Empire Builder 4: Breed, Populate, Conquer

Empire Builder, Book 4

By: Dante King

Narrated by: Tess Irondale

Ben has taken a second tower, but there are still three remaining.

He turns his sights upon the third tower, one ruled by an intelligent version of himself whose creations are both ghoulish and powerful. By breeding more monsterkin and adding new citizens to his growing empire, he might have what he needs to claim his third tower.

©2023 Dante King (P)2023 Podium Audio

Much better than book 3 and even book 2

Did the author lose a bet and had to pack a many words "monkey" in the first chapters as possible?

And then there were goblins. Lots and lots of goblins.

Just to be sure that everyone gets it: lots of monkeys, but even more goblins.

On all seriousness, I promised myself not to continue following this series after the decline of storytelling in book 2 and the compete disaster that was book 3. But I read another review and it seemed that it's author had struggled just like I did. Still, they mentioned that the fourth book was much better. And I can confirm that.

While there is room for improvement of the style, language, and dimensionality of the characters, this book can be a quite enjoyable listen.

So much better

Glad your pulled from the horrible books 2 and 3 were. This one was very well done, didn't feel like a AI drone wrote it.

the writing got worse?

The writing got so dumb, stuff is happening just because the storyline demands it, the choices and how characters act is just dumb and insanely "unorganic", characters which were built up as competent and wise start bickering in the open in the middle of enemy teritory while trying to ambush said enemy. We had so many hours telling us how bad and horrible the fire mage in the dungeon was and how the hawk girl despised him wanting him to suffer over and over again, and the mc agreed to it, he was that horrible a person, and now he just gets 5years of hard labour? really? and the hawk lady is fine with it aswell all of a sudden? And on top of that he just trusts and gives his powers back to him on the first chance??? like what the actual fuck, i might've understood if he only gave mana back to him, but he gave his magic back no worries? All characters just got dumbed down and insanely 2 dimensional, they're only good at 1 thing and literally 0iq in every other area.
The characters, especially mc always kills a no name shitter instead of the main threat just for "suspense" , they're always, ALWAYS on the back foot, it was fine at first but it got kind of same old.
The story feels too fast and disjointed, the other 3 books were too short so i always wanted a bit more timeskips, but this is just 2 much. In literally less than a book he went from a group of followers to a pop of 100k, no build up, no planning, just deal with it i guess.

tldr: performanxe excellent, writing got worse, like really bad. i honestly think the last 2 books had better writing than this, yeah nothing really happened it was slow as shit, but at least shit made sense and they didn't act like robots following a script, a shitty one as well.