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[Pex]

I really liked this game when it came out. It had everything - strategy, management, tactical battles and RPG-type adventures. It also had a very extensive tutorial, which made it very easy to figure out the rules. I never played the actual table-top (or if you prefer pen&paper) game, but from what I heard, most of the rules were implemented in the computer gamea and quite successfully.

Unfortunately, I always had a sort of bad timing with it. When I first got it, my computer was just a bit below the minimal hardware requirements for it. The game was still playable, but there was always a danger that it would crash especially during the above mentioned tactical battles or adventures. I had to be very careful not to give too many commands in a quick order and increase the risk of crashing that way. This problem was increased with the saving game rule - you could only save the game at the beginning of the turn and each turn had 3 actions. So if your first two actions were successful (like taking over a guild or assassinating an enemy general) and your game crashed on the 3rd action, you had to replay the first two as well and risk them failing.

Then when I got much better computer, it turned out it was too powerful for the game. First I couldn't even start it. The developer Sierra-On-Line had a mandatory system check to see if your computer was good enough and when it came to testing processor it would give 'Integer divided by 0' error and crash... I remember somehow overiding this test, but the game was running so fast that it was not playable at all.

And now there's DosBox available (the game was made both for dos and Win 95 at that time), but I don't have the disk anymore...

So, did any of you guys play this game?

[Smiling Spectre]

I tried it, but not too much. As for me, it have very simple (but not very easy) tactical battles and very buggy dungeon exploring. Maybe overall strategy is good, but I could not forced myself to enter it after issues, described above.

[Japo]

It looks nice enough to make me want to try it, but the reviews linked at MobyGames are so-so. :/

[Pex]

Originally Posted by Smiling Spectre

I tried it, but not too much. As for me, it have very simple (but not very easy) tactical battles and very buggy dungeon exploring. Maybe overall strategy is good, but I could not forced myself to enter it after issues, described above.

Yeah, there were some bugs. I remember one dungeon adventure where a bug would put you just a few rooms away from the quest item. You could finish it easily, but you couldn't explore the remaining dungeon 'cause the door for the section you were in was opening from the other side

Also there was a slight inconsistency, cause you could meet some of the characters in the dungeons and kill them, but they will still be alive on the world map or vice versa.

I didn't find tactical battles too hard. As with many other games, using of archers and magic was a key to the victory.

Originally Posted by Japo

It looks nice enough to make me want to try it, but the reviews linked at MobyGames are so-so. :/

Well, it wasn't the game for everyone's taste and there were some bugs, so I understand average ratings. I wonder if a patch ever came out...

[hunvagy]

I own this game, and have tried many times to get into it. But if you select a decent difficulty, the strategy part gets ridiculously convulted on the main map, while the battles and the dungeon exploring are pretty lacking. I always thought of it as Lords of the Realms D&D Somehow I never got past the tutorials And the part I liked the most, the exploring, is hampered by bugs and a few graphical glitches. Plus I never found out why the windows version doesn't support high resolution graphics

[Pex]

I've just noticed today that the game is in The ISO Cellar and with patches

[Japo]

Originally Posted by Pex

I've just noticed today that the game is in The ISO Cellar and with patches

For that price, I think I'll give it a go someday.

EDIT: how should the patches be installed? There's no documentation...

[Pex]

Originally Posted by Japo

EDIT: how should the patches be installed? There's no documentation...

I haven't tried it yet. I'm assuming that the patch I want is one brdos13 ('cause last time I tried I couldn't play the game in XP) and since it's an .exe file I'm just going to run it in dosbox and see what happens