beautiful

Its not a bad game but it suffers from a identity crisis, it doesn´t know if it wants to be an open ended adventure game, or a traditional 4x slop...

the game has a plethora of Independents roaming around and doing their own thing, this specific installment has multiple planes that you can dive into and do ♥♥♥♥ in wich adds a sense of exploration and "Wilderness" to it since you are not only fighting your oponents, but also, the world itself, the different eras emphathise this further, the Empire will have the emperor ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ around and sending out his mooks to reclaim elysium, if you play in the Fallen Empire you will have monsters roaming around the place and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥ up, so on so forth... Buuut at the same time this is a strategy game, so you need to kill all your oponents to win so this emergent world of Independents and planes takes a backseat because you still need to win the game and kill your oponents by either taking their citadels or killing all their heroes, even if you disregard the game and go full bleeding heart ♥♥♥♥♥♥ "winning is not the point of the game!!!" and go explore the rest of the world, well, your game will end abruptly when the AI gets stomped by their own summons (as Demonologist AI likes to do) or otherwise die, or better yet, it will end abruptly when you lose your own stuff... because that is all there is to the game, kill your enemies and win big, there is no PvE mode, you can´t even spectate or run AI only matches, even leaving the game is this archaic "Resign game" option wich means you are "Losing" every time you want to take a break from the game or load a save, i have the feeling that all of this comes down to the Devs being massive ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and not realizing the potential of their own game or just being prissly grognards that like to huff their own farts and make obtuse crap

also, the game tends to really slow down as it goes into the game, is a slapfest of doomstacks and just "End turn" endlessly while you watch your stacks crawl at 1 tile per century, and god forbid you don´t have crap like Ant/Spider Apocalypse, play on Fallen Empire with monsters all over the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ place, or otherwise open a portal to hell...

in short : the devs i suspect are deep seated homosexuals from what i can gather from both this and Dominions (Wich is unplayable ♥♥♥♥, unlike this game wich is rather enjoyable but could be actually great if it wasn´t for its dubious design choices) it is also overpriced as ♥♥♥♥

much like project zomboid, rimworld, and the rest of the "Overrated piece of ♥♥♥♥ games for elitists" this one can be modded to death if you so desire

or just go play Warlords II/III

This game is quite a lot of fun and a lot easier to get into than the Dominions series!