Should we buy TA now?

If you know you will be getting TA when it comes out, I see no reason why not to take the discounted price in pre-ordering it. You can continue playing DA on MV if you wish, or you can play the TA beta and see what "will be" in a month or two.

Also, the more people beta testing TA, the better the final product will be.

Though as I've said, you'll probably lose your taste for the earlier flavours of GC2 after you play TA.

I was gonna say I wasn't sure about the price. But I just noticed it dropped a lot, thank goodness! (by two tokens!)

Yes and no, especially if CalifDude gets fond of the Metaverse and joins an empire. I'm still mucking around with the beta, but I noticed that the holidays and the MV League have lowered activity amongs my fellow Gerontocrats, so I'm also strying to crank out another DA game to help out our collective score.

I will admit, though, that I haven't played a single DL game since the DA bits went gold. If TA keeps me struggling long enough, I might feel wimpy enough to need a DA game for score vanity, but I'm guessing that by April I'll be finding DA to be comparatively dull.

I bought the DA+TA expansion deal last year and saved a few bucks. I have a key code for TA, but I'm not participating in the beta. I'll be playing it first time when it's officially released.

It's definitely worth getting. Even at this stage of beta, it's better then almost every expansion that I've ever played.

The current beta seems to have all the major content in place, and lacks only the stuff outside the game like editors for custom campaigns. The devs have stamped out the early crashes with things like Terror Stars and the new invasion screen. There are still a few pathfinding glitches here and there, and the AI and tech trees haven't been fully tweaked yet, but it's enjoyable to play. At least, I'm enjoying it.

So, if you want an early look at how different TA is from DA (and there are a LOT of differences now; each race needs its own strategy!), and if you can tolerate some changes between the current version and the final release, than I'd say go for it. I don't miss DA at all... TA is my new game.

I'm still hoping they'll unlock the metaverse while TA is still in beta (pretty please?), but either way, if you have the money now, and plan to buy it when it's released anyway, I see no reason not to purchase it.

Thanks for the comments.

My impression from what I've read here is that TA is an improved game over DA and that I will want to have it, so I'm gonna go ahead and order it.

But I've also gotten the impression that some of you like TA because it is a more difficult game than DA. Is that true? I hope that TA has options for lower difficulty levels because I'm not looking for a tougher game. The Challenging level of DA is tough enough for me for a while. Thanks for your replies.

The same difficulty levels from DA are available in TA. The "harder" part is coming from the massively changed tech trees, build lists, etc. Each race now plays very distinctly, and it takes more adjustment to switch between races.

You may find it necessary to back the difficulty down a step or two while you adjust.

QFT. The game isn't harder per-se, it's just less vanilla. Now you need to know more about other race's techs while playing against them. There are some techs that are shared amongst races, but some things (notably factories/labs/morale/econ buildings) are different. It's not just a different name stamped on the same stats either.

When picking a race to play, you no longer are looking at what super ability & stats they have but also what their tech tree is like. As also mentioned by WIllythemailboy, you can't play the Terrans for a while and then pick up the Thalans and think that ANY strat you had with the Terrans will work. Every race must be played differently now to accommodate their differences.

It is an excellent expansion. Imagine you have the best toy from last Christmas, say G.I.Joe. Now imagine this Christmas, you just found out you received every accessory, tank, add-on and friends for the orginal GI joe. That is how I feel about TA. To quote the guy on Mad TV .. Stardock has taken the game to a whole!nother!level!

So get it at the discounted price.

No. You should have bought it months ago.

/snort