So, some of you may have read Tycho's post in which he mentions the new game by Cryptic Comet, Solium Infernum. You may also remember Cryptic as the folks behind the hyper-awesome Armageddon Empires, an old-school hex based post-apolocalytic strategy game where you can salvage an abandoned nuclear submarine and use the warhead to destroy Cthulhu. And that's not the coolest part. And the new game looks even better.
Solium Infernum casts you in the role of an Archfiend of Hell. You can design your Avatar with a wide mix of abilities to match your style. You can go for a warlord stomping everyone under boots of graven copper, a sorcorer type who like to hang out at home and blast enemies with columns of hellfire, a despot who uses his horrifying charisma to manipulate those around you. You gain tribute from your underlings, but instead of wood and gems you earn Hellfire and Darkness. Yes, Darkness is a critical resource in this game.
You send legions out to do bad thing, hire Praetors (i.e. heroes) to lead your legions or fight on your behalf in gladiatorial combat, cast Rituals, purchase artifacts and manuscripts of forbidden lore, and so forth.
The game is ultimately about Prestige which you earn through various evilness (winning combats, capturing Places of Power, making successful demands against enemies, etc.) and which is ultimately what you need to win. Oh, but you never know when the game will end, because it's semi-randomly determined.
The political aspect of the game is probably the most compelling. See, if you remember old-school D&D, Hell is Lawful Evil. There are rules. You can't just go romping into an enemy's land without good reason. You need an excuse to set up a Vendetta. So, you can go before the Infernal Conclave and insult your opponent. Oh, by the way, the Infernal Conclave is sort of like the UN, but less evil MIRITE?
Ahem.
Anyway, if your opponent acts like a little bitch and just accepts your insult, you take a nice piece of Prestige from him. If he mans up and refuses to accept it, he's required to declare Vendetta against you. That means you're now allowed to attack. Needless to say, make sure you can fight him.
There are other diplomatic options as well, such as demanding tribute from an enemy. The best part is, the more often you've successfully done so, the more you can demand. In other words, the game rewards you for being a bully.
Cryptic Comet is an awesome company, very responsive to customer questions, and they deserve your money. $30 bucks to seek the throne of Hell? Single player, hotseat, and Play-by-Email? Yes, please.
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Posts
You can download the manual bottom left and the forum has people talking about stuff.
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I should actually go play some Armageddon Empires right now.
EDIT: Oh, hey, Solium Infernum demo in the above link.
IOS Game Center ID: Isotope-X
I have been waiting, frothingly, for this to come out for a loong time now. I bought it a few tens of minutes after it was released, and am just waiting to get back from the holidays to my desktop so I can do this thing up right. I've been mucking around with it on a family computer, but look forward to the chance to settle down and devote time to figuring it out and embarrassing myself in a PBEM.
Well i mean the price is the straight dollar conversion. Its not the typical indie game price true, but this is so much deeper than the typical indie game. There aren't many posts on it yet, but if you read the strategy forum on the main site you can definitely see what i mean. Like a huge post about duelling with your praetor which is like, just one of the ways you can use them. Its fantastic.
Until, at least, the frustration/fun ratio gets too high.
IOS Game Center ID: Isotope-X
If you say so. This game requires a great deal of subtle strategery, though, and some things in the forums are good to read just to fully understand how game elements interact. It'll probably be a while before I can be a non-idiot in this game, but I get back home on Saturday, so if anyone is interested in perhaps slapping together a PBEM, I'd be game.
Anyone know what determines the resource cost of diplomatic actions? I was trying to set up a vendetta against another archfiend, and my insults kept being ignored by the conclave because I hadn't committed enough resources. I've read the manual and I understand the numbers for the prestige costs, but there is hardly any mention of resources costs, and no numbers.
Anyone know what I'm missing?
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On the diplomacy screen, you can pick hurl insult. Once you do, still within the diplomacy interface, you choose how much prestige to invest in your insult. This is where you decide if you're hurling a 5 prestige insult or a 7 prestige insult or whatever.
