Can someone summarise a little bit about this game?

[HellSlayer]

Ive read the description but it doesnt tell much.. Never played this kind of game I assume(im not even sure what this game genre is about)..

Is your goal to build and survive in the world map until you defeat some non-random enemies like homm series for example

Or is this game about multiple scenarios you have to do and each map is different with each map finished in few hours? Like a campaign of sorts..

Or this game is like.. sandbox where there is no campaign, enemies are just random neutral and you do nothing except whatever your mind invents?

UPDATE: added few specific questions below.

[Imperialus]

The correct answer is your first example. Though your third example is also pretty fitting.

CoE does indeed end after all of the enemy AI players are defeated. However, unlike a lot of other 4X games the environment is oftentimes one of the biggest challenges to overcome. The wildlife is pretty gnarly, you'll spend a lot of time beating it back. Not only that but someone casts the right ritual you will often encounter scenarios where suddenly there is a portal to hell or something and demons or ghosts or voidborn horrors are overrunning everything.

[Pepperoni]

It's a turn-based strategy game where you recruit leaders to travel the map, take cities, recruit soldiers, fight foes, and interact with various map tiles.
Battles are automatic and the results are given at the end of your turn.
Maps are randomized depending on your settings, so you won't experience the same map twice.

[I>U]

Have you played older HoMM's? Until whatever expansion of 3rd, most of the people played it in singleplayer\co-op on heavy scripted maps (though, there actually were comissioned random map generators even for Windows version of HoMM2).

Some time later, and majority of these very HoMM3 games shifted to random maps, at least that what I saw in GS-integrated MPnow.

CoE is the same PvP game at it's core. It's just, unlike HoMM, integrates a lot of these scripted features into the main mode (Song of Rolland wrote that good). Which still serves gameplay and is harmonic part of it, but over these years the content has become overabundant.

There will be games when you won't see other planes outside of Elysium, and I mean these games when you are badly losing to your opponent and can't even dispatch an army to take a mine from Independents, let alone be bothered with what may happen after 30 turns.

Thought that doesn't mean you can't play this game in "adventure mode" against weaker opponent (i.e AI), enjoying all the content available at your own pace, experiencing, preventing and changing late-game events; planes and a lot of units hidden on them.

That, again, doesn't mean that planes is just a bonus part. It's a good investment of troops when you have a lasting stalemate, your class have specific interractions here or you've been forced onto them. Some classes, though, are natural to Elysium (the base plane) and have an advantage here.

If you need examples:

1) You got surrounded and you have a scroll teleporting to another plane (doesn't increase your chances of survival rapidly, but at least the enemy won't get your artifacts).

2) As Senator, you have +50% Gold income. Elysium has the most Gold-producing sites with the weakest guards on them. You can use a scroll and go to Celestial plane for an additional income, but most of the guards here are no joke. You can also send some Renatuses to Hades (distorted copy of Elysium, the idea is that all their tiles are mirrored), capture some fortification and get yourself a spectral army that can appear anywhere in Elysium and, likewise, disappear (and bump onto Hades-dwellers, occassionally). That sounds great, but you need to invest A LOT of gold and time before you can have a standing force in that plane. Necromancer, on the other side, can bring whoever he wants with his late-game ritual and raid the plane at full force and with a bonus to movement (living can't regen here and might get deceased, though).

That turns into strange situation, because losing the living with soul in Elysium spawns hostile spirits in Hades, while also leaves corpses that can be infinetely revived by late-game Necro. It's a cornerstone of metaplay, but pushing Necro in Elysium mid-game to strip his opportunities in Hades is what, I suppose, you will see a lot in this match-up for human vs human sessions.

3) In a recent game, I left the castle to beat 2 AI's parties. I won, but there was a 3rd one in the FoW. That was 3/4 of all units I had. To commend AI, he rapidly proceeded on the starting location and captured it.

That would have been an end, but I played as Barbarian. I heavely invested in Spirit Guides and had 3 of them around the map (it could have saved my ass back there, if those were converted into the troops for their Gold-worth, though). They may summon Ancestral Chiefs that ignore difficult terrain and may capture you a lot of tiles in 1 turn. That gives you a great advantage in earlier Elysium, because wildlife here is mostly passive.

By the pure luck I found a Castle with only 6 guards on the South, right before losing my last stronghold. Human settlements are clustered and, over that, there was a portal connecting the largest one with the starting location of AI itself. I was left without Gold, but with a lot of Herbs to summon spirits.

