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A sign of how much impact Lords 2 had on my childhood and/or how much I played it: I can still hear bits of the intro music despite not actually opening the video (I mostly skipped the intro video though, so it's really just the first few notes, if I'm perfectly honest), and I can hear the menu music perfectly.
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Jul 17, 2023 14:37
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| # ? May 9, 2024 14:31 |
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Another year, another few thousand dead peasants. Just having a great time under the benevolent rule of Sage
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Jul 17, 2023 15:08
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Great game, lots of replay value too, since it comes with many different maps to play.
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Jul 17, 2023 15:25
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LotR 2 is so good.
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Jul 17, 2023 17:12
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Your people are starving, my lord.
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Jul 17, 2023 17:15
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This is the game I played so much, so badly.
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Jul 17, 2023 18:14
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Social Studies 3rd Period posted:Your people are starving, my lord. Send supplies to WHICH county?
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Jul 17, 2023 18:32
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I played a ton of this one, but I really don't remember that much about it! I was like, 8 at the time and I've just never gone back to it. The only thing that actually sticks in my head is the animation that plays when you make a soldier and they walk out and grab their weapon. Curious to watch this play out.
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Jul 17, 2023 18:51
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I loved this game so much as a kid. So many fond memories.
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Jul 17, 2023 20:05
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Nostalgamus posted:Send supplies to WHICH county?
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Jul 17, 2023 20:20
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Oh boy, it's time for Lord of the Realms 2! I remember playing the Prussia-map to death, never quite managing to become King in Prussia (I do remember building a lot of castles, though)
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Jul 17, 2023 20:51
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One of my best memories with Lord of the Realms 2 was finding the Easter Egg song file on the CDROM. Someone took music and voice clips from the game and mixed in some VA bloopers to make an amusing little song. The only other game I've ever seen do something similar is the original Deadlock. Games were made with personality when I was a kid. 
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Jul 17, 2023 21:50
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Tell me you never finished the campaign without telling me you never finished the campaign.
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Jul 17, 2023 21:53
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There was a campaign? I was young enough that I was obsessed with ensuring that all of my armies/garrisons were maxed out and my counties maximally prosperous and I think I only really played skirmishes where I could turtle for a bit and then crush enemies with the power of a superior economy and unit control.
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Jul 17, 2023 22:03
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Congratulations on doing it backwards :P Yes, there is a campaign, and the song mentioned plays when you finish it. The campaign eases you into learning the game ... if you bother with it that is  .
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Jul 17, 2023 22:23
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Strategic Sage posted:Congratulations on doing it backwards :P Are you going to bother with it in this LP?
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Jul 17, 2023 23:19
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Strategic Sage posted:Tell me you never finished the campaign without telling me you never finished the campaign. I'm guessing this played at the credits sequence. Yeah, I never finished the campaign, I just played the battles that came with the expansion over and over.
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Jul 18, 2023 00:10
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Strategic Sage posted:Tell me you never finished the campaign without telling me you never finished the campaign. 'Kay. I played the demo for bloody ages and ages, which only had a single small map against a single opponent (and no castle-building, or even knights I think). Then one day when I was changing computers (2010 I think?) I could not for the life of me find it again on the internet. I think it had been intentionally scrubbed, or at least that's the conclusion I came to. Upset about that, it became the only game I have ever intentionally pirated (there was also an unintentional one, but that's a whole other long story) and proceeded to try to replicate the demo conditions. The map is called Butterfly and can have up to four nobles on a six county map for a heck of a knife-fight, but I'd keep restarting with two until I was in the SW and the other one was in the NE. However this copy DID have everything like castles, which is not something you can make the AI not use, so I ended up learning the extra bits too. Then a few years later, after I stopped resisting getting Steam, I noticed it was on sale for a bloody quarter and snatched that poo poo up to have a legit copy for peace of mind. Ever since, I've been going through all the maps in turn, though I haven't played in years now and I always feel like I should get back to it, but people keeping making more games that are also interesting! Absolutely maddening not to have all the time in the world.
