The Let's Play Archive

Myth: The Fallen Lords

by Johnny Law

Part 2: LP Conditions and Myth Resources




The Conditions

All right... is everyone on board? Let me make a few comments about this LP then.

Myth has an infamously difficult campaign, or at least reviewers said so at the time. It has a wide range of difficulty levels though, which affect the number of Dark units in a mission, the relative toughness of Light vs. Dark units, and sometimes parts of the mission scripting. Here's my shot at characterizing what you need in order to beat a campaign mission on a given difficulty level: Your choice of difficulty level might of course need to be adjusted down if you're trying for zero casualties or some other difficult condition. Adjust up if you're playing in a co-op group that works well together (Legendary was pretty common for this). Adjust up if you really lean on Myth's save-anytime feature and the ability to pause the game in singleplayer.

I will be playing on Heroic difficulty with no pausing (except in the Tutorial). I also will not cheese the savegames; I'll take a savegame at the end of each mission, and possibly to split up the longer missions when they go over 20-25 minutes of gameplay, but normally that should be it. Although I reserve the right to take a savegame if faced with some absolutely unbelievable B.S. situation.

I will not be guaranteeing zero-casualties missions, just a good competent playthrough (I hope).

P.S. There was a persistent urban legend (?) that the difficulty setting affects unit toughness in competitive multiplayer. I can't tell that there is any truth to this; I believe that the difficulty option is available in competitive MP only in case mappers want to trigger different unit mixes or scripting bits based on that.


Get on the Myth Train!

If you want to play Myth:TFL but you don't own it yet... what should you do? There are several options, but let's start with something counterintuitive: There are in fact many small differences between the original and Myth-2-ported versions of TFL, if you want to open up gamedata editors and poke around, but in practice everything is close enough that even really picky obsessive co-op players from TFL are happy with the port.

So then your best options are listed below. You should be able to find new or used copies of these products at online game stores, eBay, Amazon, etc. With some minimal looking around you'll find at least one of these products dirt-cheap.


Myth: The Total Codex
This is a bundle of Myth:TFL, Myth 2, and a good third-party expansion/campaign called Chimera. This is the way to go if you'd like the choice of both the original and ported TFL experiences.


Myth II: Worlds
This is a bundle of Myth 2 plus some other maps, conversions, etc. Most of the extras should be freely downloadable elsewhere, although by now some of them might be getting hard to find.


Myth II: Soulblighter
Myth 2 by itself. No frills or extras here, but honestly the non-Bungie stuff in the other bundles is only gravy.

Note that the Myth games have crossplatform play, so regardless of whether you prefer to run it on Mac or PC you'll be in the same player pool as everyone else. Once you have made your acquisition, be sure to go to Project Magma and get the latest patch for Myth:TFL and/or the latest patch for Myth 2. You don't have to apply any other patches before applying these. If you're using Myth 2, also pick up the ported TFL campaign and TFL multiplayer maps there. If Project Magma happens to be down, then you can get these downloads from this archive (may be out of date).

The Project Magma patches are absolute must-haves in general, but I should emphasize that you especially want to patch Myth 2, just in case you ended up with a CD that has the very first version of Myth 2 on it. The original version of Myth 2 had an uninstaller bug that could delete everything in the folder above the Myth 2 installation. (Oops.) You shouldn't ever come across a new copy of Myth 2 that has this problem, but if you get a used copy... anyway, the patch fixes that among many other things, so patch up.

If you want to host games and you are behind a NAT setup, then you'll need to configure your router to forward TCP port 3453 to the system where you are running Myth. (Same port for Myth:TFL or Myth 2, by the way.) The PortForward website has instructions about that if you need 'em.

Tip for Vista users running a fully patched Myth 2: If the "Servers..." button on the Multiplayer screen is greyed out (you need this to select your matchmaking lobby) then try running Myth II.exe as Administrator. Once you do that and set your server preference, you can then run Myth II.exe normally (non-Administrator) in the future.

Finally, note that there's a Myth starter guide webpage out there for step-by-step setup assistance and some game tips. I haven't examined it closely but it looks like it could be really useful.


Myth Resources

Here's a few other Myth links to keep you fat and happy.