Eador: Genesis

I have never played a strategy game that was as rewarding, challenging, unforgiving, unique, thoughtful, and downright engrossing as Eador. It's almost in a class of its own, combining so many genres of games I absolutely adore. Seamlessly, then bringing them to a whole new level. You really, truly feel like you're ruling over a nearly living, breathing province. New events pop up that you've never seen before. You have to constantly adapt your strategies to new conditions. Every single move you make counts, no more saving, failing, reloading, and trying again without consequence. Makes everything much more thrilling. Another interesting thing about this game is how often what you are trying to accomplish shifts. As you progress the scope of the game increases and you realize more and more the breadth of what you're doing. Anyone who loves strategy, turn-based, fantasy, role-playing, and civilization-building has to buy this game. You're missing way too much by passing it up.

If you like turn-based-strategy games such as Heroes of Might & Magic or Age of Wonders you'll feel right at home with this game. But it's not nearly the same caliber as those games, and you'll likely be frustrated by its limited graphics and awkward interface. One major limitation is that it does not provide multiple saved games so you can't easily go back and try a different strategy. A further limitation is the lack of any manual or documentation.

If you like HOMM, Masters of Magic and Age of Wonders, you're likely to enjoy this game also. Prepare to be frustrated though as Eador offers no way to save your game. It saves itself after every turn or when you exit the game. The world of Eador has been shattered into shards that you must conquer and add to your world. Every Shard is a different map that consists of provinces. Build up your castle, explore provinces with your heroes, do quests and ultimately win the shard by defeating the enemy lord (or lords) that are on the same Shard. Winning a shard usually gives you new buildings and units that you can use on your next shard-invasions. The difficulty is rather hard. I managed to conquer 12 shards at a beginner level (and this took hours) until a AI Creator attacked my world (I don't know how he did that). The AI was suddenly at expert level and I made few fatal errors early in the battle that eventually cost me my world and the entire campaign was over. These are the moments when you really miss the save/Load option... Well, I'll probably give it another try later on..

Well, there's nothing glaringly wrong with it, I suppose. It's a heroes-of-might-and-magic/ age-of-wonders - like game (a little more like the latter, I think). The graphics, while basic, actually look pretty good, though be aware that there is no animation whatsoever, only static tiles. But playing it feels rather a lot like a chore. It's full of more-or-less random events, which often repeat themselves since there aren't a whole lot of them. It dispenses with free movement in favour of having heroes and their armies occupy a province and slightly-abstractly "explore" it by clicking the appropriate button. Although there are a lot of units, you only really get one faction to play, so far as I can see (there are apparently ways to access to units of other races, but your stronghold is always a human keep). And the campaign story is horrible (par for the course for this kind of game, but I think this one is worse than most). Suffers a bit from problems that Age of Wonders has, as well; heroes are a bit overpowered, and there's really no reason to use weaker units since you're limited to a fairly small number of units in an army (and you can't combine adjacent armies like in AoW either). So in summary, not terrible, but didn't sustain my interest beyond a few hours, and I doubt I'll go back to it.

GOG was giving Eador away for free during some promotion, so I wasted no time grabbing it. Why not right? I consider Lords of the Realm 2 one of the best games ever made, and while this is clearly not the same game, I found myself getting some of the same sorts of enjoyments while playing Eador. This game has plenty of "general" reviews, so I think I'll tailor mine specifically to LOTR2 fans that should give this one a try. It takes time to move around the world capturing regions, and just like LOTR2 a significant amount of customization goes in to keeping their morale, defenses, and production high. Eador uses heroes to move around the board to capture and interact with the regions, very similar to how you would use armies in LOTR2. The same ideas of customizing your army now take the form of choosing the weapons, armor, spells, and supporting soldiers the heroes take with them as they go. I will say that there are more ways to customize your heroes than LOTR2 had when customizing armies. Combat in LOTR2 was never its strongest feature, but Eador has taken a much simpler and (arguably) better approach. The hero and supporting troops become pieces on a hexagon board, moving and attacking in their own way. Battles feel much more calculated and in control, and gone are the frustrating times when your LOTR2 troops ignore your commands and royally mess things up. In LOTR2, once you finally had your regions all at top morale and production, you could run out of important decisions to make and enter in to the "mop-up" stage of the game where any idiot could win and you just had to grind away at finishing the enemy off. I am happy to say that my experiences with Eador, thus far, seem to show the game trying to stop that from happening. It seems to me that as the game goes on into the "late game", events that lower morale and production are stronger and more frequent. I highly recommend this game to anyone who enjoys turn-based strategy games.