A nice, relatively complex strategy game for a few evenings.
Pros:
1) A relatively slow start to your games. It might be a personal preference, but I severely dislike strategy games that immediately, from the very first turn/second you unpause have you manage multiple complex parameters like resources/armies/research etc. You won't have enough resources to build anything relevant for a few turns, and you are basically never under direct military pressure in the early game, so you have the time to exhale, take in the views, familiarize yourself with your villages/cities/armies, etc.
2) "Realistic" supply, movement and season/weather system. It's relatively easy to overextend yourself and start suffering the negative consequences of being undersupplied - which, in terms of in-game mechanics, means that you can't just beeline the enemy's capital or major cities (unless they are literally bordering you kingdom) - you have to capture small villages/towns first, garrison them, wait out the winter in your new winter quarters (as campaigning in winter is really tough), and only then proceed with your conquest. This gives enough time for your opponent to beef up their defenses or for another threat to arise in the opposite end of your empire.
Considering how meticulous you have to be in planning your campaigning season (you basically have half the spring, the summer, and half the fall to move around unimpeded), a slight miscalculation can severely thwart your military efforts, prolonging the war even more. For example, after scouting out the enemy's large city you calculated, that getting there will take you 2 turns, establishing a proper perimeter (so that all of your forces could fight simultaneously) will also take 1-2 turns, and the siege itself will take 4 turns max - which, overall, places you in a relatively safe position of only suffering slight maluses from being undersupplied.
But in reality heavy rains washed out the roads and it took you 2 extra turns to arrive; there were some skirmishers around the city that you relatively easily swatted away, but they postponed the establishing of a proper perimeter for 2 more turns, and the garrison itself was beefed up, so you didn't manage to take the city in 4 turns, and now your forces are stuck knee-deep in snow, 3 turns away from the nearest supplied tiles, and now you have to retreat all of your army, while they die from hunger and get harassed by the well-fed and rested forces of your enemy. I've never had this happen to me in any other game, and I loved it!
3) The diplomacy – it’s surprisingly deep for such a small game and puts the CiV7 diplomacy to shame. My favored feature is how declaring a war on a nation that your population sees as friends will have a massive stability price tag, so you usually want to start worsening your relations first, which kind of gives away your intentions, AND it can be counteracted by the opponent’s own diplomatic actions (like improving relations), making this process longer and giving them time to prepare. The same is done by the AI – they don’t usually declare war out of the blue (unlike the aforementioned CiV) but will begin slowly burning the bridges between your nations. Lovely stuff.
OK stuff:
1) The dungeon crawling. While obviously an integral part of the game and a huge sink of time and effort by the developer, it feels like a separate mini game, made to pad out the length of the turn. The mini game itself is pretty basic, and the novelty wears off in like 10 dungeons (it’s a “light” version of “proper” dungeon crawlers like Monsters’ Den: Godfall or other games), and, in terms of the “main” wargame it doesn’t provide much utility at all – you level up your heroes that will make better generals/governors, and sometimes you get an artifact that is not particularly useful by the time the mid- or lategame rolls in (the usual timeframe of getting an artifact)
You can basically ignore the whole thing without feeling any negative impact
2) The number of “different” kingdoms. While they are different on paper, this difference mostly boils down to having a relatively useless perk (like + 1 armor for your melee troops) and access to unique unit (like polar bear cavalry). But they all play the same – you build the same buildings in the same order and train same-ish armies to employ the same tactics. Pretty disappointing but could still be developed into a better system.
3) Poor English. As a non-native English speaker I understand the struggle, but it is borderline illegible for some pretty important stuff (like skill descriptions). Hopefully, it will get better.
Cons:
1) Boring economy – you can’t specialize your settlements. Need more wood? Scan through your settlement list, find the one that produces the most wood (usually located in the forest on the world map), build a harvester there and get a governor that boosts the corresponding production. Bam, that’s it. ALL your settlements end up the same: Market + Harvester + Extractor + whatever “higher tier” building you have the slots for – library/temple/council, etc. All your conquered settlements will be the same. This is all that you will ever see.
2) Boring economy – the “fake” market. It kind of mimics the real market on a basic level – you can drop the prices of goods by selling a lot of them, and vice versa, the goods get more expensive as you buy off the supply. BUT… it’s all fake – the prices are heavily capped (so that even if the global market is completely flooded with like 8k of shards, selling them is stays super profitable, even if, evidently, nobody wants them. There is also the problem of “fake supply” – in the “Realm of Aerde” scenario I was always (every turn) guaranteed to be able to buy at least 50 food, iron, wood, etc. Even if every single AI buys off every single piece of wood, there are always 50 resources available for purchase through sheer magic. In the “Warlords” scenario I messed up and starved for two winters in a row, but I could ALWAYS, every single turn buy 5 food, which significantly reduced the strain on my food supply.
This system severely reduces the impact of your own resource generation – why worry about resources when you are guaranteed to 50 of each resource every turn (which is enough to build at least 1 building per turn)?
3) Rock-steady internal political situation. While there is a stability system, you can pretty much ignore it. As I mentioned above, I messed up during one playthrough and starved my nation for 2 winters in a row (running a -22 food deficit). The stability didn’t even dip below 40, zero negative events.
You also get dissent in the newly conquered settlements. Solution? Just park the cheapest Levy unit on that settlement and forget that the problem exists. Super boring when compared to other strategy games, where your entire run can end at the hands of rebels.
4) Redundant systems. Like the “Lawful-Feudal-Chaotic” political/moral compass (in-game called Nature). While it can serve some “lore” purpose when describing different nations in the diplomacy window (which doesn’t really translate into tangible gameplay effect – even tyrannical kingdoms will eventually trade and cooperate scientifically with the benevolent kingdoms, if you are pushy enough with the relation improvement), it seems to be completely wasted on the heroes. Sure, if you dive deep into the manual you will see that, for example, the Holy Warriors can only be recruited by Lawful or Benevolent kingdoms, and that some missions are only available to nations withs certain alignment, etc. But it doesn’t impact your moment-to-moment gameplay. It’s.. just there.
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