So I was playing the first scenario of the Berber campaign. When I attacked Purple, I was met with a relentless wave of units. It wouldn’t stop. I’m not complaining about it being hard. My problem is that it was tedious and repetitive. It seems to me that the creators of the scenario confused making it hard with making it irritating and exhausting.
I’m noticing a pattern. I made another topic called “Anger in the Khmer lands” in which I described the same problem, with ships in that case. The Forgotten Empires DLC too had very bad things. So, adding it all up, I feel that the period from 2013 to 2019 was that of decadence. I know Ensemble Studios doesn’t exist anymore and I don’t know who took care of the development. But the Definitive Edition solved many of those problems. Case in point: the first scenario of the Burgundians campaign has an enemy who will attack with gunpowder units when you’re in the Castle Age. They will steamroll you, or they won’t. There is no menial, tiresome tactic.
Age of Kings and The Conquerors first, and now the Definitve Edition, have the most well thought-out and designed scenarios. Is this a mere personal impression, or is it a fact? Have the people in charge of Forgotten Empires, Affrican Kingdoms and Rise of the Rajas taken bad decisions?
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It’s mostly a case by case situation. The original FE campaigns (who have been almost completely revamped for DE) were criticised in part for infinite unit spam and too many RPG elements, but they were designed by more novice people so it was to be expected not everything is perfect. For the following expansions it boils down to personal taste (ie. I don’t think the Khmer scenario you mentioned contains too much spam, and the allied AI is competent enough to defend itself for a while anyway) but the Ethiopian, Berber and 5th Burmese scenarios are all often criticised for being grindy and having too much spam. But everything else is good enough that I think it was just bad luck or some mistakes that had to happen because everything can’t be perfect.
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I partly disagree. Yes, beetwen 2013 and RotR we had plenty of bad campaigns but outside the Forgotten which in general I consider to be one if not the worst DLC (although thats mainly because of the mediocre civ design), with four out of five campaigns being bad, but beyond that its not that bad. Half of the African Kingdom campaigns are pretty great and outside Le Loi the Rise of the Rajas canpaigns are pretty fun too, particularly Gajah Mada.
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i’d really like to have more information about the companies that made them. I mean, is the Definitive Edition made by a more experienced company, on par with Ensemble Studios? Because the differences are huge. I’m now in the fourth scenario of Berber campaign and it’s the typical all-military battle that I’ve seen in the previous expansion packs. That is, it has no economy and there are no consequences if you sit around and do nothing. The 3rd scenario of the Burgundians at least has a 45 minutes deadline.
Both were made by FE. It’s just that there were 9 years between FE’s debuts as a mod team in 2010 and DE’s release in 2019. The African Kingdom’s was like 4 years later but they already had more experience, and they called upon more talented scenario designers. The Tariq campaign is a miss with most people but once you will play Sundjata and Alfonso you will see they are much better.
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