Conquest of Elysium 4

[b]Important[/b]: according to some reports, the developers of this game openly ignore feedback from players who have left a negative review. It sounds like a way to punish people so they don't dare to state their opinion truthfully - makes you question the Very Positive score, doesn't it? See the comment by Trademark2 [url=https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198132694444/recommended/722060/]on this review[/url]: [quote]But i do agree the devs should have done more for the micromanagement, and i actually told them as much in dominions 4 (things like color coding blood hunters and researchers and automating some things). The response was: "you caused some discussion on the IRC but we're going to ignore you since you left a negative review".[/quote] ---- The kind of game you really want to like, but it doesn't let you. In theory this is right down my alley. Fantasy 4X-lite with randomized maps and starts, and a large variety of spells and creatures. The problem is it manages to be annoying in all the areas that matter to make a "lite" game playable: - UI is clumsy and non-standard: weird "right-click to select and left click to move" convention; Transfer screen has the genius idea to put X symbols on unit icons [thankfully fixed in CoE5] making them unreadable; there are few actions to do every turn yet they managed to bury them in menus. - Lack of tooltips for some map symbols, for instance what does a catapult mean in a location's attributes? You won't know unless you stumbled upon the [i]textual description of the icon[/i] in the manual. [CoE5 introduces a key to look up tile details] - UI for viewing units in an army or transferring them is *especially* clumsy: hard to differentiate tiny sprites, no summary of how many units of each type a commander has (except in a global window you have to scroll through) [CoE5 shows unit counds in the Transfer screen], and the display when multiple armies are standing on the same tile is a mess. Positive side: it'll make you appreciate the interface in every other 4X. - Slow start where you need multiple turns and solid expansion to even purchase your first unit or cast your first ritual. - Ironically there's a large variety of units and spells, but you'll be mostly repeating the same two summoning rituals over and over and using the same units for the whole game. Makes you miss the excitement of a neutral sometimes joining your ranks or the capture of a unit dwelling in HOMM or King's Bounty, - No control or influence whatsoever on fights, which are exceedingly random: some of your commanders insist on leading from the front and will die in most serious fights; worse, a single lucky shot can kill your main commander that you spent hours leveling and pretty much end your game. This means you'd LIKE to play fast and loose because this is a "lite" game, but you CAN'T and you have to tediously micromanage instead which leaders participate in a fight, with a UI that slows the process down. - The combat system changed from CoE3. Among the changes is the introduction of a massive amount of friendly fire, with mages and dragon breaths often damaging more of your own units than the enemies. Where in CoE3 a dragon or powerful mage was just a flat out cool addition to your army that you could enjoy, in this edition (and CoE5) you'll most often than not curse helplessly as your mage Decays to death your recent cool summon, or your dragon fries a dozen of your men while chasing a single remaining Feared enemy. Mitigations exist but are incomplete and micromanagement-heavy. - No end of battle summary. With battles involving hundreds of units with tiny samey sprites, it's easy to lose track and not realise you lost a key unit in the mess. [There's a command line option to enable battle reports, but you have to use it when starting a game. Afterwards, it's too late to enable it.] - No way to visualize how far your army can move along a path this turn? No way to set a path for an army over multiple turns!? Come on, Heroes of Might and Magic 1 had this in 1995. This means shuffling armies around mid-late game is really a pain. - The Civ-like "barbarians"/independents are ramped up to 11, in power but especially in number of stacks spawned. Initially you might like the challenge, only to realise it's nigh-impossible to hold all the little resource points on the map without having dedicated armies playing whack-a-mole with bandits, or tediously placing sufficient garrisons on all of them. Seriously, where's the "lite" aspect at this point? Every "deep" game I can think of has less micromanagement in this area. [CoE5 lets you "overrun" puny stacks without combat, making the fly-swatting a tiny bit less grating] - Dictatorial design decision to let you have multiple save slots, but not load them without returning to the desktop and restarting the game. Combine with the unpredictable fights, and you have a recipe for disaster. Games can last hours despite the supposed "lite" aspect, and who wants to restart and do the tedious start all over because the game decided to screw you? [CoE5 at least lets you resign and get back to the Main Menu...] There is a multiplayer component, but I don't see myself playing my typical "3 players allied vs the AI" romp I do in most 4X games, since the game is likely to screw over and maim one of the players by killing its best commander, ending the coop fun for everyone. Same problem as in single player, only three times as likely with three players. There are some positive points buried under this unsufferable UI and game design: large battles are impressive, creatures of various sizes allow for some epic and frightening monsters, some boasting spells of apocalyptic power. The maps have some interesting things to discover such as the lair of the dwarves which if unchecked can seriously impact the map, portals to go through. But the pain you have to go through to experience this doesn't seem worth it. Last topic: unit and faction descriptions are sometimes decent. At other times they try to be humorous but are rather on the dumb side and fall flat for me, with nonsensical and possibly self-referential stuff like bears liking potatoes and teaming with deer to attack towns. -- Note: I've enabled comments because (unlike the devs, if my opening quote is any indication) I welcome constructive criticism - for instance if I made a factual mistake you want to correct. Trolls and fanboys however will be mercilessly purged, and if appropriate, reported.

