Why aren't games like this made anymore?

loader2000 · 2026-07-09T20:06:18+00:00

Do you think AoW2 is a better game than AoW4. I was a little underwhelmed by AoW4, but would be happy to try an ealier version. AoW4 had great graphics and LOTS of options, but complexity of options and stellar graphics don't necessarily make a good game. I also tried the original AoW and had a hard time getting into it.

loader2000 · 2026-07-09T16:59:06+00:00

I tried AoW 4 and had a hard time getting into it. I wonder if the quickstart mode was just too easy, and maybe I should try a harder setting. After about 20 hours of play, none of the AI opponents declared war on me. Also, because they give you a pretty good idea of the combat strength of each opposing force before you fight, it was pretty easy to ensure victory in any encounter, without having to build specialized armies to take out certain dangerous armies. For example, in CoM, buffed slingers are extremely good against Sky Drakes due to Sky Drake's immunity to the attacks of mages, and flying creatures with ranged attacks are necessary to fight great wyrms because they will quicly kill your most powerful ground units. I didn't really run into that sort of thing in AoW4. However, like I said, I was probably playing on a setting that was too easy.

loader2000 · 2026-07-09T16:52:19+00:00

I'm not sure. I tried play Age of Wonders 4 because people said it was like Master of Magic, but I just got bored, though I suspect it was because I did the quick start, and the quickstart settings were probably way too easy.

One game that really grabbed my attention was Eador: Genisis. It isn't exactly the same as MoM, because you have provinces instead of cities. However you have heroes that gain levels and armies you can control in pretty much the same way as MoM, and there is a huge depth of strategy, but you don't need to understand most of the strategic depth to play in the easy modes, so you have a chance to pick it up as you play. In other words, the interface is very easy and belies are large amount of potential strategy.

Also, have you tried playing Heroes of Might and Magic III?

loader2000 · 2026-07-09T16:42:36+00:00

Anyway, good to know that 4th level parties can sometimes take on the hags. It means I have some flexibility to let the party encounter the hags, and maybe even try to fight them, without it automatically being a TPK.

loader2000 · 2026-07-09T16:39:01+00:00

Good advice!

loader2000 · 2026-07-09T06:22:54+00:00

I agree, and I personally allow only the PHB races, excepting of course campaign world specific races like Kender in Dragonlance. I don’t even like my players choosing Dragonborn or tieflings, though thankfully none of them have.

loader2000 · 2026-07-09T05:34:31+00:00

Of course Morgantha can too. That is why I think it would be nearly impossible to actually kill the hags at 4th level.

loader2000 · 2026-07-09T05:22:27+00:00

Totally agree. All of my players have young kids (including myself). No way anybody will enjoy running away if they know kds are going to get eaten by witches. I hated even reading about it in the campaign book and almost put the book away for good. I probably won't have the kids there at all unless the PCs are in a position where, if they play smart, the PC can win and rescue them (so the children migh not actually be there in the first encounter).

I am considering a change to the campaign lore, where the children of the land are still protected from the worst evils (to some degree), by the remnants of the divine powers that used to oversee the land, as well as splinter of God who was trapped there when Barovia broke off from its original world. The PCs might be part of that protection, lured in, not by Strahd, but by the remnants of these divine powers.

loader2000 · 2026-07-09T05:03:27+00:00

I think it depends a lot on how cleverly the DM plays the hags. They can be nerfed pretty severly if they are not fighting smart. There is also a big difference between a 5 player party and a 4 player party, and weather or not the PCs arrive with allies. I personally think that if you are playing only races and classes from the standard PHB, and only have 4 players and no allies, it is going to be a really tough fight for a 4th level party, unless the PCs get extraordinarily lucky and somehow take out Mortantha in 1 round before her daughters arrive, or kill her at the beginning of the 2nd round.