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Jul 18, 2023 00:33
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Always found the campaign pretty underwhelming, tbh. It's a collection of standalone levels that you play through in progressing order of complexity and difficulty. All the levels are just standard maps you could play on their own, there's nothing unique. (EDIT: This is not to say that I'm not interested in seeing the campaign, if that's what we end up doing). What I did appreciate is the way the background music is cued to your status. Hearing it go from a simple pastoral tune at one county to a more lively melody at several to strings, timpani, and choir as your kingdom becomes larger is very cool. Impressions did something similar with Caesar 3 but sadly none of their other games. JohnKilltrane fucked around with this message at 02:43 on Jul 18, 2023 |
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Jul 18, 2023 02:08
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This was the one in the series I played a ton of, though I could only get so far in the campaign. I look forward to learning what actual good gameplay looks like.
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Jul 18, 2023 04:37
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New Mars posted:Are you going to bother with it in this LP? Yes. I find the other modes to be mostly redundant, and going completionist with them would make this oppressively long for no good reason IMO. JohnKilltrane posted:Always found the campaign pretty underwhelming, tbh. It's a collection of standalone levels that you play through in progressing order of complexity and difficulty. All the levels are just standard maps you could play on their own, there's nothing unique. Huh. I see it the opposite way. After you've done a handful of maps, they become quite samey and you're just doing basically the same thing over and over again. Always made more sense to me that if I was going to just play a bunch of maps anyway, to use the progression built into the campaign.
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Jul 18, 2023 05:46
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Felinoid posted:'Kay. It's on steam but not GoG. Spoilers if you click on the link. https://store.steampowered.com/app/397350/Lords_of_the_Realm_II/
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Jul 18, 2023 09:09
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JohnKilltrane posted:Impressions did something similar with Caesar 3 but sadly none of their other games. I somehow never realized the Caesar series was made by the same studio as Lords of the Realm. It makes sense, "PLEBS ARE NEEDED!" is seared into my brain even harder than anything from LotR II. Looking forward to the LP!
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Jul 18, 2023 09:43
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Sugar Addict posted:It's on steam but not GoG. GoG has it as well. Even on sale right now! (not to shill or anything).
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Jul 18, 2023 09:57
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SugarAddict posted:It's on steam but not GoG. $3? Hell yeah!
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Jul 18, 2023 16:37
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Martian posted:I somehow never realized the Caesar series was made by the same studio as Lords of the Realm. It makes sense, "PLEBS ARE NEEDED!" is seared into my brain even harder than anything from LotR II. yes, PLEBS ARE NEEDED! often pops into my head unbidden
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Jul 18, 2023 17:49
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Martian posted:I somehow never realized the Caesar series was made by the same studio as Lords of the Realm. It makes sense, "PLEBS ARE NEEDED!" is seared into my brain even harder than anything from LotR II. Yeah between LotR and Caesar Impressions were the absolute kings of "games you thought were kinda niche but it turns out were actually some of the best-sellers of their time."
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Jul 18, 2023 18:04
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JohnKilltrane posted:Yeah between LotR and Caesar Impressions were the absolute kings of "games you thought were kinda niche but it turns out were actually some of the best-sellers of their time." Lords of the Realm II was a lot fun as well.
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Jul 18, 2023 18:20
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SugarAddict posted:It's on steam but not GoG. I guess I wasn't clear, but I meant that I got it on Steam after I finally got Steam. It was on sale at the time and thus was ludicrously cheap.
