More on combat tactics at the end, but let me quickly recount what I accomplished since the last posting:Р В РІР‚СњР В Р вЂ№. I had lots of recruits waiting to be formed into units in my four cities, and I was able to rebuild my army within about a year. Particularly notable is that newly-hired heroes don't start at Level 1 but rather about half the level of your main hero. It was the type of loss from which you seriously think about starting over, but fortunately this game (at least in parts) gives you enough breathing room to recover from such disasters. I lost five heroes, a unit of cavalry, and two units of bowmen. The titans turned out to be absolutely devastating.

I expected an easy, quick combat, as random combats usually are, and was careless in my unit deployment and the initial rounds. My main army, with almost all my heroes (save my main hero) was moving along a mountain trail when they encountered a 'small group' of titans. I had some successes since my last posting, which I will recount anon, but also one big failure. No unit is 'dispensable.'Р В РІР‚СњР вЂ™Р’В¬reating a new unit costs a quarter of my available wealth. A unit of 35 mounted infantry costs around 6,000 gold pieces to assemble and equip. You don't want to do that in Sword of Aragon. I'm thinking of the infantrymen in Warlords, whom you can create at a rate of 1 per turn, and whom I would gleefully (and somewhat sadistically, in retrospect), send on suicide missions to soften up enemy stacks before attacking with the units I really cared about. Other strategy games I've played encourage you to think of some units as essentially cannon fodder. I don't know if the AI might be stronger on 'hard' you have the option to change it every time you start the game, and I haven't experimented much yet.Р В РІР‚СњР вЂ™Р’Вespite these concerns, the game continues to delight me with the ways that it breaks common tropes. My units do all the work scouring the city while my 'allies' hang around to the southwest.

In both my fight against Paritan and my attack on Brocada, many of my allied units just hung around their starting locations instead of engaging. Unfortunately, these same AI problems often beset your allies as well. I've won several combats against cities with tactics no more intense than simply hovering my archers just far enough from a city to hit it with their bows, and raining volley after volley on the stubbornly-entrenched defenders until they surrendered. They surrender with 75% of their force still strong. They send bowmen, who could be devastating otherwise, out into the field in small, easily-destructible units. Enemy units dither around when they should attack, hole up when they should enter the field, and retreat when they should charge.

The problem is that the enemy AI is rather awful. In my last posting, I noted that 'strategy game lovers might actually dislike' Sword of Aragon, a position that I hold more firmly now that I've had a chance to experience far more involved battles.

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