what are some strategy games where you can control evil faction to overwhelm enemy forces? pic related was always weird, as narrative gives feeling that Arthas forces just straight up overwhelms opposition, but undead faction dosent expand fast or have alot of options to just spam units wheres zerg in starcraft always felt right as with 3-5 hatcheries you can spam endless hordes.
Other notable games that have similar feeling to SC zerg:
>Endless Legend The Necrophages: killing enemies gives you food so more killing->more food->more armies->more killings. its great.
>Age of Wonders 3 necromancer, similar thing, killing things gives you cheap cadavers or straight up raises enemy units to your side so war gives you lot of power.
>Total war warhammer/Vampire counts: necromancy mechanic eliminates logistics somewhat so you can constantly push. free upkeep zombies and skellies work great as fodder to soften up stronger resistances. ability to summon/resurrect dead units mid fight is great too
can anons give me more examples of strategy games where you can play as evil faction that expands via constant fighting or at least gives ways to constantly spam units ?
AOM has the Norse gain faith-resource through fighting, so that might be applicable if they have any units that cost mostly faith? Have not tried that myself though.
while all "evil" factions have some ways to bring in troops (hades can raise weak shades, set lets you convert wild animals and buy animals, and loke lets hurscarls to summon myth units mid battle but its really low %) its not spammy that i would like.
ork ability to build slugga boys for free is something more similar to what i search
yeah, i guess i did? i know graveyard spawns cadavers continuously and with meat wagons you can bring in some for necromancers and in TFT you can buy necromancy rods in undead built shop but i didnt build necromancers in campaign so thats on me
never heard of those games, thanks i will check those out.
imperial guard is defensive combined arms factions, not undead/swarm faction. they remind me of united empire in endless space
not necessarily evil or conventionally undead, the necrons in dark crusade spawn their basic warriors for free and can revive them if they fall
>undead faction dosent expand fast or have alot of options to just spam units
Did you miss Necromancers resurrecting 2 skelemanz per corpse?? In TFT they even make Skeletal mages.
Necromancers are notoriously terrible though
Didn't stop me from playing necromancer + meat wagon. It was terrible, but damn it was fun.
It's very inefficient and purges just kill off your summons.
middle age Ermor in Dominions
no faction will ever be as good at this as SC2 Zerg, the queen larva micro literally creates a visual of a bug-like web with your rally points on your screen since you expand at like the 1 minute mark and keep up the pace the whole game. the slime steadily spreading through the map with movement speed increase and regen for your bugs gives the opponent a sense of impending doom even when he's winning, and the egg hatching recruitment allows you to shit out 200 supply of zerglings in 6 seconds, run head first into their base, have them all get fried, and before they can even react you have another wave of the same size running at them. the only things that can match this level of faction identity through gameplay is shit in complex non-rts stuff like
I think Heroes of Annihilated Empires also has an undead swarm faction.
LICH SPAM IS GREAT
the swarmiest swarm faction is Sceleria
Conquest of Elysium(5). I don't know what you consider "evil" but there's lots of factions that can spam units in various ways. Dwarfs and Kobolds give birth to tons of moderately powerful units, the Witch has tentacle monsters that turn other units into tentacle monsters and a special unit that constantly gives birth to monsters, the Necromancer can rain lots of undead from the corpses of dead things but necromancy is nearly omnipresent in the game and the necromancer is merely the fastest at it. Hoburgers, Bakemono, and goblins (via Troll King or Necromancer) are small and weak and rely on great numbers.(Troll casters can also summon a jillion weak animal units in battle) Scourge Lord doesn't really spam units but can gradually turn cities into zombies and has a spell that can turn up to 100 of the enemy units directly into zombies right in the middle of battle. Necromancer may or may not have that spell as well. Finally, there's the Illusionist who stores illusions in mirrors and can show up to a battle with a handful of mirrors and release hundreds of units onto the enemy.
Reporting for duty, sir!
From the same devs as EL you got Cravers from Endless Space. Similar like Necrophages they have to keep expanding, are in state of constantly war with everyone and get science from destroyed enemy vessels, plus they have cheaper ships.
