Epic Manager - Create Your Own Adventuring Agency!

Epic Manager - Create Your Own Adventuring Agency! -- http://picfs.com/18t830

About This Game You are the General Manager and CEO of your very own Adventuring Agency, the riskiest yet most lucrative business in the Realm of Astraeus. Recruit adventurers, negotiate their contracts, send them out on dangerous quests and reap the rewards should they make it out alive. Expand your Agency, manage your growing resources and best your competitors to become the Epic Manager!Epic Manager is a fresh new take on the Tycoon RPG genre, heavily inspired by classics we all know and love! The game presents a unique mix of roster management and character progression found in titles like Football Manager or Final Fantasy Tactics, narrative choices & consequences in the beloved tradition of gamebooks series Choose Your Own Adventure, the epic scope of a D&D campaign or a Lord of the Rings novel and the humoristic tone of The Princess Bride, all in one awesome package!Your goal is to gain the title of Epic Manager by becoming the most famous Adventuring Agency in the vast Realm of Astraeus. Send agents on the field to prospect new job opportunities, scout the dangers ahead, recruit new adventurers, negotiate their contracts, organize them in parties and complete dangerous quests to earn more fame than your rivals and climb the rankings of the League Ladder!Along with managing your contracts and jobs, you’ll also hire support staff, trade with the local merchants, upgrade your agency’s HQ, research new abilities and upgrades, expand your reach across Astraeus and interact with competitors by using intrigue and diplomatic actions.Adventurers are the backbone of your Agency. To find them, you’ll first need to organize recruitment campaigns across the Realm, then negotiate contract terms with those who present suitable talents, traits and growth potential!Add recruits to your ever-growing roster of unique characters and manage their progression as they gain experience and level-up. Experiment with the endless combinations and powerful synergies offered by our Multi Class system and build parties suited for every situation.Discover an emergent narrative shaped by YOUR actions. As your forces move on the map, they will come across an ever-growing bank of Random Encounters, narrative mini-scenarios giving you many choices on how to proceed. In some cases, having a specific class in your party will even reveal special hints and hidden options!In each campaign, actions you make will influence the ruthless political web of Astraeus and modify your reputation with each of the game’s 12 factions. Encounters and quests you decide to complete will lead to job opportunities that might not have available to you otherwise. As your agency grows, you’ll also use the Tech Tree and spend research points to unlock new abilities and specializations that fit your own play-style.As the commander-in-chief, you’ll get to take command of your adventurers as they meet increasingly dangerous foes on the battlefield. The parties you create will allow for powerful class and character synergies to stack the odds in your favor, as you make the best use of the hundreds of items, skills and spells at your disposal.Scout battles in advance to gather intelligence about the enemy forces and better exploit the weaknesses of dozens of enemy types inspired by bestiary classics : Goblins, Orcs, Ratmen, Gnolls, Skeletons, Zombies, Giants and many more!Some adventurers will grow from rookies to heroes, legends even, while others will quickly meet an untimely end. Such are the dangers of being an adventurer!Epic Manager features many procedurally generated content like randomized adventurers, equipment items and quest rewards to make each play-through different from the next! We want Astraeus to feel like a living world that reacts to you, just as you react to it. World Events, Random Encounters and RNG-based dice rolls will determine the consequences of some of your choices, changing the priorities of your Agency’s day-to-day operations.Scattered in Astraeus are very familiar and powerful characters. Some, like the Shovel Knight and Rogue Legacy Knight might be easy to find, others not so much - look for them as your forces venture across the Realm!Dozens of Enemy Types and tons of Quests, Random Encounters and World Events.Unique characters and bosses.Trade Adventurers with other agencies. Discover all hidden “Prestige Classes”, available for High-Level characters.New Merchant : Enchant and improve equipment at the Enchanter.New Merchant : Craft and combine items by visiting the Alchemist.Community-Created Content :Adventurers, Quests, Encounters, Items and more!ManaVoid Entertainment is a small but dedicated four-man Indie Studio based in Montreal, Canada.http://www.manavoid.comAll of Epic Manager's SFXs and Original Sound Tracks were created by our talented collaborators and friends over at GeekSound Factory.http://www.geeksoundfactory.com a09c17d780 Title: Epic Manager - Create Your Own Adventuring Agency!Genre: Adventure, Indie, RPG, Simulation, StrategyDeveloper:ManaVoid Entertainment Inc.Publisher:ManaVoid Entertainment Inc.Release Date: 12 Dec, 2016 Epic Manager - Create Your Own Adventuring Agency! I really wanted to like this game as I'm a huge fan of both sports sim and turn based game rpg/strategy games. I really did. Pros:- Original concept - thumbs up!- Contract system is good. You just can't go Yankees style - each contract has to be pondered, doing a signing bonus to reduce total amount is a great mechanic. - Balance is not so bad really for an early access launch title. Glaring thing is using portal: costs are too high and should cost gold only if not within some kind of cooldown period.Cons:- The dealbreaker: You don't get to meet and fight the other teams. They are static, faceless entities that you only interact with through some bland message boxes on a very limited scope. You don't see them questing, clearing stuff, or try to beat them at the punch which is what I was expecting. They don't really play the game they just increase their points totals randomly at some pace. Huge thumbs down.- Battles are very boring: Characters don't move, have a very limited pool of skills.. zzzz..