REVIEW: Orions: Legend of Wizards expansion pack, Orions: Second Age

[Menneisyys]

All serious Pocket PC gamers know Orions: Legend of Wizards, by far the BEST Turn-based strategy game for the platform, of which I’ve published a Strategy Guide HERE. The homepage of the game is HERE. Unfortunately, there's (still?) no trial version; hopefully, this will be fixed now. However, I think you'll be absolutely pleased with the upgrade, even if you can't play the trial: for $9.95, it's quite a bargain. That is, just go and purchase the update - you won't regret it.

The developers have announced the forthcoming expansion pack, Orions: The Second Age, in late July. Since then, I’ve been waiting it really with anticipation pretty much comparable to waiting for Starcraft’s expansion set, Starcraft: Brood War. Thanks to the developers, I’ve received a Release Candidate version of the expansion pack. And, yes, I LOVE it. It’s REALLY good. (Note that the reviewed version is exactly the same as the final one.)



First, let’s see what has been introduced (The Good), what is (still) missing (The Bad), what has been changed and, finally, I give you some very useful tips and tricks. All this with TONS of screenshots.

The good

1. A LOT of (THIRTY!) new cards, most of them having GREAT spells (abilities), further increasing the game experience. Now, the game is really like playing chess or a similar board game!
2. The Campaign mode has been greatly enhanced; for example, the feature requests of Doug Goldring and Ben Stanley have (almost) all been implemented. For example, now, you receive bonuses in your chosen element; you can quickly teleport between words and you can buy any card on “card black markets” any time. (Screenshots of the latter in all stages of pre-building, building and using: 1 2 3 4)
3. The Dual mode (the one that I play the most) has been enhanced a lot, mostly as a response to my feature requests / complaints. For example, now, you can select between a smaller (4 cards) and a larger (6 cards with spells enabled and 5 without) desk, whether the deck should be uniform or not (in size; non-uniform decks vary in size - some elements can have even 7-8 cards, while others only 3-4) etc. I'll elaborate on these questions later.
4. There are some welcome game balance improvements; most importantly, Life / Chimera has been made much more expensive and a bit weaker and Life / Cerberus a bit more usable.

The bad

1. Unlike with, say, the Starcraft: Brood War update, there isn’t new music. Not that it’d be missing – the in-game music is REALLY great (and, if you don’t like it, you can just change it to anything else if it’s a .MOD tracked module file).
2. The game isn’t compatible with MS Smartphones (WM Standard devices - that is, devices without a touch screen). It wouldn’t be very hard for the developer to create at least a QVGA (no real need for 176*220 conversions any more, I think, as those low-end models are quickly phased out, except for some current models like HP's new iPAQ 514 Voice Messenger) Smartphone-compliant version as the game could be easily played with the D-pad / the Action button and/or the dialpad.
3. No hi-res (W)VGA support (it'd be GREAT to see the hand-drawn artwork of cards in their full glory on VGA devices - even without the (absolutely gorgeous) particle effects & other animations!)
4. There's no option of decks bigger than 6 (without spells, 5) cards. I'd certainly welcome even bigger decks - even ones that have ALL the cards.
5. TCP/IP multiplayer still only supports direct IP connections and there's still no central server (Game Lounge)-based solution like that of battle.net in Blizzard's games. This also means you won't be able to play if both of the would-be players are NAT'ed / behind a firewall.
   
   Unfortunately, there's no LAN broadcast discovery either in order to quickly find your opponent either - that is, without having to look up her or his IP address and entering it directly. Fortunately, the title, once you enter the IP address, will remember it next time you start multiplayer mode; this is definitely good news as, in general, Bluetooth PAN and Wi-Fi peer-to-peer IP addresses don't change if you the same Pocket PC's participate in the local peer-to-peer net.
   
   I REALLY hope the developer WILL (also - keeping direct TCP connections are also important to make it possible to play over Internet connectionless LAN's) introduce a game lounge so that you'll be able to
   
   1, find other opponents to play if, for example, your friends aren't available to play against - just like on most other multiplayer gaming lounges like Battle.net
   
   2, you try to play a remote friend but both of you are firewalled / NAT'ed and, therefore, no direct connection can be built up in either direction.
   
