The Valiant Review (Wicksta)
I saw this game thanks to a channel I regularly watch. It looked interesting.
It appeared to me that this title took the concept of a "Hero" unit from Age of Empires 3 and really centered or focused on the "Hero unit development" and minimal focus on the Empire Development aspect of game play. It essentially looked like instead of worrying about building an empire you were more concerned with building up a bad ass military unit with your hero commander. It sounded hella fun.So I went and purchased the title and said alright let's give this a go.
But this is where the title broke for me.
I did multiple skirmish matches with 500 team influence. I tried out each of the commander units and set my opponents to beginner mode. I obviously made some skirmishes harder on myself because I set my opponent commander to someone that clearly had a "type" advantage. So obviously that was way harder. Even when I set my opponent to someone I should have a type advantage over I was clobbered.
My most successful match was when I played as the cavalry unit leader.
The user interface map looks similar to Age of Empires 3. A rounded map that takes no time to go to the other side. Little white dots to claim which end up being your gold and lumber mines the only 2 resources in the game. The matches ended up being a capture the flag type of deal of which there are 3 points to capture.
The units earn experience but it seems like the level up is handed automatically there is really nothing to do here besides realize your unit is becoming stronger. Just how much stronger it became who knows, the UI doesn't really show clearly the differences.
Researching tech or building upgrades to a building, is built into the UI in a minimally invasive way. While I can appreciate this, it sucked.
It wasn't until about 35 minutes into my session that I even noticed little teeny buttons around the map circle are where you do your upgrades and that's because they have really no distinguishing features compared to the rest of the UI and who is really looking at the bottom right corner where the map circle is for a tiny button that doesn't stand out and only exists if you click on something that has some sort of upgrade.
That same area is also where your units special abilities are as you guessed it tiny buttons that are indistinguishable from the rest of the UI.
I never was good at Age of Empires Multiplayer because I get Zerg rushed 5 minutes by even the AI worse by human players. That why I used treaties for like 10 - 20 minutes of peace.
Too hard, too confusing and you'll be zerg rushed quickly and for some reason the AI is really good at burning your influence but when you have all 3 bases it never seems to burn the ai influence all that quickly well not as quickly as the ai is able to burn away your influence.
The game is a tug of war and unknowingly your opponent always seems to have tied the rope to a tree you can't see and exhausts you before you even realize it was tied to a tree.