Age of Empires Online: No problem Elephants can't solve

-SPI-

If you exclusively play one civ. $20 per, and booster packs such as the crete one currently available have to be bought later. You can get everything in "Season 1" which is from now until feb or so for $100 (or 125 if you live in aus...). That's premium Greeks, Egyptians, Persians and Celts. Plus all the boosters to come.

Aldo

-SPI- wrote:

If you exclusively play one civ. $20 per, and booster packs such as the crete one currently available have to be bought later. You can get everything in "Season 1" which is from now until feb or so for $100 (or 125 if you live in aus...). That's premium Greeks, Egyptians, Persians and Celts. Plus all the boosters to come.

OK, that's expensive.

Gonna dick around F2P. It's basically a Freemium* game anyway.

*try for free, but to get anything done you'll have to pay premium fees. See also: Warhammer Online.

-SPI-

Bah, I boned myself. I was fiddling around with crafting halls, of which there's a bunch which kind of spec your civ one way or another. But I didn't read the instructions well enough. You can unlearn them and swap them around, but if you want to relearn it that costs you 1000g.

Thankfully you can send mail to yourself, so I can keep most of my items and I was only level 8 anyway.

Aldo

In as the great Egyptian Pharaoh HelloIamAldo building a prosperous empire from the city of Aldodandria.

hamdingers

One interesting vibe I'm getting when discussing F2P games with folks. If you are enjoying a F2P game and decide to throw some FunBux down to unlock more features -- it's like they "got you". They "won".

I go to the store and buy AoE III for $20 and it's normal. I use my MSFT points to unlock a Civ and it's like I was hustled or something.

Suriko

Well, yeah.

You bought one civ for the cost of an entire game.

taliosfalcon

hamdingers wrote:

One interesting vibe I'm getting when discussing F2P games with folks. If you are enjoying a F2P game and decide to throw some FunBux down to unlock more features -- it's like they "got you". They "won".

I go to the store and buy AoE III for $20 and it's normal. I use my MSFT points to unlock a Civ and it's like I was hustled or something.

You go to the store and buy AoE 3 you get 9 civilizations and all the game modes, you drop 20$ on a civ you get one civ and still don't have all the game modes

SyphonBlue

Suriko wrote:

Well, yeah.

You bought one civ for the cost of an entire game.

Actually, you bought 1 civ for 1/3rd the cost of an entire game. AoE3 is 6 years old.

taliosfalcon

SyphonBlue wrote:

Suriko wrote:

Well, yeah.

You bought one civ for the cost of an entire game.

Actually, you bought 1 civ for 1/3rd the cost of an entire game. AoE3 is 6 years old.

The main problem being their 100$ everything season 1 pass looks like it'll have less content than AOE3 did when it launched, 6 years ago, for what? 49 or 59.99?

hamdingers

These are reasonable points.

EvilMonkey

EvilMonkey wrote:

Do you have the ability to generate a map with some bot partners/enemies like in #2? (not sure if 3 had this, the better-half is the AoE fan.)

In case anyone else is curious I'll answer my own question. From some quick lurking at aoeo.heavengames.com it looks like the Skirmish pack will be out "for the holiday season". Didn't see a price.

Aldo

My problem is that we have no idea how profitable this game will be for Microsoft. Games have been pulled offline for all kinds of reasons lately and I'm not very eager to blow 100$ on a game that might not survive till the holiday season.

Of course, for this to be interesting to Microsoft people will have to buy their stuff. If everyone were like me, they'd be in a Catch 22.

Echo

I got the premium Egypt civ, and that's it for me. The prices are pretty ludicrous.

Also, Priestess of Ra. <3

SyphonBlue

taliosfalcon wrote:

SyphonBlue wrote:

Suriko wrote:

Well, yeah.

You bought one civ for the cost of an entire game.

Actually, you bought 1 civ for 1/3rd the cost of an entire game. AoE3 is 6 years old.

The main problem being their 100$ everything season 1 pass looks like it'll have less content than AOE3 did when it launched, 6 years ago, for what? 49 or 59.99?

Yes, $100 for 6 months is absurd.

Zxerol

-SPI- wrote:

If you exclusively play one civ. $20 per, and booster packs such as the crete one currently available have to be bought later. You can get everything in "Season 1" which is from now until feb or so for $100 (or 125 if you live in aus...). That's premium Greeks, Egyptians, Persians and Celts. Plus all the boosters to come.

Holy shit wtf. Those prices goddamn.

Is it my own misunderstanding, or aren't F2P games supposed to be comprised of relatively inexpensive, piecemeal items? $20 bux for a civ seems... excessive.

hamdingers

Aldo wrote:

My problem is that we have no idea how profitable this game will be for Microsoft. Games have been pulled offline for all kinds of reasons lately and I'm not very eager to blow 100$ on a game that might not survive till the holiday season.

Of course, for this to be interesting to Microsoft people will have to buy their stuff. If everyone were like me, they'd be in a Catch 22.

Hmm this is an interesting point. I did spend $20 to unlock Greek, but I don't intend to spend any more.