The dev made Conquest of Elysium 5 instead of finishing Conquest of Elysium 4. [h1]If you have not bought 4 already, then buying 4 is a Dodo bird move, buy 5 instead, maybe.[/h1] I played much more CoE3 than I did CoE4, the save system was bad, the ui was bad, the bugs weren't so bad but I still couldn't do more than 20 hrs in CoE4. I doubt I'll buy CoE5, seems the dev just keeps adding a few more races and a little content instead of making any improvements to the game itself. Pity, i did initially find the game "Beer & Pretzel Fun" ... but not enough to play it more than i did.

Just get Dominions 5 if this game looks interesting. This game is nothing but whack-a-mole trying to keep your locations from being taken over by independent enemies. I'm always too busy just trying to keep my current locations from being overrun that I can hardly ever expand. Do not play this game, it is so close to being a good game that you will waste far too much time on it before giving up. Even a small band of wandering bandits can easily cost you units that it takes a town 10 turns to afford. Also, they couldn't even add a "load game" or "main menu" button, so if you want to exit out of a game you have to fully close the program. I have tried very, very hard to like this game, but there simply wasn't enough care put into it to make it anything but frustrating.

TLDR Do NOT buy at sticker, if you want it, on sale pay at most 5 or 10$ it is somewhat worth that. Full This is not remotely worth the current asking price of 25$ (US). However it might be an acceptable game for maybe 5 or 10$, if you can wait for a sale. The series isn't terrible but, despite being on it's 5th iteration now, this game still lacks compared to classics like Master of Magic, Age of Wonders, Heroes of Might and Magic, many of which were made decades before and have been ported. What's worse is, while it has so much potential, 4 never felt like it was completed before they basically barely upgraded it and called it 5 and began selling it as a new game. I'm not sure I'm comfortable fully recommending -any- of their games with that business model. It's worse than companies that do the same with DLCs since at least the DLCs usually cost a fraction of a new game. I hate doing this since at a time it had so much potential but... Thumbs Down, Not Recommended

Takes a minute to learn, but fun turn-based strategy with cool fantasy elements

If you can't wrap your head around Dominions 4/5 like me (...me dumb-dumb), then this (& it's successor CoE5) is the game for you. Not even gonna get into the factions and unique strategies & gameplay of each. Don't feel scared though. All the factions are balanced enough & the Illwinter Devs are on point & always keep on updates for years. Thank You Illwinter Game Design Sincerely, This guy writing this

I love this game. It's got a lot of depth and content, and has a certain old-school-RPG feel that I love. That being said, there are some easily fixable UI issues that drive me insane: [list] [*] Left click to move / Right click to select feels backwards and is the opposite of AoE/Civ/etc. There should at least be an option to swap these. I get that some Mac users only have a left click but most gamers have both. [*] There's no autosave (this is probably my biggest gripe). [*] If you go to manually save and accidentally hit quit (next to it), that's it: your game is gone and you're looking at the desktop (there should be a confirmation prompt if we haven't recently saved). [*] Manual save doesn't pre-fill a suggested save name, and if you save without specifying one it silently fails [*] The UI doesn't clearly indicate who the active commander is. You get used to looking in the top left corner to confirm who is active but it's still possible to make mistakes. Some sort of active unit halo/circle would be nice. [*] There's no way to select an entire column when transferring units in the army. It's either select the entire type or one-at-a-time. [*] The sans-serif title screen font feels lazy. Can we at least have Times New Roman? [/list]

viciante valendo, boa sorte pra gastar a vida vendo gameplay no youtube e levando surra de 10 min no jogo. Recomendo

I'm playing CoE4 and having a hoot with it. I just keep finding new and unusual events, creatures and geography. All the games in the series create a rich narrative. Can't stop playing... and seeing in game events, units and places I haven't seen before. The hits keep on coming! Edit note - older review with about half the hours.

So much fun and the lore is excellent! There is a bit of a learning curve but once you get over that and the 2D graphics, you will find yourself in one of the most immersive 4x games ever! Looking forward to adding more hours into this.