Epic Manager - Create Your Own Adventuring Agency!

This game has some great mechanics. Negotiating contracts for party members, gaining fame and competing against other agencies in the leagues. Balancing quests between factions. Lots of class types and skills, good research tree and some random events to test your RNG luck.

All of that however is overshadowed by how slow the combat is. Turned based combat is fine, but this game really slows that down. You have to click "end turn" after each action of each party member. Instead of just having it auto end when you are out of turns, or having your units take turns together and then you hit end turn once. It makes the combat really slow and un enjoyable to play.

For that reason im unlikely to play the game again.

I appreciate its an old game and back in 2016 that was probably the norm, but its just not aged well.

While I had some fun at first, I feel like there's too many mechanics in this game that feel anti-fun, and there really isn't much story to progress. You're here for a grind, and while the grind in some games is amazing, in this one it's... well, not.

I'd pass on this one. There's better adventurer management sims out there.

This game had cool potential but was essentially forced out of early access early and abandoned. Don't play it. There is enough potential there to make you wish it was finished, but it's ultimately overall a bad experience due to lack of polish and balancing.

it's fun for a while, but then just as you start to learn the game and get a decent squad of adventures together....

the game mechanics work against you.

i had two teams of 3 adventures completing quests for the gold / xp and it was going well.

trouble is with the league system in place, if you get knocked out or fail a time period your licence gets revoked and you just lose the game.

which is super frustrating...

i've played management games before with a league system, usually you bounce around in a league and once you get to a point you push for promotion and advance to the next league.

in this, if you don't keep up with the curve, such as having high level adventurers doing high level quests for the fame income ( fame is the league tables point system) then you will fall behind , your company's license will get revoked and the game just ends, There is no second chance, or a chance to rebuild if you lose an adventurer to an unfortunate ambush etc.

the league system would work if there was an actual promotion/demotion system in place, rather than to out fame the ai in a small time frame.

the other problem is the quest navigation and how to determine a quests difficulty, it's not clear what enemies are considered "elite" or normal" the only way to judge a quest difficulty is to accept the quest, then "scout" the quest, send your adventure party to the quest and look at the auto resolve feature, then based off that win/loss ratio can you determine your actual chances, which... wastes time... that you don't have.

i had 3 adventurers, lvl 10 , 11 , 10 , two dps one healer. up against a "level 3 quest" with 5 enemies, all level 5...

now it should of been a cake walk, however two of them had a gold marker , two more had a red marker and the 5th was just a plain lvl 5... the auto resolve gave me a 40% chance to succeed. so i did the battle myself.. i rekt the normal level five guy. then the ai went 3 times in a row and auto targeted my healer ( scored 3 direct crits) and he flat out died...

i assume that was bad RNG, the problem was i had no time to recruit a new healer ( lvl 5) and to train him up to continue doing the high level quests in the gold league.

which meant i ended up not earning enough fame finished 10th out of 12th in the league and the game was over 4 turns later.

this game looked like it had alot of potential, but its really missing out on the general gamplay/combat area.

if you do pick it up i'd recommend getting it in a sale for around a £5, you'll play it once get frustrated and wish you'd of refunded it sooner...

in other management games i can easily play 1000+ hours, so i had extremely high hopes that this would satisfy me as it combines several of my favourite genres, rp + party management + research/skill trees + turn based, world exploration. its a real shame, if this game was done correctly i'd probably never play another game again other than this...

Cool idea, but the huge punishments for doing well make it not very fun. Would rather see the other teams actually compete for first instead of doing terrible and punishing me for it.

Game has frustrating mechanics, you are penalized for doing well, and its unfulfilled in its direction. It might be feature complete, but whenever I played it I felt like I had a thousand ideas to improve upon it.

Not sure I'd recommend this unless you get it at a discount. Idea is good, everything seems promising..., but its just not right there yet.

Prior reviewers had the right of this game, interesting concept but plagued by balance issues.

#1 - if at any of the check in points in the season you're #1 (easy to achieve) then all the other managers start spreading rumors (-fame) and stealling your gold. Instead they should have gone with the more standard approach of each league having more adept opponents.

#2 - the wage demands of your team grow exponentially with their levels. This means you rapidly find you have to start sacking them because they're just too expensive and the actual income from quests doesn't increase at the same rate.

#3 - distance between quests, this keeps growing, which wouldn't be a problem if it weren't for #2 since it obviously slows your income and requires more weeks of paying salaries between incomes.

The 3 combined means you quickly find your gold depleted for daring to do well.

A light-hearted roleplaying game, treating its theme fully, also polished with great love as I can see. With ironmade mode and nice replayability, I really liked my journey in Epic Manager.

