Disclosure: Author of the rant wanted this game to be trading/management game like its predecessor, was disappointed and refunded. After enjoying Patrician IV I can’t force myself to play Grand Ages: Medieval. For those who don’t know both games are from the same studio. Grand Ages: Medieval focuses on “trading” on land instead of sea, trading is quoted because you have minimal control of what is actually bought and sold. The process itself is- 1) Buy goods with trader 2) Send trader to next town 3) Sell goods. I had a lot of fun managing automated trade routes in Patrician IV, making sure ships buy enough of needed goods in one town and distribute those goods between other towns. What is disturbing in Medieval is that you have MINIMAL control of automated trading. By minimal I mean you can only tell traders where to go and that’s it, you can’t tell them what resource to buy, what to sell, AI does it on its own. I end up in situations where I want to buy a lot of goods in faraway town regardless of price so I could then distribute those goods on the other side of the region and make profit, but NO the mighty AI doesn’t think that far away. If you wanted 1 town to be a center of your infrastructure of the region you can throw that idea out of the window. I can’t stress enough how much from the gameplay was taken by stripping automated trade to essential show what towns to go to and AI will handle itself. There are some other feature ground combat and 4 research trees but none of them can replace the mess that automated trade is.
I have only played 10 hours of it so its just a first impressions. Graphically game doesn't look bad, good enough for 4x game. No performance problems on huge maps and x10 speed. Gameplay is quite interesting i would probably point out 2 mechanics that should catch your attention. 1. Leveling planets, each planet has 1 type of resource, you will be exporting it to different planet to make the population of different planet grow, basically you will have a pyramid of planets that support each other and you have a megapewpewpew planet at the top that generates loads of resources. 2. Diplomacy cards. 1 of resources you generate is influence, with it you buy "action" and "vote" cards, action cards are used to take over artifacts/planets or even solar systems. when activated the card goes to a vote where different factions use/or not their "vote" cards. And for the things that i don't find particularly well done. 1. Combat. Combat is very stale, its basically 1 commander ship and tons of support ships around it, resulting in 1 click battles. 2. Ship designing. Its either very in depth and complicated or plain lazy and uninteresting, i couldn't figure witch it was. 3. Researches. Its a pain to navigate the research "tree/circle", it doesn't give you info on technologies that you cant research yet, meaning you will have to scroll over each one of them.Technologies are very basic + to that, - to that, boost this. Overall i like the planet and diplomacy mechanics which is the point of the game and "minuses" are not that bad. Good game
