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!

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.

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.

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.

nice tactical system but too long, too slow, too repetitive . On harder than normal it's too hard if you don't do it the only right way after a while in. Prepare to get stuck and owned making it slower and slower. AI hired guards don't scale with you. Item repair also ridiculous. loads of crashes still after 1 year and a half of patching and randomness.

I enjoyed this game for around a week or two before I just didn't have time for it. I think, if I played Eador when I was younger, I would have had 100s of hours spent playing it. It seems like the kind of single-player game that manages to reward you for putting a lot of time into it, which is rare.

++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

The key problem with this game is for the first 40 turns of play you only have 1 unit; you have to throw that unit at every threat you see and the threats are all on pretty close to level footing with that unit if not stronger. Then if you survive those 40 turns you just end up stomping everything with no difficulty at all.

Also the equipment durability system ruins the otherwise decent Scout/Archer class Hero

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.

TL;DR: Only buy this game if it is on sale and you absolutely love 4X games. If you want to spend a few dozen or hundred hours testing your patience, then this may be the game for you. Otherwise, perhaps gift it to someone you want to see spend hours on end beating their head against the wall.

This game is a great time sink, but there are lots of poorly executed concepts. Item durability, especially on arrows, is a joke. Your arrows can (and sometimes will) break before you run out of arrows in a single fight. The best magically enhanced arrows have less durability than the "heavy arrows" which themselves have to be repaired literally after every single serious fight or they will break during your next battle.

If item durability was the only flaw this game might still be a gem, but even concepts that are well thought out are not well developed. Exploration of owned territory is an interesting idea, but there is often no real reason to bother completely exploring areas. Your rewards for doing so are threefold. You receive a tiny immediate 2 gold increase in total income, you discover a large variety of new enemies to battle, and the settlements in that area can expand into the newly explored areas, eventually generating significantly increased income. This mechanic would function a lot better if there was a small amount of exploration that took place automatically in provinces with guards. The AI doesn't explore much manually, but it does have guards in every province so at the very least the AI would have some small amount of exploration done in their own territories. Instead when you take territory from an AI opponent every single province will be gripped under the stranglehold of "overpopulation". And that brings me to my second major frustration with the game.

The AI doesn't understand the mechanics, either in battle or on the world map. As an example of the flawed combat AI, ghosts can only be damaged by magic damage. However, if you try to autoresolve a battle with a ghost in it you will almost certainly be completely annihilated by the ghost because the AI will use all the physical damage it can against the ghost, while units capable of magic damage busy themselves with other tasks until your entire army is dead. This means that armies that are labelled as something you can fight without taking casualties are often impossible to defeat, where enemies that are labelled as "I will be trampled" can often be manually defeated without taking a single point of damage.

On the overland map the AI spams a granary in effectively every province. The granary itself generates no income, and takes up one of the limited building slots. The granary can be explanded to a stable which would give the AI some tiny additional income as well as allow it to move more quickly through its territory, but I have yet to see a province in which the AI had actually upgraded one. A storehouse on the other hand can add 10 gold per turn income to a province when it is fully upgraded, otherwise it will offer 5 at tier 2 or just a single gold per turn at tier one. Still, these are the most readily constructed source of income, while it takes awhile to be able to upgrade them to tier 2 you can quite readily increase your total income by a third or more by having one in every province. It's a crying shame the AI doesn't understand how to build a thriving economy, if it did perhaps there could be a provincial governer (or some such) that would automatically build the upgrades you wanted akin to automating workers in Civilization. Building a mall in every province you have is a chore when you have twenty provinces, but it's ludicrous to even consider bothering once you've gotten to the point where you have 100 or so provinces. If the AI could build wealth it might be able to field larger armies more often. I have thus far only rarely seen the AI taking advantage of units higher than tier 2, and there are 5 tiers of units that can be recruited.

As an example of something that is ridiculously easily fixed, and yet remains flawed for no good reason, just look to the autosave system. The autosave system autosaves at the end of every several turns, rather than the begining of every several turns. If they had taken the approach of labelling these saves Turn ___ or something along these lines this wouldn't really be an issue. However, they've gone the route of having 5 autosaves that roll over each other. Not necessarily a problem, but there isn't anything behind the scenes that tells the game that it has autosaved this turn in say the slot Autosave 4. So when you load Autosave 4, and end the turn, you will create Autosave 5. Does the war seem inevitable at that point? Load Autosave 3, but when you end your turn you will create Autosave 1. Get to the turn that originally was Autosave 5? Now it's created Autosave 2, and if Autosave 3 isn't early enough to head off your issue your older autosaves are gone. This is easily avoided using a rotation of manual save games, but it's just one tiny example of a problem that could likely be fixed by changing a few lines of code and remains in the game just to annoy players.

