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Just a heads-up: Lords of the Realm: Royal edition, which includes Lotr I, II and the expansion, is currently on sale for €1,95 on GOG.
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Jul 19, 2023 18:24
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It could of been The Sage, but no, my heart is broken 2 games in a row.
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Jul 19, 2023 20:49
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I loved the custom battle feature, especially since I seem to remember the AI never really doing siege assaults in the normal game, and siege defense was a ton of fun.
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Jul 19, 2023 21:00
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That's another one in the 'my experience is the opposite' camp. I definitely have defended against a number of AI sieges before. I actually think it's one of the weakest, least fun parts of the game. Not in theory, but in practice, because the AI is bad enough at attacking castles that unless they have an absolutely overwhelming advantage in numbers they're not going to win.
Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 23:01 on Jul 19, 2023 |
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Jul 19, 2023 21:59
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Strategic Sage posted:That's another one in the 'my experience is the opposite' camp. I definitely have defended against a number of AI sieges before. I actually think one of the weakest, least fun parts of the game. Not in theory, but in practice, because the AI is bad enough at attacking castles that unless they have an absolutely overwhelming advantage in numbers they're not going to win. Burning them though is extremely fun
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Jul 19, 2023 22:52
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Events Move On Apace: Conquering Quaintville Quaintville (8:14) I'm not usually going to do this as the scenarios will get a lot longer, but this one was quick without a lot of dead time so this is just the unedited run of it. It was either go with two short updates or one long one for this, I elected to just go with one and get through it.  The combination of higher population and happiness from waiting a season will allow us to get almost 50 more soldiers in the army. That'll do.  Having roughly a third of an army as archers is useful for most purpose. These bows will get us up to 90 when combined with the ones we start out with.  We also have modest amounts of stone and timber, which were sold before grabbing maces for the rest of the army. We could afford some more, but this will give us weapons for all of the available soldiers, and we'll need to pay them anyway so it's useful to not spend our whole balance.  After you choose what size of an army to raise, you don't actually field it until you confirm your choices of what weapons to equip, and click Create in the lower-right. If you just exit out of the screen, nothing happens. Each of the figures along the bottom represents a weapon type that you have at least one of, and the available weapons are also pictured on the 'armory' wall. Right now, everyone is listed as a peasant. To change this, we click on the 'card' for one of the other weapon types.  No more 'groups of 50' requirement here; we can select as many or as few as we wish, up to the amount of weapons available.  Select the next weapon type, and a figure walks in from the left representing the one you just equipped, grabbing their weapon off the wall, and then walks out the door on the right.  That was a maceman, this is an archer ...  And this is a swordsman. You'd think he'd be able to stand up well in melee combat with all of that armoring, but apparently it's made of papier mache. So disappointing.  Back on the main view, the army is represented by a single figure with a flag, much as in Lords 1. The same convention of one figure for a small army, two for a medium one, and three for a large army is used. The numbers are slightly different though; you need 500 men for a medium army and 1000 for a large one instead of 400 and 800. Because reasons, you want to click close to the base of something to select it on the map now, instead of nearer to the top of it as in Lords 1. I think this works better overall. It also takes some getting used to when you've just spent a bunch of time playing the first game.  Left-click to initiate movement, right-click to bring up these details. The narrator does their best Captain Obvious routine, stating cheerfully 'This is one of your armies[/b]. Every.Single.Time. And because the voice-over is so well-done and just plain cool, you probably won't be annoyed at this. The pay required here is quite reasonable, and we can sustain this army for a number of years without making any more crowns. A few points to note: - 15 tile movement. A 50% increase over the 10 allowed in Lords 1. - The three buttons at the bottom are for Moving, Disbanding, and Splitting.  'Disband this army?' you are queried.  'Split this army?' The way this is asked gives the impression he doesn't think it's really a good idea. Any number of soldiers can be selected, but if you try to end up with an army less than 50, you will once again be told this is impractical.  Things are ... not good in Periwinkle with this many soldiers taken, but in this case we don't care. There are a couple of improvements to army movement here. With each tile we move, we can see how many of the 15 allowed is used up. We can also do partial moves and then move the army again in the same turn/season if we've explored an area for example. As before, off-road movement happens at a third of the speed of using the roads, so you usually want to use the roads. With that, we head out as far as we can go. There's a nice marching sound effect.  