Hello. I’ve recently gotten every legend in Gauntlet Mode and I think it would be nice to share my thoughts on it.
Overall, I had a good time. The gameplay of Age of Mythology is good, and this doesn’t change that. Blessings serve as a good way to encourage me to change up my playstyle. I appreciate that they use melee maps to try to bring people into the multiplayer. I like how they let me play with a friend, something most RTS’s of this style don’t do. If you haven’t played Gauntlet Mode, give it a try.
I do think there is room for improvement, though.
Starting from the top, I think the difficulty some work. The final mission on Titan difficulty is against 2 AI’s. The final mission on Extreme difficulty is against 4 AI’s. Legendary’s final mission is also against 4 AI’s. This is weird power curve. I can steamroll 2 AI’s pretty easily. 4 AI’s keeps me on the back foot and under constant assault. The end result is that Titan feels vastly different from Extreme and Legendary, while the latter two feel almost exactly the same. The problem is not that 4 AI’s is hard, the problem is that adding AI’s is the single biggest jump in difficulty the game can do.
I have 2 big problems with blessings. Currently, you get to select a blessing to start with from a list, then unlock more as you play the game. There are also some special Eternal blessings that you can get through a couple means. In the Gauntlet itself, you select 3 of the unlocked blessings to play the mission with. As it is, you can play an entire Gauntlet run off of your starting blessing and 2 of the eternal blessings. Blue Kastor’s Elite Guard, Kronos’ Drowsy Dance, and Bragi’s Kennings is enough to win most missions. That means that blessings unlocked during a run have to compete against a functional build in order to be relevant. White and green blessings don’t have a chance. Most of the blue blessings aren’t better than what I’ve described. The first half of each gauntlet run feels pointless, while the later missions are always haunted by what worked before. I want blessings to encourage me to try different gods and playstyles, not allow me to steamroll with the same strategy every mission.
The other big problem is blessing balance. Of 55 blessings available on PC right now, 7 are game breakingly strong, 24 are decent, and 24 aren’t much better than an empty slot. Combined with how the first half of each map doesn’t matter, 75% of the rewards on each map don’t matter. The simple truth is that Blue Kastor’s Elite Guard is better than Orange Set’s Sacrificial Food. This is a problem because it exacerbates the issue of not changing what I am doing. If the rewards on the first 5 missions cannot possibly compete with what I am have and the rewards on the next 4 are bad, why would I ever change what I am doing?
Speaking of not needing to change what I am doing, lets talk about Legends. I understand that the Age Of series has a long and storied history of hidden bonuses. But the information screen on the Legends screen missing so much that it is basically incomplete. It doesn’t list abilities, damage multipliers, auras, or accurate stats. Kastor’s base movement speed (4.3) is about 16% faster than Circe’s (3.7) even though they both are listed as having 4 speed.
But beyond the unhelpfulness of the Legend select screen, there is one other big issue with Legends. Namely that Nuchou is worse than Circe in just about every way. The only way Nuchou is better than Circe is in effective hit points, and even that is marginal. She supposedly does more damage to myth units, but Circe deals divine damage instead of pierce and is 100% accurate. Nuchou has a higher DPS than Circe when she hits 100% of her shots against myth units with less than 40% pierce armor. There are 8 myth units that could fall into this category. That said, most of the legends do have a semi-distinct niche that they look to fill and competently do so. I think that most of the issues I have with Legends come from this genre’s focus on having a good opening, rather than issues with the legends themselves.
It is common knowledge in the RTS scene that the first 5 minutes of a game decide how the next half hour will go, and Gauntlet mode is no different. That is why Aphrodite’s Rite of Flourishing is crippling. Aphrodite’s Rite of Flourishing increases villager cost by 50% and villager train time by 100%, and after 10 minutes it doubles your villagers and cost/train time return to normal. All of the other world twists cause problems for the AI, but this one is incredibly debilitating for the player in a way no other twist is. Having 50% few resources than your opponent is problematic for low difficulties, but beating 4 players with a +25% handicap becomes harder to a degree that I don’t think the devs intended.
The other World Twist that causes problems is Hel’s Mythic Frenzy. This twist doubles the health and train time for mythic units while also removing their favor cost. Considering that favor cost is the primary restriction on making a bunch of myth units, this makes myth units incredibly cost effective, even against heroes. The AI always starts by assuming that it will face a vaguely normal composition of units, and as such gets steamrolled when 50 cyclops come out of the fog of war hand smash all of their buildings flat. Given a chance, the AI can adapt. The problem is that the initial engagement is so crippling that the AI never gets that chance.
Thus begins my gameplay concerns. Kastor’s Elite Guard, Kronos’ Drowsy Dance, and Bragi’s Cunnings is enough power to win small games with your starting units. So long as you hit Classical Age before your army hits the enemy, right clicking on the enemy Town Center wins the game. This strategy works on all difficulties and can be adapted for larger games. It probably shouldn’t. I think the point of the Gauntlet is to be “melee but crazier” not “walk up and kill them”. This strategy is so fast that you never encounter what the one of the apparently central mechanics to the mod.
Mid game blessings and chaos events are cool ideas on paper. It plays into the idea that crazy stuff is always happening and you need to adapt to the changing circumstances. In practice, mid game blessings usually don’t change the outcome of a game and chaos events tend to kill the AI more than the player. As a general rule, blessings are pretty strategy specific. Infantry dealing more damage doesn’t matter if you are planning to only build cavalry. Combined with the lack of visual change means that it is a very ignorable feature. Similarly, chaos events tend to just slow down the game. The best defense against the meteor storm is to put you economy on pause for 18 seconds. They are mostly annoying and slow the game down. All in all, both features are decidedly lackluster.
Overall, I had a good time with Gauntlet mode. I’ll probably play some more of it with friends. It okay right now. If I thought it was unsalvageable trash I wouldn’t have written 10 paragraphs about it. But it could be better. I have 3 different ways to solve any of the above problems, but that would make this like 3 times longer. I hope the devs iron out the kinks in their system and that anyone reading this had a good time.
Thanks for reading.