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That said, everyone made valid points. Every faith has strengths and weaknesses, yet the game is entirely unbalanced. This is a comparison of the faiths, but also of playstyles. Some people would find one playstyle impossible, while other players would struggle with another style. It all depends on how *you* play.
I currently don't have the sort of... gamer setup... to facilitate mods or multiplayer, so I'm stuck with Vanilla, and trying to enjoy myself with it. I don't even know what a "GS5" is? I know what GSG-9 is, but I doubt the German boarder police are linked to LOMSE.
Like most of you, I play this game because of my memories of childhood. It was probably the only game I was ever better at than my oldest brother in a side-by-side comparison, and since he's now dead, it will continue to be the only one I was better at than him for the rest of time. I played this game as a demo, do any of you remember that? You were limited to playing as Life, you couldn't leave the Life region or reach any villages, at one point the Air mage lord walks through the corner of your territory, and will offer a parley for some crystals.(If you chose to kill him, he was super hard and *would* destroy most of your troops with Chain Lightning.) The final boss was the Chaos warrior lord, who always had some Dark Javelins with him. If you befriended him, which was nearly impossible, he'd just wander around the Life region until you killed him. Eventually I got the game on CD when I saw it for sale in Staples, it was $20, and that's in 1999 Dollars! Even so, I begged my dad, and he was so kind as to get it for 7 year old me.(Yes, I really did mean childhood memories.) I played it a lot on CD, I read the guide book cover to cover, and my daydreams from that point on switch from fighting velociraptors to being a Lord... of magic...(I'm almost 29 and I still daydream about it. I'm a loser, sure, but I'm content with my life.) I got the Steam version when the CD got too damaged to keep using, and I was unsettled to see that it cost me less than $2... ah, time makes fools of us all, but I certainly don't regret the literal hundreds of hours I spent on this game. Every moment was worth it.
But I digress! This is a discussion of which faith is the hardest! Or rather... race? I mean, that could be a little technical. Do you mean races as they span through faiths? It would be awfully hard to play with just Lizardmen, since that leaves 1 infantry unit and 1 ranged unit. Just Amazons, and you have 3 champions and nothing else. Though I assume we do mean faith here... it would be interesting to see a mixture of Storm Giants, Flame Giants, and the odd Stone Giant...
I play as water. As a little boy I had a crush on the Water Priestess lord because I had no childhood and was born to become a shut-in weeaboo nerd and all that. But regardless of that, I actually learned to use her quite well, and I've been very fond of the water faith as a whole. I mean, Healing Waters instantly totally heals your whole army group, what's not to love about that? Their cavalry is second only to the Holy Knights, their infantry is meh, their ranged unit is meh on ranged attack but surprisingly strong at protecting themselves in melee, their warriors are excellently balanced, and their thieves are pretty nice. They have the best ships in the entire game, by far, bar none. Their artifacts are also outstanding. Tidalblade+quicksilver(Which can come with Sharktooth, or can be learned the old fashioned way) can destroy the defense of literally anything. Of course, there's dozens of tactics for the mages. The Staff of Drowning is the single best artifact in the game.
So no, water isn't the weakest.
Life isn't the weakest either, at least not in Vanilla. Those archers are something else, and if you use Autocalc, a group of 9 units of level 5 archers will always beat even a level 12 encounter.(Only possible in Vanilla if you play as Death with a level 12 lord and use Spawn Cave, either as a learned spell or with Ashes of Infestation.) Their infantry is very weak, but their cavalry is very fast. Their warriors are good, their thieves are basically a much more potent Elven Archer, and their mages are second only to Order mages with support spells, second only to Water in overworld healing spells, and 1st in terms of in-battle healing spells. Their magical creatures suck and their temple creatures are alright, but not stellar.
Fire is difficult for me. Everyone keeps discounting the warriors because the only way to use them effectively is by using the armour that counterattacked with firedarts... but that's a seriously amazing tactic! Don't discount them because they only have one super good tactic! It's super good! You can win the game in less than 5 turns with that tactic, I really wouldn't poopoo it. It's true that their mages take forever to learn the really good spells, but once they do, they make the game so much more fun. Their thieves and their missile units... suck. Even their Imp scouts suck. In the CD version of the game that I had, I remember the Rock Hurlers actually came in groups of 2, not just one... but they still sucked. The imps can't cover much ground, and their sight radius is low. Those are kinda the two things scouts are for, so I mean... pretty bad. Someone said demons are like weaker dragons in this thread... yeah, and a T-72 is like a weaker tank than an MBT-90, but it doesn't change that IT'S A BLOODY TANK! Demons are very strong for an early game unit, and certainly could give any other faith's units a good run for their money. Fire's biggest weakness is a lack of defense, and their weakness to light rain. Argh!! Drizzile! I guess I'll just die!(Seriously. For 2 MP a level 10 water mage can instantly kill a red Dragon.) The Dragon Lair is the easiest encounter for a Water mage. 5 light rains and it's over.
