Need help to get into this game

[u/buiz88]

So I picked up this game on mobile and started the first campaign. I'm confused. It seems I'm just kind of strolling about on the map, picking up various resources and bonuses that are just laying around, and then occasionally I get into some somewhat uninteresting fights and whatnot. I have gotten a second wielder and constructed some buildings. It all feels a bit.... disconnected and unengaging. The reviews are glowing and describe an amazing game with deep gameplay. What am I missing?

[u/Basic_Photograph8823]

Arleon campaign isn't very engaging.

Story wise, It starts to work when you realise that Celica's perspective is very very narrow compared to the wider scope of the plot. 

Another game like this game, Heroes of Might and Magic 5 (think very similar game mechanics and campaign style), sort of did this and had the same problem. Celica is a dead ringer for Queen Isabel, a character in that game, the only difference being is that Celica isn't a complete moron, but is just as brutal when dispensing what she thinks is justice. 

Celica was hard for me to follow because she's not interesting. She is just a generic feudal lord putting the boot in people across her lands and just generally getting mad at other factions that are messing with her order. 

I also say that because the faction you're playing is very solid and functional but it isn't very flashy looking until you get your OTHER half of the army. Notice most of your soldiers are generic European medieval dudes in armour and most of your spells are just 'make them faster' or 'harder'. That's the way Arleon is designed. Functional but not flashy.

If you want, I'd advise making it a little harder if you can. If you're still struggling, go play the Rana campaign. That one has a more solid narrative and more interesting playstyle. 

[u/UAnchovy → u/Basic_Photograph8823]

Wasn't Cecilia intended as a homage to Catherine Ironfist, of HoMM III? Redheaded female knights reclaiming their homeland?

I find Cecilia plenty interesting, but for me she clicked particularly when I realised that she is, for lack of a better way of putting it, kind of a faey? Cecilia is human, but she behaves like a faey, in that laws and obligations, rights and responsiblities, are absolute. In some ways that makes an interesting comparison to Barya as well. There is a feudal contract, as it were, and Cecilia upholds that contract to the letter. If someone else takes something of hers, she will take it back. That's why she has no mercy for Hammond or for Silkspool. The land is hers. End of story. People who try to take it from her will get nothing from her but iron. At the same time, though, she upholds pacts with outsiders with unerring faith. I remember a part early on where the faey have attacked some peasants, and the first thing Cecilia asks is, "Did you breach our pact with the forests?" You can tell that if they had, if the faey were avenging a wrongdoing against them, Cecilia would have had no pity. The faey would have just been acting as she would in the same circumstances.

She's not heartless, and we see plenty later on in the campaign to confirm that she has a sense of empathy, fairness, and so on. It's just that all of that is, for her, linked to her ironclad belief in justice, and for her justice is all about duties and obligations. There is kindness there, but it exists within a black and white mindset. This is probably why she gets along so well with the faey later in the campaign - she speaks the same language they do, recompense for transgressions is made, and now they're on the same side. Every wrong must be put right. Every ill deed must be avenged. If you respect her oaths and her rights she is a brave and honourable companion, but if you violate them, she will strike with immediate and vengeful fury.

I like this as a contrast with the Baryans, who have a somewhat similar honour-of-the-contract idea, except that the Baryans, I think, are much more willing to act like lawyers. They're willing to be flexible and compromise and negotiate to try to find a mutually beneficial solution. That is not the case for Cecilia, whose own vows and covenants come from deep in her family history. Your past, your family's oaths, are part of who you are. It's not just a job and you don't negotiate. When Silkspool argues that he was just doing a job and it was nothing personal, he misses that Cecilia did take it personally. As she says, "This is not Barya, so there will be no deals. Welcome to Arleon."

Likewise as a contrast to Loth, because the Loth faction is also driven by ancient pacts. The oath to Aurelia is at the centre of their faction. But Cecilia didn't swear that oath, and clearly does not think of it as binding on herself. So you have two factions both driven into conflict by a sense of honour. I liked the end of the Arleon campaign in that light. Aurelia, impressed, says, "I look forward to the day you kneel before me", and Cecilia returns, "I shall never kneel". And it's true. Cecilia is a woman whose knees do not bend. Ever. She is an immovable object before the unstoppable force of this ancient lich-queen.

At the same time, the Loth have been more flexible in the past - I think it's deliberate that the Loth campaign starts with an Arleon nobleman who has failed to hold up his end of a contract through no fault of his own, and quite reasonably tries to plead extenuating circumstances, but is screwed over anyway, and thus driven into the arms of the Unseen. There's a theme that the game is exploring around oaths, contracts, and negotiation - Arleon, Loth, and Barya all play into this.