I will try to understand the disappointment of others, so here is my review :)

Epic Manager let's you recruit adventurers, negotiate contracts, customize their equipment, create your adventurer parties and send them into missions. You will also recruit staff, and do dirty things (intrigue!) to competitor agencies. Every season your agency earns some small trophie or medals but the main thing you'll have to manage is your gold: things can be expensive, heroes can be hard to negotiate, however you do have plenty of negotiations tricks up your sleeve, which is fun.

The game can be played in Ironman mode, and I recommend that mode.

There are 16 adventurer classes. Every class has two possible skills, which you will customize with every level of your hero. For instance you may reduce its Action Point cost, upgrade its damage, give you another passive effect... every level proposing you two options, as in a HOMM game. You will also be able to multiclass your heroes, turning your team into a challenge-beater.

You will also take decisions in random encounters, with some options available only if you have some classes or a high enough attribute.

You will favor factions and unlock new, harder missions for a specific faction.

Combat is also challenging. Every hero earns some action points and may spend them using their base attack, their skills,
using consumables, or may wait to gather more APs (for more costly spells for instance). The combat sequence in itself is not perfect, however, it just brings enough challenge and depth (I would say "sufficient", although we could have hoped for more options, such as more varied skills etc).

Some encounters are tricky and varied. Some others are much less. But can be challenging too since at some point you must have several adventurer parties and must send your "underdogs" there.

The main important thing will then be to manage your gold, your guys, your quests, and not put them to their death.

I played on Ironman / normal difficulty, I am a hardcore gamer, and at several points I eventually found the game quite challenging. Which was surprising considering the bad reviews. My first run ended in the Silver League, because I made my first and also most terrible mistake.

Please note I don't consider the game kills you randomly. It does not, at every point I was in control of my fate.

The situation was interesting too and I lost because of a decision I made. My greatest adventurer team was close to a too difficult fight, I thought they would lose it. It was a great team with nice synergy and I just upgraded their equipment with new things. But instead of sending them into a very very difficult battle, I tried another opportunity. In the end I lacked a bit of gold at the end of the turn, this cost me a bit of Fame, and I lost the league the same turn by a slim shot, thus revoking my licence and ending the game.

Instead of this, I should have risked my heroes. They are heroes after all!
I may have had a few deaths, but would have "saved the day". ;)

Pros:

• Very, very polished
  
• Texts and graphics are very neat, stats well explained
  
• 16 classes is nice
  
• Multiclassing and hoping for Prestige classes is nice
  
• difficulty sounds right where it should be
  
• Very nice "random encounters" decisions, rolls, and UI
  
• Feature-complete: theme is treated well, though in a light hearted way
  
• Very original; this is unlike other roguelikes out there
  
• Bronze League is very easy but then it becomes tough
  
• Nice soundtrack (combat excepted)
  

Cons:

• Combat music has only one repetitive track
  
• Combat animations are a bit minimal
  
• People can exploit ironman with save slots
  
• Lacks some strategic sense and depth regarding combat
  
• The RPG depth ( = multiclassing, some class kits, etc ) of current classes is not obvious for players
  
• Quests should need more of these nice encounter dice rolls and decisions
  
[*] I would have loved AI competitor agencies to be more detailed and play like us

Abandoned.

The idea was good but its a bare bones shell of a game. Just enough to tempt you to buy it.

Unfortunately, this game has seemingly been abandoned by the developer for almost a year now, with no updates to any of the bugs in game.

Read the mixed reviews, decided to try it for my own.
My thoughts: Kind of like the game in the sense that I'm always striving to play another turn, akin to the way I feel when I'm in a game of X-com or Civ. I do feel constrained by the cap space and having to renew adventurer contracts over and over again. Also dislike the fact that there aren't enough portals to setup at every town, hence forcing you to spend turns wandering around. These facets of the game though, I can bear with them in the understanding that they are setting up the game environment, forcing you into choices. My biggest bugbear would be the time limitation. Once you get to the pinnacle of being the epic manager, you are thrown into a challenge that (for me) was way out of my league. Would've loved a sandbox version to be honest, allowing me to just potter on without that challenge at the end.

A+ for the concept.....
B- for their UI
C+ for the managment options (depth of classes etc.)
D for the combat (slower than sluggish compounded further by the next item)
F for the optimization (losing mouse clicks, ai freezes on their turn, bugs etc. etc. etc.)

5/10

I was quite suprised by how detailed and fun this game is.

