Every mechanic in the game is sabotaged by bad design choices the devs made! As others have pointed out, everything has timers; it's stupid. Even if you lose one thing when choosing another, timers are NEVER a good idea. Look at Tyrrany; you gain something and lose something with EVERY choice, but there's no hurrying the player, ever! This game has the ability to farm enemies as much as you want via random encounters and you'll need them! However, if you take the time to do the normal level up to outmatch hard enemy encounters, you WILL lose because the developers built in mechanics SPECIFICALLY to screw you over if you farmed at ALL! Speaking of encounters: the majority of the enemies have PLAYER levels. Anyone who's ever played on one of those live servers from NWN or NWN2 where they do the same thing will know why this sucks. For those who don't: Player levels are intended to make a character gain power FAST; while moster levels are intended to npcs gain power slowly. This is needed because the players group will always be outnumbered, so to make it a fair fight the npcs are weaker on a 1 to 1 basis. The kingdom building mechanics are another area that could've been great, but they completely ruined! Example: If you build a shop, you get one economy. You'd reasonably expect from that point on, no matter what happens you now have at least 1 point in economy. Sadly this is false; your kingdom can lose EVERY POINT in every single area of it's stats no matter what buildings you have. This makes no sense! It's not like you are losing buildings by way of a battle that disrupts your trade; those are completely unrelated to the actual kingdom. On events: The majority of writing and characters in the game are great. The problem comes in with the design of the events... which are essentially another stupid timer. You have ONE military guy to deal with a military event, but they spawn 2, then 3 at a time to screw you over. There's more but word limit hit. Do not buy!
A sweet, melancholic adventure. A story worth experiencing. Aside from what's in the description of the game, there isn't much to be said without spoilers.
