by DiM on Fri Aug 05, 2011 5:51 am
Feudal War is more successful because i also contributed to it's making
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... just kidding.

Gillipig's numbers are correct:
AOR 1 142.000
AOR 2 126.000
but this is not the whole truth. AoR2 was released later and it's logical to have fewer games. of the whole series AoR2 is in fact the most successful and it's only a matter of time before it will also become the leader of this trilogy when it comes to total number of games.
now, i attribute this success not only to the total change in graphics but mostly to the different gameplay. it kept a few of the old aspects but brought to the table a whole new array of gameplay changes that simply fit very well together.
AoR3 followed the same recipe. a complete change of graphics plus adding a lot of gameplay changes. unfortunatelly it didn't go just as well as AoR2 but it's still doing fine.
the current trend is AoR2>AoR3>AoR1
so at this very moment more people are playing parts 2 and 3 than those that are playing part 1.
given enough time and if the trend continues both AoR 2 and 3 will amass more total games than AoR1 proving that they are both better. however AoR3 despite being better than 1 is still not better than 2. i suspect it's probably because i went overboard with the gameplay changes trying to make each and every kingdom different. it meant people had to develop different strategies for different games and not many like that.
now back to feudal.
aside from the fact that it's too green and looks like a golf course
feudal epic didn't bring a graphical change. heck, it even features the same castle images i gave gimil for the first feudal. it simply took the original graphics and made them better. which is not a bad thing at all. it keeps things familiar and nice. but in my opinion it didn't change the gameplay enough. it's almost the same gameplay, upped for 8 players and with a different territory arrangement. the already established fans of feudal war probably tried feudal epic and decided it's the same deal but they abandoned it because they were already familiar with the layout from feudal war and didn't want to be bothered with learning a new layout only to experience roughly the same gameplay.
so in my opinion feudal needs to bring a new gameplay to attract people. simply making the same map with better graphics will not help. however it must not go overboard and include every single xml feature. a nice fresh gameplay and the map will be perfect even if it also looks too green (

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somebody stole my sig