I know I have other notes somewhere..

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(on Wikipedia)

One of the classic 4x games.

General Comments ∞

This game is very nicely designed. The scrolling is intelligent, based on where the units will need more screen space. The UI is quite good, and I especially appreciate that certain functions will abort the current animation / etc.. that really speeds things up. Some of the interface functions (like finding your list of magical items) are tucked away in a stupid place (in this case, it’s the armies list). But overall, everything is very nice.

Suffers from some stupid unit syndrome in some cases (dealing with roads can sometimes take them a bit of the wrong route – on enchanted roads. It’s a minor hiccup there. In combat, “auto” doesn’t have units back off or work in an intelligent manner at all.

I recall that this game does work on a 386/486, so it’s especially well designed.

Notes ∞

• Star fires sometimes does terrible terrible damage (to demons, at least).

Tips ∞

• Magic which affects the group is very useful compared to single-target magic. This also applies to the ranged attacks of a hero.. a bow is only so useful, where a magical ranged attack can either be crappy (lightning bolt) or good (fire ball)
• Items of stoning are very very powerful. Especially bows!
• Since trolls regenerate, they’re great throwaway units.
• First-strike really is great. Draconians have a serious edge with it.
• Sprites can dish it out, but they can’t take it.. they die very easily.
• Hell Hounds are quite nice, but they can die quite easily.

• The number of things in a unit really matters a whole lot. Unfortunately, there is no way to determine how many there will be in a unit for summonned creatures, except from past experience. When building the units onesself, there is a thumbnail of them.

Bugs ∞

• Fire elementals seem to be broken.
• In combat, magic roads don’t work as expected. Only various little sections help.
• Sometimes, when an engineer is in a tower, they will build an outbound road on the wrong plane, and they can even move into a shoreline square with the attempt.

• With a complete squad of units all with regeneration, I had two fights against me, one after the other.. the second fight didn’t have everything regenerated.. which is fine.. but once it got around to my turn again, one unit was missing from the group.

Issues ∞

• There is no keyboard-only method for saving a game.
• It’s difficult to see the outline of what unit is selected.
• It can sometimes be annoying to mouseover a particular unit if it’s crowded by other units..
• There is no keyboard support for moving units in combat.
• There is no functionality to skip one’s combat turn.

• There is no “quick fight” functionality, to skip the combat phase entirely and just estimate who would win and where the losses would be. That would be nice, but it’s probably beyond this game’s capabilities.