Most $ ever for game = cheap!

[Campy]

A couple of weeks ago I was playing the demo and posted here saying that while I did not mind the graphics and interface only being adequate, it bothered me that a game with those weaknesses was being priced at a higher cost than I had ever paid for a game.

The enthusiasm of people on these Boards and my enjoyment of the demo finally caused me to make the purchase. It arrived the day that gogamer put it on sale, but with gogamer's shipping charge I wouldn't have saved much money there unless I also wanted some more games from them.

I continued on and finished the walkthru game and now am well into my second game. My view now is that this game is cheap entertainment. I can see myself playing this game for hundreds of hours. Even at 100 hours, that would be 50 cents per hour. Like I said, cheap entertainment.

This game is full of surprises. In my second game, I wanted something very different than the Vanheim from the walkthru and I chose Ermor. In a 6 nation game, I quickly disposed of the Marignon. Then I found myself stuck between the Abysia and Pangaea. The Abysia were on one side of the map and focused on me while the Pangaea were in the middle and as I learned later must have been also fighting the Ulm. The battles were fierce, but ultimately I prevailed.

Watching the stats, I had generally been holding my own or better except in dominion. I didn't think I could spend much on temples or priests while I was fighting the two nations. When I got a little breathing room, I started building temples and preaching as I began to take on the Ulm who where stuck between me and Man. I was worried that Man was looking strong, particularly in dominion.

Even with more temples and preaching, my dominion continued to fall behind. I built temples and/or preached in provinces with -4 or -5 dominance and they usually did not get better. Sometimes, preaching with a temple seemed to help, but sometimes it continued to get worse while doing one or the other (or even both).

Thanks to an excellent tutorial by ceremony (http://www.maladjustite.com/dominion.pdf) I think I now have a much better understanding. First I think I set my dominion too low when I created my pretender. Then, I was using cultists to preach (level 1). Either they or a temple had no chance to effect a -4 or -5 dominion unless they were preaching in a province with a temple and even then the chance was relatively low. But, the big surprise was "stealth priests"! Man has stealth priests and I'm betting there are some of them out there creating problems. Guess I've got to find some resources to go on some manhunts for stealth units while trying to finish off the Ulm and start on Man.

This sort of depth will keep this game on my harddrive for a long time and make the $/hour cost of this game very low.

[licker]

Hehe, takes me back to a poll that someone did (Sabre maybe?) way back in the beginning where I was the only one to vote that the game was underpriced... everyone else was being totally hypocritical and trying to defend their positions at the time... I wonder what the votes on that poll would look like today

This game is cheap (by almost any definition ), and worth more than we paid for it. Not that I'm advocating a price hike, just making a point

[moodgiesanta]

Another thing to add into the value of the game is the fantastic postrelease support.

I didn't think twice about the price of the game, after the demo. It was the easiest game purchase I've ever made. Runesword 2 was also pretty easy, being 10 bucks and all . . .