So In my opinion Impire ends up being a well presented game with some cool features. But it it has no gameplay depth, it utterly fails to deliver on the RTS part as well as on the dungeon management part.
Sadly, this is what some people (myself included) call the game a jack of all trades. Not particularly good at any individual aspect but tries to cover multiple aspects.
There have been a lot of jack of all trade games in the past and all that I can remember have fallen into that pile of games of mediocrity.
Impire needs fleshing out, it needs the dungeon management to be beefed up and improved, as well as the overland raids need something more to them than a room that you send your minions to and they come back. My squads should mean more to me than they do in Impire. When I send out a squad to a raid and the squad comes back with only one member it means nothing to me other than I got the resource I was after and I've got to click a few more buttons to refill my squad be it creating new members of the squad of shifting members from other squads.
It does have a couple nice features, one in particular is the picture in picture system, but this also means that many players are simply going to play from the map view a great deal of the time because there's little reason to go down close and lose the overall picture of your entire game and where everything is. For somebody that enjoys to playing more of a dungeon management system I imagine it loses a lot of fun this way.
I don't know what the answer is, although there have been a lot of suggestions floated around that sounded pretty good, many of which would not change the overall core game play but only improve on it, but how much work is Paradox willing to pay Cyanide to do to this game, IMHO, Paradox has been in a pretty defensive mode about the criticism that has been launched at the game thus far while still maintaining that "first sale run" attitude of "we are listening". Kind of like other publishers / developers that I've dealt with in the past where they are listening and taking under advisement suggestions to improve their product until the first run sales and or DLC sales are over, then it simply turns to "no, that is not something we'll be doing", which is understandable since they want to sell as many units as possible by saying they're listening but not firmly promising anything.
Well, we wait and see. What will Cyanide do (if anything) to make this game more palatable to both RTS and DM type of players I wonder. Could they beef up both the RTS and DM sides of the game without it costing them all their profits. Time will tell, and gamers are getting longer memories, it used to be that we as gamers used to forget about games that we thought were trash but we're remembering longer now those games that did not please us and ultimately this means more or less sales for certain developers/publishers. The ones that are killing us are those that are even so bold as to state that they don't care about anything, they'll buy whatever the developers throw at them, it doesn't matter to them if the last game the developer released was left in a shamble and full of bugs when they stopped working on it or not, they'll continue to throw money at their screen to buy a game or DLC at first light.
On the bright side, it's not as bad as Dungeons, it's not as tedious as AGoD and hell knows what War for the Overworld will be like, probably a horrible mess. So it still might come out at the top of the whole bunch, in proper time.
Oh and really people should go back and try Dungeons dark lord again, it became an infinitely more enjoyable game after playing with Impire, you can take that either as a slur against Impire, or that Kalypso had their developers do just enough (of course we paid for it with expansion or DLC) to make the game just improved enough to make it more enjoyable, but only if you can get over the whole premise that you need to fatten your heroes for harvesting instead of just outright killing them. Personally I'm enjoying the dungeon management/building aspect of Dark lord very much, but only in a custom game, the campaign to me was just rubbish.
Sure it has a lot of shortcomings in the dungeon management department, lacks many rooms that I would have liked to see included but I do dig digging my tunnels and creating my own rooms and setting my own traps and troops where I like to try to make the heroes as fat as possible before they are killed with only my creatures/minions and or traps. It's like a game in a game for me to try to NOT use my dungeoneer to kill the enemy and try to setup good dungeon layouts so that my heroes are as fat as possible before they hit the next event that finally kills them. It's actually a blast to play after playing Impire, the jack of all trades game.
P.S. Hi Colombo
As for the rest it has nothing todo with hardcore fans, but annoyance with people who decided that the game should be something that it isn't, only because it has a dungeon. Though admittedly I too hoped for DK like game, but I quickly realized that their take is on the RTS side, with story driven camping and multiplayer focus, rather than single player Dungeon building/management sandbox which I have been wishing for ever since DK.(still hoping that 'war of the overworld' deliver).
