Conquest of Elysium 4

(Games I enjoy at the bottom of the list to see if this review is for you) Very overrated and odd the devs haven´t hired an UI artist and someone to fix controls. Regardless It´s very entertaining and a very simple game but with tons of different monsters to meet and fight. Most of you turns will be: Move one step,press "End turn" and then repeat.You basicly move your commander 1-2 step,recruit troops and use a spells and then mvoe attack or get attacked press end turn to see battles and what Ai do. It´s very cozy but nobody has helped with the Ui controls but still it gives you that "Just one more turn" and you just sit there and play more. So regardless of it´s poorly developed fiddly UI and the probable unwillingness of the developers to streamline it to make it more playable you still continue to play :) It´s to clunky which probably make me not go back to it if nobody release a mod that fixes the UI and controls. If you can get it on a sale for 5euro or buy it at Kinguin like I did for that price, But if it´s halfprice on Steam and you dont mind the Ui (Wow I just keep talking about that :D) then I would say Yes and since that´s what I paid. I will give it a thumbs down because it´s not worth the price on steam in it´s current state - UI/HUD Is very poorly made and the 2 developers should have hired a person to help them out with it for each new game they did. Some of it is very easy to fix. See bottom of review. + Lots of replayability because there are so many different factions that works differently and have their own backstory. - No information why you can not do certain things, You are only told it´s not possible even if it was possible the turn before, extremly annoying. It feels like it´s not a finished game. But I´m sure it is since its the fourth game in the series :P - Action points does not work like in other games, you need to save them up over several turns. This makes the game a bit clunky and there does not seem to be logic behind it. The turns in the game becomes very short and with little to do where you only have to click end turn over and over. There is no clear info where it´s possible to see your action points. + Nothing like it! I haven´t played a game similar to this ever. Closest resemblance is proably Heroes of might & Magic so if you enjoy and can go past the massive block which is the Ui then you will probably have tons of fun. + Spells/Magic Massive amounts of different spells and how they work, supercool and fun :) Combat Is automated but works quite well, and it´s fu to watch and you can also speed it up or choose to see the end results. Only bad thing is that when you click to attack an enemysquare you it´s allways not shown that they are behind walls, this makes you quite often loose a fight that you would have won otherwise so this is somethin you really need to remember. Wildlife hates you!! Bears takes control of your villages and free them and also armies of deers Quite silly and really something that takes me out of the game. * Graphics works well I think * Sound Does it job * Music gives a lot of atmosphere Mod support? You can click on mods in the gamemenu and then it will open a fodler in the game with no mods in :D Feedback: UI: * After each turn you you must click "Ok" in the middle of the screen on a small box to continue the game, This is very not streamlined and clunky. Make it possible to click whereever on the screen to "Ok" it. * Use numpad keys to move troops * Fix shortcommands so you dont need to move the mouse to right corner for commands, it´s unessecary far away and a bit clunky. * Right click directly on a creature to get information/ stats or just hoover mousepointer over it instead of click creature and then go into a battlefield screen to then click unit to see info/stats. Bugs: "Can be cast anywhere" There is a bug that prevents you from casting it anywhere, I waited and hoped it was a bug but I can´t no longer cast this spell anymore? Necromancer "Raise dead" dissapear from my spellist so I had to research it again. Sentry bug One bug that is very irritating is that a commander can be frozen and you can not use it anymore and suddely it will not even be viewed as a commander even though it´s still there. Perhaps it is as intended but there is no ifo of why this is. First I thought it was because my Necromancer had become insane because then you can´t control them for a time but I doubledown on that and also reloaded the game but to avail. It seems to be when you choose your commander to "Sentry" which is that you can freeze it until you manually unfreeze it to use when you want, problem is that this function does not work even if it says it´s just to press "S" to unfreeze. Games I enjoy that are turnbased or very slowpaced: I´m NOT a fan of turnbased overall because I played them a ton in the 1990s, but but the once I enjoy are: Europa Universalis 2-3, Baldursgate 3, Zorbus,ADOM (Ancient doom of mysteries),Gnollhack, Ai dungeon: Textbased rpg with Ai that help develope the story Ai Roguelite: Textbased with Ai doing art and story even though the developer ignores feedback Cauldrons of War - Barbarossa: Textbased rpg with combat operations in ww2 Kingdoms of Amalur: Xbox360 version (Turnbased combat) Moonring: Fantastic absolutely lovely free RPG Roadwarden: Very immersive textbased rpg in a dark setting Revenant March: Textbased Very darksetting,Visual novel at its best.

