Posted February 25, 2009
This unique RTS comes from Trevor Chan of the Capitalism games, and it shows in the thougtful way the economic system is constructed. Most RTS games (particularly of this era) have you collecting "stuff" (gold, lumber, &c) with peasants and then turning that stuff into units - 100 wood to make a trebuchet, that kind of thing.
This game takes a very different approach. The primary resource of your kingdom are your loyal people - the key word being "loyal", because if you do things to upset them too often, they stop being loyal and they stop being valuable to you. So when you build a copper mine, for example, it's partly in order to make money from selling the copper products you can make in your factories, but partly in order to make your people happy by filling your marketplaces with copper goods that your people can buy.
This way of thinking about what a "kingdom" is comes across in the whole design and philosophy of the game. It does mean a longer learning curve because many of the mechanics are unfamiliar, but there's something very satisfying about the way the whole thing fits together once you understand the way it's meant to work.
All that said, this is not a perfect game. There are some questions about balance, the limitedness of the resources can lead to a situation where someone is a runaway leader and there's not much anyone else can do about it, and the computer opponents can be a bit of a nuisance with the way that they constantly seem to change their minds about whether they want to ally with you or demand your money. Nonetheless, I recommend this game to anyone who's interested in the RTS genre for a couple of reasons. First, it really is a unique take on the way RTS games can work; in these days when it seems every RTS is just a clone of something else but with marginally different graphics, it's exciting to play something with not just a unique design but a design that is based on an innovative philosophy. And the second reason is, so long as you can get over a bit of a hump in the learning curve, and don't mind some fairly rudimentary graphics, this game is an awful lot of fun!
This game takes a very different approach. The primary resource of your kingdom are your loyal people - the key word being "loyal", because if you do things to upset them too often, they stop being loyal and they stop being valuable to you. So when you build a copper mine, for example, it's partly in order to make money from selling the copper products you can make in your factories, but partly in order to make your people happy by filling your marketplaces with copper goods that your people can buy.
This way of thinking about what a "kingdom" is comes across in the whole design and philosophy of the game. It does mean a longer learning curve because many of the mechanics are unfamiliar, but there's something very satisfying about the way the whole thing fits together once you understand the way it's meant to work.
All that said, this is not a perfect game. There are some questions about balance, the limitedness of the resources can lead to a situation where someone is a runaway leader and there's not much anyone else can do about it, and the computer opponents can be a bit of a nuisance with the way that they constantly seem to change their minds about whether they want to ally with you or demand your money. Nonetheless, I recommend this game to anyone who's interested in the RTS genre for a couple of reasons. First, it really is a unique take on the way RTS games can work; in these days when it seems every RTS is just a clone of something else but with marginally different graphics, it's exciting to play something with not just a unique design but a design that is based on an innovative philosophy. And the second reason is, so long as you can get over a bit of a hump in the learning curve, and don't mind some fairly rudimentary graphics, this game is an awful lot of fun!