Игрок 4269·Рекомендует

Absolutely worth the money This DLC adds a strategy layer on top of the tactical base-building gameplay the base game was already so good at. A recommend if I've ever seen one. Spoiler free explanation of the mechanics: You play on a hexagonal strategy map, starting with no base, just a trade point you can purchase units from for meta currency (Might). You can send up to 3 squads per day to do different objectives (capture bases, complete events/quests, build up bases), and your units move around on the map. The further you are sending them, the longer it takes. 1 turn = 1 day. At the end of every day, you "deploy" to a certain location. That means you actually get to play Cataclismo the good old fashioned, tactical base-building way. You start only fighting a singular weak wave of enemies per level, but you have very little resources and units, and it only takes 5-10 minutes to complete a mission. If you succeed, you get to "conquer" and keep a location. You continue where you left off on a level, and the game remembers everything. This impressed me the most. If you deploy to the same location, you continue the level exactly the way you left it (unless you sent your military units elsewhere). Units, unit experience at the end of the level, exactly which enemies/nests you cleared, which buildings you had built, even how many workers you had assigned to specific buildings, their resource paths and your actual resources. All of it is accurately tracked and carried over to the next time you deploy. If you build any resource buildings/soldiers in an actual map, you can use them on the strategy map too. So overbuilding military units and gathering lots of resources has a purpose. The strategy map is fun. You have events, buildings you can restore, invasions, settlement conquering, a vast tech tree, you name it, it's there. Always surprising you with new mechanics, fun twists, forcing you to think on your feet, and letting you prioritise what you prefer. Want to turtle in one base and build up the resources in it to the max? You can. Want to expand rapidly and conquer super fast? It will be difficult, but you can. The DLC does not hold your hand, and that's great. No bugs so far, just a lot of great content for a very reasonable price.

Игрок 5113·Рекомендует

Do I recommend this DLC? Yes. Is it objectively worth the money and is good? Questionable at best. My biggest problem is that the Conquest Map is NOT procedurally generated. It means that every time you play/restart that mode, you will have to play the same thing over and over with little difference. It is bound to become very repetitive. Since the game itself is struggling with repetitiveness, I really hoped for change. Dear Digital Sun, if you come across this review, PLEASE increase the procedurally generated aspect of the game. More specifically: make Conquest map procedurally generated every new run after the first one. (I refer to the overworld) As much as I like handcrafted experiences, it is simply not enough to keep people playing past their first attempt.

Игрок 2694·Не рекомендует

A really good concept for a DLC with sadly poor execution the longer you play. I will try to keep this short/simple. Firstly for people not experienced with turn based/4x games there's very little guidance so you might struggle to get going. For everyone else like myself thinking more long term the DLC doesn't really advise/encourage rapid expansion which appears to be something that's actually very important. Nor how important getting up the tech tree fast is and how important the new resource Might is for that tech tree (you need a LOT of it). Like some other players, I tried to build up the initial two citadels and found myself soft blocked by the significantly difficult increase in waves as days go by. When I finally tried to go for the 3rd Citadel my days were in the 20's, the enemies were significantly stronger and I was unable to hold with the 10 troops you are allowed and limited resources. This all results in an eventual situation where you don't have enough troops or resources to continue to defend the locations you already hold, never mind expand. Unless you knew in advance how fast you needed to expand and get up the tech tree, but of course the game does not tell you this. And for a game that's primarily about building up a castle/fortress its rather counterintuitive. But you basically end up stuck in a loop of trying to hold what you have with ever dwindling resources because of the ever increasing strength of the enemy waves. It would perhaps be better if they got stronger as you actually progressed across the map rather than just every day. Having spent 6 hours in the DLC, with no manual or autosaves except the main one, the only option I would have is to completely restart, as there is no way forward. All in all sadly while I love the base game I couldn't in good conscience recommend the DLC for most players.

