well since you seem to have been convinced to try Eador I hope you enjoy it I'm having a great time with it but still learning bits and pieces on how to play

good fun to you

Be careful about forum recommendations and inflated GOG.com reviews. Their opinions are extremely biased. There are no reputable reviews about Eador: Genesis.

Despite that, I don't understand your reasoning at all. To be honest, it does sound like you would want to give up very early on. You can't approach the genre like that. You'll encounter agressive AIs, brutal mission design, bugs which destroy your resources/armies, very small decisions can cause virtual death and annihilation.

According to reputable reviews, I'd go with Master of Magic. It looks horrible but in the scope of its concepts it was much wider developed than any successive fantasy TBS. The HoMM series as well as the Age of Wonders series were inspired by MoM, short for Master of Magic. But they never applied as many concepts. For instance, in MoMs combat you don't have stacks, but armies, which you can freely move. The AI is bad, but you just might like that. There are lots of over-powered spells in it, like time-stop. The devs had a lot of freedom. It currently has one of the highest user scores on GameSpot I have ever seen, 9.4 out of 289 votes. Despite its age it might fit your needs.

Eador Genesis: It's a great game. It's has amazing depth, it's only downside is it's 'puppy punching' difficulty.
I agree, I cannot put my finger on it, maybe the overall production level. I miss New World Computing.

In my opinion Eador is the best turnbased game with a fantasy setting, but the best turnbased game of all time is Jagged Alliance 2. ;)

I will, since someone else here already questioned and challenged my first impressions of the game (it might have been Keeveek?), so maybe I owe it a second chance. It also seems to be the most netbook-friendly of the ones I tried so far.


As I said, I didn't really play King's Bounty since my rig seemed to slow to handle it. Could you elaborate on why you think I might like Fantasy Wars better than the rest? What is it that makes it stand out compared to them? Are the RPG or exploration aspects stronger?

I'm not sure if it would run that well on my rig, seeing that it's from 2007, as is my PC - and it was no high-end gaming PC in the first place (only had a GeForce 7300LE), but since the graphic card died and I'm only using onboard graphics, it's even slightly worse.



I wouldn't buy a game just because some stranger says it's great, but unless users choose to outright lie about a game's features, I think even biased reviews can be informative if it goes into detail about why the user liked or hated it.

Anyway, you might be right that my approach is the wrong one for the genre, that's why I wondered if I should rather give up on it altogether, because while I like a good challenge I really hate to get frustrated by a game, especially if the rewards for overcoming the frustration are not attractive enough for my personal tastes (e.g. the thought alone that I managed to win does not motivate me a lot if it's not rewarded with new and exciting features/levels/discoveries on top of it that would vary the gameplay and prolong my enjoyment of the game. I'm not really competitive for its own sake, I don't care about scores and achievements and such).

I'm probably more of a mid-core gamer than a hardcore gamer, someone who is passionate about discovering lots of different games and who enjoys the variety and creativity of them, but generally prefers the experience of story-driven games and/or short entertaining gaming sessions to mastering a difficult game by spending huge amounts of time on it, reading rule books, replaying and retrying despite a huge frustration factor. Would that make me the wrong target group for TBS games?

Still, from what I've heard, the HOMM games for example, are supposed to be beginner-friendly and rather easy games, who can be enjoyed by more than just the hardcore faction ...

Anyway, I'm very happy that I got the opportunity to try Eador, thanks to Dischord, and I promise to be more patient with it! :)

A belated Happy New Year to the benefactor and everyone else who participated in this thread or reads it!