Yes yes I know, I could Google it or watch a YouTube video. But no, I want honest opinions from other people on what is, in my opinion, one of the last bastions of the old school Internet, where you’d get real opinions from real people.
I loved the original, but never really played multiplayer - mostly because as a young’un I had no money, so I pirated it, but also because I just loved the campaign as well as experimenting with stuff that was never going to work as a multiplayer strategy.
Do you guys feel it’s worth the 30something euros it costs on Steam? That’s not a lot of money, but more importantly, games take time to play and I have very little of it these days. And once I buy a game, I feel committed to play it.
I’m absolutely loving it. In the time since it’s come out a month ago, I’ve played 42 ranked 1v1 matches and I’m a little over 50% of the way through the first campaign. From a total of 64 hours played.
I’m really taking my time with the campaign, because I know I can only go through it for the first time (well, first time in Retold…) once. So I’ve set myself the challenge of doing every level on maximum difficulty. At first they were really quite easy, but the difficulty since I got towards the end of the Egyptian portion of the campaign has really ramped up.
And the competitive feels really good. The quality of life improvements with things like hotkeys is so nice, and the new civ bonuses etc. really feel like they fit in so well, unlike some of the changes which Extended Edition brought.
I would definitely highly recommend getting the game. And not just that, I’d recommend getting the Premium Edition. You’ve already missed the opportunity to get one of the bonuses of the Premium Edition (that being 1 week early access), but it also will give you the first 2 expansions (one of which is Chinese, and should be out before the end of the year) and the brand new Freyr 4th major god for the Norse. The cost of buying those separately is quite a bit more than the cost difference of Premium Edition.
Does it currently come with just the OG and Titans campaigns or is there something new added already?
The base game comes with Fall of the Trident, The Golden Gift, and The New Atlantis campaigns, which all existed previously but have been remastered in terms of balance. The Freyr expansion additionally comes with “Reginleif’s Rally”, which I haven’t done yet but from its description I think is set in the middle of Fall of the Trident, as an explanation for why the Norse party was sent down to Egypt.
If you’re someone who mainly likes to play single player, one specific change you might really like is that you can now build 16 houses, up from the previous limit of 10 (8 manors for Atlanteans, up from 5), and Fortified Town Centres now provide 25 population (up from 20). That, plus myth units getting automatic bonuses when you age up (so Classical Age MUs are still relevant in Mythic Age), and the reusability of god powers (for a Favour cost) mean you can get some big armies doing big dramatic battles, way more than you ever could before.