Low happiness can result in revolts just as before. 25 Happiness is the bar we need to hit to avoid this, and we've got plenty of time to recover. Once again there's a timer for how many seasons you have to fix the situation, but instead of saying 'you have X seasons', increasingly dire warnings will be issued.  Upon entering a neutral county, you'll be greeted with this. There are a few variants of this message. All of these, the low happiness warning, etc. are voiced and worth listening to IMO. There is no pointless bribe option anymore, and as before this is a toothless threat. There will be no consequences to face whatsoever, regardless of whether we remove our troops at once, after spring thaw, or never. Attacking counties works the same as in Lords 1; march up to the town with your army, unless they have a castle in which case you have to attack that. Also as before, neutral counties will never have castles. The one difference is that your counties will rouse peasants to defend if attacked by a rival noble, but this will almost never be good enough to survive since proper weapons are easier to come by and all-peasant armies are rarely if ever seen. Tip: Unlike in the first game, you do not have to conquer neutral counties to win. Usually you'll want to take at least some of them, but victory only requires eliminating all major noble rivals. In this case, we're going to bypass them completely and just head straight for our enemy. All counties border each other in this scenario, so if we take out their home county before they expand, we win.  They'll get over it. Leaving them completely untaxed assures that.  The solid grey circle after the 15 is what shows up if you try to move beyond the range of your army's allotment for a turn. This is an example where it's a little faster to move cross-country. Note that the mountains and forests are impassable; there's a solid 'wall' of them blocking our way to the west, so we have to take the long way around through these neutral counties instead of just heading directly for our enemy.  Play enough and you'll come to hate the Flooding event with a hot, hot hate. For now we don't care.  Happiness is up to 23, so this is the last warning we'll endure. There's one more that can come after it, and then if you still haven't fixed the situation the county will revolt.  *yawn*  After a year, we are now approaching our target. The Baron has a castle for us to deal with. Another mechanic carried over is that we can't see details on counties we don't control, whether they are neutral or hostile. Observing the villages and farms - and razing them along with other targets if we go scorched earth - is still very much a thing.  A couple items of note here; we are close enough to attack this season, and once again we have a colored orb, over the castle in this case, to indicate it's something we can interact with if we move our army there. Also, the sword & gold icon over the town is a nice improvement. That happens if you can hire mercenaries in a county for the current season. No more going into the military screen just to see if any are available.  After confirming the action and hearing 'Siege .... this castle?' with a stupid amount of emphasis on the first word, we are brought into the thankfully much-improved siege mechanics. There are no counter-siege weapons this time either, but you also don't just get automatic casualties for shooting at a castle. And usually you want to do minimal damage to a castle, because there are more benefits to having them as we'll explore later. So while you can just shoot and shoot and shoot some more at the fortification, you don't want to. There's also no season-by-season construction, labor distribution, placing and aiming ... siege weapons are used on the tactical battles just like your soldiers are. Here, we just choose how many we want to build, and are told how many seasons it will take. Larger the army, the shorter the time. A single battering ram will do the job here, we just want to bash down the gate and get in. What you need will vary based on the castle type. Designing your own castles is not a thing. There are five variants, of increasing benefits both militarily and economically, and also increasing expense to build. The whole process here is sooo much better and faster. I can see how some people would miss the 'I'm making a stupidly-large and hideously impractical castle design' element, but I think less is more here and Lords 2 is much the better for jettisoning it. A feature can both sound cool and be bad for a game at the same time. Also, if we had taken the smaller army on the first season, the battering ram would have required a third season to build. That would have made the battle harder without allowing us to actually attack sooner.  The white tent on the map is a constant reminder of how long we have to wait until we can attack.  We wait for another winter, and it's go time. You do not want to auto-resolve a siege. One of the strong points of the AI is that they will generally defend their castles with archer-heavy garrisons. This is the right way. Let's Get Ready to Rumble!!!  