Worth it?

[jardail]

Took a look at this game, it looks interesting, but after having been burned on several games on Steam, I'm checking the forums first. What's the general consensus? Good? Bad? Indifferent?

[Xara]

It's worth it, especially given that it's on sale, if you enjoy the sort of gameplay it represents. I enjoy the battles and the AI can be legitimately tough (on 'hard' and better). There's decent battle map variety with unique placements and scenarios. The overhead map can be somewhat awkward to maneuver through, and I'm not entirely fond of the long stretches of move->camp->repeat where nothing really happens, especially once I got to Mexico and had enough food stored up that assigning anything but guarding/patrolling was largely irrelevant. The story/lore has some decent depth to it, and you have leeway to be brutal/backstabbing/manipulative/honest/diplomatic/righteous as you see fit. Hell, it's even fairly interesting from a pure scholarly / learning things viewpoint, as I looked up several of the cities / gods on wikis

A few gameplay bugs, sometimes campaign-crippling, are out there, so buying while on sale + waiting for a patch before firing it up (or being careful and saving at key points / avoiding iron man mode) could be wise

[dragonemp]

10% is not really "on sale" in steam term, wait till next big sale, you'll probably get 50% or even 75% discount :)

[FireShark]

Completely worth $20. Now that I've played it for several hours I would pay $30 for this game.
Tactics games are my favorite and I like historical settings so if you don't like that kind of thing as much as me then it may not be worth it to you.

[Jack Dandy]

It's worth it. Good tactical combat, lots of choice and consenquence, RPG mechanics, unique setting, loads of unique companions.. go for it.

[U is PWNED!]

I love it, but I can't seem to play it now on account of the bugs. Put on your wishlist and wait till a patch comes out

[Pheace]

From what I've played of it I don't regret getting it at all

[☠ Darth Chocula ☠]

I don't regret buying it either, but there are some issues to consider: The game is difficult and fustrating at times, like it is very easy to have a game go south on you. There is hardly any herbs around for healing, and meds are expensive. If you run into a bit of bad luck in random events, it can get impossible to continue the game.

The battles are not hard imo, even on high difficulty settings, but long-term gameplay is much more difficult. Yes, you can win hard battles, but if you end up with 2-3 injuries, then have bad luck with random events during camping, you'll find yourself in a very bad situation indeed.

[Vetagris]

Two words: Turn based. Everything is turn based, walking around, fighting, interacting with NPCs, resource gathering, crafting, technologies. If you liked the Heroes of Might and Magic exploration mode, the combat style of Fallout 1 and 2, the rules of 3rd edition D&D, etc. then this is definitely the game for you and you will love it to bits, if not you will despair. :-P

[starkmaddness]

If you have 2-3 injuries and not enough herbs, then the battles MUST have been hard. Don't let your guys get knocked out in battle and the rest of the game is much easier. There is plenty of medicine if you do well in combat. I was running around on insane difficulty with over 100 herbs. One tip is to explore the map, not just make a bee-line to the quest. You will gain XP and find many resources on the way.


To answer the OP, the game is WELL worth it if you like the style of game. I kickstarted it a long time ago and kinda forgot about it as there were other games I backed that I was more excited about. Now that I have played it, I almost want to buy it again to show my appreciation.

It is a strategy/resource management/choose your own adventure combination of games that is quite well done. There are nice touches that add personality to your soldiers, and combat is strategic and fun. Combat never becomes tedious, as they are tied to quests, or story events, not just random battle after battle.

[☠ Darth Chocula ☠]

not saying it is common, but try this on and tell me you can get out of it:

Moving: doctor is bit by a spider and wounded, that same night camping: a hunter is wounded by and animal, next night both are still injured and natives ambush you, leaving another wounded by a scripted event, this is your other doctor. Next night, rebel ambush survive for 10 turns without a doctor, yes 2-3 get knocked out...now you have no herbs, no money and are screwed. None of this has anything to do with choices, it is about bad luck in random events as it is all scripted. Oh, and the next night my only level 3 warrior gets kidnapped..good times.

Just saying as stand-alone battles, the game is not that hard, but in the long haul, unless you enjoy constant reloading to get the perfect outcome, the game can be very fustrating and leave you with little means to continue.

[VanillaPCStrategy]

I had a similar thing happen as both DFC and starkmadeness described. I ran straight into the missions (basically my second expedition was the rebels in San Tiago) and didn't do any of the side stuff to gain experience and bonus supplies. I then also had a horrible run of random events crippiling a few of my key guys including a doctor, then lost a few major battles, and ran into an impossible situation.