The combat was fun and despite what people are saying the enimies dont have too much hp

The managment system is very detailed and indepth as was the questing system (my fraveroute part :) ).

The only gripe I have with this game is theres no sandbox free mode so you dont have to vs other agencies :)

First, let me say that I was really hoping for this game to be amazing. At first, I thought that it had a lot of potential as there were a pretty good amount of features and mechanics introduced, it felt great.

I have three main issues with this game.

1. You are penalized, for playing well. If you finish a trimester in first place, be assured that the following turns you will lose a lot of Fame, simply because other agencies dislike you. This is of course, for balancing purpose, however, what devs missed, is that this is NOT FUN. Being penalized for managing and planning stuff well...is simply not the way to go. Dropping the league system would most likely benefit this game.

2. The combat system, holy molly must you be patient because its slow, very slow. Everything has a lot of HPs and you dont hit all that hard. The combat would be more fun if fights would take 50% less time.

3. The price tag. Im sorry but this game is not worth 19.99 $ CDN. Maybe 10$, sure.

In the end, even after having refunded the game, I still want to play it, but I know that i'll just get frustrated over point #1.

If they ever make significant changes to at least point #1 and #2. I'll probably re-purchase the game. Until then, I would recommend waiting.

If this game had the D&D license (and the game wears its D&D influence on its sleeve), it would probably be titled as Lords of Waterdeep.

You control a Manager who commands various heroic parties, deciding who to hire (and at what price), where to dispatch them, and which factions to appease. Depth happens on both the strategic and tactical level, and with various class combinations, there's a lot of replayability.

There are a few constraints to the game though. For one, despite having 16 Classes to choose from (and some hidden Prestige Classes), there's no option to play a female character. There's also a few bugs, although at the time of this review, the game-breaking ones have been solved.

For $5 more you can buy Darkest Dungeon, and I think that's a better value.
If this goes on sale for 4.99, give it a whirl if you like offering contract deals and/or telling greedy heroes what hole they can find their raise in.


For a game with Manager in the title, you do very little management. Management is centered around your heroes, herefor referred to in my own experiences as the Badasses of the Happy Snack Cake Adventurer Agency. Recruit your badasses, send them on quests for gold and fame. All good, the combat isn't silly or hard, smack him, heal him.

Some classes and skills are just useless though, why have a priest heal one person when a shaman heals everyone. A rogue's special attack, Arrow Volley, costs 6ap, regular attack 3AP, and does, wait for it, twice the damage. Why would I wait to build up 6AP? But my mage's ice dagger was doing 5x the damage of a regular attack for the same AP costs as Arrow Volley, why would I use a regular attack?

If you end up in the bottom rankings for guilds the game ends.
Here's my biggest issue with that. The quests are randomly placed around a map, sometimes taking as much as six turns to reach one. Each turn I lose gold to pay my badasses. So I spent 600 gold to get to a quest, made 800 gold from the quest, and then spent 400 gold to get to the next quest... I just lost gold doing the only thing available to do. Do harder quests and get more gold, seems reasonable, and then my badasses meet bigger badasses and they die because I can't run from a fight like a coward so those badasses I spent gold and time developing into steroided killing machines are dead, I have to spent more gold to recruit new ones and they have to do the poorer quests because they're weak because I SPENT ALL MY DAMN GOLD MARCHING IDIOTS TO THEIR DEATH...

Quests need to be worth more gold, I want to swim in that crap early on like Scrooge McDuck. Let me finance two parties easily, let me get the low level upgrades for guilds without paying 13000 gold when a quest pays 1000, but my heroes cost 150 a turn. Let me blackmail heroes into working for free because I'm a capitalist willing to do anything to make Happy Snack Cake Adventure Agency the best damn Agency around!

It's not terrible, but it does need some balancing. I liked my characters, I didn't want them to die, but after the first six went down, I saw their replacements are disposable meat bags just there to finish the job and get me paid, and if they died, hey at least I didn't have to give them part of that gold.

The premise to this game is to create your own agency (guild) of adventurers and become the best in the realm. You start off small with enough resources to recruit a couple of heroes, forming your first party, and sending them off to do quests. As you complete quests, you gain more resources and your fame increases, which allows you to expand your agency. Soon you'll have more options for recruiting more experienced adventurers and creating more parties to send out on quests. Your adventurers will grow in strength, have the ability to unlock multiple classes, and take on even more difficult challenges resulting in more fame, more gold, and bragging rights to the best agency ever!

The challenge is that you're competing against other agencies. Every 12 weeks the lowest ranked agencies within the league will be eliminated. You have to make sure you're not one of those agencies in order to continue. This adds some urgency to the game in that you need to keep pushing ahead and completing quests to keep building fame.