So, the next screen that comes up is the standard "buy shit" interface, and I have no idea why they bother with it. It essentially functions as a confirmation screen. HOWEVER, if you're in that buy shit interface and you dial back the amount of prestige you already committed to, you'll get the "silly rabbit, dedicate enough resources to get this stuff done" message.
tl;dr version: if you commit to a 5 prestige insult, you can't try to actually spend less on the very next screen
Depends on whether or not you consider "take turns using your computer with a group of friends" to be real time.
this game is extremely complicated
but i am so fascinated
Also, worth noting for people considering a purchase that while this game is complicated and deep, you can play through a game in 2-3 hours, which is super nice. A nice break from games like Civ 4 or Sword of the Stars that require between 5 and 30 hours for one playthrough. I do think the AI needs work or the difficulty needs to be ramped up somehow. Mostly I think it could stand to be a bit more aggressive.
I'm trying for a win without powerful legions right now.
I'm still mucking around in the demo, so I may be quite wrong, but I've found a fair number of situations in which access to rituals made something possible for me. I just stopped a game in which I managed to capture the city of Dis only because I was able to whittle its hit points down with wrath rituals. That +3 prestige per turn is really nice.
I'll definitely be buying this game. Now I just need to get my friends to get it and arrange a big PBEM game.
This game is so awesome, I want to buy it. But I'm on the fence about it, because as I said, I think it's pretty expensive.
Well, I can tell you, having done the game mechanics for a turn-based strategy game (commercial failure) that an absolute shit-ton of love and work went into this. It's pretty niche, so he won't sell too many copies. It's a really reasonable price if you can afford it. Also, it probably won't go down much over time, so not much reason to hold off. Armageddon Empires--also great--is still $30, although there's a package deal for both of them.)
The only thing that gets me is the UI is lazy. Everything about the way it's designed makes his job much easier, but makes the user's life harder. It's also disruptive, which makes it harder to appreciate how pretty it is. You're dealing with jumping through UI hoops..and if you didn't have to do that, playing it could be absolutely magical. Huge improvement over AE, but I think he could get a ton more sales by improving it further.
Just won a game doing Kingmaker. The victory condition of winning by prestige is actually the "standard" win and it's surprisingly easy to manipulate things early on to really help insure that things go well.
Also, don't even try playing with a charisma of 0 That first point makes an enormous difference.
Overall, this seems like one I might come back to in 6 months and see how patches have changed the game for the better. At the moment, there are too many gripes to pay £20 for this: dubious AI, an incredibly clunky interface (all actions, even common ones, take about 5 clicks to execute), random resource acquisition (if you don't get any souls, you're pretty screwed), and a general feeling that the different paths to victory available haven't been balanced well. Essentially it feels like the game needed 6 months more playtesting, and given the multiplayer focus I'll be surprised if it doesn't get 'broken' by players.
It does have some really good ideas. I like the diplomacy aspect a lot: the formality of the thing means it might be one of the first games to do politicking well in a multiplayer setting, which is something I've been wanting forever (compare to Civ where you can break any agreement at a moment's notice, so they mean nothing). The idea of settling disputes by single combat instead of war is neat as well, as is the fact that you can frame others for your crimes. It just all needs a bit more cooking to be ready.
Not really. You can watch if someone is rooting for you, use a prophecy ritual to see their perks and eliminate the kingmaker or excommunicate them so they can't steal your win.
Steam ID
Am I missing something? I find a professional game having a UI like this nowadays to be shocking. I had to look through the manual to find out how to bid on something.
Also I'm finding it quite hard to get any feel for what orders to start with.
It's really quite vexing.
Good orders to start with:
1) Move your legions around. You want to capture territory as fast as possible so that you can move around the map without restriction, and you get prestige for the territory you've captured at the end of the game. Move towards a Place of Power and try to get at least one or two hexes adjacent to it in your control, so that you can seize them later. (This is all because you can't move through enemy territory until you use political maneuvering to start a vendetta or feud, which takes a long time usually).
