Conquest of Elysium 4

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.