You can force it to play in a window by right-clicking the icon, going into Properties, and changing the "f" on the end of the shortcut to a "w" (without the quotes). Alternately, change your video card settings to eliminate scaling. Then you can play it fullscreen with black borders.
Man... I do *not* get how this game is supposed to work. Your income doesn't seem sufficient to do *anything*. I can take 1 province, then wait like 5 turns to replace the troops I lost. And that's assuming I don't buy any buildings or garrison troops. If I do build my infrastructure, then I can't replace lost troops, so my expansion comes to a standstill. And there doesn't seem to be a way to keep my shitty troops alive. If I use the cheapest troops, they *all* die every battle. If I use the mid-tier troops (swordsmen, pikemen, etc.), then only half die... but it takes forever to replace 'em. In theory I should love this game, but the cost/income ratio seems completely fubarred.
I'm no master or anything, but I've figured out that you need to build up infrastructure to keep the population happy in the outside holdings. Building pubs/taverns helps keep the masses happy, for the most part. Also, I've tried plundering things into oblivion, but the game begins to crash.
In case they arent - you could just launch a drone and murder their families, i think i heard Obama sign the aproppriate law recently, that'll show'em ! 1) Dont lose troops. Dont just buy first things available, build the chain up to pikemen/swordsmen. For you it seems pikemen would work better, as they have first strike meaning weaker enemies will be afraid to attack them, and you can pick your targets at your leisure. 2) Building infrastructure only works in the long-term focus. For short term gain clear easy sights like skeleton-infested towers and the like, it usually gives 100-200 gold a pop. 3) Choosing evil answers in random events helps quite alot if you happen to get the right ones. 4) Dont capture swamps if you can afford to, they give almost no gold, but instead syphon gold off of you as goblins (and orcs and i think barbarians) add to corruption meter. Instead get your demesne buildings that will allow you to build mines, windmills, and sawmills. The next step is capturing strategic resources and building things that increase your income based off of those.
Ah hah! This was the culprit; I've consistently been Master of the Swamps in my games so far. Thanks a bunch! BTW... when building descriptions say "Improve X in your demesne", does that apply to your entire realm, or just your home province? (i.e. the province with the stronghold in it)
The advantage of swamps is that they offer more gem income and magic-oriented strategic resources. So if you're using a magic strategy, you will need swamps. But if not, yeah, focus on producing gold.
How do you handle independent towns that are of another race? I conquered some dwarves yesterday, and they hated me. I couldn't do anything about it but put down their revolutions. Then I tried to pillage them into nothing, but the game began to crash every time I tried. I had maybe 6-8 of the smaller villages around my town conquered when the opposition showed up. They pretty much steamrolled me.
General cash tips: Eador isn't a game where you build up a chain of ever-increasing productivity in your towns like Civ, Mark M. Instead, it's full of loot pinatas that you need to smash. It's a wargame, not a empire builder. If your choice is between constructing a building and refilling your army, refill your army -- spears or barbarians are cheap (militia and slingers are pretty much worthless as far as I can tell) and should be enough to power through some ugly victories to get you the money you need to pay the exorbitant prices for wood/ore/mandrake to get a stack of tier-1.5 units (swords/crossbows/pikes/healers or bows/shaman) and enough XP for your hero to beat up the next tier of provinces, which hopefully have at least two of wood/ore/horses/mandrake. Once you get a few victories under your belt, consider cashing in the rewards to buy the building that unlocks the cash building for whichever of plains/hills/forest you have the most of. Five gold per turn per province for those gets relevant in a hurry. Don't be afraid to "waste" a few turns here and there exploring your provinces. A lot of the time you don't have a great move -- the independents are too strong to take on, or your army needs to heal, or you're waiting for a turn or two's worth of income to buy something important -- and you need something to do. You're going to want to explore your provinces to increase their pop cap eventually anyway, so don't worry that you're "wasting" turns. Plus, you'll turn up all kinds of interesting things: ruins to smash for XP and loot, shops to buy special items (and even get quests from!), straight-up cash, and more. Plus plus, your heroes get XP for the act of exploring itself. On that note, the game becomes much easier to get rolling once you get a feel for which neutral stacks you can take on. First-tier monster camps like ruined towers full of brigands, cemeteries of undead, ruins with orcs and goblins, and the like are the free money and XP that you need. Hunt them down! They're like caves of skeletons in MOM but way more relevant and necessary to your cash flow. Don't start with a wizard. They're pretty much turrrrrrrrrible until you get higher-tier spells either through scrolls or guilds. I'm sure there are starts where wizard mains are great, but they're definitely not recommended for beginners. Scouts and warriors are the easiest IMO, though my brother swears by commanders. Re: rebellions and angry populations -- Guards will usually take care of the first rebellion. Have a hero hang out there when the second is coming, and guards should be back to full strength for the third. Once you unlock some more buildings you can pacify them more permanently, but in the meantime learning to deal with rebels is pretty key. I love this game so much. It's definitely got some blind spots, and maps do get repetitive as noted upthread, but it's got a lot to recommend it beyond that. I've never gotten such a kick out of being an evil overlord. Also, yeah, being evil is freaking awesome. Robbing innocent traders of their money, executing malcontents, selling virgins -- my war machine must feed!