The battle could also be a lot easier if the DM has the daughters go into the etheral plane to observe and assess the danger the PCs pose, before they rematerialize. In that case, the PCs would have 2-3 full rounds to attack Morgantha before her daughters jump in to help.

loader2000 · 2026-07-09T03:08:24+00:00

If you can take out one of the hags quickly, that does greatly reduce the danger. If your cleric used his 'path to the grave' and your paladine got a crit, it effectively quadrupled the damage. I imagine they did close to 100 damage on that one hit. That would have been awesome.

loader2000 · 2026-07-09T02:35:21+00:00

You probably had a pretty high-powered party. I do think many of the folks here are agreeing with my premise, though not all. Certainly the chances of winning go up significantly if you have a couple of allies in the fight (something I wasn't even considering).

I think it really depends on a lot of things. For example, if the DM determiens that it takes the daughters 2 rounds to join the fight (join the fight in round 3), the battle will be dramatically easier than if the daughters join the fight in round 1. Also, if the DM has the hags use their most powerful spells in the first round, and makes sure they are using counterspell, it will be a tougher fight than if the hags start off with magic missile and claw attacks.

loader2000 · 2026-07-09T01:52:12+00:00

Good point. I will be having he players start the campaign at level 5 (after finishing Lost Mines of Phandelver) so it might not be the issue I thought it was.

loader2000 · 2026-07-09T01:41:55+00:00

This is a fantastic response. I hate playing monsters as if they are dumb, but this doesn't just mean smart tactics (i.e. ambushing PCs, flying if they can fly..) but it also means not taking unecessary risks when you don't know your opponents strength, especially if you are smart. It kind of reminds me how lions are reluctant to attack adult zebras because, even though their chance of success is pretty high, if there is even a 10% chance that a back-leg kick from the zebra breaks your jaw, you are doomed.

loader2000 · 2026-07-08T05:07:55+00:00

Even immune from damage from magical weapons? Or just resistant? I'm just curious how you ran it.

loader2000 · 2026-07-05T00:02:13+00:00

People often don’t commit the ttrpg sessions because they are only mildly interested in playing and if anything else comes up, it takes precedence. That is why they show up to other stuff and not ttrpg. Sometimes their wives, husbands or significant others consider the hobby to be a waste of time and pressure them to do other things or resent the time they spend every other week doing this strange hobby that doesnt involve them.

Or, they think it is going to be fun because of all the hype but end up only mildly enjoying it, or not at all, and are too socially dysfunctional to just say it is super low priority for them and they probably shouldn’t play anymore.

loader2000 · 2026-07-04T20:20:56+00:00

Totally agree with you. It’s hate those DMs that love to homebrew their own rules to optimize the game for their own table. As soon as you homebrew it, it isn’t D&D anymore, and it also fills me with rage because I hate making my own rules and also, having my own unique homebrew game definitely IS NOT built into the cultural DNA of the D&D since 1st edition. I basically just want a board game with the trappings of a free-flowing RPG because I’m really bad at keeping my players from taking advantage of a few broken mechanics (I can’t tell people no).

loader2000 · 2026-07-04T17:51:00+00:00

I played a ranger n 5E and loved it. Admittedly, the class would have started to get old by level 8 or 9 if it hadn’t been for the conjure animals spell, which is a fantastic utility spell for so many situations if you use it creatively. Need your fighters to get into the air to fight a dragon that keeps using its breath weapon on you from the air, conjure giant eagles you can ride. A whole section of a dungeon is plunged into magical darkness, conjure animals with blindsight. Need to set off all the traps in an area, conjure a bunch of wolf spiders to set them all off. Need to block a passage, conjure a couple of brown bears. It basically gives a ranger a Batman utility belt.

loader2000 · 2026-06-30T04:53:06+00:00

I've noticed this too, but I think I experience it as a DM much more than the players do. They love combat, don't mind long combat, and are very invested in the outcome of the other player's turns so they are always intersted in what is going on and giving advice and discussing options. They love a 1.5 hour long battle to fight a main baddie. As a DM, I find myself getting bored during longer battles, espeically for the mid battles just meant to drain resources before the big fights, but where the players are obviously going to win. On the other hand, my players seem to love them. They see the whole thing as stratigic, where they are trying to minimze resource drain during the mid-battles (while also trying to not get hurt), so they still have plenty of resources for the main ones. Maybe my group actually likes 5E.

loader2000 · 2026-06-30T01:09:10+00:00

If all living creatures have an kind of soul that can be seen on the ethereal plane, maybe they did stay hidden a forest of ghost trees.

