The Shrine

Finally bought a game that didn't turn out to totally suck. It basically plays like an inferior version of Master of Magic in every single way, but since Master of Magic was totally awesome, an inferior version of MOM is still a pretty good game. Don't bother trying to do manual combat early on because you'll just get yourself killed because there's like 25 different names for the basic units so you'll likely die horribly while you're trying to figure out which guy is the Orcish equivalent of a Pikeman. The default setting have Resurgence on all heroes on auto combat (they revive if you win) so you don't have to worry if your hero went in like Rambo and died immediately. For some reason, despite having more information provided, it's much harder to gauge how well unit A matches up to unit B probably because every race's version of the basic unit counts as a different unit with usually minor but sometimes signficant differences.

I've heard good things but just have too much on my plate right now to pick this up on sale.

After realizing you can use more than one stack to attack enemies (except for places where you got to enter) this game makes a lot more sense than before. It still takes a while to figure out the key difference between basic units. For example the Draconian/High Elf Archer are way better than the generic archer and while elves at least isn't too hard to figure out, the Draconian isn't obvious until you play with them. This game doesn't seem to be designed with multiplayer in mind because half of the classes can summon cheap and fast flying units which means you can never leave any of your city unguarded and in fact you probably need at least 2 or 3 units there to be able to say a turn 1 Chain Lightning, and if you've only one unit you can just spam basic spells like fireball until it dies while your flyer just run away the whole time. That said this game takes forever to play anyway so I guess it doesn't really matter. It's kind of like Civ 5 in that multiplayer game plays absolutely nothing like the single player version unless you've a group of guys willing to play for 5 months on a game with some agreed rules.