   I also hope he'll add in-game chatting.
   
   (See the Multiplayer Bible for more info on all these questions - why for example in-game chatting can be useful, what LAN broadcast discovery means etc.)
6. There are some (minor) bugs: for example, Earth / Giant Spider's Spider Web (another pretty useful spell to make a given enemy card unable to attack in the next turn) costs, in reality, three Earth elements - as opposed to what (two) the help page suggests. Also, Water / Leviathan, as opposed to what the card description states, can cast Curing (the price / performance ration-wise, best owner HP increasing ability of all) any time - even when the number of your Water elements is only 1 (which is less than 6). This will work even with Water = 0 because of an internal bug. That is, if you DO have Water / Leviathan, make sure you increase the HP of your owner every time you can do so - against, this is the cheapest way to do so. And, don't forget you can do this even when you otherwise have no Water at all. You can easily make use of this bug if you have at two Leviathans on the board and use both to heal your owner every turn: if your Water is continuously staying at 1, you can gain 8 health for a mere one Water element. (Or, even more, if you have even more Leviathans.)
7. There's no option of giving the SAME cards to both players in Dual mode. This, while certainly makes duels much more boring (not knowing at first what cards the enemy has adds a lot to the game - for example, if you go for, for example, mass-low level cards and it's only later that you're faced with an Earth / Quicksands spell, your (initial) strategy may turn out to be fatal), may be required by some: mostly people that want to avoid losing just because they were unlucky to get some worse cards, while their opponent got better ones – I know well enough from my (Star)Crafter past that even the slightest game balance nuances like this can result in a LOT of difference in a game between two very good players

[Menneisyys]

(Balance) changes to old cards

Compared to the last, 1.02 version, there are some minor changes to old cards as well to improve the game balance (not to give an unfair advantage to a player that has the luck to possess a given card, while the other doesn’t).

Life / Chimera is no longer Level 11, but Level 13 and has the strength of 10 instead of 11. That is, it’s no longer one of the best cards – in previous versions, it was probably the best card (unless the enemy had the cheap Earth / Forest Spirit to absorb his damage while taking out the card with spells; most importantly, the, against Chimera, most useful / cheapest Water / Sea Justice), particularly if you often used on powerful spells like Fire / Fireball because of Chimera's halving their price.

The level of Death / Grim Reaper has been decreased from 12 to 11. This is also welcome as this card is definitely inferior to, say, Life / Chimera.

Life / Magic healer has slightly increased HP (12 instead of 10) and the same stands for Fire / Cerberus (8 instead of 6). Now, the latter is REALLY usable, particularly when backed up with a Fire / Diablo to continuously restore its health / increase its attack. Then, it really becomes a killer because of the damage done to three cards at the same time and a HP that most other cards can't match in one step to finally get rid of the card.

Note that, in my opinion, Earth / Satyr is, far too cheap for what it offers and its level, 2 (health: 10, attack / strength: 3), makes the game a bit unbalanced, particularly when you compare its level, health, strength and negative side effects to other low-level cards also used to quickly increase a given element. These cards are as follows: Fire / Demon (lvl 5 / HP 12 / strength 2, and it decreases Earth!), Water / Nixie (4 / 10 / 3 with an additional Fire -> Water conversion ability), Air / Nymph (3 / 12 / 1), Life / Priest (4 / 9 / 1, and it also decreases Death!), Life / Apostate (5 / 14 / 4, but quickly empties Life, having a pretty bad Life -> Death conversation ratio), Death / Ghost (3 / 13 / 3, but it decreases owner's life by 5 for every Death increase!) etc.

As can clearly be seen, no other element has the same cheap and powerful "quick increase" card, only Earth. Hope the developers consider raising the level of this card to, say, 4.

New settings

The settings have changed a lot: it received a completely new, second page (which can be flipped with the “Next page” icon):



It’s here that you can, for example, enable “Extended deck” so that each element has six (without spells, five) cards (instead of four).