Игрок 5942·Не рекомендует

A Brief Summary The Old Kingdom is just more Cataclismo, this time with a higher layer of strategy involved in managing multiple citadels at the same time while leaving the main gameplay relatively untouched. While Cataclismo is still awesome, it’s clear that the game wasn’t built to support the higher level of decision making introduced by the DLC. Ultimately, the DLC doesn’t change the base game enough to make its new mechanics shine. The War Map The Old Kingdom introduces the war map, your ultimate goal being the reclamation of six citadels to the north of Hogar. Rather than playing the maps from start to finish, you play one day at a time before returning to the map to then choose where to spend the next day. The threat posed by the horrors gradually increases over time, their hordes occasionally converging on your citadels. You can move your resources and soldiers, though it takes time to transport them from place to place. Various points of interest across the map, once under your control, can be supplied with resources to unlock techs, pathways, or reduce the enemy’s threat level. The goal of the war map is to push you to thoughtfully distribute your resources — your supplies, your soldiers, but most importantly your time — between your different citadels. The citadels collect resources for their stockpiles each turn you spend elsewhere, meaning that you’ll have full stockpiles at the citadels you haven’t played in a while. The War Map — Failed While the goal of the war map is to distribute your time and resources by allowing you to sling lesser citadels, this isn’t how it plays out. Developed citadels produce several times as many resources as the others will manage combined, and are able to produce dozens of elite soldiers unlike in the other locations that won’t be capable of producing much of anything without sacrificing their ability to develop. You don’t sling the other citadels with resources so much as you arm them with elite units like partisans and cannons and the seven hundred wood and stone needed to provide such an army with a suitable perch. The largest barrier to slinging your other citadels is their stockpile limits. An upgraded citadel can only carry seven hundred wood and stone, which is not enough to reach a point of self sufficiency, assuming that the map has the necessary resources available to be harvested in the first place. Some maps are designed to have certain resource shortages to push you to supply them from other locations, but in practice it wastes your time once you’ve placed your handful of houses and scaffolds. By the time that a citadel is able to construct warehouses such that it can accept more resources at a time, it’s generally capable of producing everything that it needs. The time spent developing that citadel, naturally, could instead be used to march another army of elite units to a new location. While the war map has various incentives to push your attention from place to place, it felt like I never had any hard decisions to make. I could work hard to develop a new citadel, or I could send along the resources and staff for my new gun fort blueprint and save myself the busywork. With the way that it works, I’m not rewarded or meaningfully challenged by spending my time at less developed locations. The optimal way to manage the map is to manage as little as possible. Balance issues In the scope of having a limited number of days and generally starting from zero, the game’s balancing largely makes sense. Archers aren’t valuable in that you can have a lot of them, but in that they’re your only option at the start of most missions. Lobbers are useful in protecting your other soldiers while conquering territory and clearing waves of small horrors at the bottom of your walls. While there are more advanced units that do their jobs better in later prosperity levels, you need them and you might as well retain them because a big part of their value in the campaign is the time it takes to produce them from the barracks. A partisan costs roughly three times as much as an archer and deals somewhere around five times as much damage. Partisans are produced from the Elite’s quarters, which are prohibitively expensive to build and maintain, though the cost is negligible if you’re given enough time. When you can just import an army of twenty partisans, why would you ever make an archer? There are two meaningful types of damage. Area-of-effect damage is crucial to defending your walls from the hundreds of smaller horrors that attack. Single-target damage is required for removing the durable foes that would take minutes to kill with artillery, most notably the detonators. With this in mind, every unit made in the barracks is completely outclassed by another unit. Thus, when elite units are available, there is no reason to use anything less. The problem with the balance in the Old Kingdom isn’t that elite units outclass basic ones in every way possible. It’s that it doesn’t make sense with the way that the war map creates an uneven distribution of resources. In the campaign, the time of your production structures is incredibly valuable because every second and resource counts. In the Old Kingdom, your time compounds on the same citadels allowing you to amass a new army of elites every turn and the enemies can’t keep up. Whether it’s the uphill battle of claiming a new citadel or the absolute slaughter of defending one, the fights never felt close or particularly fair. Closing I liked this DLC; it’s still Cataclismo, after all, and that game rocks~ The main thing here is that I don’t have much to say about the new additions that’s positive aside from that I got to play more scenarios in the game. There isn’t much of a narrative or progression to talk about. The war map is very interesting in concept, but somewhat wasted in practice. My defenses are less diverse than what they were in the campaign and weren’t truly tested. The Old Kingdom is incredibly cool, just like the base game, but fails to make enough alterations to that experience stand on its own merits.

