Godking: Master of Rituals Reviews

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.

I think this is one of the best support and follow up a dev has been giving to me during EA. Sensiga studio cares about the players and really are listening to them. The game has been consequently improve with every patches, introducing requested QoL and features that make this game a really good 4X. Even though you do not have a total control on combats, you will learn very quickly that strategy matters more than the tactics and than your armies composition and your Generals choices matters a lot. I like this game for what it is . It is unique and well done. You can really feel the love and passion from Sensiga. And it matters a lot.

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 wondering how much better this game could be if you had its level of army customisability. This game plonks your cav behind infantry sometimes and they never get out of the block form the start of a fight. In Dominions you can put all your inf on a narrow centre front and then place your cav on the wings with seperate script orders to charge the back line of archers. Grrrrrr. Dominions really is better.

Its not that bad. But PLUS * copy conquest of elysum (from illwinter) but 3d * intresting variety in units and factions. * lots of potential MINUS * absolutely bad optimization. 5 and something Gb in RAM. * bad interface. Cannot put units on constant cast the same spell. Not easy to select units or cities. * Balance is horrible. Played as humans and recruiting mages, you can make them produce mana for free (with a nighmare micro each turn) and summon dragons en masse. * AI is plain dumb * I read in the forum that devs are not supporting this anymore

Came here because I loved CoE 4 and 5 and thought a 3D one would be so cool. Sadly, it has a worse UI than even the earlier CoE games, and it is no longer being worked on, not to mention it is so poorly optimized that it is hard to even play. Save your money and look elsewhere (or play CoE 5)

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.

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 about that, therefore the negative review at this point. Year later Edit: Well, everything feared happened. They pretty much released it soon after my initial review. One guy tried to contact me to change it. Voila, now it's abandonware. Oh yeah, did I mention that I paid more money in EA than the actual price on releaseday?

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 start using it until I unlocked better troops that cost a lot more gold. Then, I did set up a couple commanders in a couple different cities to train my pool of militia into spearmen. You also had commanders with their own summons, but I didn’t get a chance to test them out. Likewise, there were commanders who could craft items (randomly), but I didn’t get to test them either. The game is generous with items as commanders can wear many, and units can also equip them. Most of the items just seemed to provide +1 this or that. I think those are considered Minor Items, so hopefully there are some more interesting Major Items, but I didn’t notice any. Towards the end, my Fire Mage Pretender had summoned a Fire Dragon (which is one of the potential Pretenders that can be chosen to lead any faction during game setup). My Dragon commander was in the process of destroying everything when I decided to stop playing until this game has more time to develop. The UI is pretty clunky, even compared to COE’s less than ideal UI. The AI is totally lacking right now as well (there are no difficulty levels yet). If you are annoyed by COE’s randomness (I’m not), then you’ll appreciate that this game has less. The faction I played had few random situations. The only ones I can really think of was my Fire Mage’s summon Minor Champions (the Fire Dragon was the only non-minor champion) and the item crafting by the other commander. I was autocasting Summon Minor Champion (which is a nice feature that I can’t remember if COE has), and I saw a fire horse thing and a fire wyrm come up before I quit. The horse wasn’t a commander, but the wyrm was. So, if you wanted a less random COE, with 3d models, you should wishlist this game. It has a ways to go before it can get provide an experience to rival COE, but hopefully it will by the time it leaves EA. The devs are certainly active in the Discussions, and will hopefully incorporate a lot of good ideas. My biggest concern might be their interest in making this multiplayer, and I worry that they’ll not include some of the crazy things to compare with the random things that could happen in COE. Oh yeah, and while there were some wandering bands of neutrals, but they weren’t constantly taking over my holdings.

