You will most likely also have to throttle your CPU to avoid potentially crash-inducing lag.
Eador: Genesis is a close-to-no-budget indie. It does have all the polish that kind of budget can buy - great balance, great maps, user-friendly GUI, good AI, assloads of content - but it also lacks all the polish that money buys - graphical variety, quality art, animations, free but unsupported 3rd party resources (which is why you’ll need to throttle your CPU, by the way).
The potentially good news for you, is that Eador is currently being remade with a pile of money and will be released soon. Going by screenies of the more or less public beta (I don’t know if you need to preorder to join in), rEador just might be the prettiest 3D 4X yet.
Personally I’m a little bit worried rEador will end up with an inferior GUI, and I’ve noticed a few complaints about animation speed. But most people seem to want glitz even at some expense to functionality, so I’m guessing these might be non-issues for you.
If you’re talking about the layout, I thought the Pangaea and Desert Oasis maps were pretty decent. These three are way better than anything that shipped with FFH2 though: 123
I wanted to love Fallen Enchantress but it just didn’t do it for me. It has some neat mechanics but it doesn’t do anythign with them and ends up feeling mediocre in every department. To clarify - it’s perfectly fine, there’s nothing actively wrong with it, but it leaves me going “meh” (I loved FFH2 and MoM and was hoping for something that would feel similar).
Warlock is more of a wargame than a 4X, which is no bad thing. It has all the conceits of a 4X – and those conceits have been emphasized post-release, for example terrain actually has an effect on city building now where it didn’t before – but it’s basically about building and buffing armies, and slamming them in to each other right at the get-go. I think of Warlock as being the grandchild of the original Warlord series (especially DLR). BTW I really, really like Warlock.
I can’t really agree. Warlock feels like a really slick throwback to the hex based wargaming of old. Fallen Enchantres feels like a Civ-like 4X. And Eador feels kind of like a strangely awesome 4X’y version of HoMM.
In my opinion Eador and Fallen Enchantress scratches different, but related itches. While Warlock scratches a completely unrelated kind of itch.
I agree Eador is the best game, but it’s definitely not one I’d suggest playing instead of Warlock. That’d be like recommending Mario to someone in the mood for Call of Duty.
I don’t think a release date has been set yet, but expect it in the next 2-4 months.
There is a beta you can play if you preorder?
There’s no pre-release demo, but if you’re interested in doing actual testing the developer, Snowbird, would like to hear from you. Per their site:
[INDENT]If you’re a newcomer wishing to join the beta — please send a mail to [email protected] with the “Eador- Beta (new tester)” subject. And don’t forget to include your username on our forums as well.[/INDENT]
Yes, it’s the English beta they’re talking about. And no, you can’t preorder the English version of the Eador remake yet. But it already has been greenlit by Steam, and I’m pretty sure it’ll be coming to GOG shortly as well.
I love Warlock as well and I think the refinements added via DLC and patches qualify it as a 4x. Though I agree it originally wasn’t one. It’s still city-development light and combat heavy compared to something like Civ of course.
With the latest version some thought is required nowadays about placing cities and optimizing use of the land available for settling. There’s also tradeoffs to be considered to make in terms of planning cities for short term gain vs long term potential, tradeoffs that influence both city placement and city upgrade building. There’s enough meat in the builder side to be satisfying and quite frankly it hits what I consider a perfect sweet spot between too little and too much complexity.
I agree with everything that has been posted thus far. Eador is the best of the three even while Warlock/Elemental are very playable. You probably can’t go wrong with any of the three. But there’s another difference between Warlock and Elemental in that you can find one for $10 and the other will cost $40. So you can get Eador and Warlock and spend only half the money it would take to get Elemental.
Just want to say that there is nothing wrong with playing Eador and skipping the tactical combat. The auto resolve is reasonable, and even though you can do better yourself, it doesn’t destroy you to lose some battles.
Personally I skip 90+% of the combats, pretty much everything unless I really want to kill an enemy hero that is an even battle, or if I want to win an evenish quest fight.
The revisions to the city building aspect hasn’t significantly changed anything. You’re still doing it wrong if you’re not spamming as many cities as you possibly can, and special tiles are still abundant and important enough that they determine the focus of cities. In fact, in a roundabout way the addition of tile yield modifiers has made tile yield modifiers less important than the absence of them did. Because the tile yield modifiers makes gold/food/mana/research production deficiencies more likely to develop, which in turn makes it more important that cities build whatever the empire needs right now, than that they build whatever would be most efficient in a particular city.
Likewise, the vastly expanded spell library means you can no longer do target spell research, so Warlock effectively no longer has an analogue to teching in traditional 4X games.
Well… There’s also the thing with Fallen Enchantress being extremely wonky in many, many ways.
To give an example; tactical combat techs use the typical rock, paper, scissors dynamic, but it is sabotaged because the tech tree distributes the individual tactical combat techs in such a way that they’re not even remotely equally accessible.
And of course, the game is buggy as hell. Not so much critical bugs - though the game does crash on my machine roughly once every other time I play it (I guess that translates to crashing every 4 hours or so) - but man… FE has tonnes of non-critical bugs. TONNES.
You must be much, much better at the game than I am :s
At Skilled difficulty I find I simply cannot keep up if I use auto-resolve without being certain I won’t lose troops because of it. If I have to spend resources on troops, I loose momentum on the map and get eaten. If I don’t level up my troops, my heroes tend to get stomped flat by the enemy heroes.
I’d be grateful for some pointers, because I really wouldn’t mind auto-resolving at least half the battles.
Let me put it this way: if Eador feels like a game from 1989, then Conquest of Elysium feels like a game from 1589 :D
Eador is neither slick nor pretty, but there’s nothing half-assed about it. The GUI might not be pretty, for example, but it’s uncommonly functional and efficient.
Indeed, if you hate crap GUIs like I do, Eador’s likely going to feel like a game from a distant future time in which humanity has evolved into something far more brilliant than us clunk-loving clowns ;)
