Armies of Exigo. Several of you have tried it. Some hated it, some liked it, some loved it. I was one of the ones who loved it. To me it was the new Starcraft. It had strategic and tactical aspects identical to Starcraft. At the same time it was new and fresh. It had new units and matchups to learn. Also it was not a game that was solved. You could experiment with new strategies and tactics and share them with the community. In Starcraft everything has been tried before. New trends arrise with new maps, but in the end, it's something that's been tried, mapped out and tested before. The community that played AoX were a diverse bunch, coming from different backgrounds. Starcraft players seemed to dominate, but you had some players from other RTSes that would play with a unique style and come up with some cute moves.
The user interface was very familiar, resembling that of Warcraft 3. You had MBS and automine though which I know many people here despise. I think in the end it made it a more fun game, but maybe less competitive. I can see progamers playing this game with such perfection you would be unable to tell them apart. But at the 130 apm level, there were always things that could be slightly improved. So it was still a fun game of skill. Spells and abilities were mapped out to the QWEASDZC part of the keyboard which made it easier to perform actions fast. One of the things about making the UI easier to deal with though is how it opens up the doors for lower players to learn the concept of timing, performing a perfect build order, having the right number of buildings compared to your economy. In Starcraft these concepts get muddled in the heavy amount distractions you need to cope with. Unless your micro and macro are at a certain level, timing starts to lose its meaning. Your timing windows wither away because of your awful macro. On the other hand of the scale, Armies of Exigo does not challenge a player quite as much as Starcraft does. You are not forced to make strategic decisions under the same amount of pressure. And one thing I love about Starcraft is how focusing on one thing makes something else in your game weaker. So you constantly have to weigh which actions are more important and which actions can be discarded or done slopily.
Armies of Exigo also suffers from the units in the game. You have the basic melee units, ranged units and flying units with different stats on them. Some have special abilities, but in the end, what decides the strength of the army are the basic fighting units. The problem lies in how similar they are to each other. If two armies go head to head, the largest one will win most of the time. There are few high tech units that you reach to gain to get an advantage. Area of Effect spells/units are not that strong. So the game encourages steady buildup of units, steady teching up. The person with the best macro wins, which is ironic because macro is made so easy for both players. So you'll have very small army differences deciding who has the advantage out on the battlefield. And that causes a major problem for the game. It means that harassment in an even game, means reducing your main army which means that you have essentially given up map control. Also buildings and workers are so robust that harassment does not pay off all that well. Because you lack units like the siege tank and lurker, you don't see a lot of fighting for ground. This is another strategic element that is played down. This may not all be as I portray it to be. But it remains true when comparing it to Starcraft which heavily rewards harassment, tech rushes and fighting for map positions.
I see similarities between Starcraft 2 and Armies of Exigo. I haven't played Starcraft 2, but it seems to have some of the same qualities as Armies of Exigo. I think one of the reasons why Armies of Exigo turned out the way it was is to balance the races. That's why spellcasters and Area of Effect play such a minor part in the gameplay. Hopefully Starcraft 2 does not turn out the same way.
In the end, what killed off Armies of Exigo was poor marketing and support. Poor sales gave the developers little reason to keep the server running and create new patches. It makes me sad. It was a game with a lot of potential. An expansion with some new units to mix things up, some tweeking of current units, some interface changes and a stream of balance patches could have resulted in something special. Instead all I have is a nostalgic feeling of greatness in the making.
I didn't play a TON of Armies of Exigo but if someone says "Look, this is what SC2 will become with MBS" my reaction is more along the lines of
"..ok, well, that's great..?"
Because it's a really good game. And since SC2 will have AoE effects, siege tanks, lurkers etc, hopefully the negatives Stenole described won't be as pronounced in SC2.
On November 04 2008 05:27 freelander wrote: hey stenole, was it you who beat me like 3 or 5 times on hamachi in Beast versus Fallen?
It's possible. It's hard to remember who I've played. It's been a while since the last time I played it. I remember playing against a fallen that hadn't mastered the "extrator trick" that needs to be done every game to get a good start. So I autowon all of those games. Maybe that was someone else.
In the end, what killed off Armies of Exigo was poor marketing and support.
What killed AoX? n00bs. AoX never had a chance. Had they marketed it more, it would just failed even more. Time tends to gloss things over, but remember than, other than the few of us who knew SC well, most people thought AoX = WC3 ripoff. Reviewers gave AoX low marks for graphics (wobble/not free/bland), gameplay (no squads/CPU too strong/underground lame), and sound (admittedly they did suxor). That makes for pretty much all the categories that matter. There was simple no source of players for AoX in 2004.
About the AoX = WC3 argument, the game shows signs that the Beast faction was supposed to be Orcs. Their main hero guy in the campaign is really an Orc.The Orcs are the people fighting the Empire in the intro movie. Also several orc unit types are available in the scenario editor and are also there in the campaign. They probably changed it to beasts late in development to keep it separate from WC3. Keeping similar names to WC3 on many of the buildings may not have been the best decision.
If the game had been marketed better, you would have actually been able to find the game at any store you went to, but you could only find it by specifically searching for stores that sold it. I haven't heard of anyone who has seen a single ad for the game anywhere. And most of the people online said that they had gotten the game due to knowing someone who played it or was part of the development process. With more presence prior to release, and actually having reviewers excited about the game before getting it would have lured some better reviews out of them. The problem is that EA who stood for marketing were pushing to sell Battle for Middle Earth and they didn't want to have a competing title, not completely their own, taking all the glory. It was even hard to find AoX in EA's own online store because it wasn't listed with their other titles. I talked to several people from what used to be Black Hole and they were all very disappointed in EA and pointed out things about their cooperation that hadn't worked out for them.
EPT
![[image loading]](http://img.gamespot.com/gamespot/images/2004/reviews/919920_20041214_screen002.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://www.deeperwants.com/images/starcraft.jpg)