Siege battles don't have interfering terrain other than the castle itself. We'll get to the others later, but the only lower-right button we care about for now is the hourglass (pause). There are two ways to win a siege battle: - Kill all defenders - Capture the flag - There is no 'starve them out' option. We can see the red flag in the middle of the castle here as our target. There's also a persistent mini-map in the upper right. The convention of attackers on the bottom, defenders on the top of the battle map is followed. This is the weakest castle type, the Wooden Palisade. It has a maximum garrison of 150 troops, so really the Baron couldn't do much more other than attacking us with a field army.  While paused, we can select units but not give them orders, unlike Lords 1. This is our battering ram. Or I should say, these are our battering rams, since there is scaling in effect as before based on the size of the armies involved. It feels off since we just got done being charged a specific number of seasons per siege engine, but depending on the size of the army, you will also get more or less siege engines for your trouble. Building one battering ram really means building one unit of battering rams. So the siege engines of larger armies are better and get more bang for the buck, so to speak. This is particularly important with rams. On the right panel, you can see our scale in this battle is 8 whatever per unit; we'll also have one figure for every 8 of the soldiers. This round 'bullseye' cursor is displayed when you are hovering over a unit you can select. Oh, and the music is cool, naturally.  After unpausing the action, I order the ram to go smash down the gate. Red X confirms any order you give. You can hack gates to pieces with soldiers as well, but they are much worse at it and with the number of archers defending the pallisade we'd never succeed that way. Without using siege towers to attack the walls or catapults to destroy them, this is the only way in. Your siege engines can be destroyed, but they can take a pretty good pounding before that happens.  The ram creaks and squeaks as it slowly moves toward it's target. We'll just pretend we don't notice that no actual soldiers have to push it there, it just goes on it's own because of course it does. Along with clicking individual units, you can drag-select which is often more useful. When I grab the macemen here, they grunt 'Yes, sir!' and it's kind of amusing some of the things they say. The LP title is one of the phrases peasants use. I should probably use all of the units for battles at some point, just so we can hear them say things. One happy improvement in Lords 2 is that you aren't stuck with the unit groupings you have to start the battle. Each unit of in this case 8 men can be commanded independently. You can form your own quick-reference groups in typical RTS style; Ctrl + numbers 0-9, and they can combine units of any types together. For this battle, I'm just going to throw all my melee troops under one group, and all the archers under another. Simple but effective. As I order the macemen slightly the east to a rally point, they hilariously shout 'Macemen ... FORWARD!' ... even though they're not actually going forward. Much like other games of the time such as Warcraft 2, I enjoy these brief catchphrases far more than I should. Soon afterward we here 'Your orders, my lord?' from swordsmen, 'Ready my lord' and 'COME ON, LADS!' from another group of macemen, and 'Bowmen ready!' and 'Of course, sir' from archers. We also hear arrows starting to fly; that's not us. That's enemy archers shooting at our battering ram. 'ARCHERS, HO!'. Then that's repeated as we move forward behind the ram, while the melee group says 'No problem, gov'. That's a pretty good taste, watch the battle, if you want to hear all of it. Really do watch the battle.  The situation as we approach the gate actually doesn't look that great. The archers have started shooting us instead of the ram. Once our archers get in position, they automatically fire back at targets in range, but other than the ones that have foolishly come out of the gate the enemy has the advantage of the high ground which confers appropriate advantages. I think this is mainly in the manner of lower damage received, I don't think there's a range advantage. Arrows won't go far over a tower when shooting from below, so they matter in that way as well. Another feature of castles that's been added are the cauldrons of boiling oil such as the one on the right tower. Each castle type gets a number of these inherently, there's no way to give them more or less. Wooden pallisades have just the one. We'll see how much fun that is a little later in the battle.  Arrow sounds are constant, and some death cries interspersed among them. When all soldiers in a unit have had their life force extinguished such as the archers near the ram here, the figure collapses to the ground and then disappears in a few seconds. Wouldn't want corpses littering the battlefield as a reminder of how brutal the situation is, now would we? Tip - The morale system was removed for Lords 2; soldiers don't run away, they will mindlessly fight to the death unless you order a retreat.  If you look closely, you can see the broken wreckage of the gate as the battering rams finish their work. We've actually killed more of them than they of us, thanks to less than optimal placing of their archers. The combat AI in Lords 2 is ... not great, as with most games of it's time. And any other time, really. This is esp. true when they attack a high-level castle. In field battles and siege defenses like this, it's merely poor. We lost half of the rams, and the remaining one is simply a lumbering hunk of junk in the way now, having done it's job. Need to move it out of the way so we can storm through the opening.  Classic 90s pathfinding on display. Move into the castle, then to the side if you need to. Not both at once, or you'll end up with soldiers getting caught up trying to walk through the wall and not realizing why that doesn't work. We also hear the iconic battle cry 'Draaaaaawwww Swords!' from our men as they move in.  