Thank you! I played the game trilogy once before some time ago. Edit: I am re-remembering some of the things as I play along.

I was more surprised that Jacob forgot that HE WAS THERE when we went to fetch Samara... whose power he has witnessed first hand, might I add! It created a funny moment though, I'll give it that.

In regards to Grunt and Okeer, there's another really interesting companion that I definitely feel was poorly placed, probably because of similar issue as the one you mentioned? I don't really want to spoil for those who haven't played the game yet, but as a hint for those who had: it's the one who you get veeeeery late into the main quest line that starts an in-game timer for certain consequences. Yeah, that companion can only be really explored with various side quests and dialogue only if you go for the terrible consequences route, and I wonder if it's also because certain content for that companion was also cut - I definitely feel like there was supposed to be something else.

I completely agree with you - the statistical probability of getting both your own spells AND the shaman drawing in such a way as to give the player the advantage is very, veeeeery small! Another thing to consider is the fact that the shaman always sends out his henchmen for the attack when he gets his turn, so you also die quicker before you get the spells or the advantage you need to turn this battle around. Still love the game though despite this.

The hard difficulty is what makes it almost imposible.. I made a custom shaman and a custom orc hero in the duel mode to simulate this battle from both sides. Even though the shaman qualifies as Resource Level 2 hero and the orc as RL1, because luck and orc thievery spacialisation and the creatures shaman, anger and first strike all cost at least some resources; the resource level 1orc without specialisations just a level in resources and; the basic deck still wins quite alot if the battle is fair. The problem with hard is that the computer cheats both with ether chanells and the specialisation luck procs. In a normal setting if the computer debuffs your buffed rat with a shaman, he should loose if you kill that first shaman, because that gives away an ether channel. In hardmode, he gets the channel back right away, makes more shamans, and buffs them, efectively doubling or tripling your mana in spite of sacrificing a channel because the shamans themselves are like channels. Simply put, shamans must die asap. The way I won. I made a mouse he zaped it. I waited, he made a shaman. I 2xzapped it. He made 2 more shamans. The hardest moment of the batle. Only one can die because I have 3 mana, I cast firestorm and a zap. One shaman dies the other one attacks, the survivors specialisation musn't proc or if it procs it has to discard only my buffs leaving me with sufficient firepower to kill 2 the next turn. It doesnt proc. He summons another shaman and casts anger. I kill both of them with 2 firestorms. He zaps me, casts his last shaman and casts first strike. I 2xzap him and gg. He has no more creatures. Finished him off with buffed rats after he spent all his removal.. Luck levels, through the roof :D I got an amazing firsthand + amazing speldraws + his specialisation didnt work + he didn't beef up the shamans but cast anger and first strike on them instead. :D @@AmberPlays

Good day! Thank you for sharing your story! I am really glad that they brought you some peace and comfort - I used to do that a lot as well with gaming videos, especially ones I watched like a thousand times at this point. There's something relaxing when you put on the videos, TV shows, or movies that you are familiar with, especially after a day's worth of hard work.

Indeed :D My favorite form of falling asleep. I saw the young you made an Oblivion series, I'll check that out eventually. I love that game :D I remember my favorite part of that game being trying to make varieties of insta kill and perfect protection spels or enchantments on that altar that you get access to with the mages guild.. Also the potions. Using, making and selling them I liked the alchemy coplexitiy with all the different infredients you could pick up and try to make potion out of :D@@AmberPlays

@@igororeskovic4586 I am actually planning on doing a more normal let's play of that game since a lot of my older videos are just terrible, but I keep them around for those who do want to watch them or are in a need of a pick-me-up. Anyway, if you like the newer style of my Let's Plays, then I doubt you'll enjoy the older ones. Out of the older ones, Assassin's Creed was descent but anything before it? Meh.

Legendary.

Happy New Year!

Happy new year!

Слушай, а правда - там его тоже так зовут. Всё равно страненькое имя - как игрок, думаешь что у него будет что-то более благороднее чтоли, а назвали по прямому - Неуклюжий. Наверно у него была очень интересная жизнь если его так по настоящему зовут.

