I spent hours with this game in middle-school role-playing my Undead leader backstabbing allies and gathering resources across scenarios. I have never really played the campaign, so I cannot really speak to its effectiveness, but customizing/leveling unique leaders, promoting hero units, managing cities, making and breaking treaties are a few points where this game shines. I like being able to have different faction's units at my disposal. The mix of 4x with more granular strategy in battles is hit or miss. For an important battle, I find myself controlling my units, but if I don't particularly care about the units, I will most often automate the battles. It's an interesting mix of genres, even if the game isn't always effective 100% of the time. My favorite aspect of this game is the art direction. The sound design, music, portraits, map art all hold up for me--a lot of this is probably nostalgia. It's still a game from 1999. But that's the charm! Overall, this game holds up. Worth playing if you can figure out the patch situation (see below). (Regarding performance on Windows 10: I won't link here, but there is a popular, easy-to-find patch on GitHub that I found to fix frequent crashing. Without this fix, the game is pretty much unplayable.)
