It's hard to play a game over 100 hours and then not recommend it. And yet, I can't. I wan't to - but I can't.

You've heard the saying that 'the sum is greater than the parts'; in this game, the parts are greater than the sum. There is such a good game here waiting to 'happen'. Unfortunately, the overall game design is flawed.

Specifically, the size of the 'shards' and the mechanics of the shards hurt the overall game. Because of this, you won't even use most of the best units/buildings/etc. In essence, you've got all this outstanding content that never comes into play bacause of the mechanics of the 'meta-game'.

-Bought this when feeling nostalgic about Master of Magic / HoMM. I also like CiV and slower, turn-based games sometimes.
-More complex building options than HoMM and in some aspects MoM.. More specifically the City Build menu can be overwhelming to look at for the first time. I particularly enjoyed this aspect of the game - its complexity left me wanting more and more so I would restart a game after losing to tweak the build and see what works best.
-The heroes can be viewed as simple/straightforward - 4 classes. Each time you level you put one point into one skill (out of three offerred).
-Spells are just similar to Heroes of Might & Magic. Build the 4th tower to get the best spells.. except there is a different building for each magic type - there are 6 magic types (I think?) at least as far as buildings / main spells go.
-More complex gameplay & darker theme than Heroes of Might & Magic
-Can't wait to play multiplayer!

It took me 248 hours to end the campaign - and I chose the quickest way to finish.

If you like to finish your games - beware of the necessary time investment!

The game runs very unstable (release 1.4.5) - during my playthrough I had over 100 crashes to the desktop (seems evenly distributed between "Invalid Pointer Operation" and "Access violation...").
The game might run smoothly for 5 hours or crash 5 times in 30 minutes.

Even though the "battle for a shard" is a lot of fun, it gets boring and repetitive after a while. The campaign is a sequence of maps (or shards) you have to win in order to meet all other masters. But the game is fun as long as the player wants to play it and can be recommended to anybody who likes games similar to HoM&M.

The idea is interesting but the implementation is lacking. Highly random starting positions can vary the difficulty from "cakewalk" to "impossible," and strategy games should be decided more by your decisions than by randomness. Hero units drive the game, so if your starting area is good, you steamroll the map; if not, you may be able to grind through, provided the enemy hero did not get a steamroll start that lets it one-shot your troops and two-shot your hero. "First OP hero wins" is not an interesting strategy dynamic.

Before each fight, the game evaluates your forces versus your enemies and gives you a difficulty estimate from "no casualties" to "no chance." Whatever math is being done does not compare the units' strengths and weaknesses. You will regularly find impossible "easy" fights and "run away!" fights you can win without taking damage. Between this and the highly random elements, you can see why so many places on the forums advocate save scumming.

I encountered fewer crash bugs than other reviewers did.

++faction customization, as you go
++still being updated
+broad scope of units
+vastly non linear gameplay
+many ways to play

--bugged heavily
--broken multiplayer
-limited provence interaction
-no smooth transition between easy and hard

Conclusion:
Do not buy this game... yet

so after about 20 hours of gameplay i thought it would be appropriate to tell people not to buy the game that i find insanely addicting, you're likely seeing mixed results mostly talking about bugs and various other issues and yes those are a problem, a major one, online multiplayer is either impossible or extremely clunky, the game crashes often due to node issues the longer you play (sounds like allocation problems), your interactions with provinces aside from raiding and the occasional event are very limited, and while i feel this is likely for the sake of balance I still feel they could have done something with it.

so why do i keep playing it? simply because it has so much of what i've always wanted in a game, the potential to be insanely evil, with consequences for doing so, the ability to rule my nation with an iron fist and a cold heart, and reasons to do so, a true and practical necromancy with the potential to create an army from the remains of the dead, deals with the devil, trouble with the church, the capacity to become a dark lord, raise armies of monsters, create your own faction rather than being given options within a set of factions, become a brilliant commander, a dragon slaying sniper, a powerful wizard, or mighty warrior, with subclasses in all of these to boot! Good games leave a small part of themselves with you, Great games let you put yourself into them...

but even though Eador is a great game... it is not a stable game and I simply cannot reccomend it for that very reason