2) Demand tribute. Do this a lot. This is the central means by which you gain resources, and you want resources to buy more units, buy artifacts to buff them, buy praetors for buffs and single combat, buy stat upgrades for your archdemon, buy combat cards for temporary combat buffs, etc etc - tribute cards are everything. That's why a high Charisma archdemon, who can draw and pick more tribute cards when he demands tribute, is very powerful.
3) Bid on legions, or on artifacts that will give movement bonuses or similar. You want to seize more territory so that you have more options later. With another legion or two, you'll be able to do that more quickly. This will take a few turns of demanding tribute, usually.
4) Cast rituals that give you info on your opponents. Just to see what their stats are and what they're capable of.
1) Gain Prestige.
Prestige is basically Victory Points. At the end of the game, whoever has the most Prestige wins. There are two other victory conditions - political manipulation by using certain perks, and conquering and holding Pandemonium, the capital of Hell, for five turns. The most common way to win, though, is Prestige. If anyone has a Prestige lead, they are probably winning.
Prestige is also a resource that you use for diplomatic actions, basically in the form of a wager on the outcome. You can also spend it on certain very rare things in the Bazaar.
How do you get Prestige?
2) Gain Tribute resources.
Tribute comes in four forms: Souls, Ichor, Hellfire, and Darkness. That's in order of most to least common, usually.
Tribute is your main resource - it's your gold, your lumber, your crystal, your vespene gas, whatever. Basically, all the best orders require Tribute to carry out - if you want to buy more legions, buy more artifacts, cast a Ritual, make a combat card, upgrade your archdemon, whatever, you need Tribute.
How do you get Tribute?
3) Build your army.
Even non-military archdemons are well-advised to keep an army around. Usually there's no cost to having as many armies as possible beyond the inital bid for each legion. You are limited in how many armies you can have at once by your Martial stat, and usually it's somewhere between 2 and 5.
Legions capture territory for you, which is vital. They capture Places of Power as well, which is the main early-game goal. They also defend you from other players and their attempts to take your shit - a player will be less likely to insult or demand things from you if you have a big army on his borders, because if you tell him to fuck off it gives you the right to invade.
So make sure you have plenty of legions, and that your legions are pumped up to be effective when necessary.
How do you build a strong army?
I like grabbing a strong Praetor early because it lets me bully the other Archdemons. You can throw Demands around and, if they don't like it, challenge them to a single combat Vendetta. Usually they'll back off if you have a big, bad Praetor around, and it's basically free Presige. Make sure when you buy a Praetor that you take a close look at his stats and abilities...there are some that are great at single combat but suck as a leader, and vice versa.
Also, when you get an Event card, make sure you take a look at what it is. I find it easy to forget, and they can be really helpful. Two nice early game Events are the tribute windfall and the one which upgrades a Praetor (sorry, I forget the names).
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only one other lord was even able to send a praetor and that one promptly got chopped in FUCKING TWAIN. Massive Massive prestige gain, had like 50 nearest rival had 20.
I'm loving this thing.
The game itself is brilliant. The AI is... torpid. It's not dumb, it just isn't anywhere near aggressive enough to compete with a human player.
This leads to the single-player campaign feeling very easy. Still fun, but just very little challenge. Haven't played any multiplayer yet, but it seems like that's very much where it's at.
I'd say so. It does much better with the maximum number of opponents, I've figured out (the strategies do change). And of course, one AI opponent will tend to get a lucky start if you have enough. You can also not spend all your Avatar points at the beginning for more challenge.
Competent, but definitely not as good as a good human player.
The AI works a lot better on a normal or small map with maximum opponents. The dev said that boosting their aggressiveness made them reckless and easy to dupe into losing all their stuff, so that's why they're a bit cautious.
Anyway I'm sure support for the game will be forthcoming and Vic is gonna keep working on making the AI competitive.
ed:what TeeSam said
Steam ID
I'd be up for it.
Make sure you guys do turn-by-turn reports, preferably with screens. This could become a really cool collaborative Let's Play, and hopefully also bring more people into the game.
It'd be difficult to do that over time, since revealing our plans on PA would reveal them to our opponents :P
It's not a bad idea though.