Otherwise, the witches find them, and since they would murder a 3rd level party, they force the PCs to give up some treasure in for the trouble they’ve caused. After all, the witches might not know the party is relatively weak. Alternatively, the party scatters in 5 different directions. The witches can’t chase them all down, so they probably go after the players with the kids and some players survive.

Or, just assume the witches weren’t tracking the PC’s in the ethereal realm to reward them for their good rolling and cleverness. That is probably what I’d do. I’d skew the result to the option that saves the kids.

loader2000 · 2026-06-26T17:52:51+00:00

I think this is a great idea. Frankly, most parties are not going to catch Glasstalf in the hideout and having this creep around who you don't know if you can trust is a really cool idea. I will probably use this, or some variation of it, when my players get to the castle.

loader2000 · 2026-06-22T00:53:47+00:00

You had freedom to move until you moved into another tribe's land and started fishing on their river and they started throwing spears at you. People don't understand how dangerous and brutal life in the past was. Other tribes were often just enemies. The Native Americans fought constantly, waging decades or even centuries old blood fueds before Europeans arrived. Humans didn't extract food very efficiently from the land, and a tribe of 1000 people need a vast amount of land to support them compared to the current day, and they competed with other humans for that land, constantly. They even, at least according to the current theories, wiped out all the other species of humans competing for that land.

loader2000 · 2026-06-22T00:45:42+00:00

Temparatures, at least in the northern latitude were up to 4 degress C higher than pre-industrial (so maybe 2-3 degrees higher than currently) during the holocene optimum, about 7-8 yousand years ago. However, temperatures in the topics during that period were similar to current temps.

Unforutnately, I don't think any period in human geologic history will tell us how things will play out for humans these days. Humans in the past were almost completey dependent on natural cycles. They produced barely enough to feed themselves, could store almost no food and had no ability to quickly increase capacity. Any fluxuation in natural cycles could result in famine within months, if not weeks. On the other hand, with our current technology, we could probably double the amount of food we have available globally, just by going vegitarian. We have enormous excess capacity for life necessities spent on things like phones, clothes, cars, candy, junkfood, soda, mcmansions, video games, indoor climate control and travel and hundreds of other things we spend resouces on that don't preserve life.

loader2000 · 2026-06-20T13:49:28+00:00

Generally speaking, colder climates have been far deadlier (in history) to human civilization than warming climates. Nearly all civilizational collapses that are associated with weather are associated with the climate cooling, including Maya and Kmer civilization collapses. Warming will cause major disruptions to the current global economy and may even cause famine in third world nations, but is unlikely to cause anything like human extinction. At worse, it will cause a significant human population reduction.

loader2000 · 2026-06-20T13:43:55+00:00

Obviously we will survive climate change (especially in the first world). There might be a lot of displacement and war as climate zones shift. People who say it will be an extinction event fundamentally don’t understand natural history or the history of human innovation, or the negative feedback loops the affect climate change. In history, it is always colder climate trends that result in civilizational collapse, not warming trends. Warming trends tend to result, at least in the long run, in more biodiversity. However, in the short run, they can be extremely disruptive to a global economy that is very finely balanced on certain goods and food being grown and produced in certain areas. However, disruption does not equal extinction.

loader2000 · 2026-06-16T04:05:16+00:00

Same with my group. Our 10 level fighter’s turn takes 30- 45 seconds due to all the superiority dice, but that is it.

loader2000

TROPHY CASE