If you remember my previous "Best *insert game genre here* of all time" blog post, which got incredibly popular. which is located HERE, then here's another one. But it's not really a review and it's not that huge in size and length.

Today I'm gonna talk about Disciples 2: Rise Of The Elves, which is a stand-alone expansion to Disciples 2: Dark Prophecy, including everything you can find in Dark Prophecy, but with adding the fifth race - Elves, a new mana, a new campaign and some new maps. And new neutral units too, where some are very cool.

Disciples 2: Rise Of The Elves is a turn-based strategy game, very much like Heroes Of Might & Magic series. But there are many great features that differ D2 from HOMM. First of all, there is this XP system. To make your main hero and troops grow stronger, they have to gather experience by killing other armies. And then you need to build specific buildings in your capital to make their upgrade possible. Once a unit gets the necessary XP, it will level up to a stronger unit.

The map and world is very similar to Heroes Of Might & Magic 3, however, the gameplay is very different. You cannot have anymore some 1000 or more units in more army. No, the size of your army is based on your hero's leadership level (up to 5 slots for units, starting with 3). And there are units, who take 1 slot and who take 2 slots.

To gather resources in the game, you have to transform the landscape into your race's specific terrain. When your terrain will cover the ground beneath a resource, will be gold or one of the 5 mana generators, this resource will start producing the supplies to you, like each day. The transforming looks quite a lot like in Rise Of Nations. Rare resources in your territory produce more resources than those in neutral area. Only in Disciples 2, resources in neutral area produce nothing to no one.

The magic system in this game is quite interesting. Instead of casting spells in a battle like in HOMM series, you can cast spells only on the map screen. The are spells that heal you or make you stronger. There are spells that damage others and make them weaker. There are neutral spells, like those which reveal fog of war. And there are summoning spells. In Disciples 2, you can encounter 5 tiers of spells:  first and second being the weakest, requiring only your race-specific mana. Third tier requires two sorts of mana, 4th requires 3 sorts of mana and the fifth requires 4 sorts of mana.

When you start a new quest or campaign, you can choose the type of your lord. There are three types - Battle Lord, Mage Lord and Guild Lord (if I'm correct with names). Battle Lord's ability is to heal 15% of all your units HP per day, Mage Lord's ability is to buy spells at half cost, cast each twice per day and you can buy all 5 tiers of spells. Guild Lord's ability makes upgrading your towns (smaller cities you capture on the map) 50% cheaper and gives more options to your thieves.

Now there are five types of heroes, which you can use to explore the map screen and destroy enemy forces with. There is the fighter hero, who is strong in HP and damage, whose damage source is usually "Weapon" and who attacks 1 adjacent target (meaning, if there are used slots in an hostile army in the second line and there is someone taking at least one slot in the first line (each army has two lines/6 slots to hold your units), a fighter hero cannot attack the ones in the second line. Not at first.

There's also a scout hero, who has more movement points, usually more initiative (meaning, he starts before others, maximum initiative can be more than 100),  and he has a ranged attack, meaning he can shoot anyone anywhere, but only one at a time (target one unit).

The mage hero has the least hp and usually the least damage, but it can use scrolls and orbs and can attack everyone (6 targets) with the same attack. There's also a rod planter hero, who is used to transform land and there's the thief, who can assassinate others, steal items from merchants and poison cities and armies.

Well, one more thing. There are five races. The Empire governs the human race. They have a lot of upgrades for fighter units (squire, paladin, etc.) and they have healers, but everything else isn't that good. The Undead Hordes are obviously the death race. They have a LOT of upgrades to mage units in addition to ghosts, who can paralyze others. The Legions Of The Damned are the demonic race of hell. Their speciality is two-slot troops, like gargoyles and the devil, who can ultimately become either Tiamath, Overlord or Abyssal Devil. The Mountain Clans is a dwarf race, who has also very good fighter units, two-slot units and they have damage boosting units. And the last one is the Elves, who are best with archers (ranged units).

Another thing with upgrading is that you almost never have to follow a certain path on the upgrade tree. There are branches and sometimes a lot of branches. For example, the basic Level 1 mage unit of Undead Hordes can either follow the path to become a Archlich (deals huge damage to every enemy unit in the army during a battle), become the Elder Vampire (Drains life of every hostile unit and then overflows it to your own units) or Death or Wright, who attack one unit, but do heavy damage and are immune to Death and Weapon attacks. Here's a little picture also:

Well, and the last great thing about Disciples 2, especially with Rise Of The Elves, is that when you complete a quest, you can save your heroes, to continue leveling them up in the following quests, would you playing with the same race, if it's available. Some maps are pretty much meant for stronger heroes and therefore Level 1 has nothing to do there.

Now I'm getting to the point why I even wanted to write this blog post. I've been playing it a lot recently and since my course mate spent a night at my place today, we were playing one map straight for seven hours in Disciples 2: ROTE (default, pre-made map, which isn't the biggest), from 23.00 - 06.00 and only then we were able to beat the map (we were playing in Hotseat). I presented him with the option to play HOMM 3 or HOMM 4 instead, but he refused. I had shown him this game before and he, probably for the same reasons as myself, just loves this game. It's not perfect, but it's much better than the latest of Heroes Of Might And Magic and it's much much better than it's sequel - Disciples 3: The Renaissance. If you like such games, I'd suggest you try this one out.

And now a little announcement to the readers of Wasteland Chronicles. I'm sorry, but writing Chapter V is on a hiatus, but don't worry, it will be done very soon. It's just so massive and if I would put more character's thoughts in, like Oni wished to see, it would just take me up 5 hours to write this one chapter. So I have to gather energy and time and I will do it. You'll see.

And now two more pictures, first one showing the stats of an unit (strong one) and how the army view screen looks like (in the capitol):

Thanks for reading!