Eador has a lot of interesting ideas and, on paper, the potential to be a great game. Unfortunately, it’s held back by painfully slow pacing and a serious lack of variety over time. Despite clearly taking inspiration from Heroes of Might and Magic, it ends up being far less fun to actually play. To start with the positives hero progression is genuinely well done. There are effectively twelve hero classes. The three base types mage, warrior, and scout can either stay pure at level 10 or branch into one of three subclasses, including hybrid options with their own unique abilities unlocked at levels 10 and 20. This system gives heroes a strong sense of identity and long-term progression. Exploration is another strong point. Heroes don’t just conquer provinces or fight enemy heroes; they can also explore controlled provinces, uncovering locations filled with neutral creatures and warbands. These encounters reward experience, loot, and treasure, and there’s a decent variety of creatures and both magical and non-magical items to find. Unit variety is also respectable on the surface. You can recruit many different unit types, including non-human ones through quests and racial alliances. On top of that, spells allow you to raise undead, summon demons, or create magical constructs like golems and gargoyles, which helps keep army composition interesting early on.
Unfortunately, all of this is dragged down by how slow the game is. Neutral creatures scale aggressively the farther you move from your capital, forcing you to grind hero levels, equipment, and units for a long time before you can even reach enemy heroes and they’re just as stuck doing the same thing. Progress feels gated behind excessive preparation rather than meaningful challenge. Building progression is another major issue. Structures are extremely expensive, require too many prerequisite buildings, and escalate in cost dramatically. Reaching tier-three buildings often takes over 100 turns, while top-tier buildings can take several hundred. This turns empire development into a long, tedious waiting game.
Province guards are where things really fall apart. In theory, they’re a solid idea cheap defensive units ranging from basic militia to elite forces. In practice, they’re wildly unbalanced. Both the player and the AI can recruit absurdly strong province guards for a fraction of the cost of maintaining a comparable army. By the time you reach larger maps, the remaining AI players often have massively overpowered guards protecting their capitals. Defeating them usually requires top-tier units and high-level mage guilds, which again means hundreds of turns of grinding. If you enjoy slow buildup, it somehow gets even worse. Letting the AI grow stronger just results in province guards being stacked in every single province, turning the late game into a slog of repetitive, uninteresting battles. Fighting neutrals and guards over and over is far less engaging than fighting enemy armies, and the pace becomes mind-numbing.
Variety is another major disappointment. While the AI “masters” are thematically diverse undead lords, demigods, demon rulers, dragons, and more they all play almost identically. Every master recruits the same units, uses the same spells, and relies mostly on human troops. Demon lords rarely field demons, undead masters barely summon undead, and even good-aligned masters happily use evil province guards and summon demons. Aside from the occasional “Army of Chaos,” the flavor feels entirely cosmetic. When a demon master threatens you with a demonic invasion and shows up with a human army identical to yours, it completely kills the atmosphere.
