Okay, so Brian Rubin over on Qt3 pointed out that GoG was selling a Eador: Genesis, the Russian game that's currently being revamped as Masters of the Broken World. Being incapable of resisting any turn-based fantasy 4x, I plunked down the $4.79 without hesitation. That was four days ago, and every spare moment I have had since then has been spent playing this game. The interface is a bit clunky and primitive for a 2009 release, but the gameplay is extraordinarily good. Eador has swiftly outranked Fallen Enchantress and Warlock in my estimation, and at this rate (I just lost my 5th game and am going back for more) is poised to overtake Age of Wonders. The strategic, tactical, and rpg (levelling and hero equipping) aspects are engrossing, and the AI -- especially the tactical AI! -- is impressive for the genre. The overall design is brutally challenging in that way only Russian games seem to be, but where that usually puts me off, here I adore it. If you have any interest in this kind of game, I encourage you to check it out. At this price it's a steal. Apparently Masters of the Broken World is a slickified update with all of the basic mechanics in place, which bodes well. MotBW is now my most-anticipated game.
Yeah, seriously, Brian. Were you planning to share this with us? Edit: watched the videos, and it looks pretty great. Sort of like MoM meets Dominions?
I have been reading that other thread, but I fear it will just ruin me for Masters of the Broken World. That said, if the Lutenator is giving it this kind of endorsement AND is is $5, I don't know how I can continue to resist.
Also greatly enjoying this, though I'm still in the tutorial. The low-end graphics make me actually nostalgic for the days when I was hooked on HoMM3 and the original Age of Wonders. A nice find. Apparently the manual is only in Russian, so I will be signing up for Russian language classes shortly.
Yeah, that's a fair mashup. I keep discovering new and crazy spells, which, along with the hero development, reminds me of MoM. Like, I got a random event that said the locals were suspicious of a shaman raising demons in the swamps, and I could have him killed to raise morale, leave him alone, or send him a gift to encourage his work. I sent him a gift and he gave me this awesome scroll in return, which allows me to curse one of my own units so that if it dies within 6 turns, it'll come back as a demon of equal level. Random events aren't totally random, either -- if you have an uncleared troll cave in your territory, those trolls might one day attack your settlement. Adventurers might show up and offer to clear it out for you. Or, another time I lost a province to a local noble, and began gearing up to take it back, but then I was caught off guard when he sent me an offering of appeasement, so I called off the invasion. It shares the province-by-province, provincial defender, and random event aspects of Dominions, but it lacks in the baroque faction department (though no game could compare to Dominions on that front). In fact, there's only one faction to play, but you customize it as you go, since build options are limited by expense, access to strategic resources, and . My last game I went with a straight-up warlord, this game I'm aiming to create a necromantic empire.
Sorry guys, sometimes I only have time/energy to post on one place, so I figure if I post it there, someone else will crosspost it here. No offense meant. Also, this game is awesome so far.
I splurged the $4.79, but it doesn't want to run on my Inspiron (which runs everything from Master of Orion to the new X-Com). I tried changing graphics settings, running it in a different modes, updating drivers, etc. The music plays, but all I see is a black screen. I can get the menu screen if I alt-tab out, but it's frozen. I'll try it on my other laptop later.
Yeah, the overland map split into regions reminded me a lot of Dominions, but then there's the wizard development and tactical battles that look like they might fall somewhere between MoM and Heroes of Might and Magic. And since I absolutely love all three of those games, I guess I should go buy this now.
Works fine on my other laptop. I'll play around with it and report back. It's only $4.79, though, and you can always blame Lutes, Rubin, and Tyjenks if it sucks.
Wait, I have not gotten it yet. I am assuming you believe I am deserving of blame for something even if this in not the immediate reason. That said, I am getting it tonight.
Can you destroy your unit buildings? I built all four pretty quickly without realizing I was limited to four.
I've been eyeing this since the thread popped up on QT3 and MoBW. One question for those playing it now, how is the learning curve? One of things that puts me off of games like Dominions and even Sword of the Stars 2 is not having the time to spend days trying to learn the basics of a game.
Word of warning for those considering this: the game has some issues on modern CPUs. On my machine, it stutters terribly. There's a thread about it over on GoG that suggests some fixes; I haven't had a chance to try them yet, though.
Jab, I'm in the midst of the tutorial, but it's seamlessly woven into the first campaign you play, and I'm REALLY digging it. I'm not finding the learning curve that difficult at all.
