The Stack

Map 4 seems to be the point at which Etherlords really starts to be about non-combat spells, or, as it calls them, “Global” and “World” spells. The distinction between Global and World is unclear to me; it may have been clearer in the game’s original language (Russian, apparently). But the player starts the the scenario with a whole bunch of them, and the player pretty much has to figure out what they do by experiment, because the docs are so dismal. You can get pretty far in the level without needing any overland spells beyond the ones to summon new heroes, which are familiar by this point. I’ve explored nearly half the map by now, and only just started running into a need for more. This is because the opponent just started attacking my castle ethereally.

Normal, physical attacks on castles are pretty simple: you march a hero up to a castle, and every turn that the hero is there, the castle receives an amount of damage equal to the hero’s level, possibly with a bonus from skills or magic items. Eventually either the castle’s owner manages to kill or drive away the attacker(s), or the castle is destroyed. Ethereal attacks work more or less the same way, except for the “march a hero up” part. Any hero can attack any castle ethereally, provided you have enough mana to keep the spell going. Heroes can also be assigned to ethereal defense of a castle by means of another spell. The effect is that the attacker has to defeat the defender in combat before doing any damage.

The thing is, no one actually dies in ethereal combat. Whoever wins, both heroes just go back to their bodies at the end, without even gaining any experience points from the exercise. I can imagine attacking an opponent’s castle ethereally just to keep their most powerful hero tied up defending it instead of killing your guys. In fact, that’s almost what’s happening to me: the enemy is attacking my castle with a level 6 hero, and I have one level 6 hero that I want to keep leveling up, but can I afford to? It seems like it might be a good strategy to go on a counteroffensive here, send one of my weaker heroes against his castle to see if he switches the strong guy to defending it.

Come to think of it, ethereal combat is a lot like a strategic version of what normally goes on at the tactical level. In combat mode, you basically choose every turn whether each creature under your control should attack or hang back to block attacks from the enemy. There’s no movement, no map to wander around, just a basic attack/defend option and a hero (in combat mode) or castle (in map mode) with a bunch of hit points, which it’ll lose if you don’t defend it. I wonder if this analogy was deliberate, or if the designers just felt it was the natural way to design things after they had spent so much time on M:tG-style play.

The use of 3D graphics and animation in Etherlords is worth commenting on, because it illustrates some points about the use of these things in general.

For one thing, the gameplay requires a mere fraction of what the game does with graphics. Map mode requires a map, but all we really need is a fairly abstract 2D chart. Instead, we have a rotatable, zoomable perspective model of the gameworld, with buildings and the like, most of which are animated. Combat mode requires some way to identify specific creatures for targeted effects, and having all the creatures visible graphically is a reasonable way to do this. But this does not mean that the creatures need to be 3D models, and have movement and attack animations (and, in some cases, special-action animations as well), or that the camera has to dynamically switch around to the most dramatically appropriate position from time to time. Furthermore, I’d bet that if the game were written today, it wouldn’t use 3D graphics at all. 3D might have been a necessity for any game that wanted to be taken seriously in the marketplace of 2001, but I think we’ve more or less gotten over that, thanks to the casual games explosion. I wouldn’t say that Etherlords actually looks retro yet, the way that mid-90’s FMV titles do, but it’s probably only a matter of time.

So, from a certain point of view, the graphical frippery is unnecessary. The animations in combat mode in particular remind me of Battle Chess, or the Summon animations in the Final Fantasy games, in that they don’t affect the gameplay except by slowing it down. Etherlords is at least sensitive to the fact that some players will not want this, and allows you to disable combat animation. But you have to figure that not many people will do this. The person who plays Etherlords does so at least in part because they like watching the graphics. And I have no quibble with that — heck, sometimes I go to a cinema and pay to watch computer graphics that aren’t even interactive at all.

However, given that this is a game and not just a graphics demo, one can hope that the graphics wouldn’t actively interfere with gameplay — and one can be disappointed. Some inaccessable regions in map mode are represented as plateaux, and are tall enough to obscure the things behind them. Smaller bonus items can be rendered completely invisible this way until you rotate the view. And in combat mode, I’ve had the unpleasant experience of having the bounding box of a creature I wanted to click on be completely engulfed by that of my hero. When this happens, the player’s only recourse is to switch to manual camera control and shift to a better POV. It’s nice that you’re able to do that, but it’s a workaround for an unnecessary problem.