Ah, it probably did - I can only see the ones I responded to last time. Yeah, the 1.04 is the version not only the one I remember the most because I actually had that one on my CD before it got scratched to hell (seriously, the Chaots weren't impossible to pass on the first map on hard difficulty), but also I had a hard time installing Russian voices onto the English one because on GOG, the Russian version is ONLY 1.04 while other languages are 1.03 on GOG (you can easily check if you try to download offline installers - the numbers are different on the installer files themselves). That's the only platform where you can still get it - Steam doesn't offer that 1.04 version though, so I was able to get the 1.03 game voices from there and easily transfer to my GOG install. Otherwise if the file versions don't match, the game will either load broken or won't at all and complain instead about missing correct file versions. You should try to play it though - it'll give you an idea of what the developers changed from 1.03, but uh... I don't think you'll be able to find any unofficial language patches for it. I actually tried the mod campaigns on my own - or at least some of them in Russian. I completely passed through the Elemental one, got stuck on the Donkichot, and the Kornelius one. I may have broken something though with my difficulty parameters - for Kornelius, for the love God, I just couldn't get the proper cards to come up in a very particular order to pass through the very first mandatory battle with the wolves. 🤣 So nah, I'll leave the game be - fan content can be fun sometimes - and sometimes is well crafted, well-thought out - but I'd rather try them out on my own time.

While I really wish I could find out what changes the developers made in the last patch, I don't think its worth buying the game I already own again in a language I don't really speak, not blindly at least. I scoured the internet for "демиурги 2 список изменений 1.04" but there was none. Do you think you could copypaste it from your game folder and post here? Just the 1.04 changes. If they are grand enough I'd really need to look into moving my mod onto that version. Seems like youtube filters away comments containing links, I wanted to show you a screenshot of my mod but I can't do it here, too bad. Anyway apart from the link that comment also said that your logic is sound and reasonable but there are ways to overcome technical restrictions of old games, and Etherlords 2 is no exception. You can totally run the game in high resolution and 8k textures and have a stable experience. Ah so you played some of the custom maps already. Have you tried one called Bonesnake? It has randomly generated content on the map (some really cool scripting was done there), it can be found on github. @@AmberPlays

@@Kaloitu So searching around on my own didn't yield anything either, but I FINALLY figured out what the issue was after re-installing and running the game, and searching the game files (which yielded absolutely no information on version changes, by the way). It wasn't actually a 1.04 version. It was 1.01 instead 🤦‍♀. And it's confusing because the installer file itself is listed as a version higher than the others (Russian GOG installer is 2.0.0.4 while others are 2.0.0.3). The file is basically the original CD version I had back in the day (the initial release version, I believe). Now I wonder how in the world I saw 1.04 instead of 1.01 on the game menu... Welp, it was my mistake - thanks for helping to figure out that mystery. I am going to make pinned comments to avoid any confusion for new watchers going forward! Nah, I didn't play that one - only what I mentioned in the comments. I had a bit of a hard time finding any custom maps for Etherlords - I had to go to VK (Russian social media platform), into the Russian community group for Etherlords to find any mod files. Someone collected the Russian ones there, so I managed to play some. You know, there used to be an Etherlords website a long time ago that even contained an encyclopedia for each of the creatures, and I think it even had its own dedicated community, plus mod files in there. But it was taken down a very long time ago, but it was a fun site - it kept the game's aesthetics (fonts, menus, color palette, style, composition, etc.), and it played the main menu theme from the first game I think?

Interesting, this is not at all an outcome I expected. But store installers are different from game installers, maybe they just made one more version because they wanted to correct spelling errors or something. I found some custom maps on reddit but it's true there are not many sources for those. And I know exactly what website you mean, it was called Etherplanet. To this day i remember it's unique interface and music, it had some fun stuff on it, I remember downloading game replays and being amazed at how very differently from me people play the game at a competetive level. Well with this mystery solved and the series being over I guess there is not much more for me to say other than that it's been fun to interact with another etherlords enthusiast, thank you and I wish you a good life :D @@AmberPlays

Yep

Thanks even though this isn't a stream? The video was made in post production.

Thanks! I like puns even though I am terrible at 'em. A good exercise for the mind though. Yeah, the only cantrip I ever heard of was from Dungeon and Dragons. I wouldn't say you don't waste anything per say - you technically waste an action point (in DnD and Baldur's Gate at least), but in Etherlords there's always some cost for almost every spell and recyclable you can cast. I think the only few exceptions would be the halos' ether stealing but then again, it's at the cost of their action; can't really attack if you use the creature ability. Generally, video games have differences between what they define as sorcery, cantrip, etc. - you never have a definition that applies everywhere one to one. In Etherlords 2, they almost never use that term too, so it's flabbergasting when you do see it and have no idea what it means because no one defines it properly (unless I forgot that they mentioned it somewhere like in a tutorial section, then my bad). I don't remember if they had that naming in the Russian version, which is the original one - it might be more of a translation inconsistency. 🤷‍♀ Last time I tried to play the first game was when I was a kid. I remember that it felt clunky when you compare it to other titles like Heroes Might and Magic 3, Civilization, or Age of Wonders. I might try if I do get the hang of it on my own time and manage to complete it, but personally I am not the best at strategy games - we'll see. When it comes to choosing games for recording, I don't record games that I haven't played till the end and don't like - it just comes through the video and makes it unwatchable.

