Marble Age: Remastered

old funny

Desperately needs a 'Remove Kebab' DLC for post-1000AD game.

Quick, cheap, and entertaining. It feels like a phone game and looks like one too! I still enjoy it quite a bit and remember the flash versions fondly!

Beep

游戏非常不错，在做资源管理的同时，各种策略也有发挥的空间，各个势力自己的特点都很突出。希腊擅长外交、斯巴达擅长掠夺、科林斯擅长交易。于是通关了一局希腊，还会想通关另外两个势力。而且这个remaster真的是画质改进了很多，现在我再回过头看以前的青铜时代和大理石时代，已经玩不下去了，画质无法接受了。

游戏风格是尊崇历史，让玩家体验历史事件。各个历史事件会深刻影响你在游戏里的做的事情。虽然这些事件没有太多文字说明，但事件通过对你各个游戏的数值影响，比如降低金钱/人口/生产力，很形象地描绘了历史事件。

只不过我感觉游戏的可玩性是比较有限的。开发者在设计时似乎是先假设好了玩家能达到的天花板操作，再往下设置事件作为枷锁，限制玩家的行动。

在历史事件之外，游戏还为每个势力设置了大任务，大任务所附带的奖励看起来像是鼓励玩家成为历史的一员，虽然它们不是必须马上完成的，你完全可以拖延时间，但你会发现迟于完成任务缺少的这些奖励，会大大增加游戏的困难程度。包括历史事件。

所以这些历史事件就是一个个沉重的枷锁，玩家的角色更像是勤勉的执政者，但只能走固定的一条或几条路线，去对抗难以变更的天命，或者说，重演历史。甚至有些减关系和减资源的随机事件也看起来是故意在玩家的资源丰富时才会冒出来限制玩家的游戏空间。

举个例子，希腊可以偏向外交或者偏向贸易来增强国力，但绝对不可能去做武力掠夺来强国，游戏精心设计的特性抹杀了这种可能。同理，斯巴达也难以外交，虽然你会囤积很多外交官，但不同的科技树导致了只有希腊能很好地利用外交手段。对于希腊来说，武力是负面的，外交是正面的，贸易是中性的。斯巴达则外交和武力刚好相反。科林斯则贸易是正面的，另外两个都是中性的。所以你是有一些选择，但极其有限。


AI translation:

The game is really great. While managing resources, you also have plenty of room for various strategies, and each faction has its own distinct characteristics. The Greeks excel at diplomacy, the Spartans at raiding, and the Corinthians at trade. After finishing a playthrough with the Greeks, I’m eager to complete the other two factions. And this remaster has seriously improved the graphics – now that I look back at the Bronze Age and Marble Age versions, I can't play them anymore because the graphics just don't hold up.

The game is historically faithful, letting players experience historical events. These events have a significant impact on your gameplay. Even though there's not much textual explanation, the events affect various in-game metrics, like reducing money, population, or productivity, vividly depicting historical events.

However, I feel that the game's replayability is somewhat limited. It seems like the developers designed it with a ceiling on what players can achieve and then set events as constraints to limit players' actions.

In addition to historical events, the game also sets up major tasks for each faction. The rewards attached to these major tasks seem to encourage players to become part of history. Although they don't have to be completed immediately, and you can definitely delay them, you'll find that lacking these rewards due to delayed completion will significantly increase the game's difficulty. The same goes for historical events.

So these historical events act like heavy shackles, making players feel more like diligent governors who can only follow a fixed path or a few paths to fight against unchangeable destiny, or let's say, replay the history. Some random events that decrease relationships and resources also seem to pop up deliberately when players have abundant resources, restricting the game's space.

For example, Greece can focus on diplomacy or trade to strengthen their nation, but it's absolutely impossible to use military conquest for this purpose because the game's carefully designed features eliminate that possibility. Similarly, Sparta finds diplomacy difficult, even though you might accumulate many diplomats. However, due to different tech trees, only Greece can effectively use diplomatic measures. For Greece, military is negative, diplomacy is positive, and trade is neutral. For Sparta, diplomacy and military are just the opposite. For Corinth, trade is positive, while the other two are neutral. So you do have some choices, but it is extremely limited.

A great "casual" game with a lot of depth and strategy.

pretty simple game with a very simple game play loop, though if you want a perfect run on the hardest difficulty it's one hell of a challenge. Pretty 6/10 game, fun but nothing absolutely special.

it runs great i love how you see buildings appear and how your village grows. Athens, Sparta and Corinth have different styles and bonuses to select with one relying on allies for military, one focusing on taking what you need and the other focusing on gold and buying everything. I found myself having to reload a lot to get the good random events or buildings or tech that i needed to help get that max end game score. It's very much trial and error definitely save every turn or few turns.

I'll give this game a positive review because I did enjoy playing it, but... I don't want to play it again.

Basically, it's too repetitive and unforgiving. On my first playthrough, I failed miserably, and I just thought I sucked at the game and could get better. On my second playthrough, I did do better, but the enemies were still ridiculously overwhelming. It was on my third playthrough, when I downgraded to easy mode and hardly felt any difference, that I started getting annoyed at the game. And I was also getting kind of bored with it, since every playthrough is virtually identical.

I was playing Athens, which the game declares as the easiest city, and it also has the highest win rate in the global achievements. I switched to Corinth, which the game says is hard, and suddenly the game was about 5000% easier. Still, I only managed to beat it in the very last turn.

Maybe I just suck really, really hard at this game. But it seems remarkably unforgiving because mistakes early on can basically set you so far behind that it'll never be possible to win. Barbarian armies 10 million strong come after your puny little 200k army, and there's no way in hell you can build up your army to survive in just 20 turns. A challenge is fine but it stops being fun when your chances of success are less than 0.01%.

Now that I've won, I have no desire to play the game again. I haven't played Sparta, but the game is too repetitive for me to bother wanting to. But I did genuinely enjoy my first, second, and fourth playthroughs. If you think of the game as a one-time win and disregard the replay value, it's actually a nice game. I definitely recommend Corinth over Athens, though.

"i love it"

Loads of fun, cool history, but gets a little petty/perfectionists for me with winning. Catchy music.

I really enjoyed it and learned a bit :)