Nearly every forum I have visited mess this up at some level. Many webmail clients as well. My personal approach on long posts is to copy the whole thing to clipboard/notepad before posting in case that happens. Welcome to the world wide web where in about 10 years we will have browsers nearly capable of things your pc could do 10 years ago.

Regarding the game, I've played through the beta from February which was nearly complete and enjoyed it. I will agree that difficulty of the battles at higher levels could be improved even more but that is true for most games. It seems like quality went down after the beta but maybe that is just the impression I get from the board as I've not completed the final version yet.

I kickstartered this game and really felt this was well worth it though I'm sure I paid more than I typically would have. Actually this is the first game, I've KS'd that has delivered at this point. Only 21 more to go.

That's a pity - it sounds as if it was going to be an awesome post!

Same here. Also learnt it the hard way. ^^

That's a syndrome named betatestyque, it's a similar psychological mechanisms than for sects. Ie beta testers over evaluate the game they test and tend lost their objectivity about the game. The effect could last a full year, but after that you'll recover.

And for the forum bug I disagree, it's the only forum that succeed implement this bug in such vicious variation. (I bet they tried fix it and succeed only to make it worse)

To come back to the game, there's the uncommon or even original elements that are quite well implemented, sure more would be better, but when it's good any player want more. This is for:

• The events management and the linked, lore, dialogs, followers personality development, sometimes quests information, and often dialogs with choices options that are cool even if most often only related to morale management of your team.
• The survival/expedition simulation and management. Not a very complex simulation mechanism but a very good system related to multiple elements, managing your party, camps, food and medicine, and some more stuff. It's not simulation but a series of elements giving some depth to the RPG gameplay, in an original way.

For other stuff, it's direct comparison with many other games, and well it's from good to solid but not at top:

• Very solid fights but just a solid system, and realism made them lost focus on the importance to have different units very different visually, overall solid but you can't compare it to the best past similar implementations.
• Exploration is good but not great nor even very good, many RPG did better, but a good point is it's really exploration and searching paths and locations, not rush to next cross or clear point on a map and how reach this point. View limits and global maps limits and usage of mountains and deep forests as nasty obstacles put sense in exploration. Random events, and some location events, plus various minor event, complete the exploration design, good stuff but many CRPG did better.

Not really positive or negative, depending of the player:

• Game pace is slow, that's the consequence of the exploration, of the constant care or managing the survival of the team, and the fights are turn based (as exploration). Myself I like such pace.
• They choose use an historical setup as a base. In my opinion if that brings a bit of originality, they also put on their shoulders a constraint that's better managed by much bigger teams and budgets. This added realism from the context increase also the design difficulty, in my opinion a Fantasy hybrid approach would have been much more easy, something like Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader. But myself I entered in it, and enjoyed the approach, less the not that well managed constraints coming from a very realistic approach.

They tried mix the original base design of exploration simulation and management to a more standard CRPG approach. That's cool but do it would have require to match better and more the various classical elements of the genre. I particularly think of items and locations:

• Such mildly large scale approach use either undergrounds or second scale closer for towns to add another complexity layout. That's missing here.
• Such traditional CRPG approach use a lot items because it's cheap once you have the base. For example at some point I found a treasure, it could be many gold but this hasn't the charm to find a very special item, it's even more cool when such items are rare in the game.

All of that mentioned, I must add that all what's above is pure suspicious crap because I played about 10 hours the game. Let say it's first feeling. :)

Finished the game.
Well done devs, well done.

No bugs (at least I didn't pinpoint any, and I'm very picky) at all. Finding and exploring El Dorado, meeting an ancient god in flesh, side switching possibility or betrayal in the end, enrichening fights with cannon and special items (banner, spear, etc), hell this was a fun ride. A fun expedition.

If there will be a KS project for the next Expeditions game, I'm definetly pledging on it.

A side note. I played as natives' friend and in the end, despite me having so many valuables collected, the king of Spain was not happy with me and my "thin" treasure I've brought. :)

Started playing it yesterday, so far no bugs, and loving the game.
My only complaint (unless I'm missing it) is that there is no 'undo' for a few things. (Specially when placing traps in the pre-battle stage, also when assigning skill points on troop upgrade).

Yep, missed the undo option for the barricades either. For the skill points I guess it's more a matter of taste.

That said, can you see anywhere what armor the unit actually gets at promotion?
The tooltip only says "unlocks medium armor" for each class which is useless. The manual doesn't even mention it. Would like to know what armor scholars and scouts can use Imho the both most useless classes. Would also be intersting for the native classes.
Also most of the traits could be much cooler and more interesting. The active skills are fine for the most part. But in terms of traits you got a huge selection and to me it looks very much like a no-brainer to either go for defense melee/ranged, additional hitpoints and stacking hit chance (for rangers). A scout could profit from other stuff (flanking and movement) but he doesnt tank as good as soldiers, can't shoot at all and running to the enemy is useless because 1. its suicide 2. there are traps and therefore its even more suicide. I guess you could use him as melee killer in your defence though - if he got decent armor.

I used one scout in all my fights with more than 3 units and also the same one I used in story options when you're to send someone to inspect something. Not an useless class at all. But you really don't need more than one.

