I got it yesterday, i dont like paying for early access, but well just finished poe bored , nothing to do...End up playing till 3H30 am jsut because another crash throw me out from the game.
its an almost finished game, like a late beta, the features are there but i must warn you ,as of right now theres many crashes, many bugs . Some very annoying ones on the battlefield wich force you to restart the battle from the beggning. Rebels armies vanishing after reloading a save. Its riddled with bugs.
That said its a lot of fun and the fundamentals are there, you dont even need to read the manual if you are used to those kind of games its easy to take it in hands but hard to master . Think of it as early total wars with some dominion poured in it with D&D birthright influence .
You choose one country on very large world map, each of them is unique with a specific background, some specific units (not nearly as much as dom 3 but enough to do stuff). You can expect the usual, the devs obviously are big fantasy fans so you can find the classicAD&D kingdoms, some northern folklore ones, some mongol steppe horde , the remnants of a fantasy roman empire and its decadent heirs . Each of them have several campaigns, not unlike total war but better .Destroy some country , but another must be left alive , or be allied with . Some more strange goals like for dragon hold ," make valegorn plalatinate, recognize galleni.." no idea how you achieve it yet but its nice to have more sophisticated goals than usual.
Then you start upgrading provinces, recruiting , exactly like dominion , except very good units are available immediately if you can afford the cost and specific ressources. Once built you can deploy anywhere , of course theres an upkeep to pay . The world is so big you will have to trade to get the ressoruces early and open the very well done diplomacy panel. There you can immedialtely see the relations towards your country, the same alignement the better (good, neutral , evil ) and cultruse pecific related to lore. You can see who can trade what and if the deal is likely to succeed. You can only do trade or covert operations (raising/lowering reputation, spying etc..) according the numbers of agents you have, some small island republics may have more , while military behemoth like orc horde only have two .Smaller guys are better at some things, i like that.
You have a magic panel and research, not so many spells so far but they are global spell for the world map , have to invest a lot of money to get spells similar to what you can find in the d&d birthright setting, damaging economy, boosting units etc.. the higher levels spells sound very good but havent accessed them yet.
The strong point of the game is obviously the tactical combats, think knight of the chalice combat with armies.It plays like a fantasy risk games, with some terrain having special abilities, for exemple extra scouting on adjacing tiles, or destroying occupying units evevery turn.Its worth mentioning theres also navals fights.,
After recruiting and forming armies you get the choice(only if led by an hero) to go to tactical mode instead of autresolve. Now its all goodness all goodness! ,terrain use, every unit is usefull and work with each others. Archers cannot win alone, they damage a fair bit an unit but wont be able to finish an infantry unit alone , unless you keep doing it during too many turns. Infantry can form lines with other infantry units and get big defense bonus , you have to use siege units to break their line . Cavalry gets attack bonus the more square they have to charge. Pour into it routing , attack of opportunity ,flanking, special abilties from units, differents attack types , like war damage death damage, magic cards etc. Oh and those units can level and get unique abilties according your country. For example i was surprised that my dragon hold knights were getting after some experience an orcslayer abitlity. As i said simple to understand but there's complex strategies .
Everything is very well balanced , its obvious its in the last stage of development . Once its finished it will be as classic as dominion or master of magic.
), they have showed some very nice screenshots of what appears to be a very clean looking turn based strategy game.