- The quests pool is very limited (doing the green man quest 8 times in the same game...)- There is no draft outside of the launch one :( :( :(- Character development is also very shallow: Not much synergy with the multiclass system in the long run. I just wasn't excited looking towards it beyond the 2nd one.Game is too shallow to be worth that price. Sadly I'll let this one sit there and move on. Hope someone else tackles this idea but flesh it out more. My money is waiting.. And you'll be surprised!. The game is great fun. I would definately recommend it to fans of management and turn-based tactical games...I'll expand more later (It's really late and I'm really tired). Game has frustrating mechanics, you are penalized for doing well, and its unfulfilled in its direction. It might be feature complete, but whenever I played it I felt like I had a thousand ideas to improve upon it.Not sure I'd recommend this unless you get it at a discount. Idea is good, everything seems promising..., but its just not right there yet.. As of the time of this review the game is still in alpha. If they work out balance issues it will be a pretty solid game.TLDR – I can’t recommend this game until they do some serious mechanics tuning. The system is currently to random to initially develop a reliable adventuring party. The underlying pay and gold system doesn’t seem balanced in relation to travel time. These two problems lead from a fun enjoyable experience quickly turning into a maddening fight against negative income. General:Art/Music – 8/10 – Artwork has a very Plants vs Zombies feel. Music is acceptable.Interface – 9/10 – Layout of information and options are plentiful.Combat – 7/10 – Level scaling damage seems fine. Some bad imbalance in class skills and costs. The wound system is pretty strong.World Mechanics – 3/10 – The quest for gold system has some serious flaws which are game breaking.Recruitment Mechanics – 1/10 – Factoring everything together this equates to essentially a 3% chance to get useful characters when recruiting at low level.Breakdown:I was excited when it came up in my steam queue as it is a combination of strategy, D&D and simulation. My initial play through I made it to turn 48 and quit. I had failed to properly balance income and had started down the financial death spiral. So I quit. After looking at all the available mechanics in game I decided on a new strategy. Took about 27 new game starts to get a druid with acceptable traits and the right spell.I finished the first two seasons. It stops at that point for the alpha. I did this by upgrading two characters to thief and robbing all opposition before killing them. This generally nets about 20% of quest reward gold. Changed my quest tactic to cluster 3-4 in one area or only take quests along that particular path. Once agency was upgraded to make two scout actions: If Fame gained on quest > Fame cost to steal + Relation improvement was taken.There seems to be a bug in the save mechanic. On turns when you have to renegotiate if you fail you can make a new save. Immediately reload the save and you get to redo the renegotiation. This lets you really low ball your adventures with no consequences.Primary Issues - Damage output versus AP, AP Regen - There are traits like Willful, Skillful, Lazy, ect that provide -1 AP to attacks, -1 AP to skills and +1 AP Regen. The additional damage potential they generate far surpasses everything else especially at low level. There is a classic AoE versus Single target efficiency problem. With such small AP pools you need just the right trait (-1 AP to skills) and the right skill. Several classes have AoE damage and with the AP problems it makes single target completely out of the question. At low levels any item that offers +1 AP regen is worth significantly more damage potential than anything else. Unless the item offered +50% physical damage then -1AP to combat is more effective. --- Solution: Change the AP system by a factor of 10. It is very hard to provide game balance when dealing with AP values of 2 thru 8.Character ability selection - Since there are 16 classes the ability to “recruit” the proper class becomes very difficult. The epicness level system you can eventually get your preferred class but that wastes an entire level of epicness and therefore increases weekly upkeep. Also certain abilities are much more effective making the chance of unplayable characters pretty high. Starting with only 1 action per turn makes it impossible to recruit every turn. --- Solution: Add a type drop down from research that allows selection of a subset of adventures. It would limit possible jobs to 4 and give a much better chance of having at least 1 candidate that fits my playstyle available for recruitment.Gold per travel distance - Only being able to move one tile per turn means that a quest 3 or 4 tiles out costs essentially 8 turns worth of pay. If quest rewards (gold +fame) aren’t high enough then your generating net negative income. On top of this the wound system is pretty brutal even at level 6. This also factors into travel time. --- Solution: The weekly pay cost needs to be reduced significantly. Also any quest that has Travel Time x Party Pay > Quest Reward doesn’t work. Well timed teleportation becomes critical also.. Even in Early Access the game is very enjoyable, and I haven't had a game breaking bug show up since I picked the title up a good while back. The devs are very responsive on the forums, always a plus in an EA title. This game definitely falls into the time killer category, as I fire it up to play around a bit and find myself still playing a few hours later. The class variations (and the addition of new prestige classes) provide a good deal of replayability even before it's feature complete.. None of the classes feel very different. Very very few abilities available and there is almost no management, the game just tells you what to do. Kind of a let down. The concept of Epic Manager was great, but unfortunately the execution is much less exciting. The pace is slow, the rules are somewhat overcomplicated without being very deep. It's a very casual game that I'd probably happily play on a phone or tablet, but as it is not really worth the time investment.