Posted June 22, 2014
It also seems they have even removed racial perks so your draconians won't research faster, your goblins won't get that huge boost of population growth and the not-even-in-the-game tigrans woudn't even get their bonus gold.
The removal of teleporters just leads to you turtling more and exploring less and binding casting spells to your main leader means you will cast a whole lot less spells in battle because you either attack with your leader and as soon as he attacks -oops- there goes your ability to cast spells or the leader isn't in your army which doubles the spell cost so good luck casting that big 70 mana spell that would turn the tides of battle.
All your all-powerful warlock self ends up doing is casting buffs on your cities which raise stat X to X+1, cast domain buffs which raise stat Y to Y+1 research, summon units if you even have anything worth summoning and shoot guys in the face with your not overpowered in any way at all musket+bow.
So basically, they gave shadow magic the system shock 2 -> bioshock treatment and streamlined the hell out of it, for the better and the worse.
On a different note, so far I'm finding Diplomacy to be really shallow, and diplomatic AI to be really dickish and uncooperative - also, the "balance the scales" button is utterly worthless - can we get an advisor to tell us "not a chance in hell no matter what" or something? Because that's usually the case, unless you're just trading gold, mana, and items.
It's even worse on campaing maps, where they give you really vague instructions and then no one can ally with you, but only for reasons that you don't know until you finally manage to explore far enough hours later. And worse, you're playing the hippy tree-hugger peacenik campaign, and you can't even move the story along without intentionally goading someone you don't even know anything about into declaring war on you.
They've kept more than enough of what made AoW1 good to keep me interested, but a lot of it is just slower, squintier, and Civ-ier.
