Eador Genesis Demo

[naufragar]

I must be in the mood for demo games (demonstration, not democracy ). Soon, Bob, MJW, and I will show off Age of Wonders: Planetfall, but for a while I had wanted to share my love of an old, cheap masterpiece called Eador: Genesis. Here I’ll walk through a game and try to highlight as many of the positives as I can.

I’m not an expert at this game. I play on the fourth of seven difficulties (so the equivalent of Civilization’s Prince difficulty) and still lose most of the time. There’s lots for me to learn still, so if you are an Eador savant, please don’t be offended.

Eador is, essentially, a hero-based 4x game in the same tribe as the Heroes of Might and Magic and Age of Wonders series. Doesn’t this look familiar:



The world map is divided into tiles. My cursor is on our capital, “Homeland.” I have put a red box around the “locations” counter. Each tile in Eador contains numerous locations to visit, usually with the intention of killing the locals and taking their stuff.

To do said conquering, we have heroes leading armies. Each hero gets progressively more expensive. We start with enough gold to buy one from a pool of Wizard, Warrior, Scout, and Commander. I picked a scout:


On this screen, we can view the hero’s army, equipment, skills, and memorized spells. Looks a lot like HoMM (which I’ve barely played…).

In Eador, you only have one stronghold. If you lose it, you lose the game. There is an extensive building tree. I want to unlock the “Barbarian” unit, but first I must build a Tavern.



The flow of the turns in Eador is fascinating. You can only build one building a turn. This happens instantly. All movement, yours and your opponents’, happens on the interturn. If you’ve played the boardgame Diplomacy, think of it like that. I have to wait until next turn build the building to get my Barbarians, so I might as well put my scout to use.


Here, I’m ordering my hero to visit one of those six locations indicated in the first screenshot. My hero currently has two terrible units and his weak starting weapons, so the enemies in any of these will slaughter us. All the same, I want to see what we’re up against, so I tell the hero to go to the Ancient Ruins (Brigands). I give him the order; he promises to do it; and then I press End Turn and the order is carried out.
In the interturn, I’m presented with this:



I don’t know exactly how many of each unit type my army would face, but I definitely would lose this fight. I retreat. The next turn I build a Barbarian Camp and recruit three Barbarians. I again send my hero into the Ancient Ruins. I thought I took a pic of the start of the battle, but I didn’t. Here’s halfway through:



I’ve killed on enemy unit and I’ve sent my Barbarian to attack an enemy brigand. The red numbers above each unit’s head are the damage. So far, so Wesnoth, or any other fantasy hex-based game. Here’s how damage works:


The sword is the Attack stat. The two swords is the Counterattack stat. The shield is the Defense stat. (The shield and arrow is the Ranged Defense stat, but let’s ignore that for now.) Brigands have a high Attack stat but a low Counterattack stat. Barbarians do, too. When a unit is attacked the damage received is Attack minus Defense plus or minus one (I think. I actually don’t know the combat formula precisely.) Counterattacks use the Counterattack stat. So we like to attack first with our Barbarians against their Brigands. Note in the previous picture that the Brigand received 7 damage to our 4.

I win the fight, and all my units survive. (Barely. One Barb has 1hp.) In addition to a little bit of gold and magic gems, Eador’s two currencies, we get experience. The scout gains a level and I get to pick from three randomly drawn Scout skills:


Regular units get to choose between two random upgrades. I give my promoted barbs an extra point of health. If certain conditions are met, the game tells you certain units performed heroically and can be given awards:


I guess barbs pin medals onto their kilts.

[naufragar]

Between the Barbarians and the medal, I’m losing gold per turn. This is a normal state for the early game. Unfortunately, our units heal slowly, and I don’t think they’re strong enough to take out any of the other locations in our capital province, so it’s time to go imperializing:



The game tells me (not on this screen) that this province is a “Free Settlement.” From experience, I know that the garrisons of Free Settlements will be made mostly of Spearmen (scary), Militia (not scary), Slingers (not scary), Archers (currently very, very scary). I won’t know the combination until we’re engaged. Let’s go:


Well this is about as perfect as we could have hoped. Our Scout on a hill will out-range their Slingers. The majority of their infantry are untrained peasants in sackcloth wielding pitchforks.