Also, it’s in here (with "No spells") that you can disable spells. If you find some of the spells too strong and making an adverse impact on the balance of the game (for example, a player having really good destruction / kill spells like Fire / Fireball has a definite advantage over a player that doesn't), you'll want to check in this checkbox. It' greatly contribute to additional game balance.

Note that, should you disable spells, the value / usability of Air / Astral Cloud, Life / Unicorn and Life / Chimera decreases. For example, then, you will only want to use Air / Astral Cloud to negate the, by default, 2 damage of Life / Ethereal because Air / Astral Cloud decreases the impact of direct attack done to it by 2. (Alternatively, you can use the Air / Gargoyle with the (pretty expensive) Petrification ability, which, essentially, does the same and, therefore, adds full protection against Life / Ethereal.)

Without spells, of course, the game MAY become a bit less interesting – as with decent Real-Time Strategies like Starcraft, spells add tio the game experience. Of course, this option doesn't disable card spelling abilities - that is, disabling spells doesn't mean something like taking, for example, away all the very good spells (EMP, Plague etc.) in Starcarft - just the opposite, it may help in balancing the game.

Also, you can instruct the game ("More elements at start") to give you more elements at start (generally, up to 8) so that you don't need to start with low-level cards, but can go straight for stronger ones.

Finally, with "Random first move", you can instruct the game to select the first player to move in random - no longer will you always be the first to cast a card first (or to skip your turn, if there's no decent card to be placed).

All in all, as can be seen some (but, unfortunately, not all) of my previous, particularly dual / multiplayer-related remarks / recommendations have been implemented.

[st3v3]

sweet i liked this game

[Menneisyys]

Some tips, also showing (some of) the new cards & spells

(Note that this section is in NO way a full list of all the thirty new cards. I’ll update the official Strategy Guide after having played the expansion some weeks so that the new information I tell you can be as accurate as possible.)

• If you can, get at least two (or even more – make extensive use of Fire / Daemon or Fire / Firelord, when available, to quickly bump up your fire elements) Fire / Diablos on the deck. They will be able to strengthen each other very easily. In the following screenshot, I’ve brought five of them to the deck and used their “Diabolic Path” spell to strengthen / heal them in a round-robin fashion:
  
  
  
  For example, I’ve cast this spell six times on the third Diablo (just over Grim Reaper); this is why it has the strength of 18 (instead of the default 6) and still pretty high HP.
  
  (Note that I’ve cheated a bit in order to make this screenshot: I’ve edited the “LEVEL” attribute in cards/diablo.inf so that it has the level 1 in order to be able to quickly take a screenshot).
  
  If you don't have the necessary Fire elements to go for mass-Diablos, you may still want to use this ability with any other Fire creature. I recommend the now-healthier Cerberus to be concurrently used with the spell - you can quickly (in 4-5 turns) make it a REALLY powerful, deadly card because of its attacking three opposing cards at the same time.
• If you plan to / can (for example, the enemy doesn’t have spells like Life / Gods Wrath or cards like Life / Paladin with both its quick Exorcizm spell and tripled damage to Undead (Death) cards to quickly get rid of your low-level Undeads if you use the abilities I’ll explain now to summon / create them) go the mass-Undead way.
  
  One way to do this is Death / Black Mage’s “Extract Soul” spell to quickly transfer a non-Undead creature to a Death / Ghost with 15 health. This is, incidentally, a very commonly used strategy of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) of the game. Sometimes, I find, it's overdoing this because it transfers newly-placed, weaker cards (for example, Air / Nymph) to Ghosts even if it could still use the abilities of these cards for some 2-3 rounds at least.
  
  Alternatively, with Death / Necromancer, using its “Dark summon” spell, you can populate the slots with Death / Zombies. This is a lot cheaper (costs only 2 Death elements as opposed to their original, 4 price) than summoning it from your cards (if they're available at all).
  
  If you, in any way (for example, by using the above-explained abilities to summon / transfer cards or just go the traditional way), you can use the, with several Death cards in play, VERY useful and cheap Death / Undead Swarm spell to instruct your undeads to hit their targets twice in the same turn. Again, it's a very useful spell if you go mass-Undead!
  