Death is, as someone pointed out, 2nd best at everything, more or less. Can't really argue with that.
Air has outstanding magic, and so many flying units. They lack tanks, though, which is really irritating, but apart from using Corsairs, they have the best mobility in the game, so that's pretty fetch.
Order has the best warriors,(Especially when parrying, and especially especially with the Amulet of Order and the Armor of I-yeet-anyone-who-attacks-me) some of the best artifacts, the best cavalry, the best buffing spells, a couple other over-powered spells, and generally good units all around. I'd say their weakest unit is their infantry, and honestly their not bad at all. Their White Stags are pretty worthless, but the Gargoyles are nice and bulky. The warrior spirits are so-so, but Lancelot is a more powerful warrior lord, so that's something impressive.
Earth is... not my favourite faith to play with. Their thieves level up very quickly, but have trash stats and trash artifacts. Their hatchet throwers have short range. They have good melee attack for a ranged unit, but that's like having good ice cream for a burger joint. Their scouts are slightly better than Imps. Their warriors have good stats for the most part... Their cavalry is actually pretty good, and their infantry is the second best possible in the game.(Behind only... Trolls. Yeah. Reincarnate is a fun spell. Level 5 trolls have the same attack and defense as dwarven infantry, 9 less HP, but almost 3x the agility making them WAY faster, and they also recover ALL lost HP in 1 turn.) Earth mages are... bad. Very bad. Their spells are the best at buffing 1 character at a time, though, so in conjunction with an Earth warrior, they're not totally useless. Their Wyrm is excellent, and their Stone Giant is... hot garbage. Expensive hot garbage. And apart from the Great Wyrm and their cavalry, ALL EARTH UNITS ARE SLUGS! Forget capturing a village, the war is over by the time you make it to your borders. Do you know why the special building with the temple teleports you? It's because that's the only way to get Earth units to go anywhere!
And finally Chaos... Literally all the weaknesses of fire, but worse. The warriors have HP, but no defense.(At least they have good hit recovery.) They literally have the same cavalry and infantry as Fire. Their thieves are inferior in every stat to Water thieves, with the exceptions of melee attack (iirc) and rate of fire, which is reasonable with the Chakram of Entropy, but even still they have an uncomfortably low range, so you're getting attacked by just about any other ranged unit. Stickthrowers are also awful in everything but rate of fire, which unless you intend to stunlock all of your enemies to death, which is a lot harder done than said, you're shagged. Their spells are... chaotic, and potentially amazing. Reincarnation is the only way to get a lot of Marauder units, so there's that. But good luck on... everything. Because nothing is certain with Chaos magic. Seriously, don't plan, just do. The faith of YOLO. Ogres and Goblins are alright, but there are better. Cyclops is like a way worse version of the Stone Giants of Earth, while Hydras are a slightly worse version of the Great Wyrm, but still actually pretty good.
If I had to pick, it's a toss-up between Earth and Chaos for being the worst. I'll give it to Chaos, though, because of the awful glitch in the Steam version that makes all encounters in the Chaos region have a very high chance of spawning Pegasuses. That makes it harder to play Chaos... a lot harder.
Chaos technically has one of the best spells in the game other than Reincarnate in Vortex... But as I pointed out earlier, you'll never research it in a standard game. Their warriors and cavalry have a 1 point stat difference compared to fire, but if I remember correctly they can eventually buff their cavalry, same as order, giving them very good offensively focused cavalry units. They also have a much better ship than fire does, for however that much matters. The randomness of some of their spells DOES get influenced positively by how powerful your mage is, but the risk/reward/effort ratio is still almost always going to be worse than other faiths. I generally consider Chaos fun, but unless you are exploiting them they are a little worse than every other faith. I think Chaos magic in this game is bad, but almost certainly better implemented than it was in Warlords Battlecry 3. Also if I remember correctly, their ship unit is good. I think it has slightly higher mobility than the Water ship at the cost of everything else, but I'm not sure.
Wow, that was quite the post. A few things I wanted to touch on that I wasn't aware of...
1) Fire ranged units came in groups of 2 at original release? I really don't remember that at all.
2) What strategy are you referring to about beating the game in less than 5 turns with a Fire warrior? I'm curious how it compares to the strategy with the Air Thief Lord I wrote a guide about. EDIT: Is it the strategy that you and m709 discussed in the comment section of my guide?
