Shadows Behind the Throne 2

Honestly, this game has a LOT of promise. It has a lot that it can show with a very nice premise and a pretty good theme. If you want this game, you'll likely want it until you've spent 8 dollars on it regardless of what I say. Here's a list of cons regardless. - The popups never stop. While these might be relevant at first, after the 80th time one of my agents has begun to get hunted by a paladin, I don't care to know about it happening. Just let that agent die. None of them are that important. - Depending on your gamestyle, this game can become a SLOG on certain map layouts. You wanted to play with Deep Ones? Well, welcome to a map with all of ONE coastal city. You wanted to freeze the world with the Winter's Scythe? Well, welcome to the world's literal most stable mega-empire. You can do some things to get around this sometimes, somehow, but not always. You'll almost always go back to playing the game in the same few ways, which is to say... - The generic agents you can pick up are BUSTED. 1 Vampire is the exception here it sucks. 2 The seeker is a literal game winner who can just walk around and corrupt the world in record time. The limit of them potentially getting targeted and blocked out of nations but I never had that happen. It just needs to wander around and research clues. If you speedrun one from the start of the game, you can get pretty lucky and even luckier still if you just grab the first agent who goes on their tail and enthrall them. 3 Plague doctors are just a game winner. They make zombie armies. They can get bodied if the world goes into a mega-empire early and you keep getting all foreign agents exiled, but as long as you never declare war your corpseroot caches will never go away. You'll just be sitting there with 300+ troops waiting to go scour the land. It's better than both the flesh gameplay and the Deep Ones and those are meant to be specialties. The only thing it's worse at is being used as a bargaining chip. You can do some politics with them since an army of the dead means literally everyone is ALWAYS upset and afraid of them, but you can't use them to kill specific areas or empires. 4 Masque of Red Death is just a weaker plague doctor with a stronger disease. It's great if there's a single, massive block of cities you want to weaken before starting a war, but that's all it's for. It does nothing outside of its 32 round cooldown to do that. Even if you think it should. 5. The rest are whatever. Which you might've noticed other names in there- And that's a bit of the problem. When you start the game you get the choice to pick two specialties, 'themes' behind your god. So you can be a cthulu fishman cult with a knack for political manipulation or you can be a big tentacle growing across the land as the air grows chilly and cold with every death. All cool, but... They kinda suck. The winter's scythe doesn't work in wars against your dark forces, only with wars between two nations, and these can be a pain in the ass to start up and sustain. ALmost always, going political and tryign to start wars through influence is the only way to LOSE this game. Which is to say, you can only lose this game ONE way... And that's the lightbringer ritual. Late in the game, a nation can declare they want to do the lightbringer ritual and that is your lose condition. Up until this, you can do whatever you want- Lose as many agents as you want- And just keep playing slowly and carefully until this late time. You can become the empress of a big mega-empire and corrupt everyone below you without much real danger until going loud with it, but like... This lead to my first ever game being completely over before they could even TRY the lightbringer ritual. I had a seeker, a dark empire, a big fleshy tumor, and a fishman cult already built up, and it was just a matter of waiting for the game to be over which is the worst part of a 4x. Playing this game like an RTS is too easy because of that. But the political game is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ LONG. And boring. Eventually I just spawned a few plague doctors and started making an undead army while my noble sat there like a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ idiot generating vote popups for me to ignore. Trying to start civil wars to create deaths to use to chill the world down did nothing but get corrupted nobles dead and VERY QUICKLY replaced with pure counterparts. And the thing is, I'm reading what I'm writing and it sounds SO COOL... But it's SO BORING to play. Because of the popups and constant warnings about unimportant things and other problems you can't get rid of (at least as far as I can tell)