I love RTS and castle building, this should be perfect for me. There's a great game in here, I can see it, but I just plain give up. It's not worth the frustration. If mastering a quirky, finicky and at times outright hostile interface gives you as much satisfaction as building castles and mastering RTS tactics, you'll love this game. If stupid things like those below make you want to stay away, then do that: the list below is abbreviated. It won't show you the range on your archers and siege weapons, you can't even fire test shots to tell. The keep in one of the early solo campaign levels is sited to leave a narrow path to your farms uncovered. The invaders all know your archers can't reach there, even though the only way you can learn of it is to watch them use it. It will show you some, but not all, of the reasons the terrain blocks farm placement. Often you're left to guess which of the many squares a farm occupies is unfertile. Eventually, you learn to recognize them. Some trees block placement, some don't. Foot traffic blocks building placement. There's lots of foot traffic. Your last-resort defender, the lord of the castle, will attack no one without explicit orders. Reasonable idea, but implemented in the stupidest possible way: five horse archers got through and are killing your citizens? Tell him to kill one, he'll kill that one and walk, slowly, away from the rest. You can't tell him to kill them all, if you want that you have to wait for him to kill one before telling him to kill the next. It will grudgingly tell you what's in your stockpile (it takes a few clicks to bring up the report), but it hides the supply levels before letting you build anything. Sometimes, when you select a building type for placement, it'll tell you right then that you don't have enough supplies to build it with. Other times, it won't tell you until you've found the site you want and tried to place it. Hey, at least that's one of the times it tells you exactly why the placement failed. Incoming attackers are shown on the minimap as one-pixel (or four? they're very small) dots with no flares or anything to highlight them or warn you of casualties. One of the team colors is yellow. Teeny yellow dots on a sand-colored background. People who come in contact with one of the incessant bakery fires often become human torches, running around lighting other buildings on fire. This happens most often to the fire crew, who manage to light themselves on fire while carrying pots of water. and are too stupid to douse themselves. It's difficult to distinguish wall foundation from shadowed ground -- and if you don't place a wall in exactly the right place, you can't get in to the tower you just built, which put the ground you have to build that wall on in shadow. Troops, by default, will stand around and watch the invading horde pillage and murder. There are no hotkeys for construction. Most keys do nothing. Building is time-critical, the AI attacks early. Have enemy archers survived in the woods? Are they killing your people? No one will bother informing you, and the defense range for melee troops set on "defend" doesn't cover archers' range. Your troops will just stand there. "Sire, the granary is running low!" is delivered far too late to prevent people going hungry. None of the audio messages is welcome -- they're incessant, gratingly repetitive, usually redundant, and the voice acting is very bad -- and they mostly leave you scrambling to find out exactly what they're talking about.