Easily one of the funnest games I have played, that being said, I would not recommend you buy unless you have a god tier computer. On my normal computer, this game does not work it crashes all the time, I recentlly built a very nice computer and it runs as smooth as a lampshade made of fresh baby skin. Also the issue with the crashes and errors I got on my other two computers (ones a laptop) will not be adressed as none of my emails or error reports ever got a reply. Maybe the company is not the best at pr. This game is amazing nonetheless, I enjoy the strategy and it is not insanely easy as some others, so long as you dont select skilled or anything below you will have very nice combat that requires actuall planning and thinking, story line was pretty awesome too. Only issue I have had is that you need a strong computer to play it, and the lack of help or support from the creators, but I get that from ea and almost every company too. Another cool thing so far as gameplay goes is that you can use one method to win most battles, for example necromancy, however these battles can be slugfests, and you may end up losing, where you essentially trade blows until one of you manages to get the upperhand and you will end up taking days of back and forth battling to take or lose the shard, when if you just adapt you strategy and maybe add a commander with long range units in the back and strong defense with low attack to shield the path of incoming land units you could maybe have won the shard or faster if you win anyways. There are flying units too, the strategy is quite varied, really an awesome game.

Surprisingly fun turn based fantasy game. Basically you play through 'shards' each turn, building up an army and eventually conquering each shard, which then unlocks bonuses for the next shard. While this game isnt too challenging, it is very fun to play here and there as you conquer more. Similar to Heroes of Might and Magic but with new mechanics.

For all the fans of Heroes III, Age of Wonders and similar titles. Not recomended for casuals, they will cry loud..

Highly recommend to all fans of fantasy, strategy, and tactics games. Plenty of unique units and buildings, heroes and units gain levels and you can customize their growth, explore the terrain to find new locations and upgrades, manage resources, and increase your own power by conquering other worlds/shards. The campaign does a good job of introducing you to more intricate tactics and developments as you progress. One downside is that with each new shard/map you start over somewhat, but things still manage to stay interesting through new units and buildings, new opponents, and randomized events.

This game is one of the most enjoyable games for people who enjoy sid Meyers civilization, Heroes of Might and Magic, or Warlock masters of the arcane. Using the might and magic combat system and hero system with more active heroes i combat allowing them to both give and recieve high amounts of damage. The only problem with this game is that some bots in hard story mode tend to cheat to win making the game unfairly difficult. Do not be decieved by their clever disguises as even the morally good bots with do what it takes to edge you out of every conquest. The story mode aside custom and online games are enjoyable, but long. Having to conquer a province and then explore it can become tedious on large maps with little opponents, though they allow you to get to end game scenarios before fighting your rivals. All in all it is a well made game that should be fun for any people who enjoy the games listed at the beginning of this review

Great game.

I still havent completed the campaign. It is very entertaining and maps can take long or you can bull rush and try and finish it quickly. I don't recommend trying that until you know what your doing. the ai can be very unforgiving and challenging. It keeps it entertaining.

o yea, your a demi-god with a gremlin lacky. Bonus

This game is really hard to rate. I recommend it because the core game is absolutely great and I love such games in general. I also don't want to harm the devs because they really tried hard and have created a real rough diamond but some mayor design issues will spoil the fun for probably most of the common players!

So I only recommend it to die hard 4x fans with masochistic tendencies and/or you might want to grab it on sale :)

My review became a mini guide so here is the overview and I will post more details in the comments.

Good:
- Very deep 4X game mechanics (with a focus on battles)
- Great turn based battle system (focus on tactics and not luck)
- Good RPG elements regarding the hero/unit development
- Many different units to hire and fight (most or all of the enemy units can also be hired if you are lucky to get an offer)
- Polished graphics and menus
- Nice humor (you can either play a good or evil “god” and the evil options are really funny to read)

Mixed:
- Not many armies to control or cities to build up so micro management doesn’t get out of hand
- Hard to learn even harder to master
- Endless playtime (if you can stand it - might be good for players who rather want to play in doses instead of one huge map/battle)

Bad:
- Tedious game mechanics
- Monotonous game play (most of the time you spend doing the same over and over again until you finally see/find/unlock something new)
- Easy to get stuck in “dead ends” (as long as you haven’t learned how to avoid them or have the patience to wait (for lucky random events or gaining gold/experience over time) or reload/restart)
- Still some bugs (Happened once that an enemy unit was not removed from battlefield and I had to reload the fight)


