Great job on this, Snowblind. This game smokes HOMM and Age of Wonders. It's one of the best games I've played in years, totally bucks the trend of modern gaming catering to "accessibility" and has some real depth and consequential choices. Marvelous.

Played only a few of the beginner missions, then went to sandbox campaign, huge or colossus, average everything else.

I'm beginner on turn 212 against 2 beginners.
I have 17 provinces with sporadic building as I learn the building tree, probably nowhere near "optimal", but I'm poking along learning the surprisingly good AI schemes on the tactical maps. 87 Victories 4 defeats, 6 resurrections . Gold is +161 and gems are +32. I only have 2 provinces with guards.

I have a level 21 Scout, a level 6 Mage, and a level 15 warrior. My home province is still developing, I intend to level up the magic buildings, level up the mage into something powerful and begin clearing out the province location encounters.

I started on a small (14 province) island, and have just expanded onto a new body of land. I've got my warrior and mage at the newly built arena while my scout leads the expansion. Have yet to encounter my opppents, don't really care to right now.

How does this look at a glance? Am I on a path to total destruction, or is my game feasible?
Should I recruit another hero or 2 or concentrate on getting exp for my Tier 1 units? Haven't built for many Tier 2 units yet.

Is there a game manual in Engrish anywhere? I had no luck with Google. Building charts would also be lovely, as would some quick reference cards for units.

Is it worth the trouble it seems to be to track down artifact sets?

I have a strong urge to buy MoTB but it got slammed pretty hard in the review, are they accurate in presenting it as a worse game? Don't give a fig for visuals at this point.

Is there a certain early game build strategy that's recommended?

More later as I think of them.

Looks ok I guess, you are jumping in head first, I learned the game with the campaign, which is very easy and small scale in the beginning. I would not recruit more heroes now, just level them up. You could kill single dragons with your scout, just take a lot of cannonfodder with you, hide behind it and let the dragon kill that, while you shoot at it.

I don't think there is a manual, but you can right click most things and there are extensive explanations. The campaign features a tutorial of sorts in the first few missions where some concepts are explained. I think Broken World has a manual, which would mostly apply, I am pretty sure it can be downloaded for everyone somewhere.

Sets are a bit of fun, but often you are better off with other items.

I am not getting Broken World, not enough new features or improvements for me, and the slower animations and turn waiting times really turn me off.

There are many strategies for early build orders, some go for shops to get items for their warrior, some go straight for T2 units,some never bother with anything but T1 units and get higher units from the monstrologists guild, some get spells.
Me I usually start with Mage, go for swordsmen, healers and then 1 or 2 mages guilds. But on higher difficulties (where you start with less money) its safer to build barbarians instead of the expensive swordsmen.

Oh and Genesis was only translated by Snowbird, but the game itself was made by one guy, Alexey Bokulev.

The earliest strategy for absolute beginners is to go solo. With the only class that is capable of soloing all the game - warrior lvl 5+.

You should hire either thugs or thieves, then attack simple provinces. Build Smith as soon possible to have a chainmail.Build Library and Magic guild to have Astral Energy and Magic Armor as soon as possible

1) Build Tavern and hire either Thugs or Thieves, they will help you to level up your warrior to lvl 5. They will die injure the enemy and warrior will finish the enemy and get all gold and exp
2) Build Forge to have access to chainmail
3) Build LIbrary - School of Sorcery and School of WIzardry - Astral Energy and Magic armor are your best friends, even at the final stages of the game.
4) After reaching lvl 5 you can and must go solo, it's cheaper and a lot more fun.
5) Build a Plate armory. to have a plate armor early on.
6) HIre a second hero as fast as you can. Mages are beast at the end of the game. so are commanders. Scouts are best for scouting provinces(obviously), finding treasures and if the become Snipers they will be the guys that kill strong enemies in the first few rounds of combat.

Thanks guys,


Is there any effect on increasing a skill past level 5? (ie I level up and one of the choices is already at level 5, skip it?)

