I bought the game at Humble.com and basing my review of that. It is a shame that this hasn't gotten the buzz that it deserves. This 4x game captures the Hellenistic period very well. The artwork, music, and gameplay draws you into the ambiance of that time in history. Gameplay is semi real time. You can pause the game while planning your moves. In this game, forming and maintaining your supply lines is key to building your empire. You can customize your leader and either use him to govern your city or have him lead an army into battle. It has a deep civ building aspect to the game, You can send out workers to work the mines, farm, etc. The workers can also build structures to improve productivity of a mine, farm, etc. You can also build structures in the city that help that city and your nation as a whole. Battles are also rewardingly deep. You can combine several types of units into one cohesive army and determine the formations of each unit within the army so long as you have discovered that formation. Battles occur in real time and you have to be quick to adjust tactics on the fly because battles don't normally take that long. The only fault I can give this game is the overland map. It is dull and I had difficulty at times navigating the terrain because I could not make out the type of terrain.
After reading the description and watching the video, I knew this would be my first preorder on GOG. The actual play did not disappoint. Trying to navigate your members safely through a dungeon is a lot of fun! I love the bard songs that accompany your successes and especially your failures. I'm still discovering new classes and getting familiar with the relationships among the combat cards. The only real disappointment is that I assumed your members would retain their level but they revert back to lvl 1 every time they enter a dungeon. The first dungeon was fairly easy but the third quest of the second dungeon has claimed 4 members so far. I've tried sending 3 different classes of characters through and they all died due to mostly (IMO) bad card draw. You know you are screwed when an opponent consistently plays a 3 hit/2 shield card and all you have are 1 or 2 hit cards at the time they pull that kind of card.
