Cults and Daggers

Although this game has a good concept, the Cluttered user interface and no tutorial or instructions make this difficult to learn and enjoy. Will come back to this in a couple of updates to see how it goes but for now its $30 that I wish I hadnt wasted.

I.. I have no idea what is going on. Been trying to for two days, slowly some patterns are emerging but I'm just confused. Followers suddenly disappear off the map. I win an age (how did I win?) and then the next the AI seems to overnight have 350+ faith to my 40 (the other two AIs have 5 between them). There are options and abilities but no clue what they do or why I should care. Faith seems important but no option seems to generate it. I want to like this game, the concept is awesome, but the UI is So cumbersome...

Good stuff. Watch Agrippa's lets play to learn how to play is best. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfm9XNvwBFG_DNZZEO9kOEr2yPxRAMBf6

Breath of fresh air..... I've just run through my first age of Cults and Daggers and was happily surprised. From the screen shots I expected the Rome:Total War map segment - without the fighting bits, just moving pawns around a map of central Europe, but it is much much more than that. Im real time and turn based strategy all the way and this game adds some very interesting little quirks to genres that sadly can sometimes get a little repetative. The AI is nicely devious (even on easy) and you feel that your orders to your desciples can be a genuine gamble, I lost 3 cities in 2 turns to plague and murder, great stuff. This brings to the PC alot from those old board games i used to play. Watch the devs video for a quick 'in' to playing, it taught me alot. This was a brave concept to try and its paid off, reading the boards whilst downloading the dev also seems approachable with any problems which is refreshing. 10/10

Seriously. A neutral button. Why can't we have that? There is only one reason for me not to recommend the game to most of you and that indeed is as even the dev has mentioned is that the game is made for a very niche audience. But for that niche audience, the game works and is ok to play. I still feel that friends of other grand strategy games like crusader kings 2 (F2P this week btw) won't get the same feeling from cults and daggers compared to them. Controlling you're disciples just doesn't have the same feel as in controlling royal family matters, armies and diplomatic relations I would imagine. The game works and I only ran into one bug that destroyed the world map entirely for some reason, but that's easily fixable by loading a save. In summary the game works and if you are a hardcore fan of grand strategy games, then you may want to buy it now, if you can't wait for a sale, but in any other case WAIT FOR A SALE. And even then, proceed with care. If you wan to see some gameplay take a look of my video below, where I talk about the game a bit more. http://youtu.be/VXMVhLgzmMU

Would I recommend this game? Yes How would I rate this game? 5-6/10 ... for now, I could see it being a 7-8/10 later Pros: This game has a wonderful premise. It is pretty easy to understand the basic mechanics and like many games doesnt try to be something that it is not. I have only played a few hours so far but I can see that there is a lot of potential replayability here. If you like history, theology, board games and turn based strategy you should pick this game up. Cons: There are map UI issues and playability issues that need to be worked out. Following what happens every turn can get tedious. The UI for the summary of a turn (scrolling is difficult) as well as the map UI, no high level view needs tweaking. Some scenarios need reworking, its too easy to kill off disciples with no consequences. Also, some more story depth needs to be added. I would love to see evils that take multiple events to defeat and more decisions that have to be made based on historical events of the time. To Sum Up: Overall this game has a lot of potential. As long as the game designer and developer(s) stick with the game and keep updating it, this game has the chance to be a huge winner. I am hoping this is the case because I have been waiting a long time for a game like this.

I can't recommend this game as it is. The idea is good but the UI and gameplay needs more work. Even some simple enhancements like a more user friendly event report would lift this game a lot. The occult powers are bizarre and seem to have no attempt to balance out effort vs reward yet they could have been a really fun element of a game like this. I hope the developer would spend more time working on this game but reading his recent online post, he feels the game is complete. Shame because the idea of the game is great.