AI didn't really try to unflag all possible forests and swamps, instead giving Chiefs a chase he couldn't win. Definetely, it would have been much harder to play this hide&seek against a human (by the way, ancestral troops are great at sieges, because they have Pass Wall).

When it's armies finally started to grow in quantity, I had to use Plane Shift to avoid them via Hades. I had the only artifact with Spirit Sight, so no active capturing for me here (I did steal some sites for gold, though).

Then I combined all my stacks, which got me ~120 spirits in one place. Seraphs and Saints are surely freaks with their massed banishments, but noone can't be outnumbered in this game

Surely, this is vs AI experience. Living opponent wouldn't break seals when only he gets control over Towns. Also, there was no sense in chasing me with these many units concentrated in few stacks early, and keep them split after I merged all of mine.

It won't have been an easy win with only low-tier units against more flexible opponent, but that is the one scenario when you can be forced to use other planes in this game.

Hope it helped.

[minamikaze]

Another thing to add to the little summary is how the different characters play differently. This isn't Heroes of M&Ms where any faction got their 5-6-7-whatever-Ubisoft-decided tiers of units. This isn't even Starcraft level, as Druids and Witches, to name a few, don't even use cities for growing their armies. The unique resources are unique as well. If you don't have anyone using herbs, mushrooms, gems, etc., you can't even gather them. So for most characters swamps are just an obstacle, while Witches and Troll Kings gather herbs or mushrooms there, and Barons can turn them into fields. Sometimes, this even leads to side effects. Baron can destroy brigand lairs, turning them into gallows - for the sole reason of stopping very annoying roamers from spawn. But the gallows also produce Hands of glory, a Necromancer resource, which Baron has no use for whatsoever.

[Red Bat]

You pick a class, each playing fairly different, then you recruit or summon troops and lead armies around capturing whatever is important to your class in a bid to destroy all your enemies that you are always at war with for no immediately discernible reason, despite the fact that the world is clearly on the brink of collapse from extradimensional forces.

You then have to contend with giant neutral armies of deer taking away all your captured tiles which keeps you busy until you find other players to fight.

The game is about a simple of a turn based strategy game as you can get. It has depth in terms of trying to figure out how to most optimally capture territory, use rituals, and allocate troops, but general gameplay is very simple compared to most TBS. You don't even control your troops in battle and your turn to turn options are still very limited even lategame compared to say, Age of Wonders.

[Heathy]

Originally posted by minamikaze:

Another thing to add to the little summary is how the different characters play differently. This isn't Heroes of M&Ms where any faction got their 5-6-7-whatever-Ubisoft-decided tiers of units. This isn't even Starcraft level, as Druids and Witches, to name a few, don't even use cities for growing their armies. The unique resources are unique as well. If you don't have anyone using herbs, mushrooms, gems, etc., you can't even gather them. So for most characters swamps are just an obstacle, while Witches and Troll Kings gather herbs or mushrooms there, and Barons can turn them into fields. Sometimes, this even leads to side effects. Baron can destroy brigand lairs, turning them into gallows - for the sole reason of stopping very annoying roamers from spawn. But the gallows also produce Hands of glory, a Necromancer resource, which Baron has no use for whatsoever.

I summoned a skeleton king dude with my high priests of ba'al (banquet for the dead), the king uses the hands of glory to cast his minor summon spell. I started with just one resource (slaves/sacrifices) but you can find ways of unlocking others. if you manage to get another type of commander that uses a different resource to cast spells you'll be able to collect that resource. it is harder to multi-class sorta thing (at least for me i've been mostly locked to my priests in my current game) either you have to get one of your priests to level 3 and summon a different type of commander or, you have to try recruit one from somewhere on the map or perhaps off class priests and mages can show up recruitable, so far i've had heros, but its usually my class based priests that show up recruitable and i haven't seen another type of mage or priest show up recruitable yet.

yeah in homm 3 for example you're always trying to maximise your commanders army by stacking the best monsters you can and making the most out of those limited slots, while there is a lot more tactics in coe5 not only because of the amount of different mobs and interactions, but just the fact that it doesn't really pay to just stack your best units on a single commander. diversification is more important. but harder to achieve. you actually get quite a bit of use out of the fodder units here they work as a physical meat shield for your better units.

