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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5393338" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 213: January 1995part 4/8Eye of the monitor: Ultimate Domain gets a negative review of considerable detail, due to many small flaws. It's ridiculously slow, gives you very little help in figuring out how to play it, isn't sure what it wants to be, and when they tried to call the helpline, they spent ages on hold. Bleah. Sounds more like a chore than a game. Genghis Khan II does only slightly better, having some fun elements, but also a bunch of niggly restrictions and areas which our reviewers would have done differently. They compare it quite a lot with the similarly themed Bandit Kings from their last review, and like that, you need to balance being a conquerer with a domain manager and protector. If you're looking for straightforward action, give it a miss. Master of Magic gets our best review of the issue. It also sees our first mention of that great modern annoyance, patching. No longer do game designers have to make sure they iron out all the bugs before release. Instead, you need to download something, or in this case, actually send off for a disk to get the update. ( A practice I don't think will last long simply for cost reasons. ) But once they finished getting it working, they found they thoroughly enjoyed taking over the world with their wizards. Their main complaint is the lack of a diplomacy option. Play a proper RPG then! These two haven't touched a single one yet. Space Hulk tries to emulate the board game and give you a limited amount of time to make decisions, but fails to get the balance right, with clunky AI making controlling your squad well enough to finish a scenario near impossible. And you never get to play the bad guys either. They wanted to like it, but were left frustrated. Forum: Frederick Mills complains that his experienced players with new characters are metagaming. See, this is another thing in favour of changing systems regularly. It's never quite the same starting again after the first time. Rob Gidlow tells us what real world cultures he uses for his FR nations. In the process, he also points out just what parts of the Realms still need their own sourcebooks. Get too it, Ed! Stop lallylagging round the dalelands! Jason Whitbeck complains about rising costs. Haven't had that in a while. The whole lead banning debacle has been particularly bad for this, meaning models are both more expensive and come in smaller quantities. Hey, it's hardly as bad as the gouging oil companies give us. and if you don't like the costs of gaming materials, you can just stop. The existing ones'll last you ages. Joe Katzman belatedly realises how nasty extraplanar creatures deploying summoning cascades can be, with a very real threat of the buggers taking over your entire world. This really needs houseruling, because you can't rely on the celestial cavalry to swoop in and save the day in time to avoid massive devastation. Ruediger Landmann finds his players are abusing the -10 rule, knowing exactly when their fallen companions are going to die, and only saving them at the very last second. Put a bit of randomness back in the bleeding to death process to keep them from gaming the system like this. Peter David Levi is a second forumite espousing something that would be taken up next edition. In his case, it's the elimination of demihuman level limits. The amount of time and effort to advance each level after name is so great that it's churlish to stop them at that point and pretty unlikely they'll get much further anyway.</blockquote>

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