Interesting.
I'm going to do a test shard.
I will survey statistical data every 5 turns, (corruption & the like)
Will check about chokepoints,
Analyze the effect of Orcish and Goblin Provinces when dealing with unrest and corruption.
And maybe even test some other things I will stumble upon.

Yes, I'm always doing just that when encountering the new enemy on the shard. The problem is when AI understands that it's too hard to conquer that one and moves on to get others - neutral owned.

Also I've only encountered banners on first (tutorial) map, maybe because I don't have the habit of exploring very deeply. For me it's mostly land grab and then economy expansion. Plus quelling the uprisings down.

I also encountered the two guys who represent Order and Chaos... and I have a bit of a rhetorical question... why ORDER Master is using Necromancy spells and Imp summoning each time I fight his heroes? Does glorified 'law of karma' doesn't apply to him? Just... every. damn. time. In the beginning I was just surprised but now it's getting ridiculous.

You don't know how nice he is to his subjects.
Maybe he takes that Imp summoning spell to the hospital and is making a magicians trick out of it, for the poor sick children suffering of leukemia, to get his Karma back on track. Or maybe he is rewarding the winemaker for his exceptional harvest with more than meagerly 50 gold coins. :-)

probably
well for me he is the typical nice guy - only hiring lawful or neutral troops and preferring peace over war

hmm on the chokepoints - the Ai seems to avoid hard to conquer provinces those are mostly the ones that are owned by trolls, medusa, centaurs and the princes Land - but after a while he even conquers those (damn i should play a shard under 200 turns once in a while) and he definitely conquers them if he can avoid a siege of an outpost with that

btw a wine to drown my sorrows
i was able to hire a rank three unit as a mercenary - a battlemage or so - well a magic user - to bad that he was like all other magic users unscrupulous and thus got -5 moral in my army while the rest of the (neutral) army got -2
hmm i wonder if neutral troops get negative morale if i become to good


oh yeah none of you answered the question if or if not you want to move all this to the official forum (i miss real forum thingies - like jumping to ne newest unread post)

Well he may be so nice and all, then the zombies and skeletons he summons are just tricks from the markets, right?

I usually block the chokepoints either with adventurers or guards (patrolmen if I'm too weak). Last time I had funny situation (on beginner, mind you) where enemy hero died trying to conquer either a hex or something inside of it. Because of this I had time to take all his posessions and block him inside stronhold. And afterwards just steamroll him.

That is very weird... neutral troops shouldn't have negative morale... do you remember which ones got the negative bonus? Because there are some of them which are good, lawful etc - the more the closer to order. So it should be that way.

About changing forums I must say that it's the pain to register somewhere else :P. So for now I'm feeling alright here.

I have similar question. I like to hire Barbarians and Shamans as tier 1 units, but they are not good, evil or neutral (sorry, I can't remember how it's named in the game) and there aren't a lot of units with similary attitude. So when I have horse bowmen (neutral), all morale drop down. Anyone know what is morale mechanics? Is there a chance to have Barbarians and other units without lower morale? Or I must fire Barbs later and that is just hard life?

Barbarians and Shamans are "unscrupuluous" (in hindsight, maybe the traditional "chaotic" would be a better choice :D ) - that is, "slightly evil". If they have massive morale penalty, your own master must be highly good - morale difference between unscruwhat and neutral is not enough to piss them off.

well lawful is the opposite of unscrupulous - just like evil is the opposite of good and like defender of the light is the opposite of evil incarnate
and i think this is the right order for how extreme they are - so evil incarnate is the most evil and unscrupulous the least evil (but still somewhat evil)

Thanks! Now it's more clear for me. So Barbarians belongs to evil and they feel good with other evil units, am i right?
So I must change my army to more evil to have Barbs. Sadly I don't like to do wrong stuff to my people, but maybe it's other option to be evil for commoners and other masters. Like using necromancy. But it's lame when you have warrior hero :)

What about lawful, unscrupulus and neutrals in the same army?

Exactly.

Unit karma goes Evil Incarnate - Evil - Unscrublah - Neutral - Lawful - Good - Defender of light.
Necromancy/infernalism is by far the quickest way to damnation.

Making friends with bad people (i.e. peacefully annexing bandit provinces etc) also lowers karma. So is attacking good guards.

Basically, if you are in need of spoilers, search through files in var folder. The amount of stuff which has "karma: 1+" or "karma: -1..x" in there is staggering. Even constructing some buildings has it - infirmary-type provincial buildings improve karma, for instance, while dark tower lowers it. lawful and chaotic ppl don't like to hang out together.

Mm well I seem to do more good stuff than bad, which I guess outweighs my liking to build the Dark Tower and occasionally letting bandit provinces stick around.
I'm at Merciful right now. =3

I notice the AI seems to love using Necromancy late in a battle for a shard. I'm tempted to use it every now and then, but I have yet to do so. I've only summoned an Imp once, and was REALLY tempted to use the "Supreme Dark Guard" despite knowing full well it'd wreak havoc on my karma =P
Only reason I never used it was I ended up winning without it.
Ah yes, so the first question. If you capture a province that was upset because of their necromancy-happy ruler, and you peacefully annex it into your country (Assuming they still are using those sorts of guards which has been pretty infrequent for me), would that affect your karma any?

