What's the worse crime; Necromancy or Cloning? Guess I'll just go for raising the dead at the moment...
So I've had my eye half-on this for a while now, and ended up picking it up on a whim a couple days ago to give it a go. Early game's been fun enough, what with not knowing how anything fits together in the slightest, and I'm now some 160 turns in to my Very Easy Please Don't Hurt Me first game.
And it's been... Well, a bit odd. I'm having a very hard time cracking the combat code, which I understand is a bit tricky for most new players. As befitting a dark lord of evil and conquest, most of my income is from selling excess copper and silver from my mines, as it was only after turn 100+ I discovered my first real settlements, those belonging to the nearest neighboring warlord. I've since conquered them, but apparently being an evil overlord of orcs and goblins means that there's a +20 culture clash when dealing with these populations of... Evil goblins. I dunno.
The warlord himself was a completely ineffectual pushover, sending out paltry scouting forces of paper-thin units. The
real enemy has been the multiple orcish hordes populating the southern reaches of the map, each one pumping out armies of these nonsense wolf-bow-axe-fireball chariots that do kinda ridiculous amounts of damage. Haven't found a particularly good counter yet, other than just slamming into them with overwhelming force and eating the hits necessary to catch up to them and bring them down.
Unit design is also... Curious. Some of the native troop configurations show up with things that need 2.58 gold and 0.28 food upkeep, while actually somehow being able to afford clothes. If I were to put the same thing together in the custom designer, the minimum upkeep would be several times higher. I can sorta see where that mechanic is coming from, but... Still.
I'm still trying to work out what are effective unit configurations, but so far the most efficient troops I've put together have actually been the nudist skirmserkers. Which I definitely wasn't expecting, given that I'd designed them to be the cheapest cannon fodder I could create that still carried a weapon around.
Overall, I do think the game's interesting, and I can see the
potential for some awesome stories to grow from the mechanics involved... But at the same time, it's just so horrifically bogged down in menus, bloated resource systems and fiddly micromanagement that rather detracts from the power fantasy of being some ultimately powerful master of the magical arts.
...also, Bad Moon hasn't paid off
once in the dozen or so castings I've pumped out, so obviously the game's literally unplayable