Eador: Imperium (and really, all of the series) is a great turn-based strategy game. Yes, there can be some tedious hard times if you are low on gold. And yes, there is some grinding involved. Also, if you get bored by very similiar battles over and over, you might don't like it. (The AI most of the tme makes a terrible job if you choose auto combat. You usually loose a unit or more you wouldn't have lost if you had done it all by yourself.) I enjoy the battles, they remind me of chess and HoMM and AoW and the kind. That set aside, it is a wonderful game with lots of stuff to build and discover. I gather, lot of the negative or mediocre ratings are because of the frequent crashes the game suffered, when in first came out. There have been a lot of patches that aimed at these issues. The game is much more stable now. I had some crashes, but after hours of gameplay, and they are not a big issue because of the autosave feature.