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This said I haven't played the series, so can't say how good it is. I heard ES2 is better than the first game.
yeah they are cool but they lose attrition warfare to united empire/sheradyn (ES2) and in most of my plays they get destroyed either by united empire or Horatio ai.
need to check this out. played dungeon keeper 1 when i was kid. i'd add overlord too as it checks "evil bad guy overlord' boxes well
thanks for tip.
yeah, thats why i asked for other game recommendation that translates faction identity in similar fashion. nice insight though
i will need to check this out. as MoM inspired age of wonders, i think death magic will be what im looking for, thanks
>i will need to check this out. as MoM inspired age of wonders,
Just set the cycles in dosbox config to something very high so it the inputs feel good.
I played aow1+2 before trying MoM and it ended up being my favourite 4x.
It does a lot of very interesting things, which sadly other games in the fantasy 4x genre doesn't do, and holds up quite well with the Insecticide patch, but god I'd want a proper spiritual successor one day.
Remake rant:
Even the MoM remake was apparently pretty poor, like they made that one from scratch and some of the spells they couldn't replicate which is insane to me, the game is like 30 years old, they made their remake from scratch, they should have zero limitations compared to the original game
>some of the spells they couldn't replicate
I honestly don't get this, how can you fail to recreate mechanics from a 29 years-old videogame running on MS-DOS on a modern computer?
>I honestly don't get this, how can you fail to recreate mechanics from a 29 years-old videogame running on MS-DOS on a modern computer?
Game devs are *not* skilled at programming (not the young ones and definitely not the ones from "gaming classes/curriculums" in universities), especially not low-level programming, which is the way a lot of old games were. Most game dev "programmers" nowadays are practically just scripting in pre-made engines, which is why 95% of UE games look and run like shit, because that is a primarily 3D CGI movie-making engine (ask anyone in Hollywood or from the 3rd-party CGI studios), where the default engine settings are absolute peak shite for 99% of games. So unless you re-code and touch-up at least 80% of the defaults, you're practically better off just making your own from scratch anyway (which, once again, they don't know how to do either).
>Most game dev "programmers" nowadays are practically just scripting in pre-made engines, which is why 95% of UE games look and run like shit, because that is a primarily 3D CGI movie-making engine
So that's why I feel nothing after pirating everything big AAA studios released after 2014 and dropping most of those games in less than 3 hours in without ever coming back to finish them. . .
If I were to make the Scourge in Warcraft 4 I'd make them rely more on killing as well.
Maybe merge the acolyte and necromancer into a necrolyte unit whose purpose besides gathering gold and summoning buildings would be to bolster the army by collecting and raising corpses.
So instead of ghouls just spawning from a building out of nowhere they'd be raised from enemy corpses. Abominations would need about 5 corpses to create.
So as you develop you'd be able to raise all sorts of undead. Of course they'd still need some amount of gold and lumber as well.
Maybe you could sacrifice the necrolytes themselves in case of a manpower sortage. Think of the shades.
Dungeon Keeper and its successor War for the Overworld.
Lol what a noob gay
You put 4-6 meat wagons outside enemy base + 12 necromancers and hero. Start skely spawn and watch your enemies swarmed (ultimate comfy). This is how you play Undead in Warcraft, singleplayer only. ps just remember to get corpses from graveyards
>Master of Magic
>11 Death
>pick Wraith as your rare spell
>summon Wraith asap
>Wraith have Life Steal -3
>Life Steal -3 means the enemy will have to make a resistance check at a -3 penalty when the Wraith attacks
>if enemy units are killed mainly from life steal damage, they are raised as undead variants of themselves that cost no upkeep
>most units have shit resistances
you get loads of free troops this way, and can rush and get a lot of towns
in spellforce 3 soul harvest the dark elves use spider swarms
Necromancers in the HoMM series. They ressurect a part of enemy forces as skeletons after every battle. This leads to them having a ludicrous amount of skeletons by late-game.The earlier you go in the series, the stronger they are.
Soviets in Company of Heroes 2 is a good one
>dont know this game and i could berely find descriptions regarding game that says there are alot of rpg elements and there are 4 races. is it similar to warlords bc 3/warcraft3/spellforce1/2?