The battle goes well. We want, however, for the battle to go perfectly. Losing units slows down the snowball, costing resources and time to replace. The Eador tactical AI is a real jerk. It consistently prioritizes healers, heroes, ranged units, and damaged units. It’s very simple but brutally effective. Here, I was able to manipulate the AI a little, giving that spearman a clear shot at my full health hero in order to save some hitpoints on my infantry.

We now have a bit more territory:


There’s a frowny face in our province. People don’t like being conquered. Humans are the most amenable, though, so in a few turns that frowny face will disappear. Certain races take a long time to forget your cruel oppression.

I travel back home to repair and resupply. As your heroes use their equipment, it degrades. This is binary: so long as gear has a point of health left, it works fine. At 0 health, the gear doesn’t work. Gear degrades in combat, and it’s a very scary thing to fire your bow only to hear it snap.


In the lower right corner under “Repair Price,” do you see that picture of wooden logs outlined in red? Well, bows and (some!) arrows need Redwood, a strategic resource. In the previous pic, you can see the area around us. There are no resources anywhere visible. I would have pointed them out if there were. Every time you want to use a resource you don’t control, you have to buy it from the market. Every time any player buys a resource from the market, the price goes up. Permanently. So…every battle I’m in degrades my Scout’s gear, which must be repaired with wood, which constantly rises in price…
Here’s a market summary with all the resources in the bottom left:


Some of these resources we won’t care about until the very late game. Black lotus? Phooey. On the other hand, we’d really like our own sources of Iron, Redwood, Horse, and Mandrake. I have highlighted my “Revisions” stat. One of my very few gripes with Eador is that it doesn’t really have a save game feature. The only option is to go back into the past one turn (Reversion) and take a score penalty. What can I say, I’m a save-scummer at heart. Since losing a hero and his army can be devastating, I will be making use of the feature. Like I said, I don’t claim to be good at this game.

The gameplay I’ve described is the general flow of the game. Eador is different from many 4X games in that the bulk of your economy, especially early, doesn’t come from passive income from territory but from spoils after clearing a Location. You’ll want to balance this with territorial expansion, but territories get tougher garrisons the farther from your (and other players’) capitals they are. In general, this leads to a nice flow of the game. You build up your little kingdom and heroes until your strong enough to push out of your ring of neutral territories into another players territory. (This can tend to break down because the AIs are just brutally strong and seem to be able to steamroll me very early at times…) Occasionally, random events will happen. Because Eador hates you, these are pretty much always bad.


Some disaster will happen and require your resources to fix it. You won’t be able to afford the solution (all my gems? No thanks), so you get a reputation as an evil tyrant and the province that had the event will start to hate you. Later, these matter less since you can eat the resource hit.

Speaking of evil tyrants, Eador has a morality system. Most units and spells are various shades of good or bad. Barbarians are bad. Recruiting and using them will turn me bad. Buildings that give me access to evil spells will also turn me bad, such as this Altar of Chaos:


Units of similar alignment like fighting alongside each other, while good and evil units very much do not.

That’s where I’ll leave it for today. It took me roughly a million times longer to write this up than to play the turns. Future reports will hopefully be shorter since the basic gameplay loop has been described. Next time we keep expanding, keep delving, and hopefully find some wood for our bows and arrows.

[Old Harry]

I like the natural-looking-hexagon tiles. Looking forward to learning more.

[naufragar]

I like the natural-looking-hexagon tiles. Looking forward to learning more.

I'm glad! Playing is a joy, and the write-up is easy enough.



