Legendary Heroes is a cross between a fantasy 4× game (exploration, expansion, exploitation, extermination), and a roleplaying game where you build up your heroes, and their skills, as well as your troops who get a lot more powerful with levels.

You go around the map and discover various resources, anything from fruit groves and wild wheat fields that you can use to feed your towns to iron and crystal ore, goldmines and magic nodes that supply you with mana for your mages to use in spellcasting. There are treasure locations, and there are monster lairs that often contain treasure as well as giving your heroes' armies experience. If you build your town by a river you get to build harbours and docks and watermills, if you build by a forest you get to build logging camps and sawmills that increase your town's production.

There's a fairly interesting advancement skill tree for your heroes, but not the troops who just get tougher, there's a long-ish technology tree to research in the 3 realms of magic, civilization and warcraft.

Furthermore you can design your own heroes with various starting skills, your own country (with various racial skills etc) and your own troops, depending on what technology you have researched and what materials you have at hand.

All up this game has all the makings of a captivating strategy experience. Unfortunately since patch 1.4 came out I have found that the game crashes inexplicably once you're well established and moving into the endgame – and it crashes way too often for me to take it in my stride. Very unusual for a Stardock game, but there you have it. I have wanted to give up in disgust a few times … Guess I'll have to get used to dong a quicksave every second turn or so if I don't want this game to become overly frustrating – nevertheless the crashes break the immersion factor if you have to invoke task manager to kill the game, then reload first the game, then your most recent save.