  Of course, going mass-Undead can be pretty risky if the enemy has spells like Life / Gods Wrath and, if you "only" use (low-level) Death / Zombies and/or Death / Ghosts, Earth / Quicksands. However, changing your cards to (pretty healthy) Ghosts can be a good idea when they, otherwise, would be killed in the next round OR they're very weak and you don't need their abilities any more. Just remember that all attacks on Ghosts will also do some damage to yourself - use them with care (for example, together with Water / Ice Guard to decrease the damage done to the owner by 50%)!
  
• Earth / Python is also VERY-VERY useful, both its default, always-effective ability to quickly decrease the attack strength of the opposite card and its "Suffocate" ability, with which you can quickly kill any enemy card with health less than 6. This, as with Fire / Diablo's, as has already been seen, also VERY good Diabolic Path, doesn't require any elements to use. This card should be one of your most often used cards - particularly if your opponent makes extensive use of Earth / Forest Spirit (original HP: 3; that is, less than 6). You can get rid of the latter cards at once with Python.
• Water / Scylla is useful, particularly if you play the AI and it extensively uses this card. Because of a bug? in the AI, it'll continuously be healing itself (even if you only damage it for, say, 2, in a turn, it will quickly re-heal itself for 5), which means it will very quickly increase your Water elements. In these cases, what I recommend is letting the card on the board (don't kill it quickly) so that you constantly receive a LOT of Water elements because the constant re-healing. Just put a card not taking (much) damage from the card in the opposing slot: Water / Ice Wizard (because it only takes 1 damage from Water creatures), Earth / Forest Spirit or the new Life / Etherial.
• Water / Kraken is very-very useful – it delivers damage in the following way. If the card opposing it has empty slot on neither on the left nor on the right side, it’ll deliver 10 extra damage to the creature (that is, it'll receive 17 damage by default). If the opposing card has an empty slot on its right, it’ll be immediately be shifted in there (after having been hit by your card) and, therefore, if you have a card in the opposing slot (that is, on the right of your Kraken), it'll also attack the card (instead of the enemy owner) in the same round.
  
  
  
• Water / Tython can be a good alternative to other means of healing your cards, particularly if you need a healing up to 15 HP's. Note that you MUST have at least one free slot on the board for this to work - as opposed to most alternative mass-healing means, which aren't card abilities but spells themselves.
  
  The card itself costs 7 Water elements and the Disperse ability (which does the healing) costs another 2. That is, you can have at most four of your cards to be healed for 9 Water elements, which is quite a bargain if you take the price / performance ratio of other healing spells (Earth / Revie, Earth / Restructure (price: 6, +3 HP and 6 healing) or the new Life / Cure Wounds (price: 6; heals up to 6 HP's but not severely damaged cards, which receive no HP at all) and Life / Eternal Light (price: 8 Life + losing 3 Death elements; healing: 5 + causing 5 damage to enemy undead cards) into account. Of course, if you have all your slots filled (no place for an additional Tython) and/or don't need that much HP's and/or you have a Life / Chimera on the board (which, as is well known, halves the price of all spells), you may still want to prefer the latter spells.

[Menneisyys]

• Still speaking of healing, Life / Knight can also prove useful - it automatically heals the weakest card by two each turn. (Incidentally, sometimes it has chosen another card to heal so I'm not really sure the algorithm selecting the card to heal is correct or well thought-out.)
  
  Also, if your opponent goes (mass-)Undead and frequently uses Death card abilities (for example, Death / Black Mage’s Extract Soul, very frequently used by the AI, Death / Necromancer's Dark summon etc.), the caster (Death) card will be hit for 3 damage.
  