So what to expect from the game?
I expected another Fallen Enchantress/Warlock - MotA clone but this game plays quite different. There are the same features in place but they are used in a different manner. Think of starting one of the mentioned games. Build/take over your first cities on an isolated island and form your armies, then, when you are ready to conquer the next island: you have to start over.
This is basically happening in Eador. You conquer a "shard" where you face 1-2 enemies (at the first shards) and as soon as you conquered it you lose (mostly) everything you had earned the last hours. The shards do work on a greater scale though. They unlock new buildings/units and give some mild benefits to the starting condition of the next shard. I also can only speak for the first shards because even though I played 16 hours I'm still on my second shard! (+ the good tutorial that took me 3 hours alone) According to the forums there are 80!! shards to conquer - go figure the playtime you need to beat the game. Though I have to say I always fought my battles and didn’t auto resolve them because I’m a control freak and don’t trust the AI so you can decrease playtime a lot by automated battles.
I also don't want to complain about a long playtime but the simple problem here is: motivation. I think it would have been much better to only have like 20 shards but instead increase the rewards you get for conquering each shard and thus give a better feeling of actual progress.
Which leads to the real problem here, because having an extrapolated playtime of 400 hours and making only small steps on your way from shard to shard don't has to be bad in general, but the real issue is: The start of each shard is tedious and often frustrating.

You start with you major city, the only one you can really build up (and if you lose it to an enemy it's game over). Even conquered enemy cities are just better "provinces".
So now you can start constructing buildings from different categories that either increase income, mood, get you access to certain military units, spells or items. You also have to hire a hero because there are no armies without heroes! So the heroes are the real stars of the game and they are significantly better than every other units you get (at least in early game). You can choose from 4 different classes: Warrior, Scout, Commander and Wizard.
The problem is: The hero alone is not able to win most of the fights even right at the start of the game. You need either supporting units, spells or items to make him capable of conquering the provinces around your city. More units sounds like a good idea but they cost money and upkeep and the AI tends to attack the weak units first so they most likely get killed fast. Also when you buy units you don't have much gold left to build up your city. So what happened to me in the first level was that I started with a warrior (because he was great in the tutorial), build up the city and tried to conquer the provinces around me.
When you attack you get a nice text that estimates the outcome of the battle. It also tells you how many units you spotted and which kind of units they are. It is still a little vague because when you spot 8 units of militia and bowmen it makes a great difference if there are 1 or 6 bowmen and you won't know that. So despite the text I at least started every fight and would have lost all of them (tried - failed - reloaded). So my only chance to finally progress in the game would have been to use another (great but overused) feature: Exploring.
Every province (or tile) has a level of exploration. You can send your heroes to explore the tile which will give them experience (very important, but very slow), lets them find locations (most of the time fights that are often too hard to win but bring very important loot and gold/ you can also find shops with special items or units to hire) and expands the province for the population (lowers effects of overpopulation).
So back to my problem: It would have taken ages until I got strong enough to finally start conquering the provinces so I restarted the shard and chose the scout hero. The reason is that ranged combat is a little overpower and the scout alone can win some battles as long as the enemy doesn’t have too many ranged units himself or too strong and fast melee units. I guess you can also use the wizard for that matter (not tried yet) but if you go for a melee character I suggest to invest in spell granting buildings (especially magic missile) so that he can deal some harm from a distance.
So with the scout I was finally able to gain some ground and get the game going. Eventually I was able to hire a second hero (which makes sense because just 1 army to cover ~30 tiles is difficult, especially when the enemy starts attacking).
Which leads to 2 more problems:
First, when you hire a new hero midgame he is starting at level 1. You might have some items and spells available to give him or perhaps even can give him the supporting units from your experienced hero (but then this hero is significantly weaker) but all the easy fights are already done by your experienced hero so there is no (comfortable) way to level him up and make him actually useful. You can only explore and trial and error random fights.
Second: The enemy is really annoying. He often has several heroes (more than you have) and can take every province by just moving on that tile as long as you didn't buy any guards there. The point is that those guards cost money and all they bring is defend the province against a possible hero attack (later on you get access to better units that have more benefits like auto exploring the province or even increasing the income of that province (still less than their upkeep though)). So when you start taking provinces you don’t want to spend your money on hiring guards but rather want to wait until you have an actual frontline. But when you finally have one it usually consists of 4-5 tiles per enemy.

I will continue my description in the comments as the text got cut off here in the middle of my explanation! :(

This game is pretty ♥♥♥♥ing awesome.
Imagine a slower paced and much harder Heroes of Might and Magic and you'll come pretty close to describing this game.
It gets a solid 8/10 from me.
Well worth the money.

