Eador: Genesis

A lot of the other reviewers have touched on the depth and complexities of the game. I can say that I agree with many of the comments on how much long term fun you can have with the turn based tactics and the development of your heroes, armies and cities. Even hundreds of turns in, you may not have your original stronghold 100% developed. The only thing keeping me from giving this a rating of 5/5 is one glaring problem. There is no manual save function whatsoever. The game allows you to revert to one turn prior and that is it. Yes, you can go into the folder location and make a copy of the save folder. However, that is tedious and nonsensical. Not since Atari have I missed save functions so much. Although bugs are pretty rare, if you are 200 turns in and your save breaks, you will sorely regret it if you don't back up your saves periodically. Even with the individual turn saves issue that you can bypass if you want to tab out of the game occasionally, there is one other facet of this non-save design that can be infuriating. Individual battles cannot be restarted. Your only choice is to surrender and use the revert one turn feature. In a game about positioning and tactics, there is almost no ability to experiment with tactics or learn from your mistakes and use new knowledge in the same battle. At the beginning of a campaign, this too can be worked around by using the revert one turn feature. However, when you have 4 or more heroes/armies on the map, each with the potential for having a battle each turn, reverting after 3 battles because the fourth went wrong can be very frustrating. I know it's a design feature, but it is really insane to me in a tactical / strategy / turn-based game such as this to have no battle restart / reset option and to have no built in save function. As I said, this isn't the Atari system from the '80's. I could overlook the lack of turn saves if only the battle restarts were available.

Eador is one of the better games on GoG at heart, but some design choices bloat the amount of time maps should take by a factor of 2-4 while pigeonholing the player into tier-climbing strategies; this probably worsens at higher difficulties. * Tier-climbing and bottlenecks: There is no such thing as a viable "Zerg rush" strategy. Each player will typically hire a single hero unit on Turn 1, and only heroes are mobile; escalating costs prevent you from buying more early. Each hero can only hire so many troops, and heroes take time and resources to respawn. It is literally impossible to peck at a territory with repeated waves to wear them down, both because you may do 0-1 damage per hit, and because you do not have the option to retreat for reinforcements. Power leveling is strictly necessary. * Random events happen way too often, and there aren't enough different ones. You will quite often see the same event 6-10 times playing through a single map. There should be a wider variety, and they should happen much less often. Having the same 5 events every turn gets a bit tedious. * The restriction of only being able to build one building per turn forces every turn to drag out the game. Simultaneous constructions that take a while to complete would be more streamlined.

I have a lot of mixed feelings on this game. For one, it's a time vampire. It's all too easy to spend hour after hour on a single shard, trying to defeat the local lords. It gets a lot worse when you have to fight other masters on the larger maps. I don't mind the difficulty of the learning curve. Some things you just have to learn by dying. One thing I really like is how, as you conquer shards, you unlock the abilities to build new buildings, recruit new soldiers, learn more spells, etc. What I DON'T like is the difficulty settings themselves. I'm playing on beginner because I'm already spending five or six hours on a single shard, and I don't really want the hassle and grind of playing on hard levels. What's frustrating is, after spending six freaking hours attacking a shard, you finally get to the enemy's demesne, kill the hero and the army defending it and launch a siege. Two turns later, another hero shows up...and he has minotaurs in his army? That's like a level four soldier, but I can only recruit level two...I mean, what the hell? I was so furious, I rage-quit. I'm playing on beginner difficulty. I don't mind a challenge, but to have a beginner opponent with army units I won't be able to create until maybe ten or fifteen shards down the line? Hardly seems appropriate for beginner level. To be fair, this doesn't break the game. I still could win - if I resurrect my hero six turns later, rebuild my army and have my other two heroes conquer their way back to his demesne along with the third once he's resurrected. But after spending six hours on a single shard, the last thing I want to do is spend three more getting back to the point where I can win. It's a good game, but the difficulty level is way too imbalanced.

The game does not work on Win 7 64bit. To make it work, you have to create a custom power plan in the control panel that you have to activate before starting the game, also have to deactivate after you stop playing. This is ridiculous and even more ridiculous is that this hasnt been patched up by now. Im definitely not going to fiddle with the power options all the time for the sake of playing a game since this is not a good solution. Last but not least, GoG should be more careful with the description of the games they sell, this should not be sold as a game working on win 7.

Eador seems like what one wants in a 4x. Lots to do/explore deep build trees, units, empire management. The problem however are significant, documentation is not adequate for any but the most determined TBS fan. This along with solid difficulty makes the learning curve very steep. In addition mandating iron man play is cruel especially with a campaign that can take a hundred hours bugs that can ruin your save file. Overall an ok game that the hard-core will love and will brutalize the more casual players.