It’s been a while since a strategy game really grabbed me. The last one that really sparked my interest was Sid Meier’s Civilisation: Beyond Earth which wrapped me tightly in its addictive embrace and refused to let go for weeks. I had a similar reaction to Age of Wonders III’s new expansion Eternal Lords.
I never actually played the original game so you’ll have to forgive me if I cover things you already know about. I’ll try to stick just to the expansion. Eternal Lords brings a fresh campaign to the game that is built to showcase a decent assortment its new bells and whistles. There’s a pair of new races, “cosmic happenings” which influence every party on the mapface, another influence system based on racial traits and a brand new class – the Necromancer.
Eternal Lords you assume the role of commander over the dead, risen again by magic, hurling wave after wave of monsters, zombies and ghouls at your enemy before hoovering up their dead to restore your forces and further your dark machinations. I must admit, necromancers have always tickled me so this expansion was right up my alley. But does the addition of the evil dead sit flush with the established Age of Wonders gameplay? For the most part, yes.
Necromancers are essentially hero units, in the same vein as the named units in Age of Wonders II. In terms of power and use they sit about equal with the game’s other heroes but they’re especially effective when you’re playing as a necro leader. Necro nations are free to concern themselves with becoming an overwhelming power on the map. They don’t ahve to worry about unit morale, nor do they need to pay attention to population control. Their ghoul cities don’t actually accrue any population – instead all of their resources are harvested from corpses. Similarly, necros have brand new buildings and structures like Necropoli and embalmers that will allow you to increase production. This can also be accomplished by gathering corpses from the battlefield, the felled bodies of your enemies. This allows you to give a population buff to whichever city is nearest to the fight.
This, naturally, means a genuine change in how you approach the management of your army. The resources dotted all over the map that you’re used to scrambling for in games of this kind no longer have any real use to you with your mobile mummy moshpit. That said, there are a number of spells that you can use to corrupt healthy farmland and wellsprings so that they produce dead people instead of live ones.
All of this would be well and good if the necros actually fit in with the game’s other units a bit better. Undead units are just your garden variety regular unit with a marker that designates them as undead. They can’t heal themselves nor can they be buffed by healing spells unless the spell in question is actually geared for use with an undead unit. Luckily you’ll more than likely be towing loads of Reanimators and you’ll probably have teched straight to the research upgrade that bestows the healing power on every support unit you’ve got. These are all things that are absolutely crucial to playing necro effectively but you can really only access them if your leader is also undead. But undead units also ignore morale debuffs so if your army is 100% undead AND there’s even a research option you can tech to that will actually turn almost any living unit into the undead if they hang out within your hero’s unit for a single turn. What I’m saying is that, as it stands, Necromancer is pretty thunderously overpowered.
The two new races do have a few nice units and map types that are aligned with their themes. There are the Frostlings who are icey and sad, exactly what it says on the tin and the Tigrans who are Egyptian-inspired cat people who hang out in the desert and are really into fire. Their designs are quite nice and its easy to tell them apart from a distance.
There are also new designs like aquatic cities among other specialised buildings that can be used to craft equally specialised troops. You’ve also got a pretty wide array of fresh powers and spells at your disposal, including a few that work based on alignment. These will allow you to create high-powered units.
There’s a definite vintage, Heroes of Might and Magic feel to this game which should appeal to anyone who enjoy those particular games. But if you like those sorts of games then you know how long they take to play. Eternal Lords fits that bill too. The campaign has you play a Frostling necromancer who wants to bring glory to his people and his ally, a Tigran. It takes forever to successfully complete even a single mission. Maps are filled to bursting with side-quests and dungeons and most of these lead directly to tough-as-nails fights and sweet loot if you can stick it out. All the maps are pretty highly detailed too, full of areas you can explore for extra loot and NPC’s that’ll aggro the moment you get too near. There’s nations that bicker and squabble amongst themselves that you can ally with and turn on each other for the lols.
Though this is an addictive, high-quality strategy title that should satisfy fans of the genre immensely, I am, by my own admission, fair to middling at strategy titles so I found myself getting outclassed quite quickly. It can be hard to balance your finances and assorted other cost if you’re not used to that level of micromanagement. Production increases as your cities pile up and they’ve all got to be managed so that they produce defenses efficiently. It’s streamlined to a point, but when you start to throw upgrades at more than one city at a time you’ll start to see your resources disappear really quickly. Meanwhile, my mana went more or less untouched, despite my frantically casting as many spells as I could on every turn. This, of course, meant that any capacity I had to cast spells was used up by the time I reached the combat round.
This meant that all of the more expensive units in play were pretty rare and frequently it was the basic footsoldier units that would be pumped out, turning most battles into wars of attrition. This went double if I decided to resolve a battle automatically. In fact, I was often unable to pick the result of an automatic battle, leading to me to believe it was completely random. On more than one occasion I put a fairly ridiculous army, one that should win most battles out of sheer, overwhelming force to the test against the auto-complete button only to lose units and battles that I clearly should have won by a wide margin.
When you get right down to it, Eternal Lords does most things really right. It’s addictive, it’s crunchy, it’s pretty and it’s got the kind of depth fans of the genre crave. The expansion is well worth the purchase for the amount of content it brings to the table and, for fans of necro armies like me, there’s even more to like.
Review Score: 8.5 out of 10
Highlights: Loads of content; super addictive; big longevity
Lowlights: Necro could be considered unbalanced; micromanagement can get out of hand
Developer: Triumph Studios
Publisher: Triumph Studios
Released: April 14, 2015
Platform: PC
Reviewed on PC
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