Just got sucked into the opening sequence of this. I wish you could save normally, but I would be too tempted to savescum so I guess the designer read my mind. So far I like everything about it except for the combat, which is kind of a big deal. Ranged units hit hard, and troops go down fast. I'd love to make better use of terrain to mitigate the problem but all of the fields I've fought on so far are giant plains with small wooded areas that are generally on the enemy side. It also has some roguelike elements in that you can stumble into things you can't handle really early on. I went exploring in my home territory (what a neat feature) and found a tower that had fifteen enemy units in it. That made me very glad for the retreat option, but I'm still trying to figure out if you lose glory for running away. Great find. I don't even have a hankering for updated graphics because these work so well (as does the interface). The translation is actually decent, too. EDIT: I also want to point out that I'm running it on an early i7-930 with Win8 (64-bit) and have no stuttering, mouse issues, sound issues, etc. at all. It's silky.
I started the tutorial but then didn't want things handed to me piecemeal, so I dove into free play. I like trying to figure out how everything works, and I'm doing pretty well now on my 6th game. It's not nearly as opaque as Dominions -- most things have tooltips and/or can be right-clicked for contextual info, and the important mechanical interactions can be gleaned from that. It is in fact taking me days to learn the basics of the game, but I skipped the tutorials, and I enjoy the learning process since it has a delicious sense of discovery about it.
Oh man, I LOVE the tactical combat. You definitely have to choose your fights, and the difficulty is very rogue-like in the way it can be all over the place, but I can't think of a similar type of game with a tighter set of tactical rules. I love the interaction between health, attack/defense, stamina, and morale, and the way special traits and abilities tweak things in simple ways. For instance, zombies and skeletons don't spend stamina, so they end up feeling mechanically more like zombies and skeletons than undead usually do in these kinds of games. Every stat point and special ability in this game really, really counts. The decisionmaking is excruciating. And the tactical AI is actually not terrible, which is amazing. I've seen enemy heroes use spells way more smartly than I would have expected, and I've witness behavior I've never seen in a tactical game -- like melee units moving to protect weak missile units when I attempt to flank. Also, you know you can reload previous turns, right? The "Into the past" option on the game menu will rewind 1 turn. My only real complaint is that the game doesn't track what you've retreated from in provinces and adventure sites, so if you forget what was there you have to move and retreat again to get that info. I would also prefer about a quarter the number of adventure sites per province, which would help each province have a more distinct character. And no, you don't suffer any penalty for retreating, as far as I can tell.
You do lose glory for rewinding. Not that I've figured out what glory does yet. I'll have to dig into it more. I've only played some basic battles and while my initial impressions were that the map is too small (at least relative to firing ranges and unit movement) it looks like there's much, much more to it than the early campaign lets on. Thanks for your thoughts about it.
I have no idea. I learned about it in a random forum. Maybe they were trolling, or maybe they were referring to XP, but a glory stat absolutely sounds like something this game would have.
Both of my heroes just dinged level 10, and I was pleased to discover that you get to choose a specialist class at that point. So each of the four base classes has four different specialist classes, which is awesome. Now I go to sleep.
Yeah, I just hit that right before finishing the tutorial. This game is crazy full of interesting choices.
Yeah, thanks all for the recommendations. There's definitely a lot of interesting things here. No idea if it will have any sort of staying power but at least for now it's fun to see how things go. I too forsook the tutorial after a while, it was definitely doling out information a bit too slowly. I started a couple of games on competent where I learned that I was not. Now have a game on skilled that is going much better. It's so painful not having wood or iron. I try to avoid using those resources as I've skyrocketed the price on them but everything needs them. It's also painful to expand at a certain point. I have a level 20 warrior who can sort of do it. If I give him enough cannon fodder I can push out and he'll be the only one who survives the battle, but that gets expensive.
So this game ate my weekend. Finished one game on competent on a large shard vs 6 AIs. The AIs definitely seem competent, they just had the problem that my warrior was levelling like a madman and eventually was mostly invulnerable. At the end (lvl 30) he had 100+ hp, about 10 resist vs everything and was hitting for 40 damage with his crushing blow hammer. Plus his specialization ability resurrects him once per battle. But the game stays interesting because there are some lategame dungeons/guards that are absolutely ridicolous. Worst dungeon I saw was 6 catapults 3 ballistas and 6 or so stone golems, which made mincemeat of my lategame army. And the final AI was guarded by summoners, which meant a hydra 3 wizards, 2 manticores and assorted giant spiders/slugsbasilisks (all lvl 10+). Needed to send in my level 22 wizard in to soften them up and even then my warrior only won with 4 or so units left and on his second life.
I think I am misunderstanding how the resources work. I captured a province with the horse resource. Then, I though that would allow me to construct the Inn in my Stronghold for zero cost.
