Myrmidon, I hate to cyber-stalk you, but what's the verdict on this one? I'd love a Fantasy 4x that packs a little more complexity than the standard fare. Do the different cultures and widespread customization options let you do that? Is anything else new about this one?
Dude! Sorry man! I had some fam in town and haven't had the time to type anything out.
So, that being said, yes, definitely recommend the game. It's got the one more turn addiction to it.
The graphics definitely have that Unity engine feel to it, and probably aren't the most easy on the eyes. But as a guy that spends most of his time playing Dwarf Fortress and Dominions 5, that doesn't bother me at all.
The depth is certainly there, but as W8taminute mentioned, the documentation is lacking. The UI does do a lot to try and help out, with a nice list of items needing attention before ending a turn that you can scroll through. The developer is an Indy developer, and seems pretty sharp and responsive to feedback and questions on the steam forum for the game. There are some online guides to help get you going, and some playthrough vids, but to be honest, DasTactic seemed to be trying to figure out things just like I was. His videos are engaging to watch, and helpful though.
The replay-ability is definitely there. Your character can range from a certain preset Wizard or Warlord, with a huge variety of options available (Think Necromancer, Archmage, Summoner, Barbarian, but literally like dozens of each, and the ability to customize your character.)
On top of that, the world and it's civilizations are procedurally generated each game. As you asked about, the cultures are really a nice new twist. The traits, tech, and gods they worship have an effect on what units are available to them to be able to build. For example, in my current game, in addition to all the other different cultures and races present in the game (trolls,gnolls, orcs, goblins, leonids, crystallids, elves, dwarves, undead, etc), I have 2 distinct human cultures, 1 semicultured tribal warlike society of lycanthropes, with their own favorite deities and interactions with different races. The other is a Druidlike aristocracy society, with bonuses to foraging, riders of dire bears, and a pact with nature. That's only half of the traits I could list, and each trait has a specific modifier to the game. Every civ has the same amount of detail, and those details determine how they interact with you and your different followers, what equipment is available to their troops, which is important for how much and how long a particular units takes to train, and the types available.
The recruiting is quite unique as well. You have to slowly build a manpower base to utilize before you can recruit anything, which hinges on your proximity to those different cultures and your relations with them. You can have follower of yours help augment that, but depending on the character race and vocation, along with their own traits, he/she will be more or less successful at building the available manpower pool. Each unit utilizes 100 persons of that type, and that unit can only replace losses from the pool you have built up, which can limit your military ops quite a bit. Of course, summoning or binding units, raising the undead. magically forming wisps, etc are all available depending on your wizard type you pick. I haven't even tried playing as a Warlord yet, but evidently what they lack in the magic department they make up for in the war department.
Important to your kingdom are Followers that you can recruit. Think of them like characters or council members from the CK series, or the Knights you can recruit from Knights of Honor. You are limited by their cost, but you need them for all sorts of important things, like heading up construction projects, serving as generals in your armies, exploring dungeons, serving as emmisaries, recruiting man(elf, dwarf, troll)power for your pool of troops, training new troops, etc etc.... tons of options, tons of character types, each with their own alignment,culture, traits, loyalty and desires.
There is a long list of research items, a somewhat dynamic economy of ~30-40 different resources, different Deities to appeal to, different quests to accomplish. The small map I generated, in addition to the other 3 primary opponents(Wizards or Warlords) that I am up against, also generated 7 other independent nations, again, each with their own cultural traits, races, units, owned settlements, and diplomatic options. 4 other tribal warbands were also spawned. This is in addition to different organizations (I have discovered a chapter of Chaos Knights with 2 fortresses), and of course, there are random spawning monsters, undead hordes, bandits and pirates. Oh yeah, Planar invasions too... which can vary depending on the map. In my world, the Planar invaders are "Celestial invaders" consisting of elementals and angels. Haven't had to fight them, yet....
Speaking of fighting, the battles are handled somewhat abstractly, but there is a TON of strategic depth to it that I am still attempting to grasp. You can assign your units position on the battlefield, along with their orders, and use magic that you may have been able to research to assist. From there, the battle will proceed with turns in 5 round batches, with a very detailed description of what's going on (Think Dwarf Fortress battle logs), but the UI showing the units and their locations, along with their casualties sustained and inflicted are pretty easy to make out if your not looking for all the detail. I've gotten my butt handed to me several times.. there's a ton of factors to process with troop selection that have an effect, such as their training, skill level, equipment and tactics. This doesn't include the modifiers that your assigned commanders can contribute.
I could go on and on, but this would end up being an article, and not a forum post. There's a lot of detail I'm leaving out for the sake of brevity.
The game has taken up the mantle of being the vaunted successor to MoM, and I think it has the potential to pull it off. There's a need for a little more transparency with the mechanics ( I think a Dominions sized manual would be in order, but that's a tall order), but the Dev seems quite involved and appears to have plans to continue working with and improving the game(which is great as it stands).
TLDR: It's overwhelming when you first crack open this game, but man, it is totally worth it.