Still, I have to say that the graphics are an overall positive part of the experience here, because when I came back from my week away and started playing this again, something in my brain said “Yay! 3D graphics!” It isn’t the most sophisticated application of 3D graphics, of course, but I think that adds to the effect — the obviously handcrafted polygons, in that cusp between the slick and the amateurish, draw my attention to their artfulness, rather than simply looking like the things they represent.

Well, I’ve finally gotten past map 3 in the red/black campaign. I found it easier than the corresponding scenario in the blue/green campaign, but I’m not sure if this is because it actually is easier or because I’m getting better. The use of overland spells seemed important to my victory, but I don’t remember seeing the obelisks that you learn them from in blue/green map 3. Were they absent, or did I just not notice them because they look too much like normal terrain features? I’ll have to go back and find out at some point. If it turns out that I’m just getting the hang of things, all I can say is that the learning curve for the strategic part of the game is pretty steep. Probably the designers didn’t spend as much time on it as they did on combat mode, which is clearly the heart of the game.

Regardless, to a certain extent getting this far was luck of the draw. You might expect that to be the case for something with card-game-like gameplay, but that isn’t even the part of the game I’m talking about. Whenever a hero gains a level, he also gains a skill. Skills are things like Strength (extra hit points) and Resources (lets you carry more runes) and Concentration (draws extra spells during combat). Each can be taken up to 3 times with cumulative effects. There are 15 different skills, but you don’t get to choose from the full set when you level — instead, you have to choose from three that the game picks for you at random. Heroes of Might and Magic does something similar. It’s a nice compromise, if you ask me. If you let the player choose whatever skills they want, they’ll probably assign the same skills to every hero and not get much variation in gameplay, and if you just assign a skill at random without letting the player choose, the player will be frustrated every time they get stuck with something they don’t want and probably wind up loading a save and trying again (kind of like when hit point gains are randomized). Limited choice within a randomized field mitigates both problems.

Or at least it does if the skills are reasonably balanced. In Etherlords, there are a few skills that really help a lot. Gaining experience levels faster than the enemy heroes is important, so Learning (bonus experience) is a more valuable skill than most. Perhaps unintuitively, Mobility (move farther per turn) helps even more. The main source of XP is wild monsters, and a lot of the time they’re spaced out just far enough that a normal hero can almost but not qute travel between them in one turn. In such circumstances, Mobility effectively doubles the rate at which you gain XP. And if one of your heroes gets both Learning and Mobility at once, well, you’ll find it a lot easier to get through red/black map 3. I speak from experience.

Magic: The Gathering has five colors of magic:

Red is fire, chaos, and destruction. Red has a lot of direct-damage spells (things like fireballs and lightning bolts), as well as spells to destroy land cards and artifacts. Red creatures tend to be straigthforward melee machines like orcs and minotaurs, and stronger on attack than defense.

Green is the the color of growth and vegetation. Green creatures tend to be either wild animals or elfy stuff. Green has some of the strongest creatures in the game, but it also has good buffs, and can succeed by bringing out lots of small, cheap creatures and making the ones that survive stronger. Green is also a good color for getting extra mana.

Blue’s main theme is magic itself, and to a certain extent intelligence, air, and water. Blue spells specialize in metamagical trickery: spells that affect other spells tend to be blue, as are spells that let you draw extra cards and the like. Blue creatures tend to have special powers, and can often fly (which means they can’t normally be blocked by non-fliers).

Black has undead and demonic creatures, many of which have nasty combat side-effects — for example, growing stronger by killing creatures, or making the enemy discard cards when not blocked. Black is also notable for spells that have negative side-effects for the caster, and in particular has effects that require “sacrificing” one of the caster’s creatures.

White is the chivalry and holiness color, and features most of the healing and protection effects in the game. White creatures tend to be knights and other soldiery types, and there are some white effects that buff everything of a particular type, encouraging the player to create homogenous armies.