OTOH I've been playing the hell out of Tiny Tower on my iPad but have no intention of EVER spending even 99 cents on it. If everyone feels like me, then we can assume the -next- Tiny Tower will be much less F2P friendly.

So, unless enough folks throw their real money at AoEO MS will slowly back away from it.

-SPI-

Echo wrote:

I got the premium Egypt civ, and that's it for me. The prices are pretty ludicrous.

Also, Priestess of Ra. <3

I don't think people really need more than one civ.

Are you using the priestesses to bless buildings or as healers. They didn't seem too useful as combat healers but increasing input to storehouses seems useful.

Aldo

-SPI- wrote:

Echo wrote:

I got the premium Egypt civ, and that's it for me. The prices are pretty ludicrous.

Also, Priestess of Ra. <3

I don't think people really need more than one civ.

Are you using the priestesses to bless buildings or as healers. They didn't seem too useful as combat healers but increasing input to storehouses seems useful.

I use mine to improve production and to heal returning soldiers. At least in the early missions you spend a fair bit of the game running from one treasure chest to the next and it saves me a lot of dead soldiers if I can heal them up in between fights.

Best way to save soldiers in fights is to micro-manage them away from the heavy hitter, once they run 3 steps away the heavy hitter will select another target.

Echo

I use them both for blessing and healing. But the pathing AI is really godawful in this game and the priestesses frequently just stand out of range from the melee blob, so you often need to manually micro them in there for heals.

Echo

And I still have no idea where the heck these "advisors" for premium civs are.

-SPI-

You can get some in the second city, Nubia for you.

Echo

But I need an Advisor Hall to use them.

Echo

Oh. NOW I randomly found new quests that give me an advisor hall. Yay.

-SPI-

I think you just get that levelling up eventually.
edit- there you go.

hamdingers

Echo wrote:

Oh. NOW I randomly found new quests that give me an advisor hall. Yay.

What level do you have to be to get the advisor hall?

Jephery

Echo wrote:

I got the premium Egypt civ, and that's it for me. The prices are pretty ludicrous.

Also, Priestess of Ra. <3

From this it sounds a lot more like Age of Wonders online to me.

Echo

hamdingers wrote:

Echo wrote:

Oh. NOW I randomly found new quests that give me an advisor hall. Yay.

What level do you have to be to get the advisor hall?

I was level 10, but it might be available earlier. It's from the guy that gives you a chain to do stuff on a time limit and then followups to do it even faster.

Aldo

So can we like form a guild across factions or something? General chat is pretty bad you see....

Echo

And damn, the advisor that gives 45% cheaper upgrades from the storehouse. <3

Fizban140

Ugh...fucking GFWL. I am supposed to enter a key, have nothing in GFWL downloads listed...

Ok I got it, just had to download the game again through the client.

I can't believe how poorly this game runs.

Phenom 2 X4 940 BE oced to 3.8
4 gigs ram
Radeon 4890

On the highest settings I stutter and crawl around 20-30 FPS.

-SPI-

Aldo wrote:

So can we like form a guild across factions or something? General chat is pretty bad you see....

I don't think there's any guild functionality but you can make a new chat tab and join pennyarcade.

Renegade Wolf

The live service may be unavailable, or there may be an issue with your home networking equipment

How wonderful. The same stupid error I get with every other game on GFWL.
And I have no idea how I fixed it last time

McAllen

I've only seen the fun trailer but is the gist basically building stuff and then getting conquered by players who might have paid for awesome stuff?

I hope a solid Age of Empires game is still in the works, I really like where the game's direction is going but I just don't want to wade through microtransaction garbage.

Fizban140

I don't get this game, is it all single player stuff? Is there 1n1? I don't want to lose to the farmville hero who paid $400 for his master race.

-SPI-

It's much like previous AoE games, there's the single player missions much like the campaign in previous games, which can also be done co-op. Then there's pvp and premium get ranked pvp.

Renegade Wolf

I am greatly enjoying this so far. Feels like a proper AoE game.

spitfirek

The main thing I dislike about the pay to play with this game is that it actually unlocks a LOT of the game. In other free to play games, you can spend time to achieve everything... in this one you miss out of 2/3 or more of the items, all the advisors, many missions, etc.

I wouldn't mind spending some money on it if it wasn't so much for so little, they need to break down the pricing into actual microtransactions and then make bundles out of them. That way I can either pick and choose what I want(like being able to use epic items and advisors) or just go with a bundle for the full civ.

Hardtarget

aw i'm on Marathon with my new dude but nobody is in the PennyArcade channel
(XBL name is 'Hardtrget' btw)

JediNight

What workshops have people chosen from the Construction Store? And whatever else that are limited. We should probably try to get a broad cross-section of them so we can trade or such.

IGN is ActionPrinnyGo

I'm also in the PennyArcade channel atm. If you don't know how to join: Right click on any chat tab, choose options, then type in the channel name in that window and press Join.

Hardtarget

I go to level 4 tonight, woo woo

Got all the way to the coop quest, haven't started it yet but they'll get me to level 5.