So what is this game? After having played it for a few hours, I feel that the store description is pretty much spot on. Everything it states is what the game is. The one exception is that it doesn't really mention the fact that you're competing against other guild within the league and that you need to accumulate enough fame to keep from being cut. If you're cut, it's game over.

Don't let the graphics fool you, there's a lot going on in this game. I will be honest, there are things that aren't intuitive at first and I did struggle with a few things and made mistakes. It wasn't until my second game where it really started to click and the depth of the game became evident. Initially with the single party, it starts off a little slow. However once the second party is unlocked, it becomes fun and challenging. Choices as to how to use scout points, research points, what skills to unlock, whether to renew a contract or hire a different adventurer, which quests to take, etc.

Last thing I'd like to say is that the development team has been very active in the forums and have shown that they are accepting to feedback. It's wonderful to see that the really care about their game.

Though this game has some good and bad aspects, overall it feels to be an average game. I do recommend that you pick this up but just know what you're going to get before hand.

One of the biggest things that sets this RPG game apart from others is that you're supposed to recruit and then negotiate your adventurer's contract before they will join your party. Which sounds fun until you actually go and do it. Adventurers are a dime and dozen and there's not much that separates them apart from one another besides level and traits and class. Once you do settle on one, negotiating their contract is nothing more than a slider which yields a % of success, rejection and failure.

For me I thought the adventurers would be more exclusive and that you would need to bump into them or search for them so you can hire them. Even if there was a "flyer" that was LFM.. then people wouldn't just show up like a shopping list.

There isn't any personality given to the negotiating process either. It either succeeds or rejected and you have to try again or fails. However even if it does fails - who cares?? because adventurers are a dime a dozen and you can get another person the next turn at the worst.

Easy to learn game that isn't complicated. The tutorial does a pretty good job walking you through the key points.

The UI is fairly clunky when you're trying to equip items and look for party members. Don't forget that you can't do any of this without being at a spot in which you have a home teleport to (which aren't too many).

The nicest thing about this game is the multi-classing leveling up feature. Every 5 levels you can choose a new class for the adventurer and still retain your old skills/spells with their old augmentations. Building up your adventurer is fun and trying to unlock a secret legendary class is even more so.

Though the world and quests are randomly generated, It doesn't necessarily have a huge impact on how you play the game. Since this game is essentially a race for how much fame you can achieve - it is best to repeatedly look for quests every single turn and make it to where the quests are as close to your current position as possible.

Turn based combat with action points works really well. Finally a system that has more to do than just "fight, special skill, item and flee". Certainly you still do those actions but now you can strategically wait and focus more action points for your next action and possibly gain 3 attacks in 2 turns.

https://youtu.be/OFKeZeF7jcU

Though overall an average "alright" game - this is still a fun enough game to pickup at this price point and comfortably play.

Solid thumbs up for me.

Failed 2 runs so far, had fun doing it.

Working dad with limited time for gaming, this one is pretty great for that. Quick enough progression, where you dont feel you are grinding as a time sink. Deep to where you can plan your strategy while at work for your next run (once wife and kids get to sleep).

Combat is fun, graphics are nice on the eyes. Does feel a bit like you are rushed at times, but having read through the forums (with the ridiculously engaged devs answering a majority of the posts) I can see that the rushed feeling was intended. You have to progress, or you lose. Its a nice axe over the head to keep things interesting.

There is a learning curve, nothing on dwarf fortress level, but going into my third run, I feel I may have the basics down but probably have quite a bit to see yet. This is good.

All in all woth a play, really got my moneys worth.

For the first time ever, you can create your very own Adventuring Agency and manage it as if you were a professional sports team general manager. Scout for prospects, hire adventurers, train them and form parties, send them on quests, deal with random encounters, fight frantic battles and experience an epic narrative shaped your choices!

What to expect in Early Access:

– A unique new twist on the manager genre / Create your own Adventuring Agency.
– A vast realm to explore / More than 100 locations to discover in the Realm of Astraeus.
– Random encounters and events galore.
- Every play through is fresh and unique.
– Emergent narrative shaped by player choices.
– Scouting-based recruitment system / Scout, Negotiate and Sign heroes of the Realm.
– Class system based on character potential
- Deep job system.
– Strategic and frantic combat system
- Easy to learn, hard to master.
– Push-your-luck quest system
- Gather information at a cost or go in recklessly.

Epic Manager is already a fun game in Early Access - so it can only get better as updates are pushed out.

7/10

I really wanted to like this game as I'm a huge fan of both sports sim and turn based game rpg/strategy games. I really did.