Now, you’ll notice that each color has both a theme in the game’s fiction and some tendencies in how it plays. These are separate things, and Etherlords demonstrates this by separating them.

The Chaots have Etherlords‘ version of red magic, with its orcs and kobolds and cheap direct-damage spells. Because of those direct-damage spells, it’s the one side that’s most faithful to M:tG. But it also has good defensive creatures, and it has the Kobold Shaman, which can “rest” ¹Etherlords calls “rest” what M:tG calls “tap”. All it means is that this is an ability that a creature can use once per turn, and only if it hasn’t participated in an attack. to do 1 point of damage to any player or creature — which makes it equivalent to M:tG‘s Prodigal Sorcerer, a blue creature. Also, it has the best creature buffs in the game, which makes it more like green.

Green magic is represented by the Vitals. The elfy stuff has been dropped, leaving creatures like snakes and hornets and giant ticks. Where M:tG has green creatures that can grant you extra mana when tapped, Etherlords has spells that give you an instant mana boost, including the “Sacrifice” spell, which would definitely be black in M:tG. I have trouble discerning overall trends in the Vitals, though. It’s a versatile side.

Blue is replaced by the Kinets, which are described as creatures of icy logic and experts in rapid movement, although I don’t really see how this is reflected by the blue spells. Mainly what we have here is cheap flying creatures and defensive buffs, although, as with the Vitals, this can vary a lot depending on what sorts of creatures you put into your deck. Warrior Spirits, for example, seem like they could be a very effective basis for a Kinets deck, despite not flying, because of their Lifetap ability (which heals you as it damages the enemy), but I haven’t really been able to try it. Maybe on a more advanced map.

The Synthets take the place of black, and are definitely the one side that’s most changed: synthets are bizarre semi-mechanical beings. Apart from the heroes, they don’t even look like modified organisms; they just look like things that naturally have wheels and springs as components. Although it doesn’t have many sacrificial abilities, the overall theme of the Synthet side seems to be not caring whether your creatures live or die. Synthet creatures are disposable, and often have some form of innate ability to regenerate or return from the dead. There’s even a cheap Synthet resurrection spell that, as a bonus, does 1 point of damage to the enemy. Synthets also have a wide assortment of debuffs, as well as the spell “Twisted Enhancement”, an interesting enchantment that grants +2/+2 to a creature, but then lowers its stats by 1/1 every turn until it dies. This is obviously a way to get the most out of one of your disposable creatures, but in some situations it can also be cast on an opponent’s creatures to kill them off.

There is of course no white side. The healing and protection side of white seems to be mostly taken over by the Vitals, while the business of powering up everything of a given type is spread out through all the sides, mainly by means of “Elder” types of specific species (for example, an Aviak Elder powers up all Aviaks). Really, most abilities are spread out through all sides like this. That’s sort of true in M:tG as well, but it’s not as necessary there, because M:tG allows the possibility of making a multi-color deck. In Etherlords, each hero belongs to one and only one side, and can only obtain spells belonging to that side.

So, here I am again, making repeated posts about my failure to make progress in a turn-based fantasy strategy game. I’ve started the other campaign in the hope that this will help. There are four four sides in the conflict, but in campaign mode, they’ve divided into two alliances, so you have the red/black campagin and the green/blue campaign. I had started out on the green/blue (or Vitals/Kinets, as the game calls them), which gives you just green heroes on the first two maps and switches to blue on map 3. The red/black (Chaots/Synthets) campaign similarly starts you out red, and switches to black on the third map. How it goes after that, I still don’t know.

It’s not at all unusual for strategy games to provide two or more separate campaigns, so you can play as both the good guys and the bad guys — although, as I’ve pointed out, there aren’t really any good guys in Etherlords. How the different outcomes are reconciled varies from game to game: some, like Command & Conquer, treat them as alternate and exclusive events resulting in the complete victory of whichever side you played, while others, like Starcraft, treat them as happening one after the other. The original Warcraft was notable for providing two campaigns that seem like they both end the war in victory, and thus are incompatible, but if you were paying close attention, you realized that they could in fact be taking place simultaneously — and indeed, the sequel is predicated on the consequences of the final missions of both sides.

