Video Game / Eador

A place where you'll spend your next couple of months

"Eador is a universe made of countless shards of land drifting in the Great Nothing. Each of the shards is a little world unto itself, with geography and citizens of its own. The power over the shards is bitterly contested by Masters, the immortal beings mortals believe to be gods."

"Take the role of a mighty Master and shape the destiny of Eador, on land and within the astral plane itself. Explore the land and rule provinces as you see fit, defend them, and keep the populace in line or they may rebel. Choose from thousands of items—swords, spells, weapons, armor, and more—to outfit the heroes you recruit so they may best meet any challenge. Keep your heroes healthy and they will grow stronger as they gain experience from battle. Forge alliances and engage in the delicate art of diplomacy as you negotiate trade agreements or wage war against a mutual foe. Eador with its many wonders and adventures awaits, will you answer the call?"

— From the game's description at GOG.com.

At first glance Eador (pronounced eh-ah-dOhr) may seem like Heroes of Might and Magic or Age of Wonders clone, but scratch the surface and you see a complex empire building game similar to Dominions, Civilization and (somehow) Europa Universalis. You simultaneously fight tactical battles not unlike King's Bounty or Age of Wonders; develop your home castle, build upgrades in provinces; keep an eye on population growth and mood; send your heroes on quests, to invade neighbouring provinces, into dungeons or to explore lands in search for resources; make alliances and trade with other players; buy and repair equipment or powerful artifacts for your heroes; learn and use rituals that affect the world and simple spells useful in battle; react to random events that influence the economy, world and your alignment... This is a big game.

Campaign follows you, one of the Astral Lords, on a quest to gather shards of Eador. Each shard is independent world, and you have to fight other spiritual beings like you as well as local rulers to add it to your own big world. It gets much more complicate when you meet other Lords and realize the danger of global Chaos invasion that devours all that exists. The game gets progressively more complex as your unlock new buildings, units, spells, rituals, quests. Of course, you can start singleplayer or multiplayer game on a single map with everything unlocked. Main castle has more than 200 buildings, many of each are mutually exclusive, and you can forge alliances with many races that give you unique buildings and units, so there's much strategic thinking involved.

Eador: Genesis was released in 2009 in Russia and nowhere else until December 2012 when it was released internationally via GOG. Eador: Masters of the Broken World is an Updated Re-release with 3D graphics and features that came out in 2013 and is available on Steam and GOG. The first expansion for Masters of the Broken World, Allied Forces was released June 2014, adding a swathe of new units, chiefly variants on the demihuman/humanoid units which can be recruited via an alliance. May 2016, a new expansion, Eador: Imperium was announced and placed on Steam Early Access.

Character list is in the works

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This work provides examples of:

• Achievement System: Fulfillng certain requirements on shard map will give you various achievements that add to your total score.
• Apocalypse How: Class X. The once whole world of Eador is now literally broken into shards.
• All Trolls Are Different: Local trolls are huge mean green monsters. They are also attracted to gold, bringing lots of troubles to your tax collectors in various random events.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: Your shard gets attacked several times throughout the campaign. You get some benefits from fighting on your home territory, but if you lose it's Game Over. On a smaller scale, if you lose your home province on the shard map you lose battle for that shard.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: The number of units your heroes can lead is capped by their Leadership stat, and not only the total number is limited, but how many of your units can be of higher tier as well. Unit slots in your army are divided by tiers just like units are, and while lower-tiered units can go into higher-tiered slots, the reverse is impossible.
• Army of Thieves and Whores: Can be pulled off (sans whores). Among units that you can recruit from your castle there are brigands, thieves, thugs and assassins.