  In addition, this card has a REALLY useful, mass-killer ability, Concentrate, which is even better than Earth / Pegasus' Holy Strike (which only delivers 5 damage to ONE target card at the cost of 2 Life). This ability, which costs 3 Life (that is, only slightly more expensive than Earth / Pegasus' Holy Strike), is particularly useful against all the enemy cards. It delivers 6 damage to the chosen, target enemy card (unless it's a Life creature) and the same damage, divided by the number of cards, to all the others. It has no adverse effects like damaging Knight by 3 upon attacking a Death card either (unlike with Earth / Pegasus' Holy Strike); only (default) abilities like the Fire Shield of Fire / Efreet will return half of the damage to it.
  
  All in all, ALWAYS try to get this card on your deck and make sure you always use its Concentrate ability! (Of course, you'll also want to try to bring an Air / Zeus on the deck in order to use its really cool (8 damage) and cheap (1 Air) Lightning ability if your enemy (frequently) uses cards with level 6 or below.)
  
• If you go for mass-Earth (because, for example, your enemy doesn't have Earth / Titan, whose Thunder Fist ability is particularly effective (3 damage for each of them at the expense of 1 Air only) against Earth creatures OR he's preferring the use of the new Earth / Force of Nature spell, which has absolutely no effect on Earth creatures), you'll want to use Earth / Enchanter (level: 7), which also auto-heals other cards - but Earth cards only (as opposed to Knight, which heals any other type) and only by 1 each turn.
  
  It has another feature: it heals all the other cards by five upon reaching one HP (but NOT upon simply dying) through, for example, the Death / Plague spell, other spells or direct attacks, only leaving 1 HP for the card.
  
• Air / Kronos is a VERY useful card, for three reasons:
  
  - its (pretty expensive: it costs 3 Air) Aging ability is particularly useful against high-HP cards (for example, Life / Chimera, Water / Leviathan, Fire / Infernal etc. to quickly reduce their (both maximal and current) HP to the half of the original. As it's the original that is halved, you will want to use the ability as soon as your enemy brings the card to the board - then, your first, subsequent attack will already decrease the halved HP.
  
  Speaking of high-HP cards, you should also pay special attention to the new Earth / Force of Nature spell too, which deals damage to each enemy creature equal to half of its remaining health and is, therefore, REALLY useful. Note that it has no effect to Earth cards.
  
  - attacks creatures of a level less than 10 with additional damage, equal to the HP difference. This means it'll attack for example a level 2 Earth / Satyr with (default) 4+(10-2) damage.
  
  - one of the VERY few cards to deliver direct, and pretty high damage to the, otherwise, very though Earth / Etherial.
  
• Life / Avatar is pretty strange and, frankly, I don't know why it's here at all. I consider it a pretty worthless card because, despite its high (10) level and double damage taking (the owner takes the same damage as Avatar, unless, of course, you have a Water / Ice Guard on the board to divide the damage by two), its strength isn't particularly high (7) and it has no special abilities / features either. Had it ANY extra ability, it'd be a nice card. Now, on the other hand, I in no way recommend it, not even together with the (cheap: 1 Air) Protect ability of the also-new Air / Guardian or the (expensive: 3 Earth) Spider Web ability of the also new Earth / Giant Spider.
  
• Life / Etherial can be a real pain in the back for your opponent to get rid of and is excellent against “tough”, powerful, high-strength units like Water / Kraken or Life / Chimera; in this respect, it's pretty much similar to our old friend, Earth / Forest Spirit (the latter, of course, does receive (some) damage from other cards and spelling abilities).
  
  
  
  Note that if your opponent has the Death / Lich card, it’ll deliver 5 damage to your Etherial every turn (but it won't deal any damage when it's summoned - as opposed to other cards). The same will happen with Air / Kronos as well - it'll deliver lvl 10- lvl 7 = 3 damage to Etherial each turn. If Kronos can't attack the card directly (another card is placed against Etherial), it can still use its Aging ability to reduce the health of the card to four (and, then, you can quickly Suffocate it with Python). Also, Earth / Echidna will eventually kill this card because of its poisoning it (poisons also kills Etherial - both used as card (default) ability or full spells). Finally, if you have Fire / Efreet, you can effectively use its implicit fire shield (or, if it's not in the opposite shot, its Fire Shield ability, preferably on another Fire creature to avoid losing health every turn) - it'll send back one damage (that is, damages Etherial by one) each time Etherial attacks.
  
