Posted on: September 30, 2011
NXMT
Verified ownerGames: Reviews: 2
Lords II: Like a Mailed Fist on a Gloved Hand
Lords of the Realm is one of those games with an unmistakable charm. Like most aged games, it has more than it''s fair share of dated graphics, bugs and questionable AI... but full of colour and personality. It's likely that if you are here, you've had some fond memories like me, sending taunt after taunt to the Knight just to hear more of his hilarious talkbacks and razing fields to exploit the AI in sending mass hordes of unarmed peasants. You are one of five nobles, competing for the crown. Your objective is to eliminate all the other contenders and be the last man standing. Each noble is fully voiced, have their own distinct personality and can be interacted with a series of diplomatic options from flattery to alliance forging. Game wise, though not obvious from the start, the nobles all have varied gamestyles which can be seen through the kinds of armies they raise, the castles they build and the kind of county they manage. This in turn, leads to another experience of getting to know the other players to see where and how you can exploit their weaknesses. The game is a TB/RTS hybrid similar to the Total War series. County management is turn based where you manage your the raising of crops, industry, and weapons. The real time portion are the battles and sieges. Economic management is simple, even simpler still with the addition of a slider bar that automatically calculates how much manpower to allocate into any particular field of work you want. You can get right down to the numbers if you want. Manpower is distributed among field work, which involves planting and harvesting of grain, nursing of cows or reclamation of unusable land. Industry is solely related to the building of fortifications and weaponry such as wood cutting and iron/stone mining. In addition to the labour, the upkeep of your citizens happiness and health is important as they also make up the numbers of your army. Happiness is sustained through the managing of several factors. Taxes, availability of food and health. High happiness and overall stability of your county can lead to a population boom, giving you an excess in manpower to utilize. The better the quality in life, the healthier your people are, maintaining a good birth-death ratio per turn. Lords To twist things up a little, the game also has several random events that can occur several times in a game. These can range from positive events such as a scouting party finding a cache of weapons or negative such as the plague. The battles itself offer a far more engaging experience than simply ordering a mass of knights to mow down infantry. Even though the game lacks the tactical depth of modern strategy games, simple tactics such as shielding a mass of archers behind a line of long reach pikemen can be employed successfully against a much larger enemy army. With that said, the AI is fairly wonk and can be exploited to a certain extent. It's easy to goad an enemy into weakening themselves. Destroying their infrastructure repeatedly will result in the AI, literally, throwing themselves at you every turn with weaker and weaker armies as he runs out of resources. In battles, you can send a single archer unit to disrupt an entire enemy and into your carefully laid out units. Lords 2 has a good amount of complexity underneath a seemingly simple interface. The atmosphere of the game itself steers clear from the dark brooding nature of the dark ages and instead, encourages you to embrace the magnificence and splendour in an otherwise, bloody period. In short, it's simple yet deep. Colourful yet serious. At the prices it's going for on GOG, you can't go wrong.
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