[licker]

Originally posted by Elmo:
Thanks for the feedback folks. I have the demo and will give it a whirl as it sounds like most of you prefer D2 to AoW:SM.

PS - How are the manuals in the commercial Version?

Just to offer a contrasting opinion

I think the manual is average at best. The game mechanics section is light and not very illuminating, though in fairness most of the info is in these forums or others, and the community is typically ready to help new players with their questions. You don't see many RTFMs here, mostly cuz... well the manual isn't that good...

The rest of the manual (the spell lists and magic items lists) are fine, but not well organized or referenced, still the information is there even if it is more annoying than it should be to extract. Then again, no one is buying this game for the manual, so I wouldn't worry about it, and some people seem to really like the manual, maybe you'll fall into that group.

As to which is better SM or Dom2... well its entirely a matter of personal opinion, and I don't think that that main divider between them is 'better gameplay' for Dom2 and 'prettier gfx' for SM. If you are playing MP mostly than SM stands up quite well for a certain type of game play. Also the longevity of SM will be longer than what alot of people here have pointed out, the origonal and AoW2 both had scads of user made maps and senerios (20 times more than what I've seen for Dom anyway), though in fairness the gameplay of any of the AoWs was more dependant on how the map was made than it is for Dom, that's one reason why the random map maker for SM is average at best.

I think you'll get more SP replayability out of Dom2 though, and certainly more SP challenge, the AI isn't as bad as some people make it out to be, and it is capeable of assassinations, global enchantments, and a variety of other 'higher level' strategies. It's not as good as a human of course (hense the desire to play MP), but it's far better than most people assumed it would be from the Demo.

Here's the thing about SP in Dom2 and its challenges. You'll only be as challenged as you allow yourself to be. If you chose settings that inherently favor the human player, yeah it'll be easy. If you choose balanced settings (or try to handicap yourself somehow) then the AI will be strong. Seemingly the AI has some problems with early aggression, but on a big enough map with enough opponents, even if you are able to take out 2 neighbors by turn 40, there will likely be one or two other AIs that have done a similar manuver and who will be ready to face you in the midgame. Ermor is particularly nasty about growing a huge hoard of troops and visiting smackdowns on anyone unfortunate to be next to them.