Pros:

- Original concept - thumbs up!
- Contract system is good. You just can't go Yankees style - each contract has to be pondered, doing a signing bonus to reduce total amount is a great mechanic.
- Balance is not so bad really for an early access launch title. Glaring thing is using portal: costs are too high and should cost gold only if not within some kind of cooldown period.

Cons:

- The dealbreaker: You don't get to meet and fight the other teams. They are static, faceless entities that you only interact with through some bland message boxes on a very limited scope. You don't see them questing, clearing stuff, or try to beat them at the punch which is what I was expecting. They don't really play the game they just increase their points totals randomly at some pace. Huge thumbs down.
- Battles are very boring: Characters don't move, have a very limited pool of skills.. zzzz..
- The quests pool is very limited (doing the green man quest 8 times in the same game...)
- There is no draft outside of the launch one :( :( :(
- Character development is also very shallow: Not much synergy with the multiclass system in the long run. I just wasn't excited looking towards it beyond the 2nd one.

Game is too shallow to be worth that price. Sadly I'll let this one sit there and move on. Hope someone else tackles this idea but flesh it out more. My money is waiting.

The game is a blast to play and so far has developers extremely interested in feed back and interested in the ideas of players. Have seen developers hanging out in several Twitch streams, including my own for almost 8 hours, asking opinions and having open discussions on the game. So far this is early access handled correctly from the dev side IMO.

Game play wise, I have had a blast even with this initial early access release, so I am excited for what this game will become. The fights are not always hard but they are not the sole purpose of the game, overall management is and your ability to place your Adventurer parties in the right place at the right time becomes important deeper into the game. I enjoy long games so the pace doesn't bother me, I actually enjoy it. Dice rolls are hard to resist and a blast to add in extra risk taking. You have a story, variety of enemies, and a boss is not to be taken lightly when you come across one.

TL:DR - awesome combo of game styles I was surprised to find works insanely well together, great devs interested in constructive feedback, just a big surprise of a game overall. Excited to play and and more excited for it's future.

After my first (almost) 5 hours in this game, i can say i'm having a lot of fun.

The game has a lot to offer in the actual state, enough options and things to do to keep you entertained hours and hours.

So, for now, a quick review with quick points (no specific order):

-More than a manager, you have a map to discover and combats to do with your adventurers.

-It reminds me (somewhat) to Darkest Dungeon. The main difference is that here you manage a guild and have to compete against other guilds in tournaments

-Nice cartoon art

-Have found no bugs until now

-Map has around 338 different localizations, if i'm not wrong, including cities and capitals but also mines, farms, forests, mountains and some more (map is a big hexagon with 30 cells each side)

-You compete against 11 other guilds/agencies for your level, running missions with your adventurers to be more famous than the others. I have seen 5 different leagues, so that's a total of 55 guilds to fight with

-As the tournament goes on, the agencies that have the least score will be eliminated, so you will need to manage your time and your advantage depending on where are you on the score table and the week you are in

-12 external factions which will give you the missions you need to be famous and rich, with a reputation system for each one

-A big amount of adventurers and classes to contract (i think 16 classes right now) and you have the possiblity of mixing classes after levelling a bit, so the amount of possible combinations is crazy for you to try

-RPG system: your adventurers will gain experience from missions and will level, gaining better stats and atributes and some special skills for you to choose when level

-You can equip heroes with items you will find in missions as loot or you can also buy them from a merchant, if you have the gold, ofc

-The guild/agency you rule can research improvements for almost all aspects of the game and for the heroes

-You can also contract staff to improve your adventurers: accountant to improve gold after missions, combat trainers, priests to give you bonuses (there are 7 main gods in the game and each hero will pray to its own god)

-You will recruit and search for missions to do around the world with your scout/s and then you will send your party to the mission location to fight the enemies there (turn combat)

-There are random encounters through the world (at each tile different than a city and without mission) that will test you heroes skills and your good sense to choose what to do in each encounter. Those encounters can give you loot, experience, traits to a hero or well, be the doom for some of them

-With the Intrigue system, you can steal and sabotage other guilds/agencies, but they also will do the same with you (good morning, you have been stolen! nice!)

-Agency/guild licenses (bought) will let you to expand your business while you level up your guild (with fame) to have access to other improvements

-You can save anywhere, anytime! (this is not a console game)

-Permadeath. It's fun but frustating to lose your heroes so beware what missions you choose. You know, you will have your favorite and 1 day...

Fun, polished, with a high amount of content and replayability. If you like RPG and management with a good sense of humour, try this, you will not regret.