The oil is deployed. Good a time as any. It burns, it freezes! Actually just burns. Units caught it in take damage rapidly. Generally you just want to get everyone out of it as quickly as possible and regroup. Eventually the fire will burn itself out, but until it does there will be a lot of soldiers dying at once. Some men, locked in combat, stay there and die horribly. On both sides.  The macemen line 'We'll crush 'em!' sounds as we move forwards towards the center of the castle. The AI always likes to keep some men in reserve to guard their flag. Both armies have taken heavy casualties at this point, but there aren't many of the defenders left. The health bars over our selection here indicate when a unit of soldiers only has a soldier or two left, a few, or is still at full strength. I'm not a 'graphics is everything' guy, but I think the sprites from this era really moved into the good and enjoyable category, as compared to the much more pixellated Lords 1 visuals. Everyone has a different perspective on this kind of thing, but for me it was the point at which games generally moved from the visuals being an obstacle to an asset in the mid-90s.  The straw structures are also a fire hazard; one of our archers tries to fire an arrow over one, which causes it to spontaneously burst into flames because of course it does. That will happen whenever they take damage. These are best avoided; better would have been to go around to the left instead of this position on the right. Some of our archers, heedless of the danger, position themselves in the fire and are burned alive while they continue firing at the enemy. I mean, that's dedication. And sheer stupidity.  Before too much longer, we have eliminated all the defenders and achieved victory. Typically there will be a small amount left when you reach the flag, but that's not how it worked out this time. If any are left, they automatically surrender and no longer exist in game terms. The less time spent pondering the implied war crime, the better. A series of generic videos, each with a handful of possible alternatives, follows. In this case, we celebrate crashing into a much better castle than the one we actually just conquered.  The after-battle report. We lost almost as many men as they did, but there are no more battles to fight in Quaintville. Any victory is good enough.  We've seen the battle video, now we get the county video when appropriate.  The Baron is hauled away in disgrace; one of these happens whenever a noble is defeated. Lords 2 manages to recognize that fact immediately. Some of the ones that can come up if you lose as the player are ... decidedly less kind.  And this one has only one version; it's the scenario-winning video. Trumpeters trumpet a fanfare ...  ... officials of some type bow in deference, and then one hands you the royal scepter of something-or-other ...  People applaud as you reach the balcony and raise the scepter, looking out at the castle and the countryside beyond. I certainly hope the onlookers were well-paid.  And finally, this message informs you that despite how doggone special you were just told you were, you don't actually get to be sovereign yet - until you've finished the final scenario. You don't know it's the final scenario until you actually finish. I remember when I first played, I thought getting all the nobles as opponents was the end, but that's only actually about halfway, so I kept thinking 'how many of these are there?'. I was impatient in my youth ... This is also where the title of this update comes from; events are always moving on apace. Time isn't though; regardless of how long it takes to complete a scenario, the next one will start in 1268. We'll be spending more time in Rose, and seeing how basic county management works.
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Jul 21, 2023 14:09
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Strategic Sage posted:
Heavy rains turn- Heavy rai- Heav- Heavy rains turn into a deluge
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Jul 21, 2023 14:39
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Yeah, now I understand how you can play the campaign. Kid me would have built the maximum size castle in each county on the way, staffed it with the maximum garrison, and then recruited a maximum size army to do the siege. Instead of an 8-9 minute level, it would have taken me the better part of a day.
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Jul 21, 2023 16:12
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Interesting. Young me never finished the campaign. I was a turtler, though not to that degree. I definitely made sure I took every county all the time, and had my first county built before expanding. The same part of me that didn't want to 'skip steps' so to speak though, would never have even considered going straight to a Custom Map for exactly that same reason. It would have felt so much worse to basically skip earning my way to the more complex maps entirely than to just skip a county or whatever on a specific map. The other part is, I would think it would make that kind of playstyle even worse, because on a bigger map you will, depending on difficulty, either take that much longer to succeed or not be able to succeed at all. You can get stuck with a single county that very slowly gets ground down by opponents with several, and not have the economy to build a large enough army to expand. It was only when, as an adult, I realized turtling was a bad way to play that I managed to actually beat the campaign.
