Etherlords is a 3D turn-based hybrid game, combining strategy, tactics, a magic trade card system and roleplaying elements. There are four different magic races you can choose to play for. The fun loving Vitals, the calculating Kinets, the cruel and perfidious Synthets and the belligerent Chaots. Of course each race has it's pros and cons, so your choice of the race will influence your strategy and tactics as well.

Etherlords demo at ECTS
At ECTS Fishtank showed a demo of Etherlords. The game is currently in beta and is lated to be released in november. The goal in ETherloards is either to conquer new territory (in strategy style) or beat the opposition (in tactical style) and to do that you will get into combat a lot. However you are not actually doing the combat yourself, you summon one or more heroes from your race instead and let them do the fighting. Each of the summoned heroes has spells he can use, which start out simple but get stronger over time.

The magic spells are based on the mechanisms of a trade card game. You get a predefined number of cards where each card represents a spell you can use. You get to select only a limited number of 15 spells, from all available spells, that your hero can use. The game then selects a number of cards with spells from this 15 that you can actually use in your fight. Each fight you get a new random distribution. The amount you get de-pends on your experience.

Like mentioned before you can play in either strategy or tactical style and depending on that choice your gameplay is different as well. In strategy style you need to gather resources, gather artefacts and gather spells and runes. In tactical gameplay mode there are the usual moves each of your summoned creatures can make per turn. Each move the amount of magic energy you can use increases. So if you wait longer you can use more energy, but the chances of being attacked are higher as well.

We will bring you more on Etherlords at a later stage, but for now, we have some new artwork and screen-shots for you from ECTS and last but not least there is a video with one of the Etherlords trailers as well.

Etherlords Artwork

Etherlords Screenshots

Etherlords Video