Far from it for me to call myself any sort of expert on Fall from Heaven 2, but I thought there might be some interest in some simple guides for playing each of the factions in the game. They’ll include both stuff from my individual playing experiences and advice that I’ve read elsewhere on the net, most notably from the Civfanatics forums. I don’t know if I’ll ever actually complete playthroughs for each of the factions, but I’ll keep it up for as long as it holds my interest.
One of the most important lessons any aspiring designer can learn is to heed Sid Meier’s dictum that a good game is a series of interesting decisions. This is precisely what the dark fantasy-themed Fall from Heaven 2 is all about. There is no point in the game where a particular path of action becomes so overbearingly obvious as to make the choice a non-decision. While the ultimate objective remains, as in any 4X game, to achieve complete dominance over the other factions, there are many different paths to this end and countless means within each path to advance along it.
Fall from Heaven 2 of course benefits from being a mod of Civilization 4 which provides it with a sound base to work on, but the new mechanics, factions, units, religions and events it adds makes it a worthy game more than capable of standing on its own. The cornucopia of choices begins with choosing one of a total of 21 available factions. Each faction generally has two different leaders available. Then there’s a total of 7 religions to pick from, each of which offers synergies different enough to drastically alter your playstyle. Next, you’ll want to think about which victory condition to shoot for. In addition to the ones already in Civilization 4, the Alpha Centauri victory is replaced by the Tower of Mastery victory inspired by the venerable Master of Magic game and there’s a religious Altar of Luonnatar victory condition.
My copy of Grand Theft Auto IV still hasn’t arrived yet but I’m not unhappy because I’m fully occupied with Fall from Heaven 2 at the moment. This may have started life as a mere “mod” for Civilization 4, but it’s so complete and fully featured that I wouldn’t hesitate to call it a full game in its own right. Builds of it has been circulating since 2006 but the development team only announced it as being feature complete in December 2008 so I’m not feeling too guilty about waiting until now to invest time into it. Hey, if I’m going to put dozens of hours into it, I want the finished and polished package!
For players already used to Civilization 4, a simple glance at the screen reveals how much work has gone into this project: new models and artwork for the different units and buildings of the 21 factions, new terrain types and effects with associated art and sound assets, a revamped UI to incorporate the additional gameplay elements and even a detailed card mini-game within the game! By far the greatest accomplishment however is that while a faction in Civilization 4 is differentiated from its peers only by its leader traits and a unique unit and building, all of the factions in Fall from Heaven 2 are so different that it’s like playing a new game with each of them.
Not only do each of the factions have numerous unique units and buildings, they also incorporate unique gameplay mechanics. The Grigori faction for example, can produce Adventurers as Great Persons, effectively powerful heroes that can be customized according to your needs. The Calabim faction stands out by being the only one able to field vampires, and, yes, these really are as powerful as one would imagine them to be and can feed on your cities’ excess population. In addition to all that, the choice of religion also opens up new units, buildings, spells and civics.
All of this makes for a combination of rich and interesting choices that I’ve never seen since Alpha Centauri. Plenty of people have already named Civilization 4 as one of the greatest strategy games of all time, but I can confidently say that Fall from Heaven 2 improves upon it in every conceivable way. Watch this blog for updates as I explore the myriad possibilities of this amazing game.
In a way, Empire is what Creative Assembly’s Total War series has always been building towards. Epic doesn’t even begin to describe its scope. Three distinct theatres, a dizzying multitude of major and minor factions, a greatly expanded strategic layer involving tech trees and multiple towns in each region, the ability to play naval battles in real-time mode for the first time and last but far from least, a spiffy new graphics engine so detailed and shiny that you can see the guns and buttons of your each of your soldiers gleaming in full HDR bloom.
Empire covers a relatively thin slice of history, but what glorious history it is! The French and American Revolutions, the rise of gunpowder and the apogee of the Age of Sail, the Age of Enlightenment and the beginnings of the globalized world. No one is ever going to mistake the Total War series as a replacement for a real history textbook, but this is as close as you’re going to get in a mass market video game. Total War fans already know the drill, but here it is anyway for those who have managed to miss out on it for the past 10 years.
In a moment of weakness, I decided that my next big game after finishing Far Cry 2 would be Empire: Total War. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve loved the Total War series ever since the first Medieval and I’m the guy who’d once wrote that I’d buy Total War set in just about any genre. Still, I have to admit that I start way more Total War campaigns than I actually get around to finishing and the standard formula might just be wearing a bit too thin for me. Plus, there’s the fact that the initial releases have always been buggy messes. I knew there was a good reason why I waited for the Gold Edition before buying Medieval 2.
Empire turned out to be far more of a mess than any of the previous releases. I’d had intermittent sound problems, multiple crashes to the desktop within a single play session and even out of memory errors. Some folks have reported corrupted savegames and campaigns that had to be abandoned due to irrecoverable crashes. Granted, the 30 March patch seems to have fixed most of these technical problems, but my first impressions have been irredeemably soured by all this.
Partly due to all the crashes, I’m still playing the “tutorial campaign” called the Road to Independence in which the player guides a fledgling America towards indepedence from the British Empire. One thing that has to be said is that the game is gorgeous. The naval battle portion in particular features ships so richly detailed it’s silly, because you’re unlikely to actually go in for such close-up views more than a handful of times. The strategic portion has been significantly revamped, apparently to make it play more like the Civilization games, a change that I have mixed feelings about and will go into more detail about later. As for the land battles, while it’s cool to see ranks of infantry firing guns at each other and seeing just how far your artillery can hit, the fact that all infantry can now fire missile weapons makes all of the factions a bit too similar to one another.
Anyway, I’m well on my way towards clearing the Brits out of North America completely and then we’ll see how much I like the real meat of the game, the Grand Campaign. Now, which nation should I play first?
I’ve been slowly making my way through Defense Grid, the tower defense game that I posted about a while back. I’m down to the last two maps, but I’m holding off finishing them until I go back through every single previous map and get at least a Silver Medal on all of them. My wife loves watching me play this game and both of us enjoy figuring out the best way to build a maze on each of the maps. Most of the time though we’d come up with a pretty good maze for a map, then go search on YouTube for a video on how the real experts do it, and then kick ourselves for missing something that seems so obvious in retrospect.
Then when I go look at the leaderboards, I get absolutely blown away by the top scorers. Someone tell how is it possible to get more than 200,000 points and to place nearly 300 towers on a map? Cheats?
Yay, finally done with Space Rangers 2 in the year 3330. The only way to defeat the Dominators once and for all is to eliminate the three bosses: Keller, Blazer and Terron. The main way to do that seems to be researching them by gathering parts from destroyed Dominator ships and handing them in to a scientific base. The more materials you hand in, the faster the research rate will be. The other way is to confront the bosses directly and defeat them in combat. As you’d expect, this is pretty hard as each of them has a ton of hit points, and the Dominator-controlled planets nearby will spawn an infinite stream of Dominators to protect the bosses.
As seen from the screenshot above, I’d managed to climb to the top of the rangers rating chart by 3324 after concentrating heavily on hunting and destroying Dominators, also becoming the most Distinguished Fighter in the process. It was also at around this time that the Coalition forces managed to whittle down the area controlled by the Dominators to just the three systems occupied by each of the bosses. I made a conscious decision to target the Keller boss first. This was because while the other bosses could only launch attacks against systems adjacent to their own, Keller has the ability to attack systems through black holes, allowing its forces to strike behind the Coalition’s lines, so to speak. This made it very annoying to have to constantly travel away from the front lines against Blazer and Terron to rescue a system attacked by Keller.