• Artificial Stupidity: In Genesis, at least. The AI is very punishing to an unexperienced player, but is also very unflexible, and once you figure out what makes it tick, you can play your computer opponent like a fiddle. The most glaring example, perhaps, is if you besiege your opponents home province, it'll drop everything and send all of its heroes running hell-for-leather back home to try and lift the siege... even if at that moment it was besieging YOUR home province and was one turn away from breaching the walls.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Comes in two flavours - one that ignores fixed amount of opponent's close/ranged/magic defence and one that ignores half of it. Most units have either type, but heroes may combine two by having necessary skills with appropriate equipment.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: Prerequisite to becoming an Astral Lord. Most of the opponents you face in the campaign have performed specific ritual, which allowed them to shed their mortal bodies and become one of the Masters.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Foreign units that you get from allying with any non-human race are arguably this. Sure, these units give you a better alternative to some of your castle units, but almost all of them belong to Tier 1, and perfroming the quest necessary to get them can be very tricky, time-consuming and may require considerable amount of luck. Unless you rush, by the time you get them the match has probably reached the point when they don't really matter. Of course, there are reasons to form an alliance besides getting a new unit.
• Back from the Dead: You can resurrect your fallen heroes as often as you like, provided you can pay the required price in gold and crystals. The prices get progressively steeper the more levels your hero has, and unless you can pay the price then and there, the hero's body must be delivered back to your capital first before you get the option to resurrect them again. This can take very long, so it's better to keep your heroes alive. Additionaly, the "Resurrection" and "Reincarnation" spells allow you to bring your units back to life right on the battlefield, and the Champion hero has this as a class ability.
• Bad Powers, Bad People: Using Necromancy and Chaos magic shifts your allignment towards evil. Sorcerer units also have evil allignment, with most of their powers being curses.
• Bad Powers, Good People: It's possible to keep your alligment good while using evil schools of magic by picking good options in different events.
• Beef Gate: Neutral provinces' guards and parties of monsters that inhabit sites get progressively stronger the further their province is from the players' starting positions. This means that you can't advance far from your home province without a strong army. The fan community uses the term "ring" to describe this mechanic.
  • To elaborate - provinces are classified by "ring," i.e. how many concentric rings from a starting province it is. Province guards and dungeon denizens in ring 1, the adjacent provinces, are notably weaker than those in ring 2 (and those in ring 2 weaker than ring 3 etc), encouraging you to conquer every province adjacent to your starting hex before advancing to ring 2. Note that every player, including the AI, faces this sort of Beef Gate on every map, meaning that expansion gets progressively harder as you move outward from your capital - until you're halfway between your capital and someone else's, at which point it gets easier again. Of course, unless your opponent has been napping, you'll probably encounter his border around the halfway point too...
• Body Armor As Hitpoints: Zigzagged with hero equipment. Usually, items that go into chest slot, like jackets, mails or robes, reduce incoming damage, while things like helmets, boots or cloaks increase maximum HP.
• Cannon Fodder: Militiamen, Goblins, Brigands. The former two, however, have some Magikarp Power going for them, but Brigands, while not completely incompetent, have next to none development potential and decrease the income from the province they're stationed in and the amount of gold you get after sucessfull battles. This, combined with their dirt-cheap hiring cost, means that you will either hire Brigands as disposable troops or will not hire them at all, constructing their recruitment building only to get one specific type of defenders later.
  • It should be noted that the game mechanics discourage using your troops as a Cannon Fodder - part of a total experience obtained for a sucesfull battle is equally divided among all troops, even dead and summoned ones (that disappear after battle), meaning that if you habitualy use your troops as a disposable meat, your surviving units will level slower.
• Class and Level System: For your recruitable heroes. You can recruit a Warrior, a Mage, a Commander and a Scout to be your chosen champion to lead your armies on any given shard (and can recruit more than one for extra cost). Each hero, upon reaching level 10, can choose whether to continue in his original class or dual-class into one of the other three classes. Since dual-classing is not symmetrical (i.e. Warrior -> Scout is not the same class as Scout -> Warrior), this gives a total of sixteen possible class combinations in Eador.
• Character Alignment: In-universe. Your character has specific alignment that changes during campaign and/or single map. Each unit has its own alignment too and doesn't like to fight for a Lord with different morals, and trying to from an alliance with a race of different alignment from yours may be very difficult if not outright impossible. Also, army composed of creatures with different views on life will get major penalties to units' morale.