In Eador, you can ally with various fantasy races. Each race has a different quest, ranging from trivial to impossible. The province with the exclamation mark has orcs, and the orc quest is easy, but it does involve plundering our own provinces, which our people don’t like…



But we can now start building orcs.


A little expensive without iron, so we wait.

Let’s talk about magic in Eador.


As your character levels up, they gain access to more slots in which to store spells. A tier 1 spell can be stored in any slot, but higher tiers require you to have unlocked the appropriate slot. Wizards unlock slots quickly; warriors practically never. You gain access to spells via buildings in your capital (“Demense”). I’ve built a basic Library and an Altar of Chaos. You can build lots of tier 1 magic buildings, but eventually, at tier 4, you’re down to 1. I like the enforced specialization. Spells can target anywhere on the tactical map, so I’ve given my scout some basic magic attacks in case he runs up against enemies with strong Ranged Defense. In many of my games, I end up Evil simply because Altars of Chaos give you access to Burn Ammo. It does exactly what it says on the tin and shuts down enemy ranged units well.

The unit variety in Eador is nuts.


Here I’m fighting some undead and their Sorcerer boss. The gross-looking unit I’m mousing over is a Ghoul, a tier 2 undead unit. Undead differ from normal units in a few ways. As living units get damaged, their attack value goes down. Not so undead. This means if you hit a skeleton and fail to kill it, it hits back just as strong as if it were healthy. The ghoul has, amongst other special abilities, the ability to apply the “Disease” debuff to units, lowering their speed and attack and poisoning them for a 3 hit point loss per turn. It’s a nasty unit.

Luckily the skeletons are pretty weak and my Scout outshoots the Sorcerer. I gang up on the Ghoul but it was still pretty dicey:


Now, when I say dicey, I meant in terms of losing a unit, not an army. You want to keep your army as intact as possible because while a tier 1 unit will never really be as good as a tier 3, they can come close.

Here’s our earlier Conan earning a second commendation:


A unit can earn up to three medals and the way you earn these medals is deterministic, so it’s possible to farm them. I can’t be bothered to learn the triggers and farm, but I do know that this medal is rewarded for almost dying… It raises Defense by 2 and Counterattack by 1. A Barbarian normally has 2 Defense. This one now has 6. That Brigand I fought on day 1 had an Attack of 8. Now instead of doing 6 Damage, he’d be doing 2. That’s very, very good. We want this guy to survive and level up even further.

Most of this game’s focus lies on the Demense upgrades and the tactical battles. Still, the provinces can get some love:


Each province can hold three buildings. Here I’ve unlocked the Mill, giving me +5 gold on the tile. It’s not Civ levels of micromanagement, but it’s cute. On the left side of the screen, you can see that I found Iron. I poked my head into the tile, but it looks too tough for now. You can also see a province with a flame icon. This province is halfway towards revolting!

[naufragar]

After leveling up my Scout a bit, I go for the Iron tile. If you want a look under Eador’s hood, read on, otherwise you can skip to the picture. When the map is generated, players are placed roughly equal distances from each other. In a game with 4 players, like this one, each player starts roughly in the corner. The game then places tiles down in circles extending out from each player’s capital. The tiles in the first ring have the weakest garrisons, and garrisons get stronger further out. When the circle extending from your capital touches the circle extending from another capital, the map is done. So, if you’re on a map with 6 tiles between you and an opponent. The provinces 3 and 4 tiles away are as tough as they’re going to be. The provinces 5 and 6 tiles away from you are weaker. This means on small maps, a quick rush can push through the independents and right into an unprepared rival. (The AI tends to do this a lot…) I like playing on more spacious maps, which, I admit, favors the human player. Every tile with a visible resource, like our iron, gets a +1 to its tier. So I was thinking that the Iron tile was going to be very tough. Btw, the strength of the garrison is only tangentially related to the strength of locations in the province. They generally scale, but you can still find a Dragon and its cult at your starting province.


