@Mysterio saw that I bought Godking and asked I post impressions. It’s pretty simple to do, as it is essentially Conquest of Elysium with 3D-models. It has enough of it’s own character and ideas that I will call it an homage rather than a ripoff. I think there are currently six factions in the game - Undead, Lizardmen, Goblins, Barbarians, Chaos and the one I played, which is most similar to that Romanesque faction in COE. You can upgrade your initial city and any other cities you find with buildings to provide militia every turn, incrase your gold income, or offer access to better troops and commanders. You can recruit a couple of militia every turn from villages. You can recruit a dozen or so different commanders, but they are based on your cities’ upgrades, not what randomly appears that month.
One neat touch is that your militia commander can upgrade the militia units you get every turn into a Spearman. It cost one more food, but saved you a few gold in comparison to recruiting a spearman. In my game, I had decent gold at first and was low on food, so I didn’t start using it until I unlocked better troops that cost a lot more gold. Then, I did set up a couple commanders in a couple different cities to train my pool of militia into spearmen. You also had commanders with their own summons, but I didn’t get a chance to test them out. Likewise, there were commanders who could craft items (randomly), but I didn’t get to test them either.
The game is generous with items as commanders can wear many, and units can also equip them. Most of the items just seemed to provide +1 this or that. I think those are considered Minor Items, so hopefully there are some more interesting Major Items, but I didn’t notice any.
Towards the end, my Fire Mage Pretender had summoned a Fire Dragon (which is one of the potential Pretenders that can be chosen to lead any faction during game setup). My Dragon commander was in the process of destroying everything when I decided to stop playing until this game has more time to develop.
The UI is pretty clunky, even compared to COE’s less than ideal UI. The AI is totally lacking right now as well (there are no difficulty levels yet). If you are annoyed by COE’s randomness (I’m not), then you’ll appreciate that this game has less. The faction I played had few random situations. The only ones I can really think of was my Fire Mage’s summon Minor Champions (the Fire Dragon was the only non-minor champion) and the item crafting by the other commander. I was autocasting Summon Minor Champion (which is a nice feature that I can’t remember if COE has), and I saw a fire horse thing and a fire wyrm come up before I quit. The horse wasn’t a commander, but the wyrm was.
So, if you wanted a less random COE, with 3d models, you should wishlist this game. It has a ways to go before it can get provide an experience to rival COE, but hopefully it will by the time it leaves EA. The devs are certainly active in the Discussions, and will hopefully incorporate a lot of good ideas. My biggest concern might be their interest in making this multiplayer, and I worry that they’ll not include some of the crazy things to compare with the random things that could happen in COE.
Oh yeah, and while there were some wandering bands of neutrals, but they weren’t constantly taking over my holdings.