Your lord is the most powerful unit in the game. Not only is a lord stronger than any other unit, nearby friend units benefit from the lord’s presence while enemies are negatively impacted. Lords are so powerful in fact, that you’ll play just about every mission in the game by surrounding your lord with a few supporting unit and a healer or two in tow, and then cutting a swathe through the enemy. This problem is compounded the farther you get into a campaign because your lord gains experience and levels up, becoming even more powerful. Your lord is so important to your success that the game allows you to resurrect your lord should he or she actually fall in battle. In fact, there is a special unit whose sole purpose is to revive a fallen lord. Unfortunately you can be really out of luck if you lose your lord deep within the enemy’s territory, as it can be very difficult to get a single weak unit to the corpse of your lost lord.

Launching an attack on an enemy compound.

Other units can gain levels with experience and if you can get a unit to a high enough level it will be knighted, in which case it will have a positive effect on surrounding units similar to a lord. Don’t expect to lead armies of knights into battle though because this feature is undermined by the fact that the game is so stingy in letting you carry your units from one mission to the next. You’ll have a couple of higher level units and the rest of your army will be back to square one in every mission.

The lord and friends method of smiting the enemy mentioned above is not only an effective tactic, it is a necessary one. Unit AI is so quirky that you’ll need to baby-sit your units to prevent unwanted and self-destructive behavior. Pathfinding is poor, and it is impossible to move groups of units any appreciable distance without having them strung out and wandering into dangerous areas piecemeal. Units also exhibit strange behavior in combat. In larger battles it is very common to have units standing around doing nothing, while at other times units act super-aggressively and will chase after enemies all over the map.

Base-building is made both simpler and more complicated than it is in other strategy games. It is simplified by the fact that you do not need units to build structures. You simply select a building, place it, and wait while it builds itself. This simplifies base maintenance since you can just aim your gatherers at the nearest platinum mine and place your buildings as needed without the need to disturb your resource stream. On the downside, the structures in LoE are over specialized. Each one produces one or two unit types or can only research a couple of upgrades. This leads to large sprawling bases that make it difficult to effectively support your army and are difficult to defend.

Overall LoE suffers from too many problems in design and execution to be considered a good RTS game. RTS veterans will grow tired of it before too long and newcomers to the genre will find it frustrating. This one is best left to fans of all things EverQuest.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 66%.  Lords of EverQuest has too many problems to be enjoyed by anyone except EverQuest fanatics taking a break from roleplaying.

« Page 1 of 2