In a game with asymmetric sides, providing multiple campaigns is also a way to give the solo player the full experience, letting them use everything and have everything used against them. And the sides in Etherlords do play rather differently in combat mode: blue has cheap flying units, red has lots of direct-damage spells, and so forth. (I’ll have to do a fuller post on the differences, once I have a better handle on black.) But combat mode isn’t really where I’m having problems. It’s in the strategic map that I can’t seem to get things organized fast enough, and that’s basically the same for both sides, apart from the graphics. Still, playing as black, and seeing what tactics I fall to as black, might give me some ideas about tactics to use against black. Better tactics could mean that I could challenge the high-level heroes earlier.

The first time I tried playing Etherlords, I managed to get as far as the third scenario of the campaign before giving up. I’m at that point again now, and once again, I’m finding it tough going. I recall also getting stuck on the third map in Heroes Chronicles: Conquest of the Underworld, which I really should get around to finishing at some point. There may be a general pattern at work here. Two examples isn’t really enough to establish this, but these games have a common structure in the early levels that it’s easy to imagine other similar games falling into: the first map is basically a risk-free tutorial in basic UI features, and the second is a gentle introduction to the mechanics of what you’ll actually be doing in the game, so it’s only on the third map that the game starts treating you as if you already understand the game, even if you don’t really.

Beating an enemy in this game essentially comes down to leveling one of your heroes fast enough that he can take on the enemy’s strongest hero, preferably before that enemy hero starts destroying your castles. If you can do that, everything else is just mopping up. Good choice of spells can help you take out a hero that’s a level or two higher than yours, but unless I’m missing something, that’s pretty much the limit. So, in the map I’m stuck on, I’m facing down the red and black teams simultaneously. I’ve managed to successfully subdue red’s level 6 champion using a level 4 character, but once I do that, black seems to suddenly develop two level 9 heroes that I’m just not ready for yet.

I haven’t been able to find a lot of strategic or tactical advice for this game on the web — such is the price of obscurity, I suppose, although tons of gaming sites have lists of cheat codes for it anyway. One of the few suggestions I’ve seen is to throw several expendable low-level heroes at the enemy before engaging him for real. This is the sort of thing you’d do to a hero stack in a normal game, but I hadn’t been going in for it here, because the point is usually to kill off the enemy’s troops bit by bit, and this game doesn’t quite work that way: all combat troops are summonned afresh during combat mode. However, the enemy, like the player, needs “runes” (spell ammo) to cast any spells (other than the few cantrips you start off with). So the idea here is to send your sacrificial lambs to make the enemy waste as many runes as possible before the real fight begins. I haven’t tried this technique yet, but will probably give it a whirl tomorrow.

My failures make me kind of wonder if I’m doing this all wrong. Not in a conventional strategic or tactical sense, but on the meta level: how often I save the game, how soon I go back to an earlier save and how far back I take things. Maps 1 and 2 were pretty laid-back about all this — on map 2 in particular, I kept losing heroes to ill-considered elective skirmishes, but kept going anyway, and eventually won. But map 3 demands efficiency, and making things efficient requires a lot of failed experimentation.

Frankly, I think Etherlords makes things excessively complicated. And I’m not talking about combat mode here. The M:tG model easily lends itself to becoming a mass of special cases and exceptions, but the core rules are actually fairly simple, and Etherlords streamlines them further. But outside of combat mode, on the overland map? Just the opposite: there are few exceptions because the very basics are byzantine. In order to assign new spells to a hero, you have to go to a magician’s hut and buy them. But there’s no money: you buy things with combinations of seven different non-interchangable resources, all with unhelpful wizardy names that tell you nothing about what they’re good for — a given spell might cost 4 Mandrake Root and 1 Black Lotus, for example. Once you have the spells in your spellbook, you have to go to a portal and buy “runes” to actually use them — each rune is good for only one use, and a hero can carry at most five runes per spell, unless endowed with a special skill that expands this limit. (There must be a better word than “runes” for this mechanic. Reagents, maybe.) The purpose of all this? Mainly just to put limits on what you can cast in combat — something that’s already covered by the differing mana costs of spells. ¹Actually, the game calls mana “ether”, but I’ve been calling it mana so far, so why stop now? There’s also an eighth resource used solely for casting overland spells (such as summoning new heroes).