• Chaos Is Evil: The demons of Chaos seek to overwhelm and utterly unmake Eador.
• Critical Existence Failure: Averted. When unit's health drops lower than half, their attack starts getting progressively weaker.
  • But in full effect for units with the Feels No Pain skill, including all undead & mech. They hit just as hard right up to the last hit point.
• Crystal Dragon Jesus: The Lord of Light. Interestingly, it is implied by Zarr that he may actually not exist, unlike the rest of the gods. But the powers that his monks and priests wield are very real, nonetheless.
• Deader than Dead: Being plunged into Chaos results in this, even to otherwise immortal beings like gods and Astral Lords.
• Deal with the Devil: One random event for evil rulers is this, a devil will visit your castle and offer you random magical artifact in exchange of letting it construct a chaos gate in one of your provinces. Curiously, quite often the artifact turns out to be the Sword of Justice.
• Disk One Nuke: Discovering early on a province site that allows you to recruit powerful units can count as this. Especially so during early stages in the campaign - when neither you nor your enemy normally have access to any troops beyond Tier 1, having even a single Tier 3 unit is a devastating advantage. Be carefull though - enemy can do that too!
• Difficult, but Awesome: Wizard hero class. See Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards entry below.
• Eldritch Location: The Astral Plane.
• Evil Pays Better: Random events that occur on the shard map have good and evil options to resolve them. In most cases, being evil or oppressing the local populace comes with large amounts of gold or other resources attached.
  • For instance, it's possible to encounter a halfling farmstead while exploring your province. Trading with them yields +1 gold/turn, imposing a tax yields +3 gold/turn, while plundering and razing the settlement yields 200-300 gold immediately. Given that most of the early maps are conquered in 100 turns or so, being kind or just will never pay off before the match ends and the only reason not to murder them all is to avoid the negative karma.
• Excuse Plot: Averted. The game features developed lore, opponent characters with distinct personalities, goals and motivations, well-written dialogues, plot secrets, optional quests, multiple endings and end goals beyond simple "Kill'em all and become one true Astral Lord".
• Fake Longevity: The main point of criticism for the Genesis campaign is how dragged out it feels - the battle for each individual shard can take very long time and the shards are very similar between each other with no unique features on them. Masters Of The Broken World tries to adress this by making intervals between plot events shorter and introducing new shard sub-types and terrain.
• For the Evulz: Many choices during random events allow you to paint yourself as a cartoonishly evil villain, but two cases deserve special mention. During the event with a captured unicorn you can order to make cutlets out of it, and during the event with a captured mermaid you can similarily order to make a soup out of her. You are an incorporeal entity inhabiting the astral plane, so you physically cannot eat food. Besides, the unicorn cutlets taste terrible. However, in mermaid's case the soup option is the only one that allows you to gain something - the scales your cooks peel off her tail net you some gold or crystals. All other choices from her event give you nothing.
• Fragile Speedster: Pegasi, the only castle unit that has base speed of five, but they are very squishy for second tier units. Luckily, they have the First Aid skill that somewhat mitigates this.
  • Fairies are the tier one example, being the only first tier unit with base speed of three (with the potential to eventually grow to five, but the lowest hitpoints, attack and counter-attack.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: Genesis gives you only one autosave slot in lieu of standard save system. However, at any moment you have the option to go back to previous turn and try some things differently, or go back to the Astral Plane to a point before you invaded current shard. This comes at a cost of lowering your total score for the shard in the former case and permanently lowering your energy income in the latter. In-Universe, you travel back in time when you do this.
• Geo Effects: Battle map can have forests, hills, swamps, lakes and mountains on it. Factoring the terrain into your tactics and using the advantages it provides is essential to victory. Masters Of The Broken World adds deserts to the roster.
  • To go into more details, forests provide cover from ranged attack, hills improve counter-attack and increase skirmishers' range, swamps decrease defence. All of the above are difficult to pass, meaning they require additional movement points and stamina to cross. Some creatures are native to certain terrain types, and they get defence bonus when stationed on native terrain. Lakes and mountains are impassable to all except flying units.
