Disciples: Sacred Lands Gold

I love this game, the combat is simple and its a slow paced title. Unfortunately, the game is completely broken on Windows 11. It crashes to desktop and refuses to work. (SmartHeap error, CTD) I hope that in the future this becomes addressed.

Disciples is a good game. It's addictive, challenging, with enough possibilities to keep you in front of your computer a long time despite the fact that visually it's not bad but not so great after all. But at this price, it's must try for all turn-based strategy games fans !

I tried this on its own merit without a nostalgic eye. I've played Heroes of Might and Magic I - VI, Age of Wonders II Shadow Magic, Eador, and most other fantasy strategy game with a light 4X element out there. This one unfortunately is one of the worse I've played: - Slow battle animations that can't be sped up, no auto or quick combat. - You're limited to the units of your own race, no neutrals joining you or recruiting from captured castles. Feels lacking in variety. - It's somewhat exciting initially to level up your troops, but once they're level 2 or 3 they stop upgrading, not even incremental improvements like Age of Wonders and Eador let you do. At least in Hero your stacks grow bigger. - Only two slots to equip artifacts, and you have to level up a hero once (very slow) to use one category of item, say, banners. I really missed the excitement of finding an artifact in Heroes, AoW or Eador and being able to use it immediately. - Besides your capital, captured towns are not very cool, they're basically healing/recruit spots and don't even give income. - Map while ok doesn't have the same variety of stuff to find as Heroes or AoW, no events like Eador either. - Combat lacks tactical depth compared to other games. - The mechanic of specials heroes to terraform the land and perform sabotage, while initially intriguing, quickly become tiresome with these no-name disposable heroes that you have to shuffle around one at a time. The game doesn't even remember your unit's path if you reload from a save! - Unlike Heroes, the random number generator doesn't guarantee that you'll get the same action if you reload and retry. This pushes you to abuse quicksave to get actions like poisoning powerful armies with a low % chance of success to work - something that thankfully doesn't work in Heroes. - The whole poisoning thing is tedious and a bad substitute for having encounters on the map that newer heroes can gain XP from.

Although my experience with DosBox gog games have been very good, this one is an old XP game and runs very poorly on Vista and up. Wasted a lot of time configuring it to get it to run only to have it only work in a tiny part of my monitor. If windowed mode worked it might be ok, but it's too small to use for an extended period of time.

I really like this game but it crashes ALL THE TIME even after trying all the "solutions" i found in the support forums. I would've easly given it a 4 if it wasn't for the crashing.