Right, so one other question... A few events which seem to have no real outcome and I've been reluctant to answer in specific ways.
First is "A dragon settled in the area". I can't bring myself to try and force it out, so I let it stay. I'm assuming the locals wouldn't be too happy with that, but since I'm not being a killer in this case (Despite likely making the humans in the area a bit nervous) would that raise, lower, or just do nothing?
Secondly the two-headed lizard scenario. I again can't bring myself to kill it (Love reptiles too much, and I have a bearded dragon of my own), and so far the dispelling ritual has worked every time. If I go that route do I gain good karma despite not hunting the poor thing down?

Have another round on the house, dear guests.

I delayed playing Eador for a while, as I was having 36 hours of fun with XCom Enemey Unknown I find the parallels between it and Eador quite interesting.
The only obvious difference is that in XCom you fight a powerful psychic alien entity sending troops invading your home while in Eador you are a powerful psychic alien entity invading others' homes.

I've yet to conquer a shard. Totally loving the game though. LOSING IS FUN.

Currently working on a tiny shard on Beginner. Managed to beat the enemy heroes a few times so far. ABOUT ready to start taking their provinces, although my stronghold is rather underdeveloped. My mistake last time was that my /heroes/ got underdeveloped and ended up getting stomped when I faced the enemy in combat.

I want to note though that I think the tutorial gives a very false impression of the game. The lack of an AI opponent there makes the game seem a lot simpler than it is, which actually made me not want to continue with the game at first.

Man, I was noticing the parallels between this and X-Com in terms of gameplay. In particular, the way that research works in both games can be thought of as totally salvage driven.

Interestingly the tutorial gives you a completely wrong feeling because you aren't supposed to know you are the Astral Entity you truly are. That's wicked, but fun on a general gameplay level. On the other hand the tutorial has so little resources and enemies that your hero can hardly grow into something big.

If I may give you a hint. You want to explore all the close terrorities next to your stronghold with a strong enough hero and room in his army (or rather expendable, dismissable rookies in his Army) Maybe you find Gargoyles or Faeries or other obnoxious critters willing to join to you. As I mentioned before, once I tamed unicorns in athe forest the game became "rather" easy.
Additionally a fully explored country gives a little gold bonus every turn as well.
Excatly my thoughts.
And there are much more similarities.
While the base building in XCOM is similiar to the stronghold in Eador it is also similar to the Astral Plane choices in Eador.

While in XCom you send satellites to get the bonuses of that country, in Eador you conquer the shards for the given bonus.
More Shards/Countries - more global income.

ok time for me to post here a little
but first a horn full of mead if i might ask

so i have been playing a lot Eador lately and wanted to share some of the "insights" i got with all of you.

1. alliances
Do-gooder that I am - i am rather friendly with Oinor and Vianta (both of them have friendship stated as status in the Astral) And so i wanted to try out Alliances.
On my last to shards i had an Alliance with Oinor against another Master.
On the first of those shards i had little more than half of all provinces but was surrounded by Oinors provinces and thus unable to reach our enemy (that only had his home province left) but Oinor seemed unable to finish him off - so i bought some of his provinces until i was able to reach the enemies stronghold and stomp him. (After being closed of from any enemy activities i was able to raise 4 heroes beyond level 20 that all were capable of crushing anything that one could throw at them)
After the enemies defeat Oinor approached me in a dialogue stating that we had to settle who the rightful ruler of this shard would be - my options were war or drawing lot -being so friendly with him I didn't want war and decided to draw lots - i should not have done that - i picked the wrong chest and lost the shard - in a war i would have easily won.
So i decided to try the alliance thing again but this time i started the alliance only after i pushed Oinor back until he only had his Stronghold left. After i defeated the enemy Oinor said that he believed i was the rightful ruler and i won the shard without further hassle. So i think it depends on the standing of the allied master and the amount of provinces one has to determine if the ally gives the shard up. But forming an alliance is rather easy once they are friendly with you.
I will have to try if i could also form an alliance with Beleth even so he hates me - but after some stompings he became rather polite whenever i approach him in the astral.

1.1 trade and barters
Being allied and at peace a lot lately I had the benefit of experiencing trade an barters. The AI (or at least Oinor - the only one who traded with me yet) seems rather strange - trade is easy- he wants a ressource and offers me gold or crystals each round for that ressource - he only asks for ressources that he needs and that i have double.
The barters are a little more confusing - from time to time he offered me items he seemed to had spare like black forest bows or such things - for a rather fair price - but whenever i refused - after 3 or so turns he offered me the item again but this time he even paid gold and crystals on top of it stating it was a gift of peace - so i never bought an item but always waited until he offered it as a gift.
On the other hand he rejected every gift i offered him - even if he around before wanted to start a trade for my mithril and the next round i offered it for free - he rejected it stating i shouldn't try to buy him off with so little.
Furthermore i was able to buy of provinces for round about 6k gold - i do not know if he would be willing to sell all his provinces - i will have to try in another game.

ok thats it for now

i found out how to get certain medals for your troops put will post this later on .. maybe

greeting from the astral teach/the guardian