When the Undead conquered the lands decades ago life changed for almost every being. Nations were eliminated, forests burned and the great wizard Lauriel, responsible for the balance of the elements, was trapped and prisoned. When your tribe had to leave his homelands years of war and death followed. The Undead traced your people out of every hiding place and the hunt did start again and again. After years of running away you enter the last valley - the valley of the river Barus. The Black Mountains in the north are the origin of all the suffer and death - the home of the Undead! The valley is also surrounded from the High Mountains in the northeast, the White Mountains in the south, the Desert Nam in the east and the Dwarves Valley in the northwest. The Inner Massive in the middle has once been the Empire of the Archons. Some small nation are still resisting against the evil forces. There is no place to hide again! So the time has come to fight the power of darkness.
Explore the lands, build armies and be perpared - the Undead hordes are just 30 days behind you!
Excellent game overall - one of the best I've played.
There are a series of issues though when playing Draconians
1. The pioneers are set to Frostings at the beginning I changed these to Draconian.
2. The Wizard Lauriel after release attacks rather than becomes an ally. This does not happen playing Elves. No messages appear either. Only strange thing was two spaces where taken up by the attacking forces since all did not have sufficient movement points to move into the goal release area. The guards attacked as normal. Air Mastery had been cast prior to this and Lauriel immediately took those power ups in the are next to his main city. I was then forced to play him as an enemy.
3. The rift does not seem to work. The 3 rings where brought to the spot but nothing happened. The instructions are far from clear here or the triggers are not working
snorri
Posted on 05/06/04 @ 11:02 AM
We just played a 2 player co-op of this scenario (orcs and elves) and had a really enjoyable game. Wasted way too many hours playing it! Many turns holding back the tide until two epic battles at the city of Sal 1 turned the tide!
I loved the map, there were enough interesting side stories and pursuits that provided a good atmosphere - "Do I weaken the defence to chase this?" The rewards were often well worth it, but they weren't always easy to commit resources to.
In addition, it took us a long time to get on top of the undead lad. Made for an interesting game where we had to start dominating magic wise before we could even think about getting aggressive (he got death mastery + domain of darkness off very early, made moving into his domain a very risky business!).
The Lauriel story played out well, apart from the Amaran (think that was his name - the guy in the cave) character. He was in such an obscure spot we never discovered him till after we'd actually freed Lauriel. Perhaps it would be worthwhile putting a hint about him elsewhere (or maybe there is already, but we missed it!). Someone else mentioned that Lauriel doesn't enter an alliance with you - playing as orcs he entered the game with a neutral relationship, so I had to work and pay him off a bit to get a peace. So, I dont imagine this is really a problem - worked fine for us and was quite realistic.
The only other thing it could use is some detection of the human players - not sure if this is possible, but it would be good not to have cpu players dropped by the bombshell that goes off at turn 30. The draconian cpu-played guy in our game never stood a chance in either of our games. Ideally you'll want 3 humans to play this like it is.