Beyond pillage them into nothing? Personally, I say "fuck 'em" and build a great guard unit in those areas (not a guard tower, just a great unit). Every 10 turns or so they try to have an uprising, die horribly to my guards and go back to seething again.
Another early game troop type that seems to work really well are brigands. They're *super* cheap, and pretty damn tough. Plus the buildings that give you brigands also give you raw income, which is pretty nice. I had a commander hero that carried nothing but brigands. Purchase 7 or 8 of 'em, go fight, and then come back & refill when their numbers have dwindled. Just make sure to not loiter in a high-income province with the hero that's using them; they reduce tax income. I've been using garrison troops to calm the populace down, and it's been working pretty well. The garrison you get after the pikeman building reduces unrest by 2, but I've been using the one you get after the swordsman, which reduces unrest by 3. The swordsman garrison requires you to spend a lot more money upfront buying buildings, though. Later on I eventually use the pacifying effect of inns/taverns.
Yeah I tried inns/taverns, but it wasn't enough to make them happy. Maybe my guard units just sucked.
I got a schematic once for one chance to build an Ancient Shrine that improved population mood by 5 (!) among other things. That shut the elves up pretty good. Remember that it's perfectly fine to have provinces that rebel from time to time, though. As far as I can tell you're not supposed to really be able to opt out of the mechanic like you would in a more traditional 4X like MoM or Civ. Are you really that upset about the free XP for your heroes?
Actually, using the swordsman garrison + upgraded inns/taverns, all my provinces are completely peaceful. I have orcish, goblin, dwarvish, and lizardman provinces all pacified. I do have a bunch of buildings that improve happiness in my demesne. Maybe those do affect your entire realm after all? *shrug* Documentation is not this game's strong suit.
Heh, I just found this for my Warrior: Crushing Blow lets you spend Stamina for extra damage. Stunning Blow reduces the target's Stamina. I stopped buying troops for him because even Knights kept dying to big stuff like Giants and Stone Giants, and he doesn't really need them. His Resistance is a little lower than I like, and magic attackers like Unicorns can be rough. I'm still looking for better armor, and he doesn't have any rings yet, but he's a certified juggernaut.
Yeah warrior is easymode. Especially if you skill him up to dark knight and get level 3 concentration. Just sit in the top left corner and cast buffs all day and the only things that are remotely dangerous are lvl 4 units, giant spiders and mass slugs. Here is mine in buffmode. The only thing that he could not manage was 4 dragons at once on master level.
Intellectually, I know that this game gets repetitive in the battles and has some balance issues with troop types and the map generator can royally screw you and sometimes you get RNG'd right in the pooper, but... God damn, if this isn't the best fantasy kingdom simulator since MoM. You know how Fallen Enchantress and Majesty 2 have very little of that hard-to-quantify "soul" quality that sells the fantasy and really puts you in the shoes of the evil overlord or benevolent ruler? Eador has all of it. All of it. Dumb things like letting me choose to "execute the deputy for allowing such a thing" when harpies raid my province even though it does nothing -- the next description was along the lines of "well, you killed him for his incompetence, but the harpy problem is still here" -- is the kind of touch that a lot of games could learn from. Also, the writing itself is not awful. That helps. Also also, goddamn Guardsmen are badasses. Fully armed and operational battlestations that can only very slowly crawl across the battlefield, but absorb sooooooooo much damage and counterattack entire armies into submission. Damn I love these guys.
Getting rid of stacked troops for me is the major improvement this game offers on the battle side over HoMM or King's Bounty. At some point you're trying to work out whether or not 17 titans is better or worse than 1,352 faeries or what will happen if 86 beholders shoots 138 dwarves and your brain glazes over because we've replaced strategery with spreadsheet logistics. With Eador you get a sense of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the units pretty quickly, and can move on to using them effectively instead of crunching hypotheticals.