3) GS5 is referring to Mantera's fanmade patch for Lords of Magic where they did their own rebalancing/new mechanics/other tweaks. I never really tried it as I didn't really care for what they were adding/removing/"improving", but it's out there if you want to take a look at it. I'm pretty sure there are a number of posts that have links if you want to search the Steam forum for them.
4) Speaking of posts about patches, there is an official (of sorts) patch of Lords of Magic that fixes the Pegasi bug (among a few other things) that Red Bat (post above mine) refers to. I know there are a number of posts in the forum about that since I made some of them (with links that hopefully still work). That definitely fixes the issue that Chaos (and a few other locations) have with the Pegasi spawning that should have been a scout of some sort (I think Brownie?).
I agree with a lot of your assessments regarding the various races/Faiths in the game. I've always had an inkling Chaos would be the roughest to try to deal with (Pegasi bug aside) and your descriptions aligns with my thoughts about that.
EDIT: I realized your name was familiar after I posted this originally and it dawned on me it was in the comments of my guide. xD
They've always been single units, and terrible single units at that. You sure you're not thinking of Dryads that fire Fireballs and come in groups of two?
GS5 also makes the game actually hard when you put it on hard and encounters aren't boring pushovers at the beginning. Enemy Lords start at 15 so they stay alive longer, and the Marauding Parties are threatening by day 60.
How it sounds on paper doesn't really change up the game much. A few new spells here or there, or some spells being rebalanced into something actually worth while to cast. Most of what's added is QoL changes.
I played it for about a year before changing pc. I even thought it added enough value to the game to send money for the document mantera wrote up in support. It added a lot of replayability for me, and I'm usually not fond of modding games even when its easier to do so on steam. So that speaks volume
The only thing is it waters down some of the staff-tied mage spells. For Mizupaladin...since you love water a lot, you might find drowning underwhelming in the mod. I remember as a teen playing it on easy, opening on solo water mage with the legendary staff, zoning in combat, casting the spell, running to the furthest point on the map and then autocalc what was left alive by the time they reached me as a completely viable strat because of how strong drowning was.
I don't know that I would go as far as to say it makes the game more difficult. I've found just as many kinda broken opener strats, most of which are available on hard custom starts IIRC. The fact that lords can get to lvl 15 whilst other units remain the same level-scaling as base game is partly why I don't think it makes the game harder.
However, it definitely polishes or rounds all of the rough edges of the original game. Like base game low level mages not having enough mana to cast any damn spell being addressed. I think it does reasonably well at reducing the power gap between faiths and lords. I can't believe I'm still playing this game now and again. It's by far the buggiest game I was able to manage to enjoy through its many gamebreaking bugs. Mantera modes corrects a few.
Now on the topic at hand - pegasus aside, I think earth is far worse than chaos, especially in mantera mod.
Chakram start solo thief lord openers are completely viable and very enjoyable if you want some challenging stealth and run early game combat. With mantera mod, you can pick a lower difficulty and run double thief lord, one with chakram at start and the other picking the chakram you'll get from a building since you started thief... it's extremely enjoyable to watch when you do the actual combat. And Chakram thief lords are extremely powerful late game too. Basically the chakram just shores off all of the weak points (mainly range) of the chaos thiefs. They feel like a stronger version of death thieves late game...
Chaos warrior lords...I forget if this is mantera mod only or base game too, but you can start with...I think it's a helmet that scales your defense for every hit you take while giving you passive regen in combat. You can basically solo warrior until you encounter dungeons with enough mage power to bring you down. Vs masses of physical, you just see your armor go up to 40 or 50 and you take 0 dmg, healing back to full slowly killing units between recovery, while you afk a few minutes and come back for the loot. There are a few units with crushing blows or magical damage(like death shades) that can be a bit scary for those "defense so high you are immune" kind of strats but unless you play without reloads, they offer very good pace opener.
And chaos mages were already discussed as offering a number of strong options.
By contrast with earth, I have not found any satisfactory hard difficulty custom starts that make their mage or their thief feel strong, if not very early, at least in the late game scaling. Hell, even on easy I find their mages and thieves weak.
I frequently play solo lord custom starts, as I enjoy those most, and for that playstyle, I don't think I'd put chaos as 2nd worse even.