This game closely resembles Heroes of MaM, in its gameplay but adds several features. First is is much more complex and takes significantly longer to actually play the game. One difference is that each map is devided into provences where you move from provence to provence each turn. Do do not actually attack enemies on the game map, bu through events that are specific to the provence that your hero is working in.
Then there is the world building phase of the game, which acts as a break point between each of the shard games. You play a campain on the world building section of individual conquests of each individual game map.

Type of recommendation: If you love the turn based HoMaM games or possibly King's Bounty but want something more complex, you may enjoy this game. The biggest difference between those games and this one is that you are not moving freely on the map but moving from provence to provence where all the events take place.

Otherwise this game is probably going to be too tedious for most people. I will continue to play it but only periodically.

Eador, Masters of the Broken World. The best way to describe this game would be that it is heavily influenced/steals from (well, the older version but okay) Heroes of Might and Magic 3. You upgrade cities by making new buildings allowing for magic, income, creatures, experience for your creatures, or special effects. Battle is done on a grid system in a turn based combat manner and as your heroes level they gain new abilites and skills.

However, there is were similarities end. For instance, unlike HoMM3 all cities are equal, which the same creatures being able to be recruited. You explore the map by conquering surrounding provinces - which can be upgraded with buildings but with a much smaller variety than the cities. Thus no free roaming on the map and individual armies of provinces can be daunting to defeat. Furthermore, magic does have some impact, but I would say less in the battlefield that HoMM3, but can be more impacting on a global scale than HoMM3, due to the so called rituals. Another important difference is the 'happiness' factor. If a province gets unhappy it might revolt, that is something you do not see in HoMM making Eador more of a grand strategy game in that sense. It also has more RPG elements than HoMM3 as quests can be given through the conquering of a shard (= one map) and acting differently can have very different consequences. Even more so, if you are friendly some troops will like that and get better morale, where others will think you weak. Likewise, you can not ally e.g. the Elves (some rare neutral provinces on the map) if you play like an evil ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

Personally I miss a bit the variety in units from time to time, but that has been partially lifted by the small DLC (allied forces) of 4 euro. Although that states only 2 new units per individual faction, it actually creatures more new units and with a new special building that can be found in a province (the mercenary guild) you can actually hire these troops. This is great because it sometimes tediously long to get e.g. to level 2 unit buildings and this gives your army the edge you need for higher difficulties in my opinion.

All in all, Eador is a good addition for anyone that enjoyed the old HoMM series (not V as it does not have those graphics implemented) and is looking for a different game with a slight twist.

Not sure why the user reviews are "mixed" when this game is by far one of the most enjoyable of its genre. Having played Eador Genesis before this I was happy to see the content was the same just with a shiny new look. The game has a faster pace to it than its predecessor with more unlocked with each shard conquered and the shards themselves feeling smaller. This is probably a good thing for many, though I didn't appriciate this myself. You will always start with humans as the race you control with the chance to complete (sometimes over the top difficult) quests to ally yourself with a non-human faction on each shard. One complaint many have is the difficulty, I myself am quite average when it comes to strategy games but even I found a way to secure a victory over every shard (hint: the scout is a great hero to start with). Also not seen any bugs which apparently plagued the game earlier in its life so many thanks to the developers for sorting that all out.

Overall this is a game for those seeking a challenging turn based strategy and not put off by the fact that it can get a little repetitive. Personally I would suggest trying Genesis first as it is cheaper to get a taste of what it is all about and if the old school graphics there aren't for you but the gameplay is then consider buying this.

Original and a good game. Look past bugs that happen every 5 hours of gameplay (casual crash, but the autosave keeps it in check) and you will have a friendly interesting game with original mechanics.

I had a hard time deciding wether to recommend this game or not given the current flaws it has.

Watch a few youtube videos to understand the mechanics and know that this is game about trial and error. The battle prediction is broken, dont trust it ... there are some predicted "very easy" encounters which in my oppinion cant be won. A battle against 4 medusas without a ranged hero is a loss regardless of predictions.

The above brings me to the next obvious point; inbalance. The devs simply did not take their time to implement this propperly, some creatures are simply too powerfull for early game and you have to know this prior to engaging ... unless you dont mind reloading a lot.

Early positioning and ressources can also be an issue, but in my oppinion not as vital as the two flaws mentioned above.

When all is said and done its not a bad game, the devs should just give it it a final look to balance things out and I would recommend it in a heartbeat.

Love it! Decisions make a difference and you really create your own people.

Even enjoyed getting stuck with previous mistakes, all around fun game

11/10