Eador: Genesis

Truly, a fun game. I consider myself a bit jaded as a strategy/war gamer, but Eador was immediately likeable. The graphics didn't put me off one bit. The campaign with the Tutorial option will get you going quite quickly, and the game mechanics are generally well-thought out using standard RPG conventions. The "var" folder also contains text files that are moddable so you can adjust the difficulty and other things to your liking. And yes, there really is that great "one more turn" feeling when playing the game. Thanks GOG for bringing this inexpensive gem to our attention.

For your own health, relationships with your family and friends, and employment I hope you are turned off by the graphics of this game and never try it. Otherwise, you are doomed! Several parts to this game make it especially good. - Its pretty balanced, this isn't a lot of useless stuff in it, or at least there isn't anywhere as much useless stuff as similar games I have played. Its also hard, and punishes you for making stupid mistakes. - The roguelike lite save system. The game autosaves for you and lets you go back one turn for a point penalty and reset the map for a point penalty. Thats it. I like this because often in these types of game I get obsessed with doing everything perfectly, and continuously reload saves. - The campaign is setup so that you have to conquer many smaller worlds to win. Every world you start anew with a hero. This places the emphasis on the early and mid game battle to grow powerful thats so much fun in these kinds of games, and reduces the emphasis on the flatlining difficulty curve that happens once you get over the mid-game hump (and becomes boring fast).

I really recommend this Great Game! And those who want to make the game even better and more difficult, I recommend the "New Horizons" mod. With it, the game becomes even more interesting, but it is for "experts" in this game.

Forget about the sequels, you don't need them, this is the superior experience of Eador.

Although the game is similar to AoW, HoMM it falls short in several perspectives. I found the overall story arc rather boring to the end that I wished they would have left it out. For a strategy game this is not the most important aspect but a feature badly implemented might even be worse than no feature at all. Also the combats get quickly repetitive and boring. I ended up using quick combat all the time. Basically you constantly hire new troops and fight battles to increase the number of provinces. The best aspect of the game is optimizing the access to the best units. It's difficult to pinpoint really but I found AoW or HoMM, which also contain a lot of grinding, much more fascinating. Probably Eador is very rich but it isn't very appealing - so only for very hard core fans.