One level 3 scholar with tinkering 10 is a must to grab all 4 "techs" on max. He is also awsome to create more barricades, traps and later cannonballs while the rest of the team is hunting, preserving, patrolling, guarding, creating a medicine or is being treated by… You. :)
But putting a scholar in a fight… Nah, even in the full team of 6.
I must also admit that I rarely used barricades in the game so an undo option was something I didn't need at all.

As for traps… I really didn't care if any of my team steps on those. In my fighting team there was always a doctor, even in the party of 3. Oddly, the enemy team doesn't/didn't focus him/her every time. Perhaps because I played on normal difficulty.

I am playing on insane and use 1 Doc, 2 Soldiers and 3 Rangers.
I don't find the traps very useful but the barricades are nice to create chokepoints which I then block with the soldiers. The Rangers take out the Enemy doc and then the rest.
Unfortunately the main reason it works that good is because the AI is quite bad. As you said they don't focus on the doctor, their doctor/shaman often ran right into the the battlefield to get slaughtered and once the way is blocked they run over to the other end of the map if there is the only other way "in".

I took 2 scholars just to push my diplomacy. I don't use them in fights at all. You also don't need a scholar for tinkering. As you said he needs to be level 3 (6 to 10). You can also use a doctor for that instead who also just needs to be level 3 for that (4 to 10) which also increases his healing capabilities and defense…and hitpoints with the trait.

Would have been great if the tinkering skill would have bigger influence on crafting and not just for the research.

The opponent traps can be pretty hardcore if they make your tanking plan impossible or a spike trap just did over 40 damage.

I don't know for insane but on hard I find most traps(I am using barricades ,net traps and spike traps) and scouts useful.My compositions is 2 soldiers, 1 scout ,2 hunters and doctor.Scout with additional flanking damage+ armor penetration can one-shot most targets on critical and can get in and out without triggering attack of opportunity.
IDK how viable my tactic is on insane but I will definitively try it on second play through since on hard game is pretty easy(at least so far,I am on second half of second island), because of not so smart AI.

Don't think that insane is much harder. The problem is though that once something goes wrong the whole fight might go down pretty fast (e.g. if you accidently sent someone the wrong way, triggered an attack of opportunity with a little chance that might change a flawless victory into a hard earned victory or defeat).
The hardest fights so far (first island still, but playing it a second time) are the defend for 10 turns fights. The last one I just won with one Ranger who ran away into a dead end but survived the final turn there.

I find those survive 10 turns fights pretty annoying, but I play with ironman off so I have luxury of reloading, hardest part of game so far was those last 2 battles on first island, second battle isn't hard by itself but after first survive 10 turns battle lot of my soldiers where wounded so I had to go with alternative composition and only few traps.

Yep, I think I miss clicked something in the first fight in addition to under estimating the amount of enemies and ended up by tanking it out with just one soldier in the end. Due to that I lost the second fight.

I think for any challenge you should play ironman. With loading and saving there wasn't anything so far which you couldn't solve by just doing it better next time. For non-ironman the AI is not challenging enough unfortunately.

Well I didn't know what expect from game so I played it safe and gone hard+ironman off, but I do agree with you that without ironman game lacks challenge.Except those survive 10 turns fights nothing was particularly challenging so far.

Edit: I think than option to change difficulty later during game and turn ironman on/off would be nice lot of other games have it.

Another edit: It has difficulty change in mid game(but not ironman on/off)I am just blind apparently:(.

This game is very good indie game. Nice dialogue , high replay value and addictive.

If you like strategy rpg game like heroes of might and magic . You gonna love this one too.


Its review here!
review of expeditions conquistador
Have fun!

This like some other reviews puts heavy amount of text as cons.I would disagree with than for 2 reasons.First amount of text is pretty light compared to many other RPGs(IE,NWN games for example or even somewhat similar game King's bounty ).Second game has decent writing imo so reading it was never chore.

Hmm, it pretty much depends imho.
The biggest problem I have with big texts is when they are useless.

What I mean by that: If you go to an NPC who has a huge text to explain the mission. You only have two options: to accept or not to accept. After that the mission is put onto your map. There is absolutely no point to reading the text besides of the interest in a story you can't influence.

The best case however I see in the structure Avernum is using:
They almost always only have very few sentences which then require a response. The response, which is not marked as "good" or "bad" will then trigger a response and additional text from the NPC. This text could then give you a quest, make you gain or lose reputation and chose a path for you in further quests. What you chose in the dialogues actually matters.

I think expeditions conquistador is very close to the Avernum model. I think it could have been a little less text and more to the point. In addition I personally don't feel any connection with the spanish "culture" or with the spanish names. I played the game yesterday the last time and the only name I remember from the whole game, including all my team is "Isabella". So for me personally there isn't exactly a big basement to build upon and I would probably have prefered a fantasy setting, or at least english or dutch expeditions. ;)

I'm from South America originally so I'm playing in Spanish. It's really fresh that for once in my lifetime I actually get to play a game made in my native language, and what you say has been my issue for every game I've played. Finally I get names I recognize :)