Is LH worth buying?

It's fun, and stable for a beta. I say buy it.

I can't say anything about the crashing and bugginess of FE since I never had any stability issues. Is the current version of FE still crashing and buggy for you at the moment. I noticed with the latest version of FE that the game ran smoother and quicker at least for me. Thus, when I went to LH I noticed that the performance was better for me. The looks changed although the style is the same, the look is different and there are minor tweaks everywhere that makes the game nice to look at, without the cost of performance.

There is a huge mechanic change to LH and in my opinion, and others as well, the changes were positive and makes the game more interesting and entertaining.

You should realize that the game is in beta and it is expected, although not desired, that the game may crash and be buggy. From my experience I do not encounter any crashing (but I didn't encounter this in FE either). Bugginess is part of the process and to be pointed out. The patches come out fairly frequently and thus many of these issues get resolved quickly.

I for one just purchased it and was pleased with the result.

I tentatively agree with Borg999.

Keep in mind, it is still in Beta, so there are issues that are being worked out.  But it already behaves better than FE.

It depends on what experience you are looking for.  I am a casual player, and am enjoying a relaxed game.  Some of the mechanics are very different from FE, and that is taking a little getting used to.

And the scenario hasn't yet been released in the Beta, so I can't say what it will be like as compared to FE, so if you are looking for the scenario experience, I can't say yet.

That being said, I do believe that the improvements are enough to justify the purchase price.  It just depends on whether you want to go ahead and get the Beta, and play it knowing about the bugginess and changes that are inherent in a Beta environment, or wait until the final release and get a finished product.

I would not buy this if I had FE. LH is basically a patch that smooths out a lot of the roughness in the UI and some of the mechanics, but so far there's nothing in it that I would consider worth paying for, at least not $20 or $40 for. There's a handful of new monsters I may have paid $5 for as DLC, but you'll get a lot more expansion worthy content (including many of the same monsters) by playing the Stormworld mod for FE, for free.

I'm hoping they are holding back the meat of this expansion and will release it for testing in a future patch, but I find that unlikely.

They might be holding it back for the next expansion (Which Brad confirmed a while back)

RIght now I don't think the game is ready by any stretch, but the stuff that's wrong either already exists in FE , or is fixable.

Wow many replies in such a short time. I know a beta will have some quirks thats normal.  So far i gather from your answers that  LH seems to be an improvement in many areas.

But specifically crashs don't occur that often than they did in FE final? I've had crashs in windows XP and fixed them only by setting the game to fullscreen manually in the ini file. Also when loading saves the game crashed 50%, which was not that bad but annoying.

I'm still not 100% sure but i'm getting there.

The features of LH actually dont bother me that much, no crashing/better performance are my main concerns x)

Oh and i never played the FE scenario and care mainly about the sandbox mode or what it's called.

And many thanks for your replies!

$20 really isn't a lot of money, if you compare it to the cost of other forms of entertainment. A 1.5 hour movie in my neck of the woods is $15. A visit to a museum, over $20, Cable - a heck of a lot when you consider that the majority of the channels are junk/filler, and most people only consistently watch a handfull.

I've played LH for about 17 hours so far, close to 200 hours on FE. IMO, I got my money's worth.

Well, when you save/load frequently the game still crushes quite often, and tends to be unstable after a long session (recently i discovered that manual quick saving instead of every turn auto-save helps game's stability a lot)

old bugs are still there - path finding, not accurate saves, and numerous little things  

FE pretty much never crashed on me. The LH beta has been crashing on me all morning for some reason, it was fairly stable before today though.

The point is all that content exists in FE. There's very little LH adds to the gameplay, the entire focal point is the "hero" system which is just a presentation change. "These used to be random, now we let you pick, that will be $20 please." Other than that there's a few weapon skills, and some new monsters. I've put 40 hours into LH, but not really because it added 40 hours worth of new stuff to do, I just wanted to play FE and this LH patch does make the game a bit better.

Anyone who watches a movie in a theater is crazy IMO. For $20 you can buy a brand new, quality, "non-mainstream" game, like Eador, which just went up for prepurchase on Steam. There is absolutely not an entire $20 game worth of content added by LH currently, not even remotely close. I'd probably be up in arms about this if I didn't get it for free, but since I did I'm just highly disappointed and trying to enjoy it anyway.

I agree that the prize is not fully justified, though there is still lots of time to add new content (we are just half way through). Though I got this expansion for free, but if did not, i would buy it just to support Stardock. Also b/c i so far paid for one game and that's basically third game i am getting for one price. 

It's much fun. A lot of new conceptions and every other game differs from previous due to ongoing updates.

I bought it, but only played a little.  To me, it is about the same as the original.  I am playing StarDrive myself.

I bought LH and have played it some.  I can't say that there is a lot more there for your money, and the more I play it the more little annoyances I come across.  I have not had a crash yet, touch wood, but it's early days.

LH, looks and feels better, but atm I still prefer the game play of FE.  We will see how things pan out in the next few months.

I find the tatical battles a lot more fun in this context with the implementation of these special attacks.

well i must have mis read the information, i was under the impression that you could buy this and also get to register the game on steam.

 i buy it today and see that i now can not play it while at grand ma's farm. she only has a 56k modem. no cable and just 20 years ago she was able to get a non party line.

just why would i buy a game that i knew that i can only play when i am at home and not working on the farm or having to go to other country's for business trips for days at a time.

 why did stardock decide to only use steam? i now am getting stuck with a game like the ones that i thought that i got from stardock but i have to log in to a seller of private information service called game stop, just to play a game.

the reason that i do not play those games is because i do not agree to having my name sold as a user of their service. and because of that i can not play the games that i paid for. so it too is with steam at lest they do not sell you name but track your interaction with their service so that can sell that.

put a drm back into the game if your so worried about it getting bootlegged. but look at the results, it does not prevent it it just make it happen faster.

the main point is let the people who do not have  full time broad band at lest play the game with out having to put up with the contestant steam upgrades of 5-100mb each week.

Steam doesn't sell anything and you can play this game in offline mode. Install the game at home through Steam, turn on offline mode, then take it wherever you want.

I agree with Sanati.  I live in the boondocks, so I actually DON'T have reliable internet at home (not even as reliable as a 56k modem, and it's REALLY SAD that I've thought about buying one), so I have to do my downloads elsewhere.  When I'm at home, I simply use offline mode, and play away.

Just don't clear your browser settings ... for some reason it seems the Steam account logon is saved in your internet settings ... everytime I clear my internet cache Steam seems to think I'm using a new computer, which is a bit of a pain in the rear end.  So if you clear your browser settings, make sure you log into Steam from an internet connected computer, so that it will save your login information and will let you go to Offline mode.