Игрок 7717·Не рекомендует

I like Cataclismo a lot, and the concept of adding a real strategy layer to the game is great, but the DLC doesn't really deliver on that concept. In my experience (which I know varies, because people who turtle find it quite different) you quickly expand to each citadel, face minimal challenge because you're fighting feeble vermin since you debuffed the wave strength via the technologies and then find that A: Might is hilariously inefficient for use as anything except unlocking technology, since you recruit far more in a day compared to Hogar purchases, and B: Citadels become self sufficient after pretty much the first day and no longer require any support from other citadels. Which makes the campaign layer superfluous. There's no real decision making to be done, you just shuffle resources to the next point so you can unlock another skirmish map. Which is to say, in my experience The Old Kingdom delivered minimal challenge (on hard) and strategic depth and the surprise mechanic at the end wasn't even very interesting. I finished the campaign on day 31 with no losses and found myself disappointed. Paying 10EUR to essentially play 6 skirmish maps in parallel with no new interesting mechanics isn't even up to par with the base game experience. Undercooked.

Игрок 8293·Рекомендует

I love how natural of an expansion this feels to the base game. But also feels uniquely its own thing. This really feels like a strategic simulation, without getting too nitty gritty. The team behind this really nails the vibe of this world once again. I truly hope that the Old Kingdom is a sign of more to come!

Игрок 2738·Рекомендует

This DLC is exactly what Cataclismo needed for a long time. In the base game, the devs have invented the supporting systems several times - one for the campaign (in a few different flavors), another for skirmishes (which was later remade into yet another rule set). Which buildings are unlocked which way, how units are progressed, it was all different. Now, in this mode, they've reinvented the wheel again... but it's a good solid wheel! All of the reinvented systems are in one game mode, properly connected and balanced together. You make meaningful strategic decisions on the overworld map, and then play shorter one-day games across several handcrafted maps, switching between them to develop them in parallel. The economies and armies of these regions are interconnected, so for example it makes sense to seriously overbuild the first two regions to serve as donors for the next two. These maps are manually designed really well - they are different from each other, asymmetrically balanced, and oh god they progress in difficulty (I am playing on Hard, so it's my fault, really). The first ones are nice and easy and chokepoint-y and allow you scale hard, but already the forth map got me sweating with every run. It's a bunch of marshy islands, the fast wave of Furies splits up, does not engage your towers, and beelines for the industry... On my first Deadly wave I restarted a couple of times, scrapping every last piece of building material I had lying around. Oh, and the research tree is amazing this time. YOUR WALLS REINFORCE ONE LEVEL EARLIER?!! This is a game changer! I've had to redo so many blueprints after it. But it is worth it, to make things like copy-pastable 1-tile max HP wall segments for 29 stone.

Игрок 2183·Не рекомендует

A semi-OK addition to the base game with many good that don't entirely make up for the bad. My biggest gripe: this DLC's game mode is almost entirely a knowledge check game, where progression can become extremely difficult when the game blindsides you with surprises. If you know them, you'll have a great plan to win. If you don't know them because you're casually doing a first playthrough, you might be in for a bad time if you haven't fortunately stumbled into a playstyle that works with it. The surprises, which you should actually get spoiled beforehand if you're planning on playing: The skill tree system is obscured in a way that they only reveal themselves after you spend enough points in the lower tiers. Just look up a guide somewhere, because there are a LOT of wrong options, especially after knowing the other surprises. No, you can't just reset the bad choices like the campaign. The threat level system, a rising global difficulty over time, shows no mercy when you're capturing a new area that begins again at Prosperity 1. The game's main difficulty is therefore all about your ability to hold off a night wave given 10 units and no starting base. While some unit upgrades in the skill tree help massively, the absolute guaranteed victory comes from keeping the threat level low such that 10 lobbers and archers can get everything. But don't rush too fast, because... The final assault wave happens as soon as you take over the very last Citadel. You might even want to plan it so that the final area to capture has a very defensible starting zone, since you'll be stuck with it. Oh wait, you say you wouldn't know how to do that unless you actually saw the level layout beforehand? I feel like a lot of these are all a single change away each to alleviate. Maybe throw in a late skill tree option to increase the baseline Prosperity to 2~3 with larger resource stores, so there is actually any meaning in massive convoys and unit transfer between areas. I'm sure there's changes planned to at least tackle some of the issues.