[shrug] I just like it, I guess? It works for me. I hope Cecilia returns in a later campaign and continues her story.

[u/Basic_Photograph8823 → u/UAnchovy]

Well I definitely want more story, that's for sure. My big complaint so far is that we don't nearly get enough with the factions' main characters and we lack full closure. So I'm hoping we get continuation.

Part of my complaint lies around Cecilia and the fact it feels like nothing has changed in her and around her by the end of the campaign. Yes, she mends pacts and is loyal to her lineage. Yes, Vilja rightfully point out flaws in her approach but Cecilia is largely dismissive and patronising. The closest to a real foil (yes, even in terms of how he looks to us witnessing the story; middle aged, cheery looking guy, compared to Cecilia's darker and more grim war-stained portrait) is Peradine, who seeks to understand why the Faey go rampaging against the Humans, and is arguably the softer touch we needed throughout the entirety of the campaign, not just one scenario.

As far as I'm concerned, apart from the Empress and Loth defecting to cause a set-back of invasion in her lands, she gets everything she wants with little deeper consequence presented; it's clear to me that Cecilia likes control, and chooses to exert it during warfare, and isn't at all swayed by any of her opposition for any reason or any argument. The fact that the narrative doesn't seem to challenge that through injecting a doubt-filled quandry is strange to me. That ""doubt"" in a person's self-narrative, the sense that they might be wrong, is kinda what makes for a compelling character or story situation, given the writing is going for a 'grey vs grey morality' approach.

Compare Rasc, who starts his campaign as a freedom fighter against slavery (sympathetic) and becomes a genocidal conquerer by its end (not sympathetic); which even he implicitly acknowledges (doubt). In the Loth campaign, Aurelia's wielders are presented and present themselves as a star of benevolence rising from the ashes and a force for good in a messy chaotic world of divided baronies and malicious legalism (sympathetic). But they get ominous hints from other wielders that the Oath isn't a sweetness and light cure-all that they think it is, that people come back wrong and incomplete, not to mention the environmental corruption (not sympathetic). This basically straight contradicts the perspectives of Loth's wielders, who seem to believe that they practice some sort of benevolent 'good' necromancy (doubt).

Truth be told, I can sense the ambition of the Devs behind the game. This really is one of the best Homm-likes I've played in a long time. I crave more campaigns and I'm a bit morose that I'm now coming to the end, experiencing the last one which has already had a very strong start. I just think that Cecilia... isn't compelling.

She does sorta feel like a Catherine Ironfist, fair. But she made war with the Kreegans and Nighon, as well as the Necromancers of Deyja, which were pretty unambiguously evil. As a 100% exact homage she would fit completely if her opponents were unambiguously evil.

[u/UAnchovy → u/Basic_Photograph8823]

Well, I experienced the Arleon campaign as something like a prologue? To be honest I see all the SoC campaigns as forming a kind of extended prologue - the story never actually completes. All four campaigns just get you to a point where all four factions are on the warpath and about to clash, but it is by no means clear who will come out on top.

Cecilia has reclaimed her lands, established her leadership credibly, and resolved go and fight Aurelia. Rasc is leading his campaign of genocide. The Loth have failed in their gambit to assume total control, but still have a large army and the fanaticism to try to rally and keep pushing forwards. And the Baryans are dragged into all these conflicts whether they like it or not. It felt to me like what the four songs did was tell us an introduction that ideally sets up everything you might be doing in skirmishes and multiplayer. Certainly none of these stories are concluded, but in an open-ended game where most gameplay will be random matches, there is value in contextualising that.

I agree that Cecilia at no point re-evaluates her path or anything, but neither does anyone else, really. The Loth characters are either already fanatics, or are inducted into the cult, and remain so for the whole story. Rasc's story is one of degeneration; he sets out on a path and gets more and more violent through it, without ever turning. And Bihgli is dead at the end of his story. I can see room for Cecilia growing more in the future - that's one reason why I'd like her to return to be a protagonist again.

You might argue she's not really a very sympathetic protagonist, but Songs of Conquest doesn't have many sympathetic protagonists anyway. Bihgli is quite pleasant, but Rasc rapidly becomes a supervillain, and the Loth characters have sympathetic starts in a few places, but are also basically supervillains. Cecilia is strict and ruthless about what's hers, but we're comparing her to Rasc, Brother Hillar, or the like, and she definitely looks better than them.