Eador: Masters of the Broken World Preview
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As a God-like '˜Master', your job is to conquer these shards and try to unite the world once again. The only problem is that not only are there local lords that you'll need to beat down in order to assure supremacy over a shard, but eventually you'll start encountering other '˜Masters' as well who are trying to do the same thing. Naturally, only one of you can claim the credit, so this leads to further conflict.
It's an interesting enough premise to go on, and the Star-map screen where you choose which shard you want to invade does look really nice. Each shard represents a decent amount of gameplay as well, even the small/early ones. It's not quick 30 or 40 minute matches like you'd expect from a game broken up into stages (that get longer as the game gets harder), even the first, tiny shard you step on to can have several hours of gameplay. It's like playing several games of Civilization all in a row. It's hard to tell though whether this is a symptom of really innovative or just really clumsy/poor game design. Masters of the Broken World has an unusually slow pacing to it, and even on the lowest difficulty it can be quite a challenge.
The '˜action' in this is game is divided between managing your domain, and recruiting heroes and armies and using them to explore the world and conquer rival lords/masters or the myriad of neutral parties to expand your holdings. At the start of a shard, you'll only own one tile, which is your capital. You build most of your Empire buildings in your capital, and this is also where you can recruit units in Hero armies or garrisons, store valuable items in your treasury, have your hero's learn spells.
There are four types of Heroes (Warrior, Scout, Commander & Wizard), and they can recruit and control armies that fight in the tactical battles. In order to conquer a shard, you simply need to conquer the capital of all of the rival Lords/Masters on that shard, but to do so you have to expand your empire by conquering neutral tiles near you (or bribe them to your side). It's not necessarily a case of expanding your empire to the point where your borders touch theirs you just grow at the rate you can but you do have to essentially '˜conquer' yourself a route to the other factions if you want to go on the offensive.
