The mechanics are good, except for a marginally-controllable map, and the argle-bargle "battle" sound-effect gets tiresome. But who designed the weather in this game, Noah? I guess you can shut off the rain and mud, and that might be a good idea, since it seems to there purely to slow down the game. If it rains, you can't have air combat; if it's muddy, movement is halved. I had two nice days at the beginning of the Australia scenario, then *five* of rain, and the last 3 of those with mud. So, about 3/4s of the time so far, the weather has significantly affected combat. I don't think that accurately reflects history. More like a tactically-weak AI.
I got this a few months ago, and it's the In Nomine expansion, all by itself. The only choice at startup is the "default mod", and this is what comes up, so I guess the other two aren't in it(?) $4 on sale isn't bad, it seems to run ok. But it's 1/3 of what they're advertising.
I got tired of that depressing image, of the native kids waving at the cannons rolling in to kill them. And the game's more interesting without it. On medium difficulty, it's not easy to find free territory but it is possible. (This part actually reminds me of Machiavelli: The Prince, where the initial fun is simply scooting around the map, lighting it up.) It's more challenging to develop resource chains without driving out the natives, and at revolution-time, you can shut down all your temporary, raw-material cities and force the King to conquer one or two superforts. Plays faster, too.
Running it on Windows 10. The labor allocation in Caralis started giving me bogus numbers when the pop gets near 1,000, and seems to quit working. Crashed a couple times, but been running it 4-12 hours a day the first week. It's intoxicating enough. To say the least. A very responsive city-builder. Gorgeous map. Ingenious strategies that slowly dawn and develop over multiple attempts-- can I really handle special orders by annually cycling the number of my plebs with common goods? Maybe we'll see by 4 am. Oh yeah, almost forgot: on mine, anyway, the "back" build button doesn't work. It actually charges me the same amount all over again, when I cancel. If a road costs 200 Dn and I cancel it, I'm out 400. Saving while I build as an alternative. Overall, it's extremely immersive, pretty, & fairly well crafted. Very easy to fall into for long periods if you happen to go for that kind of thing.
