Strongly recommend if you are an unemployed with infinite day-off & having nothing else better to do
This sentence of your post has the potential of insulting everyone who is playing the campaign,
so you should not be surprised to get offensive replies. I am not supporting any of those offensive
replies, but you pretty much asked for people to attack you.
Also, on a sidenote,
every game is a "waste of time" since it serves little to no purpose. They all
serve to entertain and this form of entertainment itself can be seen as a "waste of time".
This is however a discussion not to take place here.
You don't like the missions taking so much time, and that is okay, but others might enjoy long
challenges like this. Everyone has his own preferances and I don't mind reading others thinking
about something differently than I do as long as it's on a professional level without any insults
being thrown at each other.
I really like your campaigns. Scenarios, involving base control, are challenging, takes time to complete. I am also enjoying the ability to see major battles through the eyes of the different factions. Below are my thoughts on four areas of the “Second Human Book of Arkain”
I'm glad that you liked the campaign & took the time to write this post!
- All maps use constant weather effects like rain or blizzard; Maps feel dark.
I went for a "darker" map design on purpose to make the world feel "darker" as well.
- In some maps you control forces of two or more different colors and have opponents marked by another 3-4 different colors. And those colors are quite crazy: dark brown, silver, dark green, pink. As a result, i was using blue/teal/red color mode during majority of the campaign.
I understand your point, I'm not too happy with this myself, the problem is, however, that I am limited to the
WarCraft colors and that every faction has its own color. I am limited to 13 colors that are used for countless
factions.
2. Heroes. I was not impressed by Gardon’s character development. I would say he has lost his edge, and is no longer interesting/mysterious/dark character like he used to be in the first book. This new Lord Brian took his spot.
The reason for this is that Gardon is now the main character and therefore his entire personality is more "visible",
making him feel less mysterious while Brian just appeared recently out of nowhere and didn't have much time
on the screen of the players as of yet.
Neither Gardon is super appealing as a in-game hero. Previously, his toolkit was all about doing massive damage, but now half of his abilities was replaced by the weaker ones. I did not manage to catch the point of his first ability: melee range, mediocre damage, weak secondary effect most of the time. The new elven hero is not impressive in battle either. Was it supposed to be a healer, yet that healing ability is so crappy. 750 HoT during 18 sec on ~20 sec CD. On the other hand, Lord Brian and the new mage hero are among best made heroes in the whole Arkain series.
Gardon's first ability could use getting buffed, yes, however, the Gardon in the First Book was ridiculously overpowered.
However, the heroes are most likely going to get an overhaul before the full release anyway.
3. Items. I think your maps lack neutral creeps that drop items. I am not talking about getting powerful items like Sobi mask left and right, but it is annoying that some heroes have to wear 4-5x orbs of fire. For example, in the last 4 maps we control 9 heroes and only can loot 4 items. I do understand that too many good items can result in a scenario, where you can finish the map by using mainly your heroes.
Going to be improved!
4. Units. I think you should make more distinctions between various human factions, mainly by mixing up their casters.
Absolutely agreeing on that, gonna happen as well!
-New sorceress units were quite overpowered with their 900dmg crushing waves, and were substantially nerfed, I do not know how you are going to address the destructors. These units represent the extreme powercreep over normal units (even justicars with 65 avr. attack and 14 armor do not seem scary). And the worst thing, destructors can be only countered by other destructors. I have to say that the start of the last chapter was really challenging and fun, however, once you amassed enough destructors, terrors and cleaned up elven base, the mission became easy even on the hardest difficulty. I also have to point out, that during last two missions I mainly used my heroes for base defense because of their inferiority on offence (compared to the army of destructors). And 4-5 orbs of fire do not help in this department.
Kasrkin and I are working on nerfing the Destructors since the release of Chapter Six. We are not absolutely
sure yet how exactly we are going to adress the issue, but we are currently testing several possible nerfs.
- Difficulty resets. For example if you play on easy and click “continue campaign”, your next mission will be served on normal difficulty.
This is a point that affects every custom campaign with multiple difficulty settings, but I am working on it.
I will most likely replace the current difficulty system with a dialogue at the beginning of every mission to select
the difficulty for each chapter.
- Some people reported critical error during the 3rd mission. I encountered the same problem not only by attacking the middle-left base but also the middle-right. However, it was on the previous Beta version without mission 6, so I am not sure if the error was solved.
That error should not appear in the new versions anymore.
- Ships during mission 6 do not benefit from armory improvements.
Already fixed in a not-yet-released version.
All in all, “Second human book” is shaping into the best campaign of the series. Good luck with your future projects!
Thank you! And also thank you for your post!