Overall most helpful review

Posted on: July 30, 2009

christianboutin

Games: 165 Reviews: 2

Before there was Total War...

As a whole, Lords of the Realm II remains one of the best combination of TBS/RTT game there was until the coming of the Total War series. All the ingredients are there from the strategic management of your realms (taxes and so forth) to the real-time warcraft-like battle sequences. It remains to this day one of the best LAN-party experience I've had. The way turns take place simultaneously and the timer you can activate takes care of those suffering from analysis paralysis. I highly recommend!

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Posted on: July 30, 2009

rwh1

Verified owner

Games: 153 Reviews: 4

Maybe the Best RTS Ever, a “MUST” buy

Before LOTR, most games didn’t catch and keep my interest for long. Having a background in 3D Graphics Tool Kit development as well as International Project Management, I enjoyed checking out new games, but few if any were able to hold my interest. While browsing Best Buy or some other such store, I ran into a boxed set that included LOTR 1, LOTR 2 and the expansion battle chest for around $20.00. Decided to give it a try and I’ve always been glad I did. This game has it all. If you come from any sort of management background, especially if you have tendencies to micro-manage (I’m not as bad as I used to be. ;-) ) you will love the resource management detail in this game. The game also requires a well-developed expansion plan with contingencies to successful win the game at the higher difficulty levels. For its’ time, the graphics in LOTR II are outstanding, the game play, while turned based, will keep you captivated for hours and hours (Married guys and gals beware, this game can get you in the hot seat with your spouse). Anyway, since then I’ve tried dozens of RTS games and while the graphics and game play features have continued to improve, I’ve never found an RTS that was more captivating than this one. BTW, even though it was included in the boxed set, LOTR II was so good, I have never actually given LOTR I a play. Once you complete the main campaign, the Battle Chest expansion will allow you to play some custom scenarios along with several notable castle sieges/defenses from history. Notable features included the ability to allocate serfs to cattle herding, farming, tool making or fighting and instantly see the impact on your economy and the overall health of the county. As mentioned before this is a turn based RTS, so you have plenty of time to think through your next step. LOTR II also gives you full control over the game’s difficulty settings. For new players, I’d suggest turning off most of these features, until you’ve gotten a handle on resource management and strategic planning. One of the other things that I’ve always enjoyed in this game is that while you don’t have much control over building in your towns, beyond specifying the type of castle, when you do so the campaign map accurately depicts the type of stronghold as well as the size of the town. As towns prosper and increase in population, the graphics change to depict the additional development. The fighting is probably the games weakest point, but it never reaches a point where it has a negligible impact on the overall enjoyment. If you have never played this game, give it a try, I’m sure you will be glad you did! ;-)

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Posted on: July 30, 2009

smartalek89

Verified owner

Games: 123 Reviews: 1

Hours of Fun Await You

My friend and I recently sat down with this game on a LAN and played with each other for about 5 hours straight. No joke. This game is deep while still being relatively easy to learn. As my playing time shows, the game is addictive and combines the best aspects of RTS games with turn-based games. It's amazingly fun, even more than 10 years later.