Turns out the Iron province was quite easy. Ghouls are scary, but the terrain with all those hills, mountains, and lakes slowed the undead down enough that my Scout made short work of them.

With our new Iron, I embarked on a building campaign and recruited a new hero.


The other classes are pretty intuitive: Warriors get combat upgrades and fight well. Scouts shoot bows from a distance. Wizards do magic. Commanders, on the other hand, unlock army slots faster. Just like in the magic system, armies are made up of units of different tiers. Warriors, being solo fighters, unlock new slots and new tiers slowly. I’m pretty sure a Commander can use a tier 2 unit at level 2. Commanders, in my opinion, generally make poor starting heroes because the ability to build high tier units requires significant economic investment.

Somewhere along the way, one province got fed up with obeying a chaos worshipping barbarian, so they rebelled:


Rebellions scale with the population of the province, so I lost good units.



I took this opportunity to store my veterans safely away in my castle and recruit an army entirely of orcs. Once we got iron, Orcs became incredibly cost efficient cannon fodder. Slow, lots of hitpoints, cheap. Perfect for standing in from out our Scout while he does his thing.
You see, there was a source of Horses nearby, but they were under the control of Centaurs, who are right bastards. I mentioned before that the Eador AI is ruthless. They exploit weakpoints. If you have a unit with low morale, they’ll know to cast the Fear spell on it. If they can shoot your squishy healer, they will. This is incredibly frustrating because in many battles, the outcome is not in doubt. You know you’ll win handily but lose your healers or glass-cannon ranged troops. So, I kept the non-expendable troops at home:



The pocket holds. I lose some orcs, but they’re 15 gold, and our economy is finally humming.


You might’ve noticed that my hero now has a button of a bowman shooting two arrows, a la Legolas. At level 10, heroes gain a prestige class and can either further specialize in their original class, as this Scout has, or branch off into one of the other classes. At the cost of a lot of stamina, the Scout can now shoot twice.

Centaurs hate being conquered and stay angry for a very long time. Happiness in Eador works like this. Each province has a mood ranging from Hateful to Happy. Each mood adds or subtracts points from their rebellion meter (or whatever the game calls it). Hateful provinces rebel fast. Discontent provinces will probably get over it. I built a tavern for the Centaurs and then got an event with the opportunity to build a temple for their gods. (Just flavor. -200gold for +mood) So they’re content for now.

At the close, our empire has Iron and Horse and a strong hero. I start the long trek to tier 2 units, and now, because we’re apparently evil, we can build Thugs:


We still have no wood, so it costs the wealth of empires to restring out bow, but without our iron, this building would cost over 300 gold more. If you compare this Stronghold screen with previous ones I’ve posted, you’ll notice that the buildings I’ve made are being added on the right. Eador’s graphics are low-budget but made with love.

[naufragar]

Has it been six months since the last update? Time flies. I finished this game a long time ago, but didn't bother to write it up. I've got another game I'd like to demo, but I'd feel bad abandoning this one to do so.

When we last left off, we had reached the mid-game. We were no longer scraping by economically, and we had gained access to units and heroes that wouldn't die to a stiff breeze. So naturally, I got over-confident:


I had previously praised both Eador's unit diversity and it's art. You can see in this screenshot those working together. The orcs and goblins, the smallest units, are tier 1, and the goblins are less scary than the orcs, so they're smaller. The ogres are bigger and the single cyclops is biggest. I'll show another pic later where the units aren't hulking piles of muscle, and this visual clarity still holds. Better units are bigger, without becoming Godzilla-like monstrosities. This army was way too much for mine. In fact, the cyclops + ogres probably would've been enough to kill me. So I lose:



When a hero dies, you can choose to abandon them to oblivion or to resurrect them. This resurrection ritual takes place at your capital, so distant heroes take longer. Stronger heroes are more expensive than weaker heroes, but since they also come back with their gear, you should generally resurrect. If I weren't playing this as a demo game, I'd just rewind the turn and not attack, but since it is, we play on. (My end game stats show I rewinded twice. For the first, I can't remember. For the second, it was for total BS. )

After a while, a player will just memorize or look up the random events in Eador. There are few that are so common, I don't even read. Here is one that can happen when you control an orc province:


I don't know what all the options do, but I know that if I choose to execute the usurper, the orcs grumble a bit, but generally respect it. If you execute people in human provinces, on the other hand, you'll quickly find yourself staring down rebellion. I don't know everything that events are keyed to, but the triggers are super varied.