The manual is pretty lengthy, which I suppose is one way that the game shows its age. Today’s games tend to cover the details in-game, through context menus and other discoverable means. Indeed, that’s how combat mode works here: aside from a few points like how mana channels work, you can pretty much learn how to fight by right-clicking on things to discover their significance and special properties. On the overland map, everything is at least one step removed from its significance. You can right-click on a mandrake farm to learn that it yields mandrake root to its owner, but not why you want mandrake root. You can right-click on a portal to learn that it sells runes, but only the manual or a lot of experiment will tell you that runes = spell ammo. On the level I’m on, I can see a spellbook guarded by a monster. I can tell that it teaches Bless, but it doesn’t tell me what the effects of Bless are. The only way to know how urgent it is to spend turns on acquiring it is to try and see, and possibly restore afterward. Or, I suppose, read that manual. But even documentation isn’t necessarily adequate to give understanding of implications.

There might be a bit of a grognard capture in effect here — goodness knows I’m not much of a strategy gamer, and the genre was popular enough when Etherlords was written (the golden age of Warcraft and Command & Conquer) that a game written just for the hard-core fans could get a wide release. But even so, the designers of Etherlords were taking a risk by jamming two such grognardy genres together. It’s like a game aimed just at those people who are enthusiasts of both strategy games and CCGs. Okay, so those two fandoms have a pretty large intersection. I just have to contrast it to Puzzle Quest, which seems to me extremely accessible, choosing as it did a simplified RPG model and an already-simple combat mechanic.

I recently mentioned that the magic system in Puzzle Quest was reminiscent of Magic: the Gathering, but here’s a game that takes that to an extreme. Etherlords is basically a turn-based strategy game with mechanics on the large scale derived from Warlords and Heroes of Might and Magic, but combat mode is very specifically patterned after the mechanics of M:tG. Both sides have a hand of spells chosen at random from your “library” (or deck); spells in hand are used up when cast, but you automatically draw one new one every turn. Some of those spells summon creatures, which are characterized chiefly by two numbers, attack rating and health. The summoned creatures can be sent to attack the opponent, but can be blocked by your opponent’s creatures, and so forth. Concepts like “summoning sickness” are imported without alteration.

In fact, the combat mechanics are so close to M:tG that it’s more instructive to list the ways in which they differ. Things are tuned so matches generally end faster than in M:tG, as is reasonable for the context. Attackers hit before blockers, rather than both damaging eath other simultaneously. And, in general, Etherlords takes advantage of the fact that it’s not a direct adaptation of a card game by discarding some of the more literal points of simulation. Spells are not drawn without replacement, like cards from a deck: you have exactly fifteen spell slots, and when you draw, each has a 1 in 15 chance of coming up, even if you already have another copy of it in your hand. (If you want a spell to come up more frequently, you can assign it to multiple slots.) Also, there are no “land cards”: the mana you need to cast spells comes from “mana channels”, which automatically increase in number over the course of combat, at a rate determined by the hero’s experience level. Thus, more powerful characters are able to cast more powerful spells earlier.

There are no “colors” of mana, but the four armies in the story, and the sorts of spells they get, clearly correspond to the red, green, blue, and black magic in M:tG — but with the interesting alteration that black creatures, instead of undead, are primarily cyborgs. (White magic is left out: as the intro cutscene makes clear, there are no good guys in this story. Everyone involved is motivated solely by lust for power.) As a result, it feels a little strange that the spells are all so different. For example, if you have a primarily green deck in M:tG, you’re likely to spend your first turn summoning Llanowar Elves (1/1, tap for 1 green mana). ¹At least, that’s how it went when I last spent time playing M:tG, many years ago. It might all be different now. Llanowar Elves are almost essential to what it means to have a green deck, and Etherlords doesn’t even provide a close analog to them. Instead, your basic low-level green summon is Spitting Fingus (0/2, can’t attack, sacrifice to do 1 damage to target hero or creature) — something that M:tG would probably make blue or black. It’s like a version of M:tG from an alternate universe where some early design decisions went differently.