Well I meant a Cantrip here in this game specifically. But it's true that nowehere else it is publically named so, the only reason I know is because I looked at the game files from the inside (I'm making a balance mod for the duel mode, maybe you'd wanna try it out some day). Cards are first sorted by their rarity and then their type so you have Cantrip, Common, Rare and Unique. And those are the words used in there, that's how russian developers wrote them so it probably isn't a translation error as much as it is the fact that devs were exposed to the "behind the scenes" stuff so much they were blind to the fact that these codenames do not appear anywhere in game. @@AmberPlays

@@Kaloitu Interesting! 🤔 Sounds like some kind of miscommunication happened either in development or in translation (again, I don't know if that term ever appears in the game's description or dialogue - the side that is visible to the player that is, because if it does not appear, then it really should have been an almost one to one translation of the correct magical terms and such). I can see the later happening if someone asked for technical context as well as the conceptual context - and the difference between the two since the sorting mechanism isn't visible to the player in the campaign - and mixing up between the two at some point. These things happen especially if there's a lot of information to unpack or someone new was put on the team who didn't quite grasp the differences and didn’t bother to ask questions to clarify. Happens regardless of the job or field. I tried some mods at some point, so sure - why not? Will the balancing translate over to the campaign duels as well or is it for the one on one, custom duels?

The sorting mechanism is present in the campaign as well, whenever you make a new deck before a fight you can see that in the spells you posess. Cantrip first, then the rest. Next the second sorting priority kicks in among the rarities: Summons first, then Sorcery, then Enchantments. I have to give devs some credit though because I looked up the game folder and it turns out spell rarity is indeed shown there, in the .pdf file called "World Of Etherlords II". Back in the days of this game's release, conceptually, players were expected to read the manuals that came with the games at the beginning of their playthroughs, so some players were intended to learn about rarity that way. But still, it is not explained in the game itself. Funnily enough it WAS clearly visible in the first game, rare spells had more yellow markings in the upper corner of their icon. The mod is currently for the Duel mode only, it's like a very early alpha version I'd say. But I know that most people on youtube just play the campaign so once the balancing is done I'd like to move onto the adventure mode to eventually make it ready for public release. I also am trying to improve textures to make the game look worthy of 2023 but that's hard to describe without pictures. :P @@AmberPlays

​@@Kaloitu I actually had a physical CD of the game back when those were still a thing - pre Steam, GOG and everything - except I don't remember if we ever had a manual for it - usually they are square-sized to fit right into the CD box (the older CDs anyway, not rectangular like what you would buy nowadays at Xbox or PS stores). I guess that one was lost to time, along with its CD eventually as well. Well, the only sorting system that jumps out is the one hidden to the player - it’s most obvious when you re-arrange your spells in your inventory, close the menu, and then open it back up again to see them arranged in a different order. I guess you mean that? Still, the labelling isn’t visible. It does make more sense to have that in a manual as you say - for early 2000s anyway. To be honest, the textures don’t even look that bad, but that’s my subjective opinion as someone who is used to playing older games like Gothic or even Oblivion - with all of their potato heads and everything, ha. Besides, the upscale is somewhat meaningless if the game is stuck to resolutions below 1920x1080 (I upscaled mine using a program meant to upscale older games for widescreens, but even those don't always play nicely 100% - you can tell by the cursor in my video whenever it moves around, though the textures look SIGNIFICANTLY less blurry than in the original install) and unless the game itself can handle higher graphics, but you’d probably would know better than I am as someone who is working on the mod for it. I just know that a lot of older games often times have issues with memory and tend to lag if you overwhelm them with high res models, textures, etc. - mostly because they weren’t meant to handle a lot of large sized assets. Kind of like how a lot of people try to upscale Oblivion into 4K, or even 6K - and it just starts to lag because the game can’t handle it that well and wasn't programmed to, and that game came out even later than Etherlords 2.