I wish I could introduce Snowbird to the concept of numbers that end in 0, it would be a lot less frustrating to see that I've done 2 damage or 5 damage to something with 50 health than that I did 0 damage four times in a row firing Ballistae at one skeleton (each with damage potential labelled as 0-5 on a 5 health skeleton). And that's just another in a litany of odd design decisions. If a flying creature flies onto a hill, it gains +1 range for its attacks. But it already flies, it's flitting about in the air, why on earth should the topography below it matter? If anything flying units should constantly receive a +1 range buff, perhaps losing it when they run out of stamina. There's a reason why it's a fairly common practice that ground based effects, positive and negative alike, are typically ignored by flying units in games. Siege engines are considered mechanical units for the purposes of healing spells, but they're not immune to being petrified by a medusa. There is literally only one unit, at least according to the wiki, who can gain the Repair ability so that they can repair siege engines, and it is the militiaman which is one of the weakest units in the game. Both the Ballista and (clearly described as self propelled, yet also capable of being petrified) Catapult are described as having been created initially by the Dwarves, but the Dwarf cannot gain repair. Interestingly the Dwarf can gain petrification immunity, and now I have nearly come to the end of this tirade. I am baffled anew by this game every time I play it, I understand many of its quirks, and yet I am consistantly scratching my head and asking "Why?". Why did they make every quiver of arrows in the game have the potential to break if you fight two back to back battles when you can very easily be required to fight at least three armies during a fortress siege (the guards, a defending hero, and the garrison. You will honestly likely fight five as two more armies rush home to commit suicide as an act of solidarity with their comrades). Early game a quiver of 10 arrows will break before you've even run out of arrows, apparently you break arrows like a drunk having a nicotine fit might break cigarettes.

This game has had a lot of thought put into it, but it seems to me that very little logic has gone into the development. I almost wish it had come out alongside Master of Magic and the first Civilization. At least then I could have more readily forgiven its faults and the games it inspired would be able to refine the good ideas and burn away the dross. As it stands at the end of the day there are better 4X games out there for your purchasing dollar.

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.

The game is excellent - a lot like MOM with a nice twist. The only - major- drawback is that none of the fixes so far fixes all the bugs...and nothing is more frustrating than a gamecrash after an hour of tactical mahem....unsaved.

You want to play turn-based combat and simultaneously building up your empire while leveling every single unit in your army up? You, dear Sir, have quite an interesting taste. And found a jewel.

The story itself is engaging while you conquer the whole universe and face from humans to gods everything you might think of. The shards (worlds) itself are then conquered by your hero and his armies, who fight your battles in turn-based combats. All the shards then allow for more units, equipments, buildings and boosts for the next shard to fall under your rule.

The graphical presentation might not appeal to anyone, but it is atmospherical and suits the game and gameplay well enough. A lot of peopel are reporting technical issues with the game, however I have never encountered such problems. If this bothers you, I recommend checking other reviews in more detail.

7/10 for breaking under it's own size from time to time and the technical issues a lot of peopel might have (This is hard to factor in, though, because if you do have such issues, one would very likely give it a 0, as in did not deliver).

Too frustrating TBS, with 4X elements.

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 had so much potential, but script and dialogue box errors and glitches make the game unplayable.

From Russia, with bugs.

I really wanted to enjoy this game. Seriously, I did, and the lost potential is unfortunate. This seems to be a trend with developers in post-Soviet states. Akella, GSC Gameworld, 1C, and now Snowbird Games keep releasing very ambitious, genre-bending designs that simply aren't implemented to quality upon release.

I stubbornly sank an entire Saturday into this game. The interface takes some getting used to, and quite a few bugs are lingering around even now. (Here's a fun one: if you have only a single hero and he dies in battle, choosing not to resurrect the hero causes a crash to desktop. Nice testing there, comrades.) However, it's such a joy to explore the nooks and crannies of your provinces, rooting out evil and building up your heroes and your stronghold.

By the 4th or 5th map - or "shard" in Eador parlance - you start noticing how badly the AI cheats. Seriously, on the "Skilled" level - one up from "Beginner" - the AI will be stomping around the shards with killer stacks, turning the game into a cold war arms race. Ironically, and disappointingly, this game works so much better as a slow-paced RPG than a fast-paced strategic war game. The RPG part is awesome. Too bad that the poor interface, game-breaking bugs, and ridiculously overpowered AI opponents turn the whole experience into a dull slugfest.

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.

Fun game but it has a memory error that basically makes it unplayable if it manifests on your save game.