  • Terrain also plays part on the shard map - each province has its own terrain type, and it affects movement rates for that province, sites and strategic resource that may be found in the province, and the layout of the battle map.
• Glass Cannon: Elves, who are the best ranged troops among Tier 1 units, and, arguably, Tier 2 as well. But they have one of the worst HP rates in the game.
• Golem: Clay and Stone Golems are used as guards by some powerful mages, and are almost always found guarding various relics of the Ancients. With a Golem Ingot and the right stronghold building, you can construct one yourself for your army.
• Götterdämmerung: Most of the gods were killed by demons during or shortly after the Cataclysm that shattered Eador. Very few, however, managed to survive by going into hiding or through other means.
• Harping on About Harpies: Harpies can be fought in various neutral sites, and you can recuit them if you manage to find their nests. They are attracted to shiny things, which makes them steal and accumulate treasures in their nests. It also makes them good at stealing skirmishers' ammunition right on the battlefield.
• Hero Unit: Heroes lead non-garrisoned units over map. There are 4 classes of heroes - Ranger, Mage, Warrior and Commander. All heroes actively participate in battle like any other unit.
• Hobbits: Known here as Halflings, they are unquestionably straight out of LOTR. It is possible to ally with them by completing a brigand slaying quest then throwing them a party. Having them as allies increases your income via farming and trading and allows you to recruit Halflings. As units, they're slingers (natch) and if promoted to Halfling Scout can learn an impressive array of abilities which grant great survivability: stealth, immunity to counter-attacks, high magic resistance, and ability to flee the attacks of stronger units. Amusingly, every party of adventurers will always include a halfling.
• Humans Are Average: Every Master uses humans as his default race (even the Elf King and Fairy Queen for some reason), all heroes are humans too. Player can have an alliance with other races and they provide additional units and buildings.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: Some units, like ghouls or slimes, can eat bodies of dead soldiers to restore some of their health. There's an item that allows your hero to do this.
• I'm a Humanitarian: Various giant subspecies, and especially Ogres, are explicitely stated to love human meat. Additionaly, several random events will have you dealing with various creatures kidnapping your subjects with specific purpose of eating them.
• I Thought Everyone Could Do That: The PC himself. Part way through the campaign, you find out from Zarr that none of the other masters can reverse time like you do and can express surprise at this.
• Jack of All Trades: When it comes to hero units, Scout is one. He's moderately tough, but not as tough as Warrior, he gets spell and unit slots reasonably fast, but not as fast as Wizard and Commander, and he has some unique support skills of his own. This gives him enough tactical flexibility to adapt to any situation.
• Karma Meter: Building certain buildings or recruiting certain units will swing your karma meter one way or another (reflected in your statistics page with monikers such as "the Pure" or "the Dark"). With chaotic or necromantic spells, simply casting them gives you negative karma each time.
• Knight Templar: The Inquisition is implied to be this. It is possible to peacefully occupy Holy Lands-type provinces and leave Inquisitor guards in place, but this penalises province mood and also your karma. Furthermore, every Inquisitor group will include one Executioner, an evil-aligned unit. Since the other units are emphatically good aligned (healers, swordsmen, and especially monks), it's unclear what relationship the Inquisition has to the rest of the church of the Lord of Light.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: The protagonist suffers from one.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Good-aligned rulers tend to get more beneficial random events, while evil-aligned get more detrimental ones.
  • This is even aknowledged In-Universe, under the name of The Law of Karma.
• Legend Fades to Myth: On the material plane, so much time has passed from the Cataclysm that this event is considered nothing more than a legend by mortal races. Most people don't even believe that Eador was once whole, and think that it has always been broken into shards. On the Astral Plane, where time works differently, things are not much better. Only a very few counted witnessed the Cataclysm, and among those few even less know the truth of what actually happened.
• Lightning Bruiser: There is one or more of these at each tier: Barbarians and Brigands fill the role in tier one, Horsemen and Thugs in tier two, Knights and Gryphons in tier three, the Vampire in tier four.
• Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Played straight for both hero units and regulars. Warrior hero dominates the battlefield on low levels, and remains tough on high ones, but can easily be overwhelmed with clever tactics and sheer numbers. Wizard starts squishy, requires lots of crystals, skill and considerable and diverse array of spells to remain competitive, but things that high-level Wizards can do to enemy armies can be described only as obscene.
  • As of regular units, while your melee fighters often get new perks that may seriously improve their performance, for caster units getting a new spell can make that unit exponentially more useful and even change the unit's role on the battlefield.
• Lizard Folk: One of the races you can form an alliance with. They are one of more popular choices for an allied race, as they will deal with a ruler of any alignment (themselves being neutral) and their quest being relatively easy to perform.
• Magic Is Evil: All units from sorcery family (shamans, sorcerers, etc.) have evil alignment. It should be noted that they are not necessary evil per se, but rather wilful and unscrupulous. This is reflected in them having only slightly evil alignment. However, warlocks (the top of the spellcasting family Tier 4 units) are an exception, their alignment is described as "Evil Incarnate."
• Magic Knight: The Dark Knight (Warrior/Wizard hybrid) and the Battlemage (Wizard/Warrior hybrid) classes are this, with them both having access to Warrior and Wizard skillsets. Naturally the two classes are tied for lowest maximum Command stat.
• Magikarp Power: Militiamen and Goblins, the most useless units in the game, who otherwise fit only as a fodder for your necromancers and demonologists or as a living shield for your more valuable troops. Militiamen, however, can learn some valuable perks that allow them to take a punch and live to tell the tale, and after reaching certain level they may get an option of turning into Spearmen, while retaining their experience and awards. Goblins, while never growing into frontline infantry, can also learn some very useful perks.
  • Even more true for Goblins with the Allied Forces expansion enabled: they can promote into either Goblin Spitters (ranged poison units) or Goblin Alchemists (healers who can eventually learn a powerful tier 3 spell).
• The Medic: Healers, the only tier one healing unit recruitable inside your stronghold, will almost always fill this role. Fairies can substitute with some levels under their belt, and Monks and Clerics offer healing from the higher unit tiers.
• Mighty Glacier: Trolls are an ultimate axample - slow, hit like a truck, have tons of HP and a Healing Factor to boot.
• Mr. Exposition: Zarr.
• Multiple Endings: And not just alignment-based ones.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Several cases among other Masters, but the best example would be Adrageron.
• Necromancer: Present as units, as heroes, and as Masters. "Necromancers" is a type of location guard composed of a mix of offensive spellcasters and undead, and the highest-tier offensive caster, the Warlock, has a skill which causes all units he kills to rise as skeletons. Wizard heroes can use the necromancy skill to raise undead and keep them in their army permanently: the Wizard/Scout multiclass is called a Necromancer and is extra good at it. Finally, two of the Astral Masters, Beleth and l'Anshar, are necromancers themselves. L'Anshar qualify, is also a lich.
• Night of the Living Mooks: The Necromancy magic school allows you to rise your units as various kinds of undead during battle, and the Necromancy skill allows you to keep undead units in your army permanently. Having an army made solely of undead is not only possible, but it is quite an effective strategy as well.
• Non-Entity General: In-Universe. On each shard you invade you exist as an incorporeal presence that can speak to your subjects and sometimes perform some magical rituals, but cannot interact with the world in any other way. It is mentioned early on by Zarr that you can actually incarnate into a material body, but it is very difficult to do, requires a lot of energy and very impractical, as you have to be born and live your life and develop as a normal human at normal speed, and you don't get any special powers in your human form. So there's really no reason for you to do that.
• Omnicidal Maniac: Demons, who want to plunge what little remains of Eador into Chaos. Also, l'Anshar, who wants to purge the world of all life.
• One-Man Army: Most warriors end up being this. With high HP and damage they can destroy whole armies without any units. Mages and Rangers can be that too, though they're much more fragile and have to rely on specific tactics. Mages use summons and crowd-control spells while Rangers uses hit-and-run. Commanders, unlike others, benefit from skills affecting the entire army and can hire more troops, so they're almost useless on their own.
