Eador Imperium

Games
21

I picked this up and am playing the first mini-campaign. I always played benevloent, so I’m not sure if the Necromancer was previously available as an upgraded mage? You start off the first mini-campaign as a 10th level necromancer, and have 4 or 5 provinces already. I’ve seen people complain about a time limit at 90 turns, but I think you have two choices on how you play it. You can either choose to wreak vengeance upon your foes, or to strengthen your defenses until their return.

I’ve chosen the aggressive route, so I am playing it as a fairly typical map and trying to work my way across the map. I would have chosen defensive, but didn’t really know I was committing myself when I chose my answer. I figured it was just flavor text.

22

I’d heard the time limit was 90 turns, so I was pretty anxious to see it was going to take 8 turns to besiege the enemy castle, and I was already at turn 84. Fortunately, the game didn’t end at 90, and I was able to win on turn 92. You get to the victory screen, and it explains why you need to start the next scenario.

You again start with surrounding provinces, and all your troops, equipment and levels carry onto the next scenario. This time, I’ll need to defeat two neighbors to access keys needed to unlock a door in the third neighbors demesne.

Performance seems better than MOTBW. There are some nice UI changes as well. I’d definitely recommend picking it up with the discount if you are cool with playing a number of scenarios before unlocking the Grand Campaign.

I still don’t know how many scenarios are contained within the three mini-campaigns, and I’m not exactly clear if the Grand Campaign is the same as earlier games.

23

Masters of the Broken World was one of my favorite games ever, spent ridiculous numbers of hours on it, up there with Civ and OOTP Baseball.

But reviews I am reading claim that Imperium is very buggy, and that the additions aren’t really all that. I’ll be curious to hear what people think.

24

I haven’t encountered any bugs yet. It runs better than I remember MOTBW running.

I haven’t really gotten to play with any of the additions yet. Unless the Necromancer hero is a new one. If so, it is a pretty cool class.

25

I fired this up to give it an honest try this weekend. The campaigns don’t appear to be what I want so I started up with a random big game with 6 total players. I wanted a chance to build and unlock all the new additions and to hire whatever heroes I want.

I played maybe 25 turns of one game and realized I made some really bad decisions and wanted to refine my start.

My second game was going great until I realized I either encountered a really bad bug or a really bad design decision that essentially appears to cripple my entire game at about turn 20-25 or so.

I fought one of the normal encounters with 4 shaman and a sorcerer? (forget name, but the evil wizard guys that are low level). The battlefields are now larger, it appears, which can be a good thing. I noticed that most spells now have a range of 8 so cannot be used to immediately target any unit on the battlefield from round one. That is also fine. However, in my battle with one sorcerer, they had 5 ammo and decided to use the Fear spell all 5 times. They feared my ranger(scout) hero twice, lowering him to 0 morale and unable to act for quite a few turns, and then my bowman twice, which did the same to him. As soon as my Scout got back to 1 morale and able to act, he was feared again to zero.

I ended up winning the battle with my other units and wasn’t too concerned. Now I may have to bring more morale restoration spells to battle and be a bit more diverse in my load out. I walked my army back to the capitol, switched out some spells, and figured the next battle I would cast a bunch of morale restoration spells and be back on my way. Well, I hit the next battle and my hero was at 1/1 stamina. It reset his max stamina to 1! Haha! I cast the spell on him and it did nothing, leaving it at 1/1. As most of you know that have played this game, that basically reduced his attacks to completely ineffective and now with orc parties having a caster that also has a morale reducing spell, it basically crippled any game advancement I can now make.

It looks like there were some neat additions in this update like some buildings you could build that give you alliances with certain races? The description made it sounds like that. There were also quite a few new unit types at each level that sounded interesting with roman style soldiers that gained bonuses while in formation and while led by the new Legate leader class.

I will see if I can submit a bug report. It looks like it has promise, but if fear becomes that powerful, I can’t see myself playing again.

EDIT: I think I saved before that battle. Maybe I will keep pressing on and see it that was a fluke and/or whether I can just avoid those guys :).

26

Well, looks like it may be working as intended. The next time I fought those guys I put 3 other units at the front to burn up all the fears. At the end of the battle, they all had reduced max morale and I figured they may be permanently nerfed from then on. Well, I pressed on and the next battle they remained in this state and I pretty much had to keep them out of battle. However, at the end of the successful battle, their max morale was restored so perhaps things are okay.

Still, it makes fear quite powerful, but at least I can recover and press on for now.

27

I read that morale, like HP, takes a few turns to regenerate. Unlike Stamina which resets for each battle.

28

Are turn times any better?

29

Hmm, good question.

I just did a test on my current game against 5 AI players on a very large map (not sure of exact name, but one of the larger ones) on turn 150 and the planning stages of the AI took about 27 seconds. Then I did all of my battles/events and finally the AI did their execution and that took maybe 3-4 seconds is all.

It doesn’t seem too bad at all now to me. My kingdom is fairly large at probably 20+ provinces and 3 heroes for reference.

30

I should probably add that I have a fairly new processor i7-5820 running at a modest 3.30 GHz with 16 GB RAM.

31

The AI was very slow in the old one, it used so long to do the few actions you can do, it took longer than me

32

Anyone tried this recently? As a recovering Eador addict I’m always looking for another fix. Honestly, the same mechanics with minor tweaks is likely good enough for me.

33

Apparently, it’s still a buggy mess and the publisher, Snowbird Games, just went belly up (deservedly so, imo). It looks like there may be a new development team trying to fix things so we’ll see how that goes. I might bite at some point if they can iron out the issues. I’m a huge fan of the first game but the follow-up ones have had some problems, to say the least.

34

Seems to have been mostly fixed up. Steam now shows recent reviews as Overwhelmingly Positive – 97% on the last 140 reviews.

35

New dev shop doesn’t happen to have 136 employees, does it?

36

The thought occurred to me, which is why I checked the number of reviews 97% positive in 140 reviews seems like it would be hard to fake.

37

I bought it during the Steam sale and promptly returned it when I couldn’t change resolutions on my ultra wide monitor and at native resolution the mouse wouldn’t work. There were some posts on the Steam forums about this topic with no responses, so not worth the hassle.

38

The number of times I’ve read something like this is why I still don’t have (nor care to) a super wide monitor. Still seems to early to adopt yet.

39

But when it does work (which really is most games released recently) it’s oh so sweet! Hitman has never looked so good.

40

Does Eador Imperium not have a “windowed” mode? I would think that would be my go-to solution if I had an ultra wide display but a game I wanted to play didn’t support it.