Heroes garrison themselves inside buildings - to shop, rest, gamble, drink, and so forth. They cannot stay inside buildings to defend the kingdom, and heroes have different reactions to the town being attacked. Rogues are apt to run away, but might fight back if their guild building got attacked. Do-gooders will protect the town as a whole, because that is what good people do.

The RTS bits of the game has to do with placing bounties, buildings, casting spells, and pursuing research. The big difference is that you cannot control any of the NPCs directly.

I see. So how long does a mission/level usually last? Are there any timed missions?

Ah I must have missed that. I may have to dig up a forum post to see what possible reason there was for doing that.

The main problem with Majesty 2 is the AI . The hero types in the first one act very different from each other, but in the second one they're more or less the same (unless they fixed it since the last time I played ) .

I haven't played Majesty 2 yet but I absolutely adore Majesty 1 and I've heard in tons of places that Majesty 2 is crap. That pretty much seems to be the consensus.

I am playing Majesty 2 right now. Aside from having less distinct personalities, there are fewer activities for the heroes to engage in. For example, no gambling.

My biggest gripe is that Majesty 2 doesn't lend itself to some casual sandboxing. The way all but the beginner maps are laid out, the monsters are ruthlessly aggressive and give you no slack at all to play around. Stray just a bit from the perfect solution to the map and they obliterate you.

Add to that the complete lack of a random mission generator that was a staple feature of Majesty 1 and a lot of the pretty 3D and in my opinion better ruleset for buildings was nullified by it turning essentially into a puzzle game. Amazing it still was successful enough to earn 3 DLC's.

And despite that, one spinoff after the other comes out without a single word on a true Majesty 3 that might combine the sandboxing of M1 with the wider range of buildings and less overpowered economy of M2.

O-o-o-okay, I thought I don't want anything else here, I take it back.
Wishlisting these two for now.

There were some reasonable business concerns they were trying to address, it was just a clumsy and ineffective way to handle it. Once the community pointed out concerns and better approaches GOG listened and changed course.

Thread:
http://www.gog.com/forum/general/on_gnulinux_has_anyone_be_able_to_extract_the_rar_innosetup_installers

The official reasons given were
1) Installers do more than simply hold data files, and GOG wanted to ensure all included settings/etc installed properly

and, direct quote from bluetext:
2) I want to avoid the situation where someone tampers with the archives (let's say adding malware, or some illegal content), and uploads the modified version on torrents. I don't want the GOG Installer installing anything else than it was supposed to, and it doesn't matter how it was obtained.

Reason 1 is understandable, but if someone can unpack an installer then they've got to know that they're just getting the data files.

Reason 2 is complete hogwash - the password scheme doesn't protect against someone tampering with the installer and uploading it. There are several more secure and less intrusive ways to handle that, which the thread details and GOG said they're now investigating.

GOG backed off from this and is looking at other ways to handle their concerns, which counts as a good resolution for me. People make mistakes, but they listened to concerns and changed course pretty quickly for a business, so I'm satisfied.

Thanks for the information Gilozard. I don't feel either reason is acceptable really and glad they backed off that.

My initial post I was more referring ot the actual game executables being encrypted after installation, which is always tied to some sort of DRM and what kills certain modding options.

Mostly making nice with newer systems. The original Majesty was released about 2000 or so. 15 years have passed since then, which meant that stuff would inevitably break.

Yeah. I own the Impulse version of it, and i had to find out about processor affinity to keep mine from crashing (it can't play nice with the ability of multi core procesors to share the workload while acting as if it were a single processor).

The HD version also runs on higher resolutions than 800 x 600

I tried the demo of the first one back in the day (when it was on a PC Gamer disc), and was not crazy about it.

But that is not saying much, as I am a much different gamer now than I was then.

Definitely going to take the plunge on these at some point and purchase them.

That being said, my impressions of these games are that they are reminiscent of Dungeons & Dragons: Stronghold (an SSI game?) from the early 90's.

Liked Majesty in the day and get to replace my Desura version which replaced my old cd copy so time to buy.