[HellSlayer]

Hm.. thanks for nice replies. I see it sounds interesting, I will keep an eye for some gameplay videos but I might not be smart enough to play this :)

[Imperialus]

Originally posted by HellSlayer:

Hm.. thanks for nice replies. I see it sounds interesting, I will keep an eye for some gameplay videos but I might not be smart enough to play this :)

Over in the videos tab I've started a series aimed at people new to the series in order to help figure your way through your first game.

[✏pencils✏]

Originally posted by Red Bat Media:

You pick a class, each playing fairly different, then you recruit or summon troops and lead armies around capturing whatever is important to your class in a bid to destroy all your enemies that you are always at war with for no immediately discernible reason, despite the fact that the world is clearly on the brink of collapse from extradimensional forces.

I love this description. It really describes the vibe when playing.

[HellSlayer]

I would like to update with few questions..

I believe these answers would help me understand the genre of this game and the flow of it.

in general - this game is more fun when you start learning and then it becomes more boring or its the game where it becomes more interesting once you get better at it?

Name 2 things this game excels compared to Homm2/3 and 2things this game does worse.

Name 2 things this game excels compared to Endless legend and 2things this game does worse.

Name 2 things this game excels compared to battle brothers and 2things this game does worse.

How would you describe this game: you/enemies snowballs outta control; steamrolling is very important to play this game;

Which one: insane amount of armies galore management game or few armies you control can let you win and enjoy the game?

This game looks overwhelming and I dislike too much management, so while EL game was super fun for me, i never liked the endgame, but early game mid-game was as fun as AoE or Age of mythology.

p.s. disliked age of wonders3 very much, but played age of wonders1/2 and it was fun..

thanks for replies

[Tomn]

The thing about CoE5 is that it's something of a popcorn strategy game - given the right circumstances it's entirely possible to polish off a single playthrough in a few hours, and unless you're playing absurdly huge maps with tons of players you can probably finish most games in three or four sessions at most. There is strategy to it, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't have nearly the complexity of full-on 4X games. In particular there's pretty much no empire management to speak of, and the economy basically consists of "capture that which is useful to you, reap benefits as long as you hold them." The entire game consists of creating armies, capturing different resource nodes, empowering your armies one way or another with magic, and then mashing armies together. You don't even control the battles, so all you have to worry about is army composition and higher strategy - and some classes rely heavily on freespawn troops which leaves you even less to concern yourself with.

Comparing this to Endless Legend or Battle Brothers is comparing apples to a cubist painting of an orange. They are wildly, wildly different beasts and I don't know that any direct comparison could be at all helpful, or more than theoretically possible.

[HellSlayer]

Originally posted by Tomn:

The thing about CoE5 is that it's something of a popcorn strategy game - given the right circumstances it's entirely possible to polish off a single playthrough in a few hours, and unless you're playing absurdly huge maps with tons of players you can probably finish most games in three or four sessions at most. There is strategy to it, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't have nearly the complexity of full-on 4X games. In particular there's pretty much no empire management to speak of, and the economy basically consists of "capture that which is useful to you, reap benefits as long as you hold them." The entire game consists of creating armies, capturing different resource nodes, empowering your armies one way or another with magic, and then mashing armies together. You don't even control the battles, so all you have to worry about is army composition and higher strategy - and some classes rely heavily on freespawn troops which leaves you even less to concern yourself with.

Comparing this to Endless Legend or Battle Brothers is comparing apples to a cubist painting of an orange. They are wildly, wildly different beasts and I don't know that any direct comparison could be at all helpful, or more than theoretically possible.

You got me in the first paragraph but then you messed up in the second. :)

[junta]

compared to EndlessLegend pros: +any kind of neutrals here are much more diverse and interesting to fight;
+layers of depth of Eysium's world is non comparable to Auriga at all.
and cons: since you are asking to compare 4x I'll tell the obvious — construction of any kind is absent;
the market (trade) in EL is more realistic and diverse :p

[HellSlayer]

Originally posted by Tiltsen:

compared to EndlessLegend pros: +any kind of neutrals here are much more diverse and interesting to fight;
+layers of depth of Eysium's world is non comparable to Auriga at all.
and cons: since you are asking to compare 4x I'll tell the obvious — construction of any kind is absent;
the market (trade) in EL is more realistic and diverse :p

No weapon crafting either? Hm what about unit upgrading, does this exist?

[✏pencils✏]

Sometimes items will be for sale at recruitment sites and "mercs" often come with items equipped.

Units also level up but I think only to 3 experience levels. Most types of mages can be promoted if they find high enough level libraries. Still others can promote through rituals outside of battle.