Dragoness plays similar to HoMM, except town upgrades only occur between missions (which can be farmed for resources to an extent, hence the roguelite aspect). In mission, enemies don't move around, but you are limited by movement and food. If you manage it well, there's usually enough time to do everything on a map. Units don't stack, so no more 1 shot wonder + 4 expendable meatshields, but you have 6 slots and two of the same rank/type can be merged to make a stronger one. More mechanics and unit types unlock with later missions. The hero character themselves levels up similar to HoMM or King's Bounty and learns spells or passive skills, but the hero and army do not transfer between missions. Each mission has an option of 2 or 3 randomly generated skillsets to choose from, and lets you select some units to start each mission with, both of which which can be further boosted by buildings in the town. Combat takes place on a 12x12 grid, with a decent balance between archers, melee, and caster/support units. Story is there but there's not much to it. Overall fun and worthwhile if you like strategy RPGs or HoMM like games in general.
TL;DR very good, slightly simplified Dwarf Fortress-like, just like the words I wrote in the title. KeeperRL is like Dwarf Fortress with less complicated economy/survival mechanics and a focus on conquest. In the default mode, you start with one keeper (if he dies, you lose, and no save scumming) and a few easily-replaceable workers. You still have to get gold, wood, several tiers of ore, and a lot of equipment for each fighting unit you hire, but gold is obtained by raiding and killing enemy strongholds, defending against attacks, or digging for it--you can dig infinitely up a mountain, or down as in Dwarf Fortress. There's no economy, though there are shops you can discover and buy (or pillage) various items from. Survival is less about meeting food/water needs and more about building and upgrading to accommodate the units you want, so that your zombies and goblins can appreciate the carpeting; if they don't have carpeting to appreciate, they won't fight as well. You also level your Keeper, separately from combat levels (which increase a unit's base stats), and learn, in any order you choose, 19 or 20 different skills which allow more magic or new buildings to be built, which in turn let you recruit better units or craft better gear. These levels are gained only when you fully conquer an area on the map or defend against an attack. There are also multiple modes which play completely differently; I've described just the default mode. You can be a necromancer, or an adventurer with no base, and more, as well as download other players' dungeons and try to raid them. The UI is somewhat complex at first, but also simpler than Dwarf Fortress, and the tutorial explains it pretty well. Google answered most other questions I had. Overall have gotten a lot of time out of it and still enjoying a lot.
Similar to Fantasy General, Fantasy Wars is a turn-based SRPG that starts you off on a campaign with a few units, which gain experience/levels/abilities as they fight, and you get more both as the story progresses and you can buy them. Compared to Fantasy General, it's much harder, even on easy difficulty, and doesn't have research (you are granted access to more/higher unit types as the storyline progresses), you also get a lot less gold and it's much easier to lose your units, and except for heroes (regular units die permanently, heroes don't), so you can be handicapped if you win a mission but lose too many. Missions give extra rewards for completing them quickly, denoted by a gold, silver, or bronze cup. Silver or gold is usually required to get any extra unit or artifact that comes as a reward. There are three campaigns with some heroes/equipped gear/surviving units carried over from the first two to the third. The missions start out as simple conquer a location or kill all enemies, but later have more dynamic objectives, like survive X rounds or get to Y location without stopping to fight or be overwhelmed. While the graphics are dated and story is nothing special, it's a solid tactical SRPG.
Go in loops Kill skeletons Go in loops Build huts Go in loops Kill vampires Go in loops Build more huts Go in loops
Chaosbane has 6 classes with skills learned on level similar to Diablo 3, slightly more complex as instead of just getting alternate versions of the skills, you get a number of skill points, and the higher level variants of skills are "improved" but cost more points to equip. They can be swapped freely in and out at any time, though. There's additionally a level-based "God" skill tree which has a relatively simple web of passive bonuses with major nodes that grant additional active skills, altogether making for a decent variety of combinations. Difficulty can also be adjusted, making enemies harder but giving loot/exp bonuses. This is unfortunately not tuned very well as I was able to get a full heroic set on normal (very, very easy) as well as massive amount of exp in the chaos tower, where enemy difficulty and loot quality scale up each floor, but loot quality scales up a lot faster than the difficulty does with the normal difficulty settings. Where Chaosbane falls short is the layout of maps and progression through the main storyline, which instead of allowing you to move forward and return to town as you like, splits each act up into an unnecessarily large number of tiny missions to go from town, to an instance, to kill or collect something, and then back to town. Each instance looks like, or is a randomly generated map of simple hallways, and while the game does have a decent number of biomes, having to go straight back to the same one again and again, into maps that all look the same, makes it less appealing than it otherwise would be. Overall it's still decent.
After arriving in the City of Tpopolis to follow your dreams of becoming a clone of Shia LeBeouf, one thing leads to another and you end up joining Keanu Reeves on his quest to stop himself from becoming a meme in 2019 at E3. However, standing in your way are a lot of angry Japanese people will yell and throw things at you. You'll have to punch, spill chocolate milk, and stab your way through an army of call center employees, wild karens, hippies, and erstwhile Russian guys who don't afraid of anything. You can also choose to help or hinder the po-lice, but if you commit crimes without your plot armor on, watch out, as while they will still shoot at you like traditional police, they will also begin a summoning ritual that attaches a Jew star to you each time you commit a crime (including fighting back). Once four Jew stars have been accumulated, a MaxTec helicopter will appear and T-posed combatants will start spilling out. Needless to say, dominance will be asserted post haste. Fortunately, like the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, the police of Tpopolis believe that they can't see you if you can't see them, so you can lose any outstanding Jew stars and wannabe Judge Dredds simply by going around a corner or inside a building and looking away. I didn't get the game until after the 1.3 patch, so the only bugs I noticed were Potato People (occasionally, every person is actually a potato until you get close to them and look at them for several seconds) and aggressively mislayered foliage (all trees and shrubs will randomly appear in front of everything else, but retain the appropriate scale for their distance, giving the appearance of trees and shrubs in your face constantly. Seems more prevalent when driving, or loading a game when driving, but not exclusively, so I'm not sure what caused it. At any rate, I wouldn't trust the foliage.
First off, if anyone is wanting to choose between Agarest: Generations of War and Agarest Zero, I would recommend starting with Zero as it contains almost the entirety of Generations of War within it, on top of its own story. The content from the original game becomes available after beating Agarest Zero's main story on hard mode, leaving out only the random encounters you'd normally have to slog through (so you fight only story battles), as well as some characters from the original are either unavailable or only available through DLC. Many of the reviews mark the game down for its slow speed or dialogue scenes that you have to watch again and again, but both can be circumvented. I strongly recommended opening agarestzero.ini and changing the number on the line LockWindowFrameRate=30 to at least 120 (higher or lower depending on your preference; higher makes everything go faster, but too high makes the menu difficult to control), and in-game, going into options and disabling attack animations and movement, at least once you get sick of looking at the nice attack animations for the 500th time, otherwise fights and dialogue, particularly dialogue you've already seen, really will require you to have sufficient offspring to see the game through to completion. Once you've done these things, you can skip all dialogue almost instantly just by holding down E, as well as either auto battle or fight without any delays (making farming or clearing easy areas take minutes instead of hours). I was also initially turned off by the speed until I found out about these changes, they make a very big difference. Aside from that, there are a lot of things to unlock, a decent story, a massive amount of content (albeit much of it is repetitive, even some of the story as you go through generations), a deep crafting system, and a lot of things to do.