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Posted on: August 27, 2009

Zardus

Verified owner

Games: 432 Reviews: 5

Amazing Depth

The problem with most strategy games is that they essentially boil down to massing the biggest amount of units. Even hallowed TBS titles like Heroes 3, for example, suffer a bit from this. Other titles, specifically most RTSes, are thinly designed abstractions of "build, build, build". Lords of the Realm 2, though, avoids this pitfall almost completely. The RTS battle portion, with it's insanely strategy-demanding maps and it's beautifully balanced yet simple units, puts more stress on the skill of the general (you) than on the size of the army. Over the last week since I rebought this on GoG, I've fought battles utilizing an amazing array of military strategy and terrain utilization to win seemingly impossible battles against armies with superior numbers. On the TBS side, the depth is equally impressive. Resource management, juggling raising and feeding armies with pleasing and feeding your people, is a very tricky process with the capacity to collapse with alarming speed. Having to make the difficult decision to pull your limited amount of peasants off of making weapons so that they can harvest grain for the next year and avoid starvation is quite difficult when a 500-man enemy army is marching in on your much-smaller force. Of course, there's still hope for winning the battle through superior strategy, but if you have to bail, you can cut-and-run and leave your enemy with a devastated county to conquer. In my last game, the fighting got so bitter that my enemy and I completely destroyed the resources within a wide swath of land. The result was, since armies need to eat (which is an optional setting, but more fun to play with than without) and there was no food for such a long stretch, that any army trying to march across the devastation to fight the enemy would starve to death before arriving at their destination. The solution was to send supply carts ahead of the armies to the counties if you wanted to attack, and if you didn't want to be attacked, to try to intercept and destroy the enemy's supply carts before they reached the county to feed the troops. Such a strategy required many small armies (because risking losing a large army to starvation is insanity) to defend and attack these carts, the resources in which were extremely valuable to begin with and were devastating to lose. Instead, a war was fought along another path across another county, unintentionally devastating a Lord that happened to be in the way. My point is that this game can take some pretty unexpected, very strategically demanding paths that you wouldn't ordinarily run into in other games. Heroes, Starcraft, and even Myth (although it beats LoTR on the battle strategy front, I'd say) don't have these potential situations. The game does have a few minor negatives. For example, selected groups of units in battle will try to form themselves into formation. This is ok for moving them places but the fatal flaw of the setup is that when you select them and before doing anything else, the selected group will move into formation immediately. In addition, the units around them will move out of the way to accommodate them. This can result in very carefully positioned troops moving themselves into range of enemy fire and other unfortunate occurrences like this and is insanely frustrating. There might be some advanced combat controls somewhere for changing this behavior, but all I can find in the manual is hotkeys for making the troops assume horizontal or vertical formations (H and V keys). I haven't played with this yet, but it might alleviate some of the pain. Outside of battle, diplomacy with the AI could be improved slightly. Alliances are mostly useless, as I have yet to to have an ally help me out in any way. The only thing my allies do is betray me at the worst possible moment. However, I haven't played the campaign (just been playing custom maps), so there might be some scripting there to improve this. Finally, in LAN games (which don't seem to work on the one Vista box I've tried, but work just fine in XP), all info boxes seem to vanish very quickly without giving you a chance to read them. This might be a problem with my setup, but it might also be something designed to make people not drag on their turns or something... For experienced players, this isn't too bad, but it's extremely annoying at first. Other than that, the game's pretty much perfect. The flaws are present just like in anything else, but everything except those three complaints is practically perfect. For $5.99, it's criminal not to give this game a try.

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Posted on: August 4, 2009

darth_careful

Verified owner

Games: 526 Reviews: 9

One for retro strategists

Fellow GOG devotee, I sympathise with your plight. $5.99 may not be a lot of money, but it ‘s certainly more then -no- money, and you may be wondering if this epic slice of medieval tomfoolery is worth your hard-earned USD. If so, I sympathise, I really do; I’m wondering the same thing, and I’m someone who played this game to death all those years ago. So, let’s review the pros and cons together. Some pros: the kingdom management bit is great fun, and reminiscent of ye olde dayes of classic strategy on Amiga and Atari. The AI opponents may be a bit one-dimensional, but they’re aggressive enough to keep you on your toes, and the real-world map offers many different tactical opportunities. But where there are pros, there are also cons. When the LOTR2 was released, the main competition came from Civ2 and C&C, and it has to be said that the gameplay doesn’t match up to those classic titles. In particular, the RTS sections are underdeveloped; a few basic strategies will see you though most situations with barely a furrow in your tactical brow, the pathfinding isn’t great, and the battlefield AI is basic at best. Of course, if you’re intending to play against real-life humans, then you should ignore everything I’ve said and buy the game immediately. If not, it’s a close call; it’s not an enduring classic, but it’s certainly very good. On balance, I’m going to take a punt and relive those classic moments from a decade ago; after all, $5.99 seems a small price to pay when the fate of a kingdom lies in the balance. If you like similar retro games such as Mega-lo-mania and Defender of the Crown, then maybe you should too.

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