Rising Lords

First off: You can have fun with Rising Lords, if you are willing to accept that it's far, far from perfect. The main reasons why I wouldn't recommend the game is that you can't create more fields in any region. That means your growth is ALWAYS limited by that. It sounds good on paper, it's frustrating in-game. Mostly because it means that any region that holds 3 fields, instead of the usual 2, is highly incentived to be a central province. This is problematic for two reasons: You should have food diversity, which means that rearing cows is most effective, due to the milk they give and having a wheat field on top of that. Sheep usually shouldn't be eaten, you need the wool. Same with horses, you need them for your mounted units. This game mechanic, which I find rather arbitrary, is not fun to play with. And woe to you if you find a province with 3 fields that is close to an aggressive enemy. Not fun. And that brings me to my true gripe with Rising Lords: Combat! Combat is utterly miserable, it relies on a rudimentary card system and Rock, Paper, Scissor system. Sounds good in theory. It is absolutely atrocious though. There's no initiative, usually the AI gets a full turn where they can wallop on your troops. Forget smart positioning, it's barely helping. I ran with a full roster of 7 or 8 units through the campaign, each unit sporting 300 people. After each fight I had even in the easiest fights to replace dozens of people. The first real fight? A few hundred. And that's barely sustainable when you have properly built provinces. This expectations that you have to take everything on the chin makes combat frustrating, because you can't shine, and the enemy often sports "FUN" card decks that make your attacks useless. You COULD do the same, the problem is that the AI seems to know what units not to attack then. So yeah, it's not a bad game, it's just has some mechanics that are unfun. If you can put up with those? Then it's a solid middle of the pack game.