It works like this: Every building has a base gold price and a list of required resources. If you have those resources you only pay the base gold price. If you don't have all resources you have to buy them at market prices, which can be seen in the statistics menu. So in your case you have to pay the base gold price, it cannot get any cheaper than that.
I played the ever-living hell out of this Saturday and Sunday. Definitely has that "one more turn" quality. I haven't got it all sorted out in my brain yet, so here are some off-the-top keyword thoughts... SCARCITY - I think that this is where the game gets the "just one more turn" addictive nature from. There's just so much you can do in any one turn since you'll likely only have one or two heroes. You can hire guards in just one province. You can explore just one place. You can build only one new building. There's only so much money to go around. You can have only so many troops in your army. You can have only so many spells in your spellbook. You simply can't do everything and great games restrict you from doing everything. At the same time, they don't restrict... CHOICE - There are so many choices in the game. So while time and money are scarce, you're not restricted by what you can do. There are dozens upon dozens of city upgrades. You can build a dozen or so buildings in the various provinces. There are countless territories to explore and it could take 20-30 turns just to fully explore one. So do you explore province A so they can expand or try to conquer province B? Do you hire troops in that unruly but valuable interior province or do you hire them on your border? Do you engage in battle or do you play it safe, protecting your valuable troops? It's not overwhelming, but it can get close with a large empire. Every turn presents you with important and difficult choices. Speaking of difficult... HARD - This game is very unforgiving. I've been playing TBS games for a long time and this may be one of the hardest I've ever played. I finally won last night - at a paltry 12% difficulty - and still think I accomplished something. There are so many different ways to lose. Jump into too many monster fights and you may bleed yourself dry. Lose your hero and you may be out of commissions for 3-4 valuable turns, never mind coming up with the gold to resurrect him. Expand too quickly and you can't control your empire. Expand too slowly and you'll get overwhelmed. This is definitely one of the hardest TBS games I've every played, but it's got that fun... TACTICAL COMBAT - It may look ugly, but the tactical combat is very challenging and quite enjoyable. Between the various units and the spells that can be cast, there are many choices. I've been best with a leveled-up warrior who can walk through virtually anything, though my ranger behind a protective wall was also extremely effective. I haven't had as much success with the wizard and haven't used the champion much at all. It's important to know thy enemy in this game - it's going to dictate exactly how you play any given combat. If anything there's too much combat, but at least it's not a cakewalk. With all that said, I have some questions I'm hoping that some of you can help me with: 1. Is there any place on the web where I can get an English listing of the buildings and perhaps even a chart of what buildings are required to build what? For example, in one game I managed to build something that converted gems to gold, but I couldn't find it in another game. I know I can "plan" a building, but it still doesn't tell me what's coming down the pike. I feel blind when building stuff in my main city. 2. It seems that you're restricted to building only so many buildings in any given province. Where can I see the number of building "slots" in a province so I can plan my buildings better? For instance, I finally uncovered the dock (or shipyard or whatever it is), but couldn't build it anywhere on the coast - I guess I couldn't build anything else in those zones, but I have yet to find any place that shows me how many things I can build in a province? This one really bugs me. 3. I always have an overabundance of gems. Like thousands. I know some buildings and units use them, but not in the quantities that I end up generating. What am I missing about gems? I think I should be spending them on something, but I have no idea what. 4. Is it me, or is combat against another wizard like trying to catch an eel with your bare hands? I'm going from my province A to his province B, but he goes from B to A and so we don't fight. He takes A, I take B...and then we reverse and do the whole dance all over again. If I don't go to his province, then he can safely retreat. It would seem to me that someone could game the mechanics and stay alive almost indefinitely against a bigger, better force just by moving (and then retreating if your enemy doesn't move). 5. In my last game I couldn't make diplomatic contact with any of the other wizards. The menu option was always greyed out. Any idea why?
1. There is only russian at the moment, but i don't think it is something useful, u can always find relationships between different buildings via city interface. 2. You're restricted to three buildings per province. I think, that you can't build docks at small lakes, only near big seas. 3. Mostly all magic costs many gems. 4. I think you can build a fort in province, not sure about exact name of the building, and put some troops there so the AI will waste time sieging it and you can fight him there. 5. If there is only one of them it is permawar, can't think about anything else.
In addition to this: 2. You can demolish buildings in provinces. Useful if you don't need population growth enhancing stuff anymore and really need that dock. 3. In addition to magic, there is also a lategame Alchemist guild that converts magic to gold. Using the awesome mage troops is also a fairly effective gemsink. 5. You may have accidently clicked on the diplomacy icon during game creation thinking a menu would popup. This creates permawar mode if it is greyed out. Happened to me too.
Just to make sure... Only 3 buildings per province? Is that for all provinces? Or can you build more buildings in bigger ones?