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Jul 21, 2023 17:32
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Note: I've done some more experimenting with the videos, and even the gameplay parts are getting distorted/blurred by me merely moving them to the center of the frame without doing any scaling. This is annoying, but starting with the update after the next one, I won't be moving them anymore as I think having the picture be clearer but off-center is the better alternative. Edit: Ok, finally found an OBS setting that crops it properly. Grrr. And happydance all at the same time. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Jul 21, 2023 |
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Jul 21, 2023 21:15
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Strategic Sage posted:Note: I've done some more experimenting with the videos, and even the gameplay parts are getting distorted/blurred by me merely moving them to the center of the frame without doing any scaling. This is annoying, but starting with the update after the next one, I won't be moving them anymore as I think having the picture be clearer but off-center is the better alternative. OBS is a fun adventure for all ages.
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Jul 21, 2023 22:26
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Strategic Sage posted:Edit: Ok, finally found an OBS setting that crops it properly. Grrr. And happydance all at the same time. Once I found a way to get my OBS settings to work I locked it in and never looked back. The one time I updated them I broke it for a little bit and had to fix them again OBS is rough to deal with
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Jul 21, 2023 22:28
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Strategic Sage posted:The one difference is that your counties will rouse peasants to defend if attacked by a rival noble, but this will almost never be good enough to survive since proper weapons are easier to come by and all-peasant armies are rarely if ever seen. Is that true? It wasn't in the demo, but there are a number of things that got fixed between demo and launch, and I have to admit I haven't re-tested it with a full copy. E: Related, I turtle pretty hard but do very well anyway (on low settings). Mercenaries are a hell of a drug. Felinoid fucked around with this message at 03:19 on Jul 22, 2023 |
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Jul 22, 2023 03:16
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I never played the demo and am not sure which of the quoted things you are referring to. But it's one of: - Yes, it's true. OR - Mandela Effect, as I specifically remember all of those things happening but haven't been in a situation to test them yet during the course of this thread. Don't rule out the second option. My capacity to be stupidly wrong is at least as high as an average human. In other words, off the charts.
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Jul 22, 2023 16:12
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Specifically I remember in demo having an enemy noble army touch one of my town centers (I was still learning, and also no castles in the demo) and they just instantly won it. No peasant army, no fight, just "welp, that's theirs now" with my proper army being like 2 movement points away. Naturally the nobles would get to have a defending peasant army, but I put that down to AI instant reactions and the fact that everyone takes their turns at the same time in LotR2 singleplayer  . It's one of the reasons I started religiously building at least a motte & bailey in any county I intended to keep once I got the full version. E: But again, the demo also let you create supply wagons between two neutral counties or two enemy counties even, so it clearly wasn't feature-complete.I was also going to argue the "all-peasant armies are rare" thing, but immediately remembered that they do actually at least shove some bows in there, if not tons more weapons whenever they can afford to. You fight plenty of all-peasant armies, but they're mostly last-mile county seat defenses with the occasional rebel band or min-size harasser party, so like 98% of them aren't actually made by nobles. Felinoid fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Jul 22, 2023 |
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Jul 22, 2023 17:34
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You can cheat the AI in that way if you turn the game speed down, which can help if you're trying to cut them off in certain situations (can't remember if sieges resolve before or after AI armies and merchants move)
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Jul 22, 2023 18:05
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Aces High posted:You can cheat the AI in that way if you turn the game speed down, which can help if you're trying to cut them off in certain situations (can't remember if sieges resolve before or after AI armies and merchants move) Yeah I usually play on slow and prioritize existing army movement to deal with things like that. The incident I was talking about in the demo had my max movement too short to save the county, I think. Or it just didn't work out even with the best timing. Sieges resolve before any other actions, I think. They're essentially queued from the previous turn, so they should at least.
