Ok this is made by Stardock and is on Steam Early access
Still here? Good
So what is this? Its like Masters of magic except that the Bad guys have won. The Premise is that you are a small reminent of a faction that has to build up and take on a Huge empire that is busy trying to cast the "I Win" Spell, while not actually pissing off the Big Bad too much so he doesn't waste too many resources attacking you.
I played about 3 hours of this yesterday. It plays something like a Mix of Civilisation and Age of Wonders. You are one of 6 wizard-rulers, each with their own Skill tree and different mix of spells available to you. You build up cities and build improvements to them, and use "outposts" to expand your territory over resources. You are not present on the map, you instead have armies and "Champions" which are heroes that allow you to cast spells into combat if its outside your control areas. While you are playing you see a "doomsday counter" slowly creeping up which reflects how close the Sorcerer Lord is to casting "I win". It is hard to get new Champions though which is a bit frustrating.
City management is pretty civilization like.
The Sorcerer lord will occasionally offer you stuff. Accepting keeps him happy as he thinks you are closer to joining up with him. However, it also increases the Doomsday clock. Losing a Champion increases the Doomsday Clock, though the champion pops back next turn. A high DC actually starts the people in your cities turning against you which removes the logistics you need to have Armies and buildings out.
You send your heroes off. There are stacks of Creatures you simply cant take on at the start so you have to run around getting resources to Craft into gear for your soldiers. All units gain experience and can have weapons and armour crafted for them. There are quests which have different effects depending your choices, and good choices reduce the doomsday clock. The goal really is to protect elemental Shards that if you can claim them with an outpost will give you mana and sov skill points. The Sorcerer Lord wants to kill them to speed up his spell. Needless to say claiming them Pisses him off, but letting him kill them increases the Doomsday Clock.
There are minor factions as well that you can either conquer or do quests for to get them on your side, at which point they do stuff like giving you units that you dont need logistics for or at least one can reduce your Doomsday clock.
One thing is that you can only found cities on certain places. The Sorcerer King likes to plant cities on them though so claiming them can be an issue.
I enjoyed it last night. Its a little rough around the edges as you might expect from early access but its fun. It looks gorgeous, obviously built on their Elemental game engine
If you want to see a playthrough of where its at at the moment you can look at this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6ic2PyBkEs
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