This is one of my old-time favorites: beautiful graphics, well-developed economic structure, intricate detail, and a decent selection of music. I became hooked on this game because I marveled at it's economic structure and began to try to develop new economic strategies; all of which eventually fell back to the same basic structure that the game requires for survival. This was slightly annoying, but made it more challenging to get up to speed as quickly as possible before trying anything tricky.
There are some improvements over the original K&M game, such as speeding up time, new units, etc. but I still find some faults.
1) Retarded AI - In the original game, the AI was set to attack at certain time intervals to make the game a constant rush for advancement and added greatly to the strategy. In the Peasant's Rebellion it may begin a scenario where you are being attacked, but that's about as intelligent as the AI gets. If you ever attack it forces the AI to become retarded and randomly send a line of troops into your base that kill peasants, stand still for minutes, leave, and then return. This continues for the rest of the game. Many times it happens by accident when the enemy army gets too big and a stray soldier attacks some random unit, which triggers the enemy to empty their base of all military units in an all out war to destroy you.
2) You can't control your units - This is a blessing and a curse. I came to enjoy the fact that your non-military units did their own thing, and there is still some control over what they do in modifying their priorities (distribution of wares, etc.). However, the military units are very difficult to control. You may tell your military to perform an action, but one unit starts walking off randomly in a direction until your army comes to a halt. If one unit touches an enemy unit you lose control of your units and they begin attacking until they all die or until the enemy army dies. You can't call them off. It's too late: you lost your army, and now the AI acts as I explained above. This problem forces you to NEVER attack until you are certain you can maintain enough troops to keep the enemy out of your base until the end of the level, or win the level right then and there.
3) You can't capture an enemy storehouse and take its wares. - It made me sad, but I got over it.
4) Random bugs - Buildings and their workers becoming idle, even after resetting the build que for that building. 1 or 2 military units don't get fed when you feed the army. A unit doesn't get triggered to enter a building of his type and just stands around aimlessly until the end of the level.
I still enjoyed the game, and give it 4 stars despite these discrepancies. I enjoyed the first of the series slightly more for its AI, but I also enjoyed having the new unit types of The Peasant's Rebellion.
Overall, it's worth a try. You may love or hate how different it plays from your typical RTS.