So this is a game you can lose.

The next game I started I quickly improved my layout and battle plans, and I went on all the side quests before worrying about the rebels, and I did much better. I won't say I crushed it... but I rarely had a battle with more than one person injured.

So this game is fun, it's difficult, and it has a lot of details in the planning. I don't expect a lot of replayability but I've already gotten more than 10 hours out of it and have barely started the Mexico campaign. So I expect 30+ hours, which is pretty reasonable for an inexpensive game like this. Absolutely worth the money.

[Lyhroi]

Well, I think those random events do a great job in displaying the harsh conditions the people at that time had to live up to. I started my first playthrough in ironman mode. That way I really got connected and concerned about my characters since all those chars ingame have a story and are not faceless and silent skillextentions to the main character and I really have a responsibility for them (can't load). I have just reached a point where I started to think about restarting... not because I'm game over or broke (running around with somewhere about 7k valuables, 200 rations and medicine in Hispaniola) but because I was 3!!! steps late on the worldmap to prevent someone from dieing (no other way to tell without spoiling). And it's not about "omg I lost a char, it won't be a flawless playthrough" - that I already was aware of when I started ironman without knowing the game - It's the problem that I got so connected to the character, that this really bothers me from a personal kind of view. It's been quite a while since a game managed to do that to me.

Therefore MY vote on this game is: Get it, play it, love it (if you're not an emotionally dead person that can't connect to any great written characters in books and other narrativ kind of media)

As a more neutral version of recommendation, or your chance to see if this is for you:

You get:
-a fully turn based game (worldmap exploration, combat)

-a choice driven event system with different outcomes. Your decision matters if that camp of natives does trade or battle with you (just one example of different event endings)

-relevant choice of skills... I could by now have gotten better prices or avioded a battle if I had invested more into my diplomacy skill or taken an extra scholar with me (boosts diplomacy). But then I might have had more problems feeding my people (got 3 hunters with me and still got to a point where I was for a while running low on food). So in the end you have to struggle with something but it is up to if that's going to be people, food or medical problems, maybe all, maybe none

-deep and connective characters. Every character you take with you has his own story which will be told to you and involve you with choices (lowering or raising moral or even getting/losing characters) at some point as a random event while camping or doing other stuff that the character secretly feels connected to. That might be more details to the character decription in the profile or a whole different version of the "known facts" about him/her.

-OK normal battle difficulty. If I restart I will take more then normal out of personal preference, but normal is ok for being fun, but not taking too much efford.
(edit to clarify this point: I played XCOM on hard ironman and mostly had fluent battles. just after 3 battles in this game all following until now were flawless victories (without anyone getting incapacitated, incapacitated = char out of the battle, but not dead) on normal mode, even when outnumbered by 2 people with everyone one or two experience levels above my own troops. So if you're on the same level in tactical battles as me, I'd suggest starting in a harder mode to get more fun out of it - I did not post this to show off, but to give a reasonable idea about the battle difficultis so you may have more fun from the beginning )

-interesting, but a bit problematic camping system. When you run out of moving points on the worldmap, you need to set camp and assign duties for your people, like guarding, patroling, hunting and building stuff. I had some problems here with how the food distribution works. you have to assign fresh hunted meat or conserved rations and turn excess fresh meat into conserved rations. So far so good. But if your hunters had a bad day and only got 3 meat and you have to feed 12 people, the system drops the meat to 3 and the rest out of rations. That's ok so far. But next day you get 12 meat, system still has 3 rations and you have to adjust it manually to 12 to conserve your rations and don't need people to work on processing the meat for later. that might happen every other day. You can set this to automatic, but that will always give the chars 1 meat. Sometimes you have days where you run accross so much meat during hunt, that you don't have enough people to process it. Solution would be so give everyone additional rations to raise moral. Well yes, but that deacivates the automatic system.. (minor problem and one get's used to it very fast, but I feel I have to mention negative points as well)

-sometimes very hard combination and amount of random events happening, even harder if another scripted event happens at the same time because it is triggered after a certain amount of days after completing some quests. This can as shown in posts above sometimes even be game breaking.

That's what I can tell you SO FAR, as I just recently started the game and have not yet reached the mainland. But looking forward to what will be coming next.

Hope this could help you to decide if this game is what you are looking for.