I meet an AI opponent:


I don't know if the different AI leaders get different bonuses. I know they have different flavors, so the evil ones will build lots of undead, etc. In my experience, they all behave exactly the same, and diplomacy is pretty useless. If you're weaker, they'll attack. If you're stronger, they'll send you gifts to appease you. If you're already at war, they'll only sue for peace for an interval in which to rebuild to attack you again. It's refreshingly honest, actually.

So, Oinor declared war on me, and I march to attack him.


My armies are in the south and need to cross the water to get to him in the north. You can see a couple provinces (his and mine) have buildings in them that look a bit like ships. These are shipyards. In Eador, there are no naval units or naval combat. Instead, provinces with shipyards (or their upgrades) connect to provinces 1 tile away over water (or more, with the upgrades). Movement in Eador very, very much favors the attacker until the defender has enough money to put sufficient garrisons in provinces.

I basically crush Oinor's armies and garrisons until I arrive at his capital, which is defended by this:


Again, note the unit sizes. The guys in purple robes on the right are good-aligned, magic slinging healing units (tier 2). The guys in red robes are good-aligned, magic slinging healing units (tier 3). Isn't it cool how the tier 3s are just a touch more visually impressive than the tier 2s? The big riders with the glowing swords are Paladins, tier 4 units that, along with being amazing combats specializing in smiting evil (which almost all my units are), can also heal themselves. Normally, a hero-controlled army can only have 1 tier 4 unit (2 tier 4s if the hero is a commander). I threw so many armies against this garrison, just to lose them all.

In the above pic, you can see a non-humanoid unit. This is a Giant Slug. Not only is Eador's unit diversity insane, the ways in which one gets units are diverse. You can recruit them from buildings, summon them using spells, buy them from neutral locations, and hatch them from their requisite eggs (or acorns, for Treants/Ents):


(This screenshot is chronologically out of order. This is from the late game. You can see I've unlocked War Elephants, the tier 4 unit I've chosen for this game.)

So, I couldn't kill Oinor because of his ridiculous garrison, so I blockaded him in his capital and worked on building up my strength. The three ways to get stronger are with a better economy (i.e. more advanced buildings), higher level heroes, and better items. These last two are connected, so I was delving into some scary locations with my, by now, incredible heroes.


It's weird to think that Diablo has had such an influence on gaming culture that pretty much everybody uses gold/orange for legendary items. Eador uses red. In the many, many, many hours that I've played Eador, I've only come across a very small handful of legendary items. Partly this is because of their rarity: they're only found in the deadliest locations. Part of this is due to timing. By the time you can raid these locations, you really ought to be ending the game. This is part of the reason I like large maps. I like picking up the shiny gear. This ring is nuts. +2 attack on something that isn't a weapon is already insanely rare. The Bloodsucker +20 mod means that 20% of the damage this unit does on attack or counter attack he leeches as life (so long as he's attacking a living unit). My warrior routinely casts Vampirism on himself for another 50% leech, making him pretty darn unkillable against anything living (which, admittedly, is a big caveat). My warrior is up in the top left in the background. Warriors reach a point where them leading other units is a liability. They can solo enemy armies (mostly. My warrior died to that garrison earlier.) and bringing allies along just wastes gold.

