Editing Disciples (section)

==Gameplay==
Lots of good Fluff, but few and very deterministic Crunch. That's it.

Before you can cast yourself into the vortex of battle for domination over Nevendaar, you choose one of the four (later five) races and then write down your Lord's name, choose his portrait and what kind of Lord he is. There are three types:

* [[Warrior]] Lord: He makes your parties heal faster every turn. Games start with a Fighter Type Hero and a build Temple, which allows to resurrect and heal units in cities instantly, if for extraordinary sums of money ( depending on unit damage and level you ).
* [[Mage]] Lord: Can research spells cheaper, cast them twice and has access to Tier 5 Spells that are the most destructive ones while other Lords can research only to Tier 4. Games start with a Mage Type Hero. The Mage Lord also starts with build Mage Tower, wich allows, well, spell research.
* [[Guild]] Master: Can build stuff in the capital much cheaper than the Warrior and Mage Lords can, starts with a Guild (thus with Thieves from the get go) and Thieves have more options when interacting with object/parties. Games start with a Archer Type Hero.

Gameplay focuses around small, max 5 unit parties (starts out as 3 units), lead by a Hero, who do most of game's important job - capture or conquer cities (as cities, including the capital, terraform terrain into one that characterizes your race, and only resources lying on own terrain can be harvested and stockpiled) and fighting other parties, be them neutral AI or ones that are controlled controlled by other players. 

The resources are Gold and four (five with Rise of The Elves) types of mana: Life, Death, Fire, Rune and Grove (usable only by Elves). Gold is used to build structures in the capital, upgrading cities, recruiting/healing/resurrecting (the latter two only after building a Temple) Heroes and units for the parties. Mana is used to research and cast spells. Spells are divided into four tiers (five if you play as a Mage Lord), and the more powerful the spells, the more mana it is required to research/cast them. Additionally, depending on the race you are playing, the spells require different types of mana (divided into primary and additional mana). Each race is bound to specific types of mana. The Empire goes with Life Mana, The [[Undead]] Hordes go with Death Mana, Legions of The Damned play with Fire Mana, The Mountain Clans roll with Rune Mana, and finally The Elven Alliance sticks to Grove Mana. The more advanced the spell of a race, the more primary mana it requires and some higher tier spells require a lot of primary and some secondary mana to cast/research. Thus sometimes you are stuck with a dilemma whether to research stuff, or leave some mana for particularly difficult moments.

By winning in old-school JRPG (Japanese Role Playing Games) style battles, both the Hero that leads the party, and his loyal party members, gain experience that allows them to level up, advancing to higher tier, more powerful units. While there are only 5 basic units per nation (Fighter, Archer, Mage, Support and Special), every one of them have at least 2 advances, while some have much more (often branching at certain points). These advances can be gained only when you build a proper building in your capital. Once build, you can't even demolish it and other alternate paths are locked for good, so choose wisely. Once a unit gathers sufficiently enough experience (and you build the proper buildings), it transforms into a much more powerful being (sometimes the looks are completely radical), gaining sometimes in the process new abilities.

Heroes that lead your parties don't transform, but in return of leveling up, they gain the options of choosing new abilities (like the use of certain artefacts and magical equipment) or upgrading their current capabilities (extra party slots, extra movement, bonuses to combat capabilities).

The only difference in gameplay (dominantly in combat) is Disciples 3 that gained a lot of flak for turning from a JRPG-esque combat style into one that blatantly copies Heroes of Might and Magic (with the addition of points on the map that can empower specific unit types), while terraforming Heroes were kicked out, replaced with Guardian Nodes that do a similar job and get more powerful with each turn (the most powerful ones can do terrifying damage to a party, so don't go after one unless you have a sufficiently experienced party). And that's gameplay only. Some of the more iconic units got replaced with other units (some of which made people [[RAGE]]). On the other hand, it was no longer a simple point and click where units stood like rocks in Final Fantasy and swung.

The Heroes also changed in terms of capabilities. Now in a more truer CRPG-like way they can purchase equipment and wear it like in a actual RPG (and these also offer not only physical changes, but also stat improvements and so on). Additionally there is something of a skill labyrinth/tree/whatever it is that one can access even if they didn't get enough experience in order to advance. When you level up, you gain points that you use to purchase boxes until you purchased enough of them and in the right direction until you unlocked those abilities you wanted (even personal spells that the Hero can use).

In short: Despite getting a lot of critique for the combat, Disciples 3 made Hero customization and development richer. Also Thieves, who couldn't neither level up or have parties in 1 and 2, are now fully fledged Heroes in their own rights.

In summary: Disciples 2 had graphics. And by graphics we mean with a capital G, probably the only saving grace of the game. There is no tactics in unit maneuvring but pre-planned 6 slot JRPG duels, and most importantly, no such thing as sufficiently available experience, the game's *only* resource worth mentioning. New units recruited start from the bottom, meaning that any loss of your primary XP-sink party you spent DAYS throughout missions simply costs you the whole game, since the killer's band instantly facerolls the rest of the map with no opposition..