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Jul 18, 2023 19:56
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A Quaint Beginning This is the first screen we can interact with. We're ignoring Lords of Magic of course, and could not care less about multiplayer. But the siege is indeed on. A bit further down in this update you'll get to hear the audio that accompanies this if you so choose, but we have side trails to investigate first. The same backdrop is used as we proceed through after selecting Single Player.  Play Now is how you get to the actual campaign, which is what we'll be doing. Skirmish! takes us to ways of setting up battles, and Custom Game is a full scenario that you can set up with various options. Editorial: I have a serious bone to pick with many otherwhise good content creators at this point. I've seen so very many do what I think is a great disservice to the game, and that includes the lone Lords 2 LP on this site. They just launch straight into a Custom Game without so much as mentioning in passing the fact that there's an actual campaign you can play. As we'll shortly see, these other modes are well fleshed-out and I understand the appeal of them, but ... how do you show off a game like this and just pretend the campaign isn't even there? At least half of the YouTube content I was able to find was like this. Just why ... how ... what are you thinking?!? /rant  Any of the three choices bring up this selection.  This is Skirmish!. On the left we have a description of the currently selected map - and by the way I love the font/style of the written text. It's so very appropriate for the time period, without going full Middle English and making it incomprehensible to modern readers. Historical, yet accessible. - Defender/Attacker determines whether you begin on the top or bottom of the map, much as in Lords 1 - The Advantage at the bottom can be swung either way, and reduces the gold you get, which in turn reduces the amount of troops. It's a simple, high-level difficulty setting for those who don't want to delve into details. On the right: - We have a Map at the top and can notice immediately that battles in Lords 2 have terrain. We have bridges, trees, water, and open land. Impassable rocks are also a thing in some battles. - Then there is the Battle Type, which can be Siege, Equal Battle like this one, or Unequal Battle which are situations like a large attacking army against a smaller but fortified defensive one. The feather button allows you to load player-made maps, but leaving that aside there are 10 Equal Battle, 10 Unequal Battle, and 15 Siege maps for a total of 35. Some of the Siege ones also include castle designs that are not available in the campaign. At the bottom right, the Cust. button is perhaps not the most clear or obvious, but allows customizing the armies involved.  Same selections on the right, but on the left we have a list of unit types identified by their weapons. The numbers on the left by the weapons are the amount of gold required for each, and the ones on the right are the amount the army currently has. The difficulty for each army has five different settings, which increase or decrease the amount of gold available. Siege engines are only available for siege battles, and the arrow controls there disappear if it's not a siege style battle.  This is the Custom Game screen. We can see the full cast of rival Nobles on the left; it's the same as Lords 1, except the Earl has been cut. Four opponents is the most, where it was previously always five. A variety of settings are available at the bottom, and then there's a map selector in the upper-right. Various countries are visible initially, but the selection is wider than that. For example:     These are just a taste. By my count there are 44 maps available. Clearly these two modes were not just thrown in as an afterthought. There was serious effort put into giving Lords 2 replayability beyond the campaigns that we'll be focusing on here.  Main Menus (0:17)  This follows the Play Now! selection. On YouTube I was able to find 2-3 playthroughs of the first campaign. None of the expansion one though. We'll be experiencing both here, starting of course with the original campaign.  Again we are promoted for a name and shield. Choose one you can live with, as you can't change it later. If anyone has any nominations for what color to take for the expansion campaign, I will let the thread choose if you are interested. Not at all obvious is that your choice of shield will impact which nobles you face first. For that reason, I don't like choosing the red or yellow ones at the start here. I prefer black, but have on occasion gone with blue as a change of pace. Sticking with black here. Help Narration (0:30)  And we're into the game! First observe the map in the upper-right. Our county is Periwinkle, the one colored in grey and outlined by white, the southeast county on this map. Southwest is colored red and belongs to our lone rival here, while the two green counties in the north are neutral. This sort of 'minimap' feature combines the Realm and Kingdom views from Lords 1, so that there are only two levels of control if you will instead of three; Kingdom and County. 4 counties is of course a far cry from the 32 we dealt with before. Tip: Campaigns in Lords 2 are not played on one map as in the first game, but consist of a series of scenarios to be completed in order, much like how popular RTS of the time were made. This allows the challenge and complexity to gradually increase from a low point. You'll also notice that there are no difficulty settings for the campaign either. It's a different, somewhat more modern approach to presenting the player with gradually higher hurdles to overcome. This map is known as Quaintville, and each successive scenario will add another noble until we are facing the full allotment of them. If I recall correctly, there are eight scenarios in the campaign.  Each of the menus at the top of the screen has a drop-down. This is Help - Game Help. I plan on leaving the Tip screens off, but turn it on here just for demonstration.  