As in Warlords and HOMM, there are basically two sorts of things you fight: enemy heroes, and “wild” creatures not allied with any side (and typically set on crucial choke points on the map or guarding valuable resources). But even the wild encounters have heroes, because that’s essential to how M:tG-style combat works. If you encounter a giant rat on the road, the combat will be against a rat spellcaster that summons other sorts of rats, smaller versions of itself. There generally seem to be three or four versions of every summonable creature type to support this kind of specialization.

The first time I tried playing Etherlords, back in 2001 or 2002, I found myself unable to make headway on the third map of the campaign, and eventually gave up. (Frustration with long loading times was also a factor. I think my system at the time didn’t really have enough memory for all the graphics, and had to swap even as it loaded. Anyway, moot now.) I think my main problem, as is usually the case for me in games of this sort, was timidity: I didn’t want to commit to invading enemy territory until I knew my heroes were tough enough, when I should have been out there stealing resources before the enemy could get to them. I’m thinking now that the key is to be clever enough in your choice of spells that your hero can take on enemy heroes that are nominally more powerful. We’ll see how that pans out.

Outside of the cities, there are free-standing buildings scattered throughout the map. Some of them, such as the training camps that improve the stats of visiting heroes, are intrinsically neutral, and will serve heroes on either side. Others can be claimed. A banner on the side indicates by its color the owner of such a structure, and typically any enemy hero passing by can change the color of that banner by tagging it. It’s possible to leave troops behind as guards to prevent this, but this is seldom if ever worthwhile, as it leaves fewer units in the hands of your heroes.

Some of the claimable structures, such as mines and sawmills, provide resources to their owner every turn, and it’s very important to claim as many of these as possible — even if you don’t need the resources, it keeps them out of enemy hands. Others produce troops on a weekly basis, provided that a hero comes along to pick them up. It seems a lot less important who owns these; it just matters who can reach it, tag it, and recruit the troops first every week.

But on level 3 of Conquest of the Underworld provides a motivation to claim everything you can, even things you have no intention of using. It has to do with the “fog of war”. Every level I’ve seen so far starts out with most of the map dark, revealing it through exploration, as is typical in these games. But in levels 1 and 2, once an area was explored, it stayed explored. In level 3, the only things you can see on the map are the areas that can be seen by your heroes or from your buildings. Dark areas aren’t even considered as navigable by the game’s pathfinding algorithm if you’ve seen them before and know there’s a way through. So keeping those roadside towers under your control is an important convenience, even if you have no intention of ever recruiting what they produce. (Heroes can only have so many creature stacks under their control at a time, so recruiting everything you see isn’t always an option.) And when an enemy hero slips through, he brings darkness.

I don’t remember episode 1 well enough to know if this returning darkness is the state of most levels or if it’s a special feature of the underworld. It shows the game’s age somewhat, though. More recent games with fog-of-war effects tend to have three states: not just “visible” and “not visible”, but “visible”, “not currently visible but explored”, and “unexplored”.

I’m back to level 3 of Conquest of the Underworld which is where I was when I decided to start over. So far, it’s proved pointless. My main heroes (Tarnum is allowed to take two other heroes with him between levels) all have Earth Magic and the ability to learn the Town Portal spell, but the spell hasn’t been offered yet.

Heroes mainly learn spells from the mage guilds that you build in your cities. Each mage guild, when built, gets a random assortment of spells. I wonder how random it is? It might be possible to repeatedly load a saved game and rebuild the mage guild until it gives you the spells you want. Which would be cheap. But putting a die roll in the way of crucial permanent effects encourages cheap behavior. That’s why most CRPGs these days don’t randomize hit point gains from levelling: to eliminate the temptation to quit without saving when you don’t get enough.

Somehow, even though I knew the second level better this time, it took me longer to finish. Consequently, I got to see some plot events that I had missed the first time around — events in the form of narration in a dialog box. Some events are just color text (as when Tarnum gets a letter from Queen Allison, his boss for this adventure, asking about his progress), some have effects on gameplay (as when Allison’s letter is accompanied by funds for recruiting more troops). But past a certain point, you know they can’t be essential to the story: any sufficiently skilled player will miss them.