To be honest I don't know a lot about HoAE myself, I know it's got the hero units similar to the games you mentioned but the armies are much. much larger.
It's kind of shit. Every faction is a swarm faction, really. But aside from big numbers it just exists.
Zuul in sword of the stars. They rape the frick out of their planets and make them degrade into useless wastelands over time in exchange for a huge short term boost to resource output. So they're forced to constantly pump out swarms of ships, aggressively expand and find new planets to consume before their economy collapses. They also have a slavery mechanics where you can raid enemy worlds for slaves and transport them home to boost your eco even further. They're really thematic and fun.
cravers from endless space are just a zuul ripoff aren't they
Nah, Cravers are just le bug men (women, really). Have a hive like structure without going into full on hivemind/overmind even though dust and technology would make it easy, and concerned only with eating and breeding. The only similarity they have is that a higher race modified them, but that race did it to almost everyone.
Zuul are more of a ork/skaven ripoff with feminism injected. Instead of being a hive, the evil men mind control the strong women into being eternally pregnant mindless warriors. They ruin the planets they live on and keep slaves because they are chuds. They only understand slavery and can only be kept as slaves themselves because they have no redeeming qualities, and also they are the religious faction because the priesthood is bigoted and evil. Now the Cravers can ruin planets they live on too but ES has mechanics to mitigate that. Cravers also have decent technology on their own vs the cobbled together Zuul ships which btw also travel though space by literally drilling painful holes in reality with their evil spaceship dicks. Because of being always pregnant, killed Zuul also have that ability of remaining on a planet even after being defeated because new ones were born from the corpses. A purely evil race that's counted as a bioweapon themselves.
>Tfw no mind-controlled harem/army of beastly women you constantly impregnate
Now I'm sad.
You sold me on this game? How are humans in this one, are they diplomatic star trek type or imperialistic starship troopers "federation" type?
Neitherish. They're somewhat aggressive but not to the point of being "the empire". They're ruled by the Chinese and also for some reason there are vague roman influence in backstory that never come up in game. They're interesting in that they're not the middle ground race, but rather have the aspects of speedy ftl engines (at the cost of being restricted to phase lanes) and the most random tech tree, meaning they are sometimes godlike in a game and sometimes struggle to even get by.
you recommend 2nd or 1st game?
Second is a buggy mess, unfortunately with some extremely questionable design choices.
Although, I really liked its dual armor and damage patterns system. Makes weapons feel more unique
If you will actually play it, try any other race first. Except bugs.
Zuuls require at least some understanding of the game mechanics.
P.S. During design, right clicking on the weapon to which you want to change changes all weapons of this size. You are welcome.
Wait… meat wagons plus necromancers = massive skeleton horde in Warcraft 3, no?
...Huh. Was the KDR obsession and underdog worship always there?
this webm is 8 years old, I knew I saved it for a reason.
These aren't even the skeletons, they're summoned units by a magic-focused hero. Every faction is a swarm faction if you play it right, but Undead triples down on it.
Heroes of Might and Magic 3 gets an up too, yes. Necro faction is so busted that it's typically banned in mp.
>but undead faction dosent expand fast or have alot of options to just spam units wheres zerg in starcraft always felt right as with 3-5 hatcheries you can spam endless hordes.
I remember always overwhelming my friends with loads of necromancers and meat wagons, but yeah, they don't really swarm that much.
The original vision for the undead was something along the lines of constant skirmishes and harrass where'd they'd gather up the corpses of their enemies and then reanimate them at pivotal fights to bolster their numbers and overwhelm their opponent, which would have been a take on the undead theme from the campaign in pvp. Alas, in the end it didn't quite end up like that.
How is it different from proper version? Undead do use corpses as recource for raising undead, they have few ways to do it ( necromancers, hero abilities, shop items) meat wagons are vital part of undead line up as they bring siege dmg and you can collect corpses for future uses. Skellies are also used in pushes to soften up bases or scouting/harrasing. From your description first design was more reliant on resurrected corpses but I think middle ground of permenant buildable forces + cheap skellies is good as you have something to fall back onto if skellies are too weak