• Order Versus Chaos: Major theme in the setting. The once whole world of Eador is now shattered into many shards that slowly get consumed by Chaos. Demons are the creatures of Chaos that seek to further this process, and establishing strong order on your shard is one way to deterr them.
• Our Demons Are Different: They are creatures of Chaos out to destroy the world.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Western-type variety. They like to hoard treasures, occasionally raid your settlements for tribute but usually just stick to their lairs, and they are, not surprisingly, the strongest single units in the game, being flying Lightning Bruisers with magical ranged attack and having magic immunity. Taking out even one can be tricky if you're not smart, and late in the game you can stumble upon sites guarded by EIGHT dragons at once. One of the Masters you may encounter is (or rather, was) a dragon. He has a bad temper and he can deploy dragons in his armies. Also, a rare defender contract allows you to hire a dragon to defend your province.
• Our Dwarves Are All the Same: Yep. Their rivalry with elves is really pronounced only in the backstory, and otherwise not that noticeable, but apart from that they're as same as it gets. Battleaxes, crossbows and pikes? Check. Siege equipment? Check. Magic resistance and mining? Check and check.
• Our Elves Are Different: Of Wood variety with some elements of High as well. Like Tolkien's elves, they are in mourning for old losses.
• Our Fairies Are Different: Fairies are present as neutral units in the game, they can be recruited through certain province sites. They're fragile support units who with some leveling can substitute as medics. Also, one of the Masters is the queen of fairies, Vianta.
• Our Goblins Are Different: Swamp-dwelling poison users. Zarr has a grudging respect for them, claiming they're so irrationally good at surviving they'll probably be the last race on Eador. With the Allied Forces expansion, their better-defended provinces can approach Demonic Spiders territory, as promoted goblins plus Giant Slugs make for enormous amounts of ranged poison damage.
• Our Minotaurs Are Different: Here they are creations and servants of Eador's god of secrets. Most often they can be found in their mazes which are scattered across different shards, where they can be fought and occasionally recruited. Getting them into your army is difficult (as it depends on random result of the maze exploration) but well worth the trouble.
• Our Orcs Are Different: Of the early Warhammer type: they were created by the war god to be his fighting servants, and they're slow but hard-hitting units who can potentially become berserkers.
• Pragmatic Villainy. In handling of random events, the optimal path is usually being villainous early for the large short-term gains then working on population mood and karma once your treasury has fattened. Similarly, the best mix of spells and units tends to include both good and evil of both.
• Precursors: The Ancients. Their civilization collapsed some time around the Cataclysm, however due to their longevity some remnant individuals managed to survive up to somewhat recent times, but by the time the game takes place in they are all extinct.
• Random Event: Big variety of them occurs on shard map. They provide you with oppurtunities to shift karma either way and, most of the time, to gain some additional money or resources. Some of them happen completely randomly, others are influenced by various factors, like your karma, constructed buildings, people's happiness, type of province where the event occurs etc.
• Regenerating Health: Comes in two varieties: First Aid, where the unit must skip a turn in order for it to kick in, and Regeneration, which is always on - and much rarer.
• Reinventing the Wheel: You have to start anew on each shard you invade.
• "Risk"-Style Map: The shard map is organized into hexagonal provinces, and each player must expand outward hex by hex.
• Sealed Badass in a Can: Garros, Eador's god of war was one of the few gods who managed to survive the Cataclysm and the demons' hunt for them. Fittingly for a god of war, he accomplished this by virtue of being too tough for demons to destroy, so instead they sealed him in a certain magical artifact. Hint: it hangs from Doh-Gor's neck.
• Scoring Points: The game keeps score of how you play, both in campaign as a whole and on each separate shard, and ranks you according to your score.
