure out how to win at all difficulty levels once I learn each game. except with this game, I think I'm doing well when all of a sudden an enemy ai shows up with an armada and obliterates me. Even at easy level. Early usually but sometimes I can make it to mid game. Don't know how to play it. Only game that ever "triggered" me and never touched after the last time.

Congrats!
The constant respawns made me give up on that, on top of it just being annoying to constantly have to deal with the same creatures (which after a while were barely even a nuisance anymore in terms of threat, but were still there, every - single - time), it just felt like having no impact on the world, same creatures always there, same resources always there... Felt like a hamster wheel. Plus also the very low amount of gold of shopkeepers so you couldn't sell stuff at normal price.
Still mean to get back to it someday, but...

Oh, one of mine, needing to do a 360° turn on the skidpad in NFS: Porsche Unleashed. Or maybe I had managed one but was stuck at the double 360 challenge, not sure. Either way, tried over 100 times with not a chance, then my gf's brother has a look when I was still struggling and I ask him to try and he nails it on first try. Made up for it when he was stuck at a long no damage delivery job in his game and I did it right away (but I had done that before in my game, took several tries, learned the tricks, so was just a matter of doing it again then).