Part 34: Rebellion Recap
Previously on Myth III
We ran Trow around in a circle and killed a bunch of them.
Now that's how you do a mission with Trow. You make it hard as balls. It's still a little cheap how you have to kill the Iron Warriors, but difficulty makes this level work. And damn is it hard. As you saw, if you don't pay almost constant attention to Damas he'll get killed, ending the mission. No other level in any Myth requires you to pay attention to so many things at once, except maybe The Gates of Myrgard and Siege of Llancarfan, but neither of those levels are instant fail if you make a mistake. Finally the addition of Trow Priests gives this level the spice that Bonds of the Oghre was so clearly lacking. There's a lot of strategy going on in which groups you dream, or use as dream bait.
Screenshots:
Game film:
Now that was a much more satisfying kill of fifteen Trow. I lost a crapton of Oghres and both my dwarves, but I've said it before - you really have to treat Oghre as disposable. There's always going to be more where they came from.
Oh.
Oh damn.
I suppose Damas wasn't kidding when he said the Oghre don't stand a chance against the Trow. Because in the time between this mission and the next, the Trow win the war against the Oghre via genocide. Freedom cost the Oghre everything. If, like me, you wondered in Flight From the Dark where these Oghre came from since they were never mentioned or seen in previous games; now you know. I can't help but feel partially responsible.
YouTube
You saw all my failures in the main video, but here's a little weird thing about victory triggers in this mission.
You saw the fail screen in the main video, so I want to talk about that cutscene at the end. It is the best thing ever, because the voice acting is all over the place. Myrdred's actor is terrible, Moghbragga is so bad he's good, and Damas and Connacht are done very well. We only see him for like 30 seconds, but we learn so much about Moghbragga and the Oghre through his terrible, terrible voice acting. We also learned that the two Oghre behind Moghbragga were pretty clearly copy/pasted from one set of motions, as those two Oghre are in prefect sync. The happiness of the first part (Myrdred/Moghbragga) is contrasted with the darkness of the second part (Damas/Connacht) which is further saddened knowing the Oghre don't make it. Man, I love that cutscene.
Trow PriestLike all fantasy priest stereotypes, Trow Priests are much weaker than normal Trow. This is noticeable in that your really strong units can actually survive one of their kicks! You really want to stay away from Trow Priests as that kick comes fast and has larger range than the unit model suggests. Like Trow from Myth 1 and 2 it is possible to kill a Trow Priest with melee units if you surround it, and only suffer moderate casualties.
The Priests of Nyx are formidable - and not just because they are Trow. The priests have learned many a subtle dream from their God. One such dream used in battle is the Dream of Molten Iron, which creates a geyser of fiery rock to burst from beneath the feet of their enemies.* Thankfully, Trow Priests are somewhat less resilient than your average trow.
*Yeah, they don't do that. They do get a different ability later, and Corbeau says Priests don't show up in multiplayer, so that's not it. This volcano dream will show up later, just not from the Trow Priests. Unless Corbeau fucks around more with the code, which I asked him to do.
"...after seeing the first death of their own kind, the Trow priests prayed to Nyx, 'You have made your creations mighty, beloved one. But, we have seen one of our kind meet with oblivion. How do we protect ourselves from this fate?' The chanting silenced, and a wind began to blow through the stone temple. The voice of Nyx arose and whispered to her children the secrets of iron..."
"...'We are Nyx's children. We are Her word and Her hand. Before Wyrd changed the face of the world, we lived in Nyx's light. The lesser races are no challenge to us - they are young, as is this world. Those that have the audacity to challenge us, we conquer in Nyx's name - be they Human, Oghre, Sileh'hei, Callieach, or other children of Wyrd. We are that which came before all..."
Next time on Myth III
Corbeau posted:
Rebellion.
While Guava was practicing it, I actually played this level myself out of morbid curiosity. I'm not certain that it's the hardest level in all of the Myth games, but I've played enough Myth II modded coop levels to have my perception of difficulty skewed. Beating Rebellion with a single-save limit, even on Mighty, is brutal. No individual task is particularly hard, but there are a lot of things happening at once and you're dead if you lose track of what you're doing.
Oh, and then units go invisible. This was actually my bane as a modder; it's a hard-coded limit on the number of polygons that the engine will display. It shows up in this mission due to the gibs, but it was also the death of my Total War-esque mod for massive army combat. Even removing all gib effects, scenery models, and simplifying the unit models as far as possible without completely re-making them, the engine will only display a couple hundred units at once.
That doesn't even cover the full glitchiness of this level though. Both Guava and I experienced that it's possible to lose either Damas or Myrdred at the last second, kill the last Trow, and still win. The victory script for killing off the Trow seems to supersede the defeat script for losing a hero unit. It's possible to pull out a glitch victory even as the screen is fading to black - in fact, you can make a black-screen defeat fade-out suddenly switch to a white-screen victory fade-out! There's really no explanation for this other than a lazy oversight in scripting - I don't think that anything of the sort is possible on any other Myth level.
Still, Rebellion is actually kinda fun. Unlike Bonds of the Oghre, you're not just running individual Trow around in boring circles forever. You're attempting to run entire groups of Trow around while in a panic due to the other three crises happening simultaneously. It's still bullshit characterization of the Trow, but at least it's not the same degree of abomination that Bonds of the Oghre is. Rebellion can at least be fun to play.
Not quite, though they never appear as "Oghre" in other Myth games. In the Myth 3 tag files, however, the Oghre tag is actually titled "Maul"...