• Save Scumming: In-Universe example. You can reverse time whenever things go wrong, stepping back one turn (for a loss in score) or going back to before you began fighting for the current shard (for a small but permanent loss of energy income). The score loss is eventually explained as the other masters (who can't do it) being annoyed at you "cheating". Incidentally, in Genesis, this is the only way to save scum without quitting and copying save directories as the game autosaves.
• Shattered World: You probably know this by now.
• Smite Evil: Certain good-aligned units have skill that lets them inflict additional damage on creatures of evil alignment - the bigger the difference in their karma, the bigger the bonus damage.
  • Smite Good: The evil counterpart of the above skill is also present in the game, but none of default creatures has it. It's there for modders.
• Snarky Non-Human Sidekick: Zarr the gremlin, who is very similar to Morte in that regard. Depending on your dialogue choices, you can play Straight Man to him or gleefuly engage in Snark-to-Snark Combat.
• Sssssnaketalk: Lizardmen speak like that.
• Sorcerer King or Sorcerous Overlord: All Masters qualify to a various degree, except Doh-Gor.
• Stone Wall: Swordsmen, Pikemen, and Dwarves all make highly durable front-line troops for their tier, but their offense is quite lacking.
• Take a Third Option: Diplomacy skill allows your hero to do this during negotiations.
• Timed Mission: The campaign. It has to be finished in a fixed amount of turns (the exact amount depends on the difficulty level) unless you want to Earn Your Bad Ending.
• Time Master: You are! As mentioned above, in Genesis, when you choose to go back one turn or return to Astral, you actually return to an earlier point in the past in-story. Apparently, before you lost your memory, you were capable of travelling through time even more liberally.
• Treacherous Advisor: Danur, who kills you at the end of the tutorial map. Subverted in that he was actually your servant, and was acting according to your orders.
• Unstoppable Rage: Some units have this as an ability (namely, Barbarians, Minotaurs, etc.). When hit with a single strong enough attack, the unit becomes enraged for the remainder of the battle, gaining bonus to attack as well as immunity to morale damage and attack penalties for low heatlh.
• Useless Useful Spell: Averted. Some spells may be situational but none of them are completely useless. Additionaly, many of the spells have some additional, sometimes completely unxepected effect or property that is not apparent from spell's name. Read the descriptions, seriously!
• Video Game Caring Potential: Pick good choices during random events, send food to starving provinces, dedicate funds to combat epidemics, save innocent non-humans from angry mobs, reward your subjects for jobs well done, light magical fireworks for village fairs and enjoy your good karma and all benefits that come with it.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Nothing stops you from picking evil choices. Sell food for sky-high prices to starving provinces, sell bodies of those who died during epidemics to necromancers, make nifty trinkets out of captured magical creatures, rob your own provinces, take Cannon Fodder units in your army and turn them into undead or use as sacrifices to summon demons. Enjoy your evulz, as well as (usually much bigger) short-term rewards that may be more useful for you right now than the long term bonus and good karma points that the good choices give. See Evil Pays Better above.
• Video Game Stealing: Thieves and Harpies can steal ammo with their melee attacks.
• Villain with Good Publicity: You can actually play like this, as long as you manage to keep your karma up and your populace happy while dabbling into dark magic and other atrocities. Some dialogue choices during random events seem specifically tailored to this mindset.
• Vancian Magic: Spells are organised into tiers and slots like units, must be selected inside a library - though once selected, they refresh between combat without needing a return trip to the library. There's also a strategic resource management element, with all spells except the most basic ones needing crystals to be cast.
• Warrior Monk: Western type variety. We have monks of the White Eagle order, that even look like typical catholic monks. They can heal your troops and blast your enemies with holy powers granted to them by the Lord of Light, plus cast some support spells. Their senior cousins, Clerics, can do the same but better.
• You Require More Vespene Gas: Gold and magic crystals on shard map, energy on the Astral Plane.
• Your Soul Is Mine!: Certain units (i.e. ghosts, executioners) can absorb the essence of living enemies they kill and convert it to their hitpoints, and the Death Knight hero has this as a class ability. Obviously, it doesn't work when you kill an undead unit, a machine or a golem.

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