I have LH, and it's been very satisfactory so far. I don't want to go back to play regular Fallen Enchantress. My only complaint would be that it took a couple of turns for it to feel really very different from FE. Perhaps just some new assets? *shrugs* dunno. 

Yeppers STEAM OWNS YOUR games always and forever. If you do something THEY don't like they can not let you play ANY of them and ban your account forever. Games you PAID for do not belong to you on Steam. That is why it's better to get games from Gamersgate or GOG or just about any other service out there besides STEAM, EA and EA's Origon client. But, they took away our "Gamers Bill of Rights" the big HYPE Frogboy made up when Galactic Civilizations came out and how they would never do anything like this to us. Well look where they are now!

I thought the same thing as you Willie.  How they had their big deal about Gamers Rights and bad and good DRM and then they go require steam for LH.  To be honest as silly as it sounds I do feel a little betrayed by stardock now. 

I'm always fine with steam being an option for purchase but I have problems when its required.  Steam works most of the time for me but the times it doesn't is what the problem is.  I had it update itself and then break when it was set for offline mode,  I've had games refusing to launch in offline mode until I connected to the internet again.  I've had skyrim update itself even after being set not to thus breaking my heavily moded game for possibly weeks until new mod patches came out.  I don't like going to start a game only to have steam tell me it needs to update itself first.  I've had many of these problems in the last couple of months so it is not even a "oh steam is better now thing".  And I just don't like supporting something that refuses to give me a refund for a game that won't launch and can take away all of the games I paid for if they decide they want to.

GoG will always get my money first and steam will always be last if at all.  I once thought the same of stardock products but it turns out that won't be the case anymore.  Looks like my money will be going to the new Eador game coming out sometime this year.

I do not know what is worse, whether Stardock is in big trouble so it was forced to cancel its "Gamers Bill of Rights" or Stardock canceled it on its own will.

Steam as an option is ok, but as requirement is a bad thing.

And please Kael or someone from Stardock please confirm that LH requires Steam!

I was not able to find minimal system requirements for LH on stardock site, http://www.vgrequirements.info says nothing about Steam is required. Please add steam to requirements (when they will be published) to be clear.

Thank you for confirmation although I would prefer to hear it from some official person.

The Gamers Bill of Rights was not about DRM only. I will just cite

You might also want to check items 8-10 from the Bill. I am not sure whether Steam installs any drivers so that item 6 is in the case.

Here you go.  Steam will be required.

I am very happy to see this project continue. 

I am not happy about steam.  I hate it.  I detest it.  I know I'm in the minority.  I still have the right to voice my opinions about it.  I'll  also swear and call you names like I did Firaxis for doing this with Civ 5  (but this won't go farther than my computer room).  Just give me another way to download without steam please.  

Good bye OrionM42

You insightful comments, excellant opinions, and thought-out views will be sorely missed.

Tried it an looove it! A few improvements could be made that have already been suggested by a lot of the forum users. Particularly the one where you make settlements cost population and outpost cost gold.

The undead models look beautiful! You should include an undead faction! The faction abilities are great and diverse, really enjoying it

Public Beta - Super happy to see the open Beta.  I really like that this was done.  Can't overstate how pleased this made me as a customer.  This kind of thing is great for the mod community as well.

Steam - hate it.  It's easy to use, but I object to how it operates.  Also can’t overstate how much I wish that the beta did not require this.

Product Install - I'm biased here.  I've worked with software installs as a part of my job for over 15 years.  I find both the beta an FE install to be rather amateurish.  I really don’t like to see things like FE installing C++ redistributables that are already on my system.  I especially don’t like it that the beta installs this yet again.  Much better logic and detection is needed.

Reporting back – Based on what was said elsewhere not enough information is getting back about direct gameplay from the beta.  Steam reporting is just a workaround.  The beta shouldn’t require an internet connection to work … but it should store info and periodically try to send that info back if the game is actively running.

Overall Impressions of Beta:

Monster difficulty is too high early.  I’ve had to essentially restart games due to situations being unmanageable 20 or so turns in.  This never happened in FE.

Level up trees need major work.  Commented in another thread, but these could use some TLC.

Choosing champions is good but isn’t quite enough.  I do kind of wish that I had even more choice here though.  Maybe choose 1 of 3 instead of 1 of 2?  In FE if I wasn’t playing with the Adventurer trait I was pretty selective on who I recruited outside that first guy.  I’m finding myself choosing to add folks that I don’t really want that much when choosing 1 of 2.

New weapon abilities are neat.  I would like to see them unlocked by level up rather than default though.  This goes to both the argument that companions aren’t strong enough now vs maxed out units and that I want to feel like the companions are “more special” than units.

New racial abilities are nice.  Solid addition.

Pop-ups – there are too many & they can appear out of order.  This isn’t new from FE, but I’m feeling the pain more in the beta as I try to see what’s new.  Things appearing out of order is also bad.  Getting an item, clicking trade, and then going to the tech research tree at the end of a turn is bad.

Icons – really like the new game icon.

Overall more positive than negative things to say.  Really good work on the beta!

Hi,

i'll keep my question simple:

MULTIPLAYER SOON?

i'll love to play legendary heroes, but i (and my friends) REALLY need multiplayer! until then - we will keep playing FFH2.

btw. i know its just a simple matter and we bugfixed it ourselfs - but the last proposed patch with soa exploding instead of pyros would be nice to have it downloaded..... 

You can play gavciv2 still w/o impulse just like 2 days ago I was looking at my stardock account profile and in there it listed all the games I'd bought and their key codes and next to galciv2 was a direct dl link to click. It downloads right from stardock's servers and not impulse or steam.

https://store.stardock.com/login.aspx?ReturnUrl=/myaccount  just login click My Downloads and next to galciv2 hit the big ole DOWNLOAD button.

Love the new Beta!  Really wish I could change the map though.