4X Leylines by Crystal Shard - now available on Steam!

[Kabas]

- No neutral cities, monster lairs or dungeons, no epic fights for mana nodes

Leylines do actually have the neutral towns belonging to the raiders. These are mostly the units specific to the scenario roaming the map and bothering you.
In that lizard realm scenario you have the sea full of bunyips, a relatively nasty diving unit of Regency. Thanks to them you could accidently win this scenario if your fellow wizards were unlucky enough to start with the harbor towns. Though it seems that they can't do this now thanks to the v1.1 update.

But yeah, you don't have secret vaults or unexplored crypts with the artefact rewards or something like that here.

 

[Yeoman]

Leylines do actually have the neutral towns belonging to the raiders. These are mostly the units specific to the scenario roaming the map and bothering you.

Yeah, I see that now. I still like the way Master of Magic does it better where neutral cities aren't necessarily out to get you, most of them keep to themselves, it feels more like a natural world you're exploring.

Not sure how I feel about the lizard scenario. At first it seemed really hardcore and interesting because of the plague, like I would send a ship full of swordsmen to attack a city and by the time I get there there would only be half of them left, and I found a healing pool where units can be cured of the plague but it's in the middle of the wilderness and there's monsters roaming about. But then I found out that you could just bring healers to cure the plague. So you just end up being given busywork to lug healers around and the AI (at least in this scenario) can't seem to deal with it so you could just wait outside their cities and wait for their units to die off. Still, I had fun and I appreciate the exploration aspect, but it seems like I've already won the scenario and I still have 2/3rds of the map to mop up. I already spent like 3-4 hours in the map and I just want to end it. Not being able to build on the other cities you capture really, really slows down your expansion.

 

[Kabas]

^Stuff like that does make you want to reconsider bothering with the exploration and just go for abjuration spell/5 monuments victory, i must admit.
This issue becomes bigger on the bigger maps.

 

[Fizzii]

Here are my quick impressions, I've only played the tutorial and a bit of the lizardpeople realm scenario so I'm probably still poorly informed about much of the game. Can't comment on the AI yet obviously.

Thanks for the feedback; Radiant will be taking all comments on board. Per Steam board post, if Radiant is happy to implement a custom portrait import option, I'm more than fine with that; I'm not that precious about my art

Feel free to keep posting suggestions / bug reports etc here and/or on the Steam boards. It may take a bit of time to address them all, but we will get there eventually!

Edit: I've also just sent out Steam keys to everyone that purchased on Itch.IO before the game got released on Steam. For those who this applies to, please check your email (the same one you use for Itch)

 

[Yeoman]

Played through the Goblin scenario. Another onslaught of roaming raiders. Barely interacted with rival wizards and just ended up banishing them to finish the scenario. I think these maps are too large and make it extremely difficult for interaction with rival wizards to occur.

I finally encountered some heroes, but boy are they rare. Judging from the menu, you can only get a maximum of 3 heroes in one game. I played the Goblin scenario for maybe 6-8 hours and only got my third hero toward the end.

Heroes work differently from most games. They don't level up, they just accumulate experience points which you spend to increase their attributes or unlock skills. It's an interesting system, however, based on the three heroes I encountered (two warrior type guys, and one guy that looks like Snape), it seems they have very samey pools of unlockable skills and they only differ significantly in their starting attributes, and whether they have certain attack types or not (missile or magical ranged attacks). No items to equip on them like in MoM or AoW unfortunately.