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 exploit my opponents weakness to fire. No, here you are just buying units and stacking them into armies to meat grind against the enemy armies. [hr][/hr]The same strategic depth issue exists on the overland map. The "tech tree" for each faction is just some rather cheap buildings in their main city. It takes very little time to get through it but it doesn't really change the core gameplay. There is no late game/early game divide in strategy. There are no interesting decisions to be made. Just buy the cheap upgrades and keep stacking units. [hr][/hr]The only seemingly interesting decision is that you can choose a leader from one faction to "lead" a different faction. I guess this is their attempt to copy the pretender creation from Dominions but IMO it does not alleviate the strategic depth issue. You aren't choosing between faction power vs pretender power or defining your core strategy, you are just changing your starting unit.[hr][/hr][h1]Balance[/h1][hr][/hr]I tried playing Chaos first and the early game was a nightmare. 3 failed starts with them so I tried Alfendor and it was a walk in the park from turn 1. I tried the returned and the early game was also a tedious nightmare. I enjoy the variety of gameplay but I dont think the balance is there between factions.[hr][/hr]The enemy seems to snowball very slowly but also INDEPENDENTLY of the amount of income structures they were able to control. Why? This is classic feels-bad 4x design. I cornered an enemy into only owning its home castle on ~turn 15 or 20 and by the time I raised an army big enough to challenge them in their castle and ferry it to them, they had doubled the size of their army. Tim Allen says "HWWHAAA?" In contrast, 100 turns later on the other side of the map the final enemy I killed had almost exactly the same size garrison. So once I generated armies capable of dealing with that first faction on turn 20ish the rest of the game was almost entirely determined to be victory for me but still took me 100+ turns to get there. I don't think the AI is actually "playing" but instead just generating units on a timer up to a limit and making meager attempts at expansion.[hr][/hr][h1]Tedium[/h1][hr][/hr]As is the case with many of these games you inevitably end up with dozens of champions running around ferrying units and items to the front lines. There's no tech tree or anything to alleviate this issue. You can pay close attention to the types of units you are recruiting and try to recruit only fast moving units to make the process quicker but it is tedious either way. It is basically 1-2 hexes per turn per army unless you recruit only fast units or scouts. [hr][/hr]In my playthrough a lot of my commanders had rituals they could cast after moving, so for each commander to move I had to click multiple times to confirm that all I wanted them to do was move and nothing else. Also, in the mid game I found a large amount of "Neutral" creatures roaming the map with very low power. I never took a single casualty fighting these creatures but I had to clean them up to prevent them taking my buildings back etc. about 40 completely pointless combat sequences for me. None of these squads were interesting to fight.[hr][/hr][h1]Polish[/h1][hr][/hr]Given the lack of strategic depth the way that this game could differentiate itself positively from Illwinter's games is through a superior level of polish and QOL experience. Sadly, I think this is where Godking is at its weakest. The text, for me, was readable but very uncomfortable to look at in many places. If I didn't have 20/20 vision I think much of the text would be unreadable. Icons in the home city denoting the type of unit you are recruiting (melee, archer, etc) were hard to look at and differentiate. Units which I had set on "autocast" for their abilities occasionally got knocked out of this mode and had to be reset, despite me having plenty of resources to keep casting the ability. Units which I had previously set to go to a far part of the map had to be reminded with 3-4 clicks EVERY TURN to confirm that I wanted them to keep moving. Battle AI produces some nonsensical results in certain circumstances. Neutral resource generators on the map seem to be generated completely randomly which creates some real bad feels in the early game when you are surrounded by too-hard-to siege garrisons and no easy-to-get towns or farms.[hr][/hr][h1]Conclusion[/h1][hr][/hr]The game isn't all bad, it does have a similar feel to Illwinter's games but I don't think it brings enough to the table to warrant its own entry. If this game looks in any way interesting then you should probably be playing Dominions, Conquest of Elysium, or going to another 4x series entirely.

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, which commander goes best with which units, which composition counters my closest opponent, and so on is pretty important too and min-maxing your army isn't easy. So even there isn't a real tactical layer since auto-battle, there's plenty of strategic decisions to be made, which I prefer anyway. You win by taking over all your opponents capitals and you lose by losing you capital. So how does Godking compare against CoE? Pretty good for early access I would say: + Visual upgrade. Beautiful world map, and awesome battles. + Plenty of QoL + Plenty of cool stuff to explore (items, skills, spells and so on) - CoE has way more content. I finished my first game in less than two hours. A CoE game takes up multiple hours. In CoE you have global events, multiple "dimensions" of the world, more variety in tiles, nations and stuff to do. - AI is currently pretty oblivious. For example, he saw my doom stack of hundred guys bee lining for his capital and did absolutely nothing to prevent this. And another opponent saw how I moved almost all my army out of my capital, but didn't capitalize on it with a big push. Opponents almost never split their army to speed up the early game scouting and the conquering of unprotected tiles, and they almost never keep garrisons on important tiles. For example there's a tile protected by a decent amount of neutrals, you just have to wait for the AI to conquer the tile and move away from it. Now it's undefended and for you to take. AI currently is no challenge at all. But both content and AI are like a given for every early access title so I'm optimistic those are worked on. Some issues I found during my game: - Performance is ass. I'm playing on a 2080 and 4k is unplayable. Have to play @1080p - If your army has like 15 commanders in a single "division" you can't see all your commanders if you click on your division. That's cumbersome. - You have to move your units tile-by-tile and can't setup multi turn paths. Some wishes I have: - An item courier system like in Age of Wonders 3. Your commander A found an item which would pretty awesome for commander B? Well they can only trade items if they are on the same tile. So if A is at the other edge of the world it's bad luck for B. - An army reinforcement/rally point option. Basically an already existing army/division can be set up as a rally point for other divisions of yours to join, so I don't have to micro them to move all over the map just to merge two divisions. - Something that would make Godking truly unique. Be it a focus on dynamic global events, or maybe a diplomatic layer, or having an army formation designer like Dominions or whatever kind of emergent gameplay options you could come up with. But currently the "only" selling point imho are the graphics and the combinations of nations and gods (think main hero commander) compared to CoE in which you only have nations. Imho that's not enough for an unique twist and for truly standing on its own. I would rate this game currently an 6/10 and CoE an 8/10. But I see there's plenty of potential to elevate this game even beyond CoE. So please use this potential, and make this game truly unique and awesome!