This is the first one that greets you when you start a campaign if you haven't turned them off before. There's a voice-over that is mostly a verbatim citation of the words on the scroll, and after a few of these Lords 2 will leave you be - until you enter any other screen which requires further explanation. We'll pass on these, but they are useful for new players. For this first scenario, we're going to ignore a lot of mechanics including most of the county management. All we really need to do is raise an army and rush our opponent before they can do anything useful. I plan on getting into the various mechanics gradually, and also taking a variety of approaches. Quaintville will be all about the military/army basics. One nice thing about having many scenarios is that I don't have to decide how cheesy/exploity to be for the whole campaign; I intend to 'play fair' some of the time, and ridiculously unfair at others. I'm curious to see how people react to the different approaches. Tip: County economics work similarly to how they did in Lords 1 in most respects; the same ration levels are available, health contributes to happiness and influences birth & death rates, taxes contribute to happiness and give us crowns based on the population of a county, happiness influences migration from nearby counties, etc. One major difference though is that happiness is on a 100-point scale instead of 40.  Here's where we raise armies, the left-most button above End Turn is how you get here. The slider allows us to move people en masse from the peasants on the left, currently 435, to the conscripted soldiers on the right, currently 0. Or you can just click over using the arrows in 1% increments. There are six troop types in Lords of the Realm 2, indicated by the weapon types below. There was a walkthrough with stats posted by somebody on I think IGN which is often used as a reference. It's bad and misleading. I am one of many who initially fell into it's clutches. The stats given were unofficial, and as it turns out not entirely accurate. - Peasants - As before, available for the low, low price of free (no weapons required, wages only for upkeep) and they also suck at everything. Go figure. - Crossbowmen - Like in Lords 1, they have a lower rate of fire but higher effectiveness against more armored troops compared to standard archers. Arguably useful in limited numbers for defending castles. - Macemen - Stupidly OP. Macemen are cheap, fast, and do a lot of damage. They are fairly brittle and die easily, but more than make up for in other ways. Frankly, there's limited reason to use any other melee troop type. - Swordsmen - A huge disappointment. I used to rely on them heavily based on the mentioned walkthrough. They are probably the best at surviving ranged fire from archers, but that's not nearly worth having them around for. I seriously question if they are bugged, but whether intentional or not both their attack and defense are underwhelming for their cost. - Pikemen - Slow, fairly low cost, hard to kill. They also do very little damage. Survivability in melee combat, i.e. holding the line, is their lone calling card but they are very good at it. I favor having some of them around for most armies. They're often good at holding positions such as bridges, and ensuring enemies can't reach our archers. - Archers - Longest range and rate of fire. Like in Lords 1, they are the ranged unit of choice and will be deployed in large numbers. - Knights - Again the elite and most expensive melee unit; again not worth the cost to deploy in large numbers. They're the fastest and hardest-hitting type, but also take up the most space which often means a limited number can actually get in the fight quickly. Axemen did not make the transition from Lords 1 and don't exist.  As you click over to put more soldiers in the army, the happiness cost updates. It is small at first, costing just one point of happiness each few % of population added. 13 soldiers here costs the same 1 happiness as 4 soldiers do. After a while you're charged 1 happiness every 2% of population added, then every 1%, then 2 happiness every percent, and so on.  In our particular case, once happiness reaches 32 it will drop by the maximum of 4 every time we add another percent of conscription.  Happiness can't be reduced to 0 in this method, so it drops to 4 and it doesn't matter how much further I take the slider, this is the limit on what I can conscript; 178 soldiers.  50 is the minimum size allowed, both for creating an army initially or splitting an army. I think this is intended to minimize scorched-earth cheese. It's possible to exploit your way around this limitation, but that's a tale for a future time. Tip: One might think to just make a small army each season to counteract the accelerating penalty for making a large army all at once, but this is not really practical as there is a built-in penalty for that. After you make an army, there will be an extra 10 happiness hit for making another one the next season. Waiting two seasons reducing that penalty to 5 happiness, and waiting a third eliminates it entirely. I find this to be a reasonable balance. Also, you don't get happiness refunded by disbanding an army, so the Infinite Happiness Loop will not be among the exploits we can abuse. Not to worry, we'll find entirely new ones . As it turns out, waiting a season to be able to get a larger army is a little better in this case.  Draw your attention to the covered wagon if you please. That's a merchant.  All merchants are the same in Lords 2. There is no gossip feature, all products are always available and always at the same prices. If you ask me, this is a regression. Anything you can buy and sell, like the Grain shown, is sold for half the price that you purchase it for. The items available are very similar to those in the first game; food, weapons, building/industrial materials like stone/iron/timber.  Ale, as in Lords 1, is only available to purchase despite two prices being listed.  The effect is the same as well; increasing happiness.  It takes some practice to get to the amount you want reasonably. Holding down the amount arrow will increase the number stupidly-fast after a few seconds, and it's easy to miss what you're aiming for, even by over a hundred. The given +5 increase to Happiness is the maximum for one season. 1 jug of Ale per 10 people gives a point of happiness boost, so you need half as much Ale as population to max it out.  Advancing to Spring increases our population and happiness further. The merchant has moved, but is still within our county borders, and we can still access it. Next time, we'll raise an army to go punch our opponent in the mouth.
