Either I'm doing something wrong, or Disciples 2 kinda sucks

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CapnTthePirateG
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Either I'm doing something wrong, or Disciples 2 kinda sucks

Post by CapnTthePirateG »

I have a weird relationship with the Disciples series. On one hand, I think the units and atmosphere is really cool. At the same time, the gameplay - at least the campaigns - make me rage. Maybe someone can correct my impressions.

Instead of deploying an army, you will deploy the same six guys over and over again
So in Disciples 1 and 2, the sagas let you bring along one hero and enough bling to outfit him with between missions. Seems simple enough. The problem is that Disciples likes to pretend it's a wargame where you actually want to deploy multiple parties, but...you don't. It's more effective to stack all the permanent effect potions and items on one hero, have him take a party, and level them up. This of course means that you can't hold or take territory that's not in immediate proximity to the hero of choice (I like the archdevil). The computer, on the other hand, has some mysterious way of producing high-level units. Any new parties you produce will get horribly, horribly slaughtered by these things so it's up to your archdevil to lead his troops to actually do anything. This leads to...

You don't actually give a fuck about the resource system
The resource system consists of 2 resources: various flavors of mana used to cast overworld spells (we'll get to these later) and gold used to buy upgrades for units and buy parties. You will never be producing more units then the units needed to join your hero on his quest, so you can dump all the gold into upgrades.

"But CapnT, if they take all your gold mines, you won't be able to upgrade, right?"

Well...here's the thing. Each faction has a capital which gives a basic gold and mana income. In their infinite wisdom, the Disciples developers gave each capital a nigh-unkillable beast which can strike your whole party for 250 damage - enough to explode anything not a large unit or warrior - goes first, and can't be warded against. If you spend a lot of resources buffing your guys, you can take it down - but the AI will never attack a capital. What this means is that whenever your guys upgrade, you sit on your ass spamming "end turn" for 25 turns so you can build the building needed to upgrade your liches. Of which you have 1, because you sure as hell aren't building a new party and they all start at initiate level anyway. This leads to...

You will spend 1 out of 3 turns doing nothing
Are you playing the empire? No? Elves? High-level specific dwarf unit? Well then no healers for you. This means that instead of doing stuff, you will be spending most of your turns sitting in a temporarily-captured town waiting for the health bars of your team to rise. This means you pretty much need to play a warrior lord, as they grant your team regeneration. This doesn't actually STOP you from playing the game, it just turns the game into a slogfest where the computer has control of all resources, while you are clicking end turn so you can move your 1 squad of guys to their next destination once they've healed enough.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but I'm kinda aggravated. As an aside, I've been playing the Legions mostly, so if the other factions play better do let me know.
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Doom
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Post by Doom »

I never understood how Disciples managed sequels...it was terrible initially, and never improved from that low bar.
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PhoneLobster
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Re: Either I'm doing something wrong, or Disciples 2 kinda sucks

Post by PhoneLobster »

I vaguely recall having secondary heroes functioning a bit. I can't recall the precise details. But I think sitting them on neutral cities may have discouraged the AI from psychically detecting them and sending invaders. And I think there was some routine possibly involving garrisons or summoned units that let you pretty close to suicide mission with a garrisoned lesser hero team to weaken a (lower level) invader enough to kill it. Also, I think it was, Giants? Good enough as rookies to stand some chance against the worst (by which I mean weakest) of the computers teams.

Also also, I vaguely recall camping a secondary hero (scout type to run them down with movement) outside a capital and as long as your main stomped the original/scripted/first wave heroes hard enough the replacements were actually low level IF you caught them right away or something. Give the secondary camper at least one half good unit and it sorta worked I think.

But. Even with that it was crap and really stupidly designed. Secondary heroes did NOT work as intended or in a good way and it was a borderline exploit to make them function even remotely like that.

Also. I seem to recall Scout type heroes with the double move items were like THE bees knees if you wanted to power game. To the point of everyone else moving, and advancing, at a snails pace (and taking much more risk of falling behind the computer heroes or the scripted neutral NPCs). Especially with healing waits and such.

Edit: I mean the scout main hero thingies. I DON'T mean those weird not really hero spy/assassin whatever they weres. They were so freaking useless the vast majority of the time.
Last edited by PhoneLobster on Thu Feb 13, 2014 8:08 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Endovior
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Post by Endovior »

I played a little bit of Disciples at one point... long enough to realize that despite the wargame styling, you really needed to only use one guy (and his minions, which you'd better be sure to keep alive), or else not be effective. That annoyed me, and I stopped playing.
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Avoraciopoctules
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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

Disciples 2 has cheat codes. It's the only one I played, and I basically cheated through the whole story. Dumping endless spells on the enemies and having infinite movement points made the game actually kinda fun.
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