After banging my head against that Paladin stack for so long, I forgot to take a picture when I beat it! Oops. Instead, have a picture of when I defeated Oinor:


There are actually two layers of defense to some provinces. The Paladin stack was a regenerating, upkeep-heavy "Defenders" piece. Then there was the stronghold itself, which had a garrison of units that could be picked up for heroes and their armies. I lay siege to this, made a break in the wall, decided one break was enough, and sent in the elephant. The end.

1 opponent down, 2 to go. At this point, I'll admit, the game became a bit of a slog. Opponent #2 was incredibly wealthy and had put very strong defenders in each province.


Pretty much every creature in the enemy army inflicts high damage and poison. Plus three of those units fly and basically assassinate my weaker units, so getting through these was a slog with unavoidable losses. By the by, poison is the counter to the solo Warrior strategy. The poison ramps up too quickly for the warrior to survive.

But, slowly and surely, we grind through Opponent #2 and eliminate him. He was actually the strongest AI, so after that, there was an easy mop up against #3, whom #2 had been strangling.



Sweet victory and a new high score:


The alignment (super evil, hence "Furious") and the final ranking are displayed. The next game I played, I had so many reversions that I won with 0 points... but this one, I'll take.

The end.

[Commodore]

Thanks for this; I was a fan.

[NobleHelium]

Wow, I can't believe I've never heard of this game before. It is definitely incredibly similar to HoMM. Are you playing the Steam or GoG version? Apparently there are two sequels also on Steam, but they seem to be pretty buggy judging from the reviews. I still might pick up the most recent one since I haven't really liked where HoMM has gone since New World Computing went under.

Are there any hard differences between players, or do all players get access to the same buildings and units from the start of the game? I know you'll branch out and specialize immediately, but are there any different factions like in HoMM?

Speaking of Wesnoth, that'd be a pretty good game for an SG or similar. I played through the primary (longest) campaign a number of years ago but haven't tried any of the other campaigns.

[haphazard1]

Thanks for this -- very entertaining. I played much more of the first Eador sequel (Broken World) than of Genesis, but have plenty of fond memories of the original game.

[naufragar]

Thanks, Haphazard and Commodore! Hap, you'll have to chime in about MotBW.

Are you playing the Steam or GoG version?  Apparently there are two sequels also on Steam, but they seem to be pretty buggy judging from the reviews.  I still might pick up the most recent one since I haven't really liked where HoMM has gone since New World Computing went under.

I'm playing the GoG version. I try to buy through them when I can. As far as I know, the first sequel (Eador: Masters of the Broken World (let's just call it Broken World )) isn't really a sequel but a reskin in a 3D engine. They're so similar that I use the Broken World wiki to look up Genesis stuff. Genesis is, in my opinion, beautiful, but it is primitive. Wesnoth has more animation than it. The second sequel, Imperium, as I understand it, does have new content. Can't speak to those.

Are there any hard differences between players, or do all players get access to the same buildings and units from the start of the game?  I know you'll branch out and specialize immediately, but are there any different factions like in HoMM?

Everybody has the same tech tree etc., although as you say things get specialized very quickly based on building restrictions and resource availability. Eador: Genesis has a campaign that takes forever, like hundreds upon hundreds of hours. In this campaign, you start with next to nothing, and for each campaign mission you win, you conquer a shard and gain a couple new buildings. I started out with the campaign in order to learn the game, and I strongly recommend new players avoid it like the plague. For starters, it's way too long. I gave up trying to finish it. Second, while being very long, it's also brutally unforgiving: if you lose a mission, you miss out on unlocking whatever you were trying to unlock, which might doom you. (Imagine losing a map 100 hours in and not gaining access to the building you were leveling towards.) Finally, if you're new, you're not going to know which buildings you should be unlocking when the choice comes up. I might pick the campaign up again to see how I like it after actually learning the game, but stay away at the start! But, if such is your desire, the campaign does impose building restrictions and forces you to specialize your Player Character. And the writing is quite good, but the game is just too brutal for me to handle the campaign.