The conquest of elysium series is by far the least fun set of games that I've played for cumulatively over 100 hours, and will likely continue to play. The game itself offers such a unique and interesting set of possibilities and strategies that it is always tantalizing to try a new set of starting conditions. Not only that but there are any number of unique encounters and enemy combinations which can keep the game fresh and exciting. Unfortunately the game does everything in it's power to stop you from experiencing any of it. Between the extreme imbalance of classes, impenetrable resource barriers, terrain which constantly hinders your movement, and agonizingly long waiting times between turns there is rarely much of anything to actually do on a turn. Generally speaking your commanders will have three action points per turn, but the vast majority of tiles require two or more action to move through, leaving you with one or two clicks for each turn before ending and waiting on opponents. Then there is the winter season which makes all the tiles take even more points to traverse, meaning you might move on a turn then not even be able to act at all the next round. Speaking of seasons the winter will also half your economy from many money making tiles. That's a problem because the economy is another way the game halts your engagement. Most classes who don't rely on gold exclusively will languish for resources, and have trouble being able to even recruit units. In the event you can hire or summon your units they are often weak to the point of being laughable unless they are ludicrously expensive. Sometimes these units are also problematic to summon as well, you might fail to summon them and have your whole army killed by the unit you summoned after a three hour game. Or perhaps you will simply be punished by having your commander be unable to move for an indeterminate amount of turns. Either option is basically punishing the player for trying to engage in the mechanics of the game. There are so many anecdotes I could list, constantly having groups of two snakes or a single deer take my resources, or having all my commanders only able to move one or less tiles per round due to weather and geography, or simply not being able to get any economy because every resource tile has massive NPC armies on it which lock me out of building an army. The list could go on, but the main takeaway is that this game doesn't want you to play it. it has cool ideas and interesting classes with the foundation of a great game, but then the mechanics of it try at every turn to stop your fun. There are a lot of people who play the game who I see enjoying the "difficulty" but for me the strategy of the game is very simple to understand, and would be fun to play if not for the constant barrage of annoyances and inconveniences. Unfortunately there just isn't another game like it, and so I'll probably come back again and try to ignore the abuse the game puts me through to scrape what little fun from it that the game will let me have. From what I've heard conquest of elysium 5 doesn't address any of these issues either, so I'm not hopeful that there will be a solution. Do yourself a favor and just don't even play the game, don't get a taste of the poisoned fruit or you might get tricked into eating the whole thing like me.

Fun once you get into it

To be honest, i never played it much, but thats maybe because Dom 4 existed and - compared to dominions generic mechanics of pumping out (or catching...) troops and sending them around while the respective nations gimmicks mostly only get important with time - here every one has something weird unique right at the start so i had not found "my" faction.

I wish there was a neutral option. The game itself is fun, might of magic type but there's some serious issues I have. 1. Price- I can't see the justification of this at full price. Only worth it if on sale of over 70%. 2. No option to load/return to main menu when in game. - results in having to close game down each time and re-opening in order to reload (save scumming is a thing) I do think the game is fun for people into this genre but I would not recommend paying for it at full price.

beautiful hell

Terrible user-interface and default control scheme. It's not a good look when a game fails to offer user-experience on-par with a 480p DOS game from literally 20 years earlier (like HOMM). Text is on the verge of being unreadable, even with the largest font size selected, probably due to poor choice in fore- and back-ground colors. Some panels don't fit the screen and offer no scrolling when the font is not the default one. I do see that the next installment in the series has what seems to be a better user-interface so I'd try that at some later point. I hear good things about Illwinter's Dominion series too. Definitely a refund and would say it's not worth your time even for free. Would 100% rather play Heroes of Might and Magic 3, especially with VCMI.

Fun turn based game with hotseat!

CoE 3 was great, CoE 4 just got even more greater

Fun classic game