Totally agree, can't stop playing. I think that executing the deputy does have an in game effect, though, it's just not transparent. It moves you closer to evil, and your alignment does things like encourage certain events and open up negotiating possibilities with other races. Also, it's clear that some event decisions that seem incidental are links in an event chain, increasing the chance for other events to pop up later. Overall, the event system could use some work (greater event variety, lower overall chance of events), but is still is the richest of any game I can think of, and leads to a world that feels dynamic and alive despite its relatively static trappings. There are one-off, random things that can occur regardless of context, but more often than not events are caused by some in-game element or variable. If you have an uncleared spider lair in a province, you'll get the spider-related events; uncleared troll lairs will spawn troll raids; uncleared bandit lairs will trigger bandit ambushes. Unconquered NPC Human, Orc and Barbarian provinces will periodically attack neighboring provinces. If you say no to torturing your subjects at the behest of the Inquisition, the Inquisition may show up on your doorstep. I didn't expect that! I also love that enemy NPC units aren't just base, level 0 units; they can be levelled anywhere from 0 to 20, depending on how far out from the demesne you find them, with all of the same level-up traits your own units might have. Encountering a Skeleton that has 3 moves instead of 2, or an Archer with Double Shot, can force you to reevaluate tactics that might otherwise get stale. It all goes a long way toward making the world more "believable."
I always, always disliked that about the HoMM games, and learned to love HoMM II and III despite that problem. Eador gets it right!
Here's how the resources work. Look at a unit or building - notice how, in addition to the price in gold and gems, there's a series of icons for resources? For example, a Crossbowman has a wood icon and an iron icon. If you go to the statistics screen for your kingdom, you'll see a list of prices for each resource. The prices fluctuate over time and can change with random events. When you buy a unit or build a building, if you DO NOT have a source of that resource somewhere in your kingdom, you will have to pay the price to buy it, once for each time the icon appears. So if there are 3 horse icons in the price of a building, you don't have horses, and the current going rate is 30 gold, you will pay an extra 90 gold to construct it above and beyond the base gold price. The resource icons will be highlighted in red if you have to pay money for that kind of resource. If you DO have access to the resource, you pay nothing. The price of the resource simply ceases to matter to you - there are some buildings that will give more income if you have access to a resource, but you won't get any more or less gold if the market price goes up or down. You only need one copy of a resource. You don't need to control 3 plains with horses in order to build a building that has 3 horse icons; it just means that you would pay the going rate times 3 if you didn't have any horses at all. That one plains province is an infinite well of horses, stacked 70 high in serried ranks, waiting for your stablehands to take them away. You will never run out. Pretty much everything requires at least one special resource, except for the weakest tier-1 unit that exist specifically to serve as cheap cannon fodder even without resources. That means you should regard your resources as a list of things you get a huge discount for building. Got horses? Cheap cavalry. Got iron? Cheap heavy infantry. Wood? Archers are a dime a dozen to you now. You will still build things that require horses, iron, and wood even if you don't have any of those resources at all, because those resources are very common requirements, but you save big stacks of gold by focusing on paths covered mainly by your resources.
Surely you jest. There's nothing more empowering than encountering 3333 skeletons and whipping out your 55 black dragons. Nothing, I say!
The event chains remind me of Castles (one of the best games EVAR) back in the day. Really wish something with castle design that detailed would be created today. The only gripe I have so far with Eador is...everything is a village. I'm not sure I dig that.
One additional note here: It's not enough to control the province a resource is in. If that resource is red on the main map, you'll have to send a hero to clear out the resource location before it actually gets counted, and these fights are pretty hard.
So I won a game on beginner, and then a game on skilled, but I have been having a hard time getting off the ground om skilled- the starter mobs (eg 2 skels and 2 zombies or 5 goblins) that I could take before are wiping me out. I tried my preferred mage+wand starter. no luck twice, then the warrior plus swordsmen and while that group won a fight or two I went broke looking for another fighter he could win.
I tried so hard, I really did, but... Militia are utterly and forever dead to me. Can't...kill...anything.
Yeah, about the only use I've found for militia is as fodder to get my undead army started. Slingers, on the other hand... I have a feeling that there might be quite a lot of life left in those suckers. I was looking at the various tier 1 archer units, and I noticed that slingers have almost the exact same offensive stats as the other 2 ranged units at a mere fraction of the cost. Granted, crossbowmen have the special ability where enemies' defensive values are halved, but bowmen don't have that advantage. It seems like bowmens' only advantage is their range, which really isn't that useful. As I dig deeper into this game, one thing I'm noticing (which might prove to be wrong) is that there seem to be a fair number of completely useless units. Militia are a good example: they really don't seem to any function at all, except as a trap for new players to waste their money on them trying to get to work. Several of the options for province guards seem to fall into the same category. I'm not sure I like that. A mark of good game design is that all options available to the player have some use in certain situations as long as the player knows what he/she is doing.
