Godking: Master of Rituals

Here's my quick review after I finished my first victory in this game: This game is basically a modern re-interpretation of Illwinter's awesome Conquest Of Elysium (CoE) series. For people who don't know those games here's a quick rundown of the main gameplay loop: In short it's a combat focused 4x. You start with a capital and a army. With your army you conquer tiles (resolved in auto-battle) which increases your resource generation to let you buy upgrades, better units and sling cool magic spells to get you closer to victory. Sounds easy, but there's a deep emergent strategic layer that evolves out of this. Tiles can be protected by neutrals or your opponent's army, and after conquering a tile you can let a part of your army stay there to defend and protect those resources. Armies are organized by commanders, who are basically hero units who have skills/spells you can activate and who you can equip with items you find by beating neutrals or conquering tiles. So army composition...

As stated by many others, it is similar in nature to Conquest of Elysium or Dominions but to me it feels more like a poor copy than a proper advancement or even homage to those titles. Here's why:[hr][h1]Strategic Depth[/h1][/hr][hr][/hr]90% of strategy is choosing which units to buy and how to ferry them around. Most of the "passive" abilities on units are fairly ignorable. Figure out which units are "good" and which are "bad" and just stack the good units to win. In example, Alfendor Archers are unilaterally broken so if you are playing Alfendor, stack archers to win. [hr][/hr]In CoE/Dominions you have more control over the strategy of your units or the position on the battlefield, and the combat spellcasting can determine the outcome of the battle. All of that strategic depth seems to be missing here. I can't decide, for instance, to just have 10 necromancers in my army and summon a dumb amount of skeletons as my primary combat strategy. Or stack 100 archers and cast fire arrows to ...

Godking is essentially Conquest of Elysium with 3D-models. It has enough of it’s own character and ideas that I will call it an homage rather than a ripoff. I think there are currently six factions in the game - Undead, Lizardmen, Goblins, Barbarians, Chaos and the one I played, which is most similar to that Romanesque faction in COE. You can upgrade your initial city and any other cities you find with buildings to provide militia every turn, incrase your gold income, or offer access to better troops and commanders. You can recruit a couple of militia every turn from villages. You can recruit a dozen or so different commanders, but they are based on your cities’ upgrades, not what randomly appears that month. One neat touch is that your militia commander can upgrade the militia units you get every turn into a Spearman. It cost one more food, but saved you a few gold in comparison to recruiting a spearman. In my game, I had decent gold at first and was low on food, so I didn’t st...

I feel forced to give a negative review to set a better perspective for potential buyers... I watched the title for a while in the hope to get a discount. But well, today I got bored and thought, fuck it lets go. Well, what can I say... The game itself is a good concept by design. But I still wont recommend it because thats literally it. For the hefty pricetag this just isn't enough for me. It grabs ideas from different outher titles to merge them to a nice new product. Unfortunatly I can get every concept for a much lower pricetag much more fleshed out in multiple other games. Don't get me wrong, if this conglomerate ever gets polished out and enhanced with dozens QoL additions, this will propably be a nice game. Right now it just is not. By no means bad, but for what you get the pricetag is way out of proportion. I am happy supporting various EA- and kickstarter titles, but this one requires an immense leap of faith on the customer side. I think a potential buyer should know abo...

If you have played Conquest of Elysium and thought "Man, this game would be better if it sacrificed 75% of it's strategic depth, content, and variability for some better graphics", then I guess you should buy this game. For the rest of us, there are just a lot of better options. I honestly thought this game would be in early access though mid 2021, and was surprised to hear that it had released in the state it did. I would refund it if I could.

Full disclosure, I refunded this game after half an hour. I am an avid 4X player and this just isn't a 4X, it's a 3X at best. It's like the shell of a 4X. No tactical combat, only 4 resources to manage, it's just not a good 4X is you have played good 4X games.

If you have any experience with or love for Illwinter's "Conquest of Elysium", but wished it used hexes and looked absolutely gorgeous instead of, well, you know, then definitely either get this or at least wishlist it to see how it progresses, because in my brief playtime, that's pretty much how it played.

TL;DR - No. It may look cool, but there's no game here. Bad AI. Bad Faction design. No MP. Buy Conquest of Elysium instead (if you can stand the graphics ;). I'll keep this review short and simple. Godking is a rip off of Conquest of Elysium with 3D graphics. It was released early, sort of half baked, with imbalanced and flat factions. The designers failed to grasp the key aspects of what makes CoE fun, but other than the lack of interesting faction design, hidden upgrade paths, etc. the two games are pretty similar. They did, instead, add a few alternate features, primarily in the realm of army layout/management, movement, citadel types and resource handling (which one could claim was better or worse by taste). Beyond the half-baked random factions (which number too few as well), overall the AI is *terrible*. Given the lack of MP as well, this game is pretty insulting at the price point, and even if it were free, is more of a prototype than a game (such that you might pla...

Not as good as Dominions but a solid 7/10: It is Dominions very/semi-light with a slight QoL upgrade. Explore Expand Exterminate Expunge Ex-sanguinate Yeah ok. It is more about kill kill kill than any really deep strategic level of gameplay. Play every faction once against the AI then your next step to get anything else out of the game is multiplayer. This is where I think it would shine. Because, vs AI, all you are doing is figuring out which units to stack and pump them out of your city til you have a death stack and go stomp the capitals. For instance as Khaosate, get the yellow 2 reach cleaving hero units that have a high regen and stack flying stunner range critters and summon stun dogs. As Mercia, park your boss and pump out Red Dragons and find some Mountain Giant Lairs and recruit them. So, figure out your killer units and wipe the map. Rinse repeat with each faction. Formulaic. BUT it's so much fun finding that out. HOWEVER, if you have played Dominions you are always wonderi...

Strategy? lol the only strategy you'll use is, how to split up your team (units have more or less action points(how many steps you can take) so you can cover more land faster. Not very challenging at all, This is a game for a kid to play tbh. Tips if you do play, don't even worry about a tactical unit comp nothing counters anything, just run all cav(High action point units) so you can clear the map faster. Don't worry about the catapult 100% useless and slows you down.All they have to do is make the combat more interactive (custom formations would be one) and increase the difficulty by 5 folds.