  To my knowledge, these are the only creatures that can do any kind of harm to this card by direct attack. Of card abilities (spells), you can Suffocate it Earth / Python (after damaging it with something like Fire / Fire Spikes, Water / Poison or the new, really effective Water / Poison Storm - or, with the other means (Aging, Fire Shield etc.) outlined above). You can also consume it with Water / Kraken, but the latter also consumes all other cards and, therefore, can only be used sparingly. Finally, you can also use Kronos' Aging against the card. It, however, can't directly kill the card with this ability - you'll need another spell / ability / card to finally kill it.

Installation tip

Make sure you also get and install the brand new version 1.10 of the original game (that is, Orions: Legend of Wizards) BEFORE installing the new pack on top of it. The expansion will NOT flawlessly work with the previous, 1.02 version of the original game.

Cross-posted to (might be worth checking out for additional info / discussions!): PPCT, AximSite, XDA-Developers, FirstLoox, BrightHand, HowardForums, MoDaCo, PocketGamer.org, PocketGaming.de.

UPDATE (08/20/2007): PPCT frontpage


UPDATE (08/26/2007): PocketGamer.org frontpage & featured review (no direct links can be given to top-of-the-page banner announcements; hence the screenshot)

[Menneisyys]

Yet another major article update.

[Menneisyys]

UPDATE (08/26/2007): PocketGamer.org frontpage & featured review (no direct links can be given to top-of-the-page banner announcements; hence the screenshot)

[Menneisyys]

Yeah, you've guessed right: another update.

[Menneisyys]

UPDATE (11/22/2007): version 1.11 has just been released. It contains several bugfixes and, what is even more important, balance changes. Please read this update BEFORE reading the main review because I haven’t updated the latter in order to keep it consistent.

1. Fire / Diablo: instead of 4, it only heals the target fire creature for 3 (fortunately, increasing its strength is not changed). Casting the spell costs 1 Fire (instead of 0). This makes this card considerably less recommended than previously.
2. Fire / Infernal has been made MUCH cheaper (10 instead of 13), which really extends its functionality. While, previously, I had little chance of using this card (I just didn’t have the necessary Fire elements and an additional, preferably low-cost like the now-strengthened “Fire / Imp” cards on the board most of the time), now I’ve found myself using it much more frequently.
3. Fire / Imp has been made MUCH stronger (14 vs. 9), which makes it much more useful, particularly if, used together with the now much more frequently used Fire / Infernal (you need to wait until you get the necessary Fire elements to summon Infernal) or the, unfortunately, somewhat degraded Fire / Diablo.
4. Life / Avatar, while it was not only completely useless, but also heavily noxious in the previous version, has become pretty useful now. For 10 Life points, you get a card with a very high HP (and an, unfortunately, pretty mediocre attack). Now, the damage taken is just the opposite of what was before: instead of damaging the owner by the same amount originally received by Avatar, the damage is done in the opposite way. That is, when the owner is damaged, Avatar is also damaged by the same amount. If you can make sure your owner won’t (really) be damaged in the near future, then, Avatar may be a decent pick.
5. The damage of Lightning Bolt has been increased to 6 (from 5). A decent move – for 4 Air, the previous version was pretty much overpriced, taking the other ways of damaging the enemy owner into account.
6. As far as Water / Tython is concerned, it’s now slightly stronger. (More HP (16 vs. 15) and attack (4 vs. 3)) and its casting no longer costs water elements. I’m not entirely sure this was a nice idea – after all, Tython has already been THE best and most cost-effective way for mass re-healing. Now, a player )if the other doesn’t have it) owning this card will be next to unbeatable (if he’s playing using the right strategy and is, otherwise, decent)

Bug fixes:

1. AI no longer casts Scylla's abilities too much. Oh dear, now, we can’t take advantage of this bug to quickly bump up our Water elements…
   Leviathan, Nixie, Demon - elemental issues solved. (No more exchange nothing for fire/water).
2. Fixed cast cost for Spider.