Are you are reffering to hero masteries? Level 5 is the maximum and you can't level up further. level 5 mastery options will only show up at 15 level of Hero.
Also only pure classes can upgrade masteries to level 5, Dual clasess only to level 3.

Also check out my post #28 here
http://www.snowbirdgames.com/forum/index.php?threads/eador-genesis-%E2%80%94-advice-for-beginners.71/page-2

It is about masteries and item properties.

Drakon, эта стратегия довольно кривая для новичка, т.к. он не знает всех юнитов и не сможет оценить силу противника. Thug - это громила, разбои - brigands. Имхо, ты слишком безапелляционно пишешь.

On topic: 1)Set of basilisk can become mandatory until you could be able to get cloak of phoenix(both give poison immunity). AI loves to put "Monsters" guards, where each unit have 3-5 poison. Other than that, there is no gamechanging sets.

2)MoTBW slower than Genesis by default, and you can increase Genesis's speed by 3-5 times in .cfg file on top of that. I hear review "I could finish whole tutorial in Genesis in the same time as I could finish 2 battles in motbw tutorial".

UI in motbw, lets say, "for fans". For 1 player, which likes it, there are 5-7 dislikes.

Content-wise there is almost no difference.

3) http://www.gog.com/forum/eador_series/army_building_strategy

Новичок сможет узнать всех юнитов только в бою, при самых разных раскладах. Говорить, что стратегия кривая странно, потому что новичок учась, использует стратегии еще более кривые. Слишком безапелляционно? Я пишу исходя из собственного опыта. Соло Воин дешевле и позволяет сэкономить кристаллы для будущих героев. Я на эксперте очень быстро выбивал почти все круги даже в НГ(горадо быстрее и дешевле любого другого класса). В любом случае это моя точка зрения, которая для меня работает.

Thanks to Gremlion, I messed up some unit names. There are Brigands and Thieves available at the start not Thugs.

Yep, that's what I was talking about. Kind of annoying when then only masteries you can chose from you either don't want or already at level 5 though.


How do you dual class?

At level 10 you'll recevie a choice of advancing your class, There are 4 choices for each class. The most left choice is single class. Others are mixes with different other hero classes. Example
Warrior
lvl 10 can become

Berserker(pure warrior class), Slayer(warrior+Scout class), Holy Knight(warrior + commander), Death Knight

Check out this post, I've created a chart with all Warrior class progression here
http://eador.com/B2/viewtopic.php?p=148739#148739

Interesting, could you explain what to do in the .cfg to speed up genesis.

yeah, i know, i'm just lazy here. i could try it myself but, well, i've modded a game once, even reverse engineered stuff wasting month' of my life. That tought me one thing: Asking/telling people stuff is faster than try and error.

Decrease "Refresh delay" and "Sleep time". I use 20 and 25 instead of default 40 and 50.
While you at it, set Lake ships to 1.

It drains a bit of enemy stamina. Can be effective in mage/archer encounters. This is my favourite diversion works best on low stamina units.

False Alarm causes the enemy units to start the battle with their stamina partially depleted.

Raise Panic does the same thing for morale.

Poison Water Supply does not cause them to start with lower health. Instead, it applies a poison DoT to them at the start of the battle, which can take a few turns to have full effect.



False Alarm is the only one that is consistently useful. The poison effect is too weak to help much, and there also a much wider range of things immune to it (or that have regeneration to effectively negate it), and raising a panic is similarly unreliable between immunities and how quickly morale can shift up and down during the battle. That said, there are a few enemies with stamina much higher than their morale, and raising a panic can be helpful against those when combined with morale-lowering spells.

False alarm on high levels become obsolete, because you start to win initiative, and opponent with second turn regain stamina like after Rest(units with meditation can regain ammo if you burned ammo on first turn). Really useful during the first few levels.

Raise panic is extremely effective, if you pair it with Necromancy Tier 2 ritual and necromancy T1 spell(Fear. doesn't decrease karma). This is win button against guard with 3 war elephants.

Poison - somewhat useful against AI with mass healers. they would heal this 1 damage each turn.