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Jul 19, 2023 14:38
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I see we're in the era where many games' UI's bore a suspicious resemblance to Windows' file browser, with the top bar and such.  It usually made them easy to parse, mind you, but also tended to make them look kind of jank at a glance.
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Jul 19, 2023 15:10
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macemen and knights have a shared x-factor that the other troop types don't have, which is one of the reasons why macemen are the go-to troops for harassing and open combat (it is very easy to overcome army sizes even 4x larger than yours if all you have is maces and the enemy is a hodgepodge of every type). also, today I learned that you can actually disable the tooltips, I've just learned to live with having to click through the narrator every time I close and open the game again
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Jul 19, 2023 15:32
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I never knew there even was an expansion to Lords 2... Anyway, I feel that the lack of campaign playthroughs available might be, essentially, because the campaign doesn't actually offer anything you can't get from Custom Game mode. No story, no special conditions, it's basically just a haphazard series of maps which you don't even get to specify the starting conditions for. At least it doesn't throw players into a whirlpool (forget "deep end of the pool") when they start out anymore, though, so that's progress.
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Jul 19, 2023 15:41
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CptWedgie posted:Anyway, I feel that the lack of campaign playthroughs available might be, essentially, because the campaign doesn't actually offer anything you can't get from Custom Game mode. No story, no special conditions, it's basically just a haphazard series of maps which you don't even get to specify the starting conditions for. Yeah, by the sounds of it, you don't get the "full" game until several scenarios in, in any case, while with a custom game you can just jump straight there.
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Jul 19, 2023 15:42
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Should have bought some grain to plant during that winter I always used mainly pikemen + archers for my armies. My younger self thought macemen died too quickly
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Jul 19, 2023 15:45
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I'm ok with people just wanting to jump into Custom Game for the reason stated and not showing a full campaign playthrough. What I'm not ok with is the campaign not even being mentioned. If you're presenting a game that presumably a significant part of your audience doesn't know, I don't think it's asking too much to spend 15 seconds or so observing that it exists since, if a new player jumps straight into Custom Game, they're a lot more likely to just be overwhelmed which is ... why the campaign exists in the first place. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Kanthulhu posted:Should have bought some grain to plant during that winter We're not going to be here long enough for that to be useful.
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Jul 19, 2023 15:52
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Kanthulhu posted:I always used mainly pikemen + archers for my armies. My younger self thought macemen died too quickly Hell, I had issues keeping archers out of melee, which should really tell you how bad at that sorta thing I am (hey, I said I played this as a kid, not that I was any good at it).
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Jul 19, 2023 15:53
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Yeah, I think what happened for me is that as a kid it took me so long to beat each map because I wanted each county to be perfect before moving on that I just got bored of the campaign and went straight to the custom games with larger maps and more players because that's what I wanted to play.
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Jul 19, 2023 16:06
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I just wanted to make really big castles, or destroy the enemies castles.
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Jul 19, 2023 16:09
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| # ? May 9, 2024 14:31 |
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Strategic Sage posted:I'm ok with people just wanting to jump into Custom Game for the reason stated and not showing a full campaign playthrough. What I'm not ok with is the campaign not even being mentioned. If you're presenting a game that presumably a significant part of your audience doesn't know, I don't think it's asking too much to spend 15 seconds or so observing that it exists since, if a new player jumps straight into Custom Game, they're a lot more likely to just be overwhelmed which is ... why the campaign exists in the first place. Especially given how vaguely the option is named. A modern sensibility seeing "Play Now!" might assume it's some quickplay option where the game randomly (within reason) assigns maps and settings, or even... a default game.  Strategic Sage posted:We can see the full cast of rival Nobles on the left; it's the same as Lords 1, except the Earl has been cut. Four opponents is the most, where it was previously always five. A variety of settings are available at the bottom, and then there's a map selector in the upper-right. Various countries are visible initially, but the selection is wider than that. You know what that means, right? You're the Earl now.
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Jul 19, 2023 18:13
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