I bought and played the first game here on gog, and its great, this sequel is not. They have destroyed everything they got right with the first, and made no improvements on what they got wrong. Its biggest problem is balancing. It plays like a pay to win mobile app, everything is so painfully slow and unbalanced. Trade no longer works because you can only trade with provinces close by, and you need commerce points no, so the start game is painfully slow and boring. You now get only 4 building slots before having to pay huge prices to activate additional slots. Marriage is useless because every time your king dies they lay claim and their kingdom declares war for not giving them half you provinces. Spy stuff is useless because you can never afford to do any of the actions. Skill upgrades are random, so you can specialise your knights. Don't let the graphics fool you. Save your money and get the first one.
Never even heard of this game until i saw it on GOG, but glad i bought it. This is my first grand strategy game and its amazing. The interface is quite good for an old game, and it has a well done tutorial at the beginning. It seems complicated at first but once you start playing all the parts make sense and it becomes rather easy to understand. Lots of simple ideas working well together to make a deep strategy experience. It very addictive. My only gripe is that it would have probably been better as a TBS rather than RTS.
