High Strategy: Oradros

Oradros is a fascinating contrast to Urukon. Despite having the same general turn structure and interface as Urukon, the underlying systems of Oradros create a tone that is almost the polar opposite of Urukon. Urukon was largely a game of exploration with the goal of building a resource conversion engine that would achieve whatever your faction goal was (though violence/depth output was essential in any case). Passive income from your cities wasn't nothing, but it was tiny compared to what you earned by taking actions (trade, raid, and recruit in particular). Combined with the wide array of different resources possible to generate, and you've got a game where your main activity is figuring out the best cycles of resource conversion for your faction. The exploration part comes in simply because you never knew what a city's recruitment action would be until you control it. That sounds somewhat frustrating, but the majority of faction goals gave you plenty of leeway to experiment and explore and flounder before finding your engine - and the AI wasn't particularly antagonistic, mostly just doing it's own thing in parallel while you got yourself sorted out. That made Urukon qui…

Tl:drl; High Strategy: Oradros is a good follow-up to High Strategy: Urukon, with substantial changes in the core gameplay loop and a tightening of focus on strategy without compromising depth or scope. Changes I liked: + Terrain: Every node is now situated on one of half a dozen or so terrains. + Army composition can be changed, which gives bonuses or penalties to different types of terrain. Additionally, army types accrue xp with use, which allows you to upgrade them to be better still. + diplomatic stances towards a specific nation affects not just their attitude, but also gives bonuses or penalties to actions + population growth and resource production is substantially more straightforward. These factors combined make it so there is a substantial strategic benefit to planning your conquests carefully and restricting yourself to only 1 or 2 offensive fronts at a time. Where as before there was no real disadvantage beyond distance from capital to mindlessly "painting the map", now there are benefits to, say, managing relations, or leaving a weaker power standing on one front so you can focus your attention on another front. Knowing when and how to change army composition will…

The developer has capped the military resource at 10000 per faction. At about turn 100, you and likely more than 1 neighbor will never be anywhere less than 9500. Once it gets to 10,000 for your opponents, it's likely they've also maxed out the individual units' promotions that will keep you from getting into enemy territory. Having the spy fail in one town 6 times in a row while trying to tag that town 3 times for an insta-capture isn't my idea of fun.

Fun snowball simulator that has more depth than it initially seem, but still has a relaxing and fast play experience. Recommended!

Overall, it is a really neat game. While the actions can be overwhelming, experimenting really shows their effects. I was flying through turns by the end of my first game. I would like it if some of the Events had a tooltip or at least showed up better in the city screen, but overall, it is a great game.

A definite improvement of the first Game "Urukon". Really looking forward for this developer. The game itself is a satisfying Grand strategy loop. The focus is abstract and fast. you will finish a normal campaign in a single sitting. Basicly a casual and fun grand strategy game.