Originally (Well, after the Demo) I had the Lords of Magic: Special Edition CD-ROM on a... Windows 98 Gateway PC? The game worked fine, the pegasus bug didn't exist, it was nice. I'm quite certain the Rock Hurlers came in units of 2 members, because I remember thinking how weird it was that they were the only thieves-guild missile unit to not come in 3. Bear in mind this is the old CD version, so unless you happen to have that Purple and Gold CD with the Legends of Urak expansion built in, then it's hard to confirm or deny. They still weren't worth it, though. As a side note, Dryads don't come in groups of 2... if they did, I'd actually use them, since they have really long range. They're certainly more useful than Unicorns, which are worth less than infantry, but cost more. To the best of my knowledge, unmodded, unpatched LOM or LOMSE have never had 2 member Dryads.
As for the ships of Chaos, when I made my guide assessing ships they were tied with Life for 3rd place on mobility, behind Air and Water (Way behind water) for mobility, but they were better in combat than Life, making them one of the best, if not the absolute best, compromise. There are better combat options, and there are more mobile options, but nothing better all-around. Meanwhile Earth's barges were tied with Fire for worst mobility, but they had the best combat stats... which admittedly is really a drag, considering that Earth needs mobility desperately.
As for the helmet you described, to the best of my knowledge the only base-game artifacts that change any stat on the hit-by-hit basis are the Tidal Blade (Which has a 50% chance of reducing defense by 1 per hit.) and, technically, Balkoth's Scythe, since it can increase your HP. The only helm that Chaos can wear in the vanilla game is the Helm of Asymmetry, which I'm pretty sure gives you nice defense and sight radius, but I don't think it had any special effects... I'll check it out and comment here again if I'm wrong. If the helmet you're describing is in the Vanilla game, then I have to add a section to my guide on cheesy tactics! :) Alas, I don't remember them getting... anything that gives them regeneration...
Chakram of Entropy x2 is a very valid tactic, I'll give you that. I still don't like their builds too much, but that can still work.
Yeah, Earth thieves and mages are almost impossible to work with, but their warriors really pull the race up as a whole. Especially with that Armour of Inspiration + whatever that ring that gives regeneration is... I mean, right there you have overwhelming 'Counter Tanking'. They have all the right stats for it. Also, their Greater Axe of Mauling casts Tremor, which does quite a bit of damage to all enemies, and pairs well with Earthquake from the overworld, or Meteor Shower or Locusts, if you bring in a foreign mage.
If I knew how to get the dang thing to work on Windows 10 i wouldnt have even bought this version XD. Not that it's worse, just a waste of money when you already have the game. Already tried running compatiability mode, not sure how to get it to work.
ANYWHO, i think people are hating on fire a little too much. Their units are glass canons without buffs, sure... but like... you can still buff their armor and stuff, and they end up being one of the best in the game. It's not even an exploit or cheese... just effective. And tbh late mid and late game spells are some of the best as far as i'm concerned. I'd put fire in the top 3 or 4 for sure. Also their monsters (dragons, flame bois, etc.) are increadibly good at what they do. The little fire guys are perfect for taking on damage while your heavy hitters put the canon in glass canon. Hero Mage and Warrior are honestly really good, especially the warrior.
maybe I'm biased here, but I think people hating on fire just don't know how to play them.
Honestly, sums up pretty much all of the races. Surely all of them are playable, you just have to know how to use them.
Exactly. Thats why I chose earth as the hardest to play. Solely because they start so close to chaos. Anything above easy difficulty and early game chaos can be a killer. But Earth itself with a good player can win the game same as water, life, etc etc etc can win the game. It's really how you play.
Fire Warriors are incredible imo.
Yes the have zero to none defense but thats actually a great benefit.
Using the "defend" skill on him self converts a massive ammount of attack into defense so he can practically tank anything, while rock dwellers and berserkers etc. deal the damage.
I dont exactly know how he performs on higher difficulty though.
What you said sounds good on paper, but doesn't really work in practice. Even Fire Warlords start with such low defense that defending at the beginning will not grant enough defense to meaningfully tank, especially against any kind of Archer unit. Hard only amplifies his shortcomings during early, mid and late game as well. Plus there's a good chance that once you start hitting any enemies that do start attacking the Fire Warrior, they will be pulled off him due to him not retaliating and keeping them in combat.
Rock throwers don't have the defense to be able to handle any kind of pressure on them, especially due to being only 1 unit with quite low armor and missile resistance. Even their ranged attack is terrible with their Aimed Attack having one of the longer times before firing, and you'll be using that plenty since their range and damage output is fairly low, even at level 5. Flame Zerkers can dish out damage, but any kind of extended battle will see them dropping fast due to their abysmal defense. High HP value with low defense isn't feasible once you start getting into level 5+ encounters where you'll see many groups of level 2-4 supported by champions.
Chaos suffers in a similar manner, but their Warriors can atleast hold their own.