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Jul 22, 2023 18:22
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Felinoid posted:I was also going to argue the "all-peasant armies are rare" thing, but immediately remembered that they do actually at least shove some bows in there, if not tons more weapons whenever they can afford to. You fight plenty of all-peasant armies, but they're mostly last-mile county seat defenses with the occasional rebel band or min-size harasser party, so like 98% of them aren't actually made by nobles. That's just terminology mostly. I don't consider county defenders to be armies. But also, even those aren't usually just peasants.
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Jul 22, 2023 19:11
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Dirk the Average posted:Yeah, now I understand how you can play the campaign. Kid me would have built the maximum size castle in each county on the way, staffed it with the maximum garrison, and then recruited a maximum size army to do the siege. Instead of an 8-9 minute level, it would have taken me the better part of a day. Same.
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Jul 23, 2023 06:15
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Rose: Exploring the UI We're not actually going to do anything in this update; we're going to learn the basics of how Lords of the Realm II works, so that we can do things in the future. Feel free to skip this one if you're in the 'sigh, just go smash things already' or 'I know how the game works, darn it' categories. I know that's not everybody though, and there are parts of the interface that I had missed before working on this LP. Also ... Aces High posted: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 This right here is part of why I'm doing this. I've been in this kind of boat also. While we're at it though, we can also hear more of the voice-overs: Stewards Say the Darndest Things, Part 1 (1:30) Some people have commented that the line to confirm you want to close it out 'Exit the game, my lord?' felt to them like Lords 2 was mocking them, calling out their gaming addiction and reminding them that there is a whole real world they aren't paying enough attention to. There's a more substantive point as well though, which is to look at some of the items we can interact with on the map. A clear point of emphasis was improving the UI; you can control anything a county does, albeit at a somewhat less precise level, from the main view. I spend some time clicking about on various industries:  Blacksmith is where weapons are constructed. Right-clicking brings up info like so, and left-clicking toggles whether it is active or not. We'll explore this more in detail later when we look at the county details, but the point of turning industries on or off from the main view is that it allows you a less granular level of control over county economics without leaving this screen.  An animation begins and the narrator states 'Blacksmith ... on'. Click again and 'Blacksmith off' is stated and displayed and it goes back to the way it was.  There's a figure chopping away here, as the timber area is already active. Turning it on and off works the same way.  There's no flag over our castle, since there's no garrison in it. 'A wooden palisade', saith our narrator. Tip: 'Boosts tax revenues by 50%'. This a game-changing distinction from Lords 1. Better castles get better boosts in taxes. Basically you've invested in defending the peasants more heavily, and use that as justification for ever-more confiscatory taxes without taking a happiness hit.  Nearby there is also a stone quarry, the last of our available industries in this county.  Wandering about the map, we head to the Baron's county of Waverly, where we notice that his lumber mill is described as 'very large'. All our industries are described as 'small'. To my knowledge, here is an exhaustive list of the effects of the difference: - Larger industries have faster animations on the map. No really, that's it. Putting more or fewer workers in them doesn't change the description. Larger or smaller industries don't produce more; you either have an industry or you don't, and if you have one the same labor situation will always produce the same output (efficiency is still a thing if you have it turned on, but that's for another time). They even change sizes with no discernible reason for or impact from the change. So yeah. I have no idea what the difference was originally supposed to be, but it's a complete gameplay irrelevance.  Heroes my foot ... oh. Yeah, the narrator brilliantly informs us here that 'this ... is an enemy army'.  They have nothing to say about the town though.  Left-click on anything useful in a county we don't control, and we're reminded of the limits of our reach.  The central county in Rose, Poncapoag, is the only one with an iron mine. This is not by accident. Except in rare cases, each county will typically have timber and either stone or iron, but not both. The uses of the resources are familiar: - Timber; Weapons and Castles - Stone; Castles - Iron: Weapons In this case, the other, perimeter counties have stone but no iron, which means that whoever controls Poncapoag controls the realm of Rose and will be best-suited to outfit their armies. Prior to gaining control of it, all three nobles will have to do without iron or purchase it from merchants.  This is pretty cool, accessible from the magnifying glass by the minimap. A zoomed-out view of the realm, and the narrator tells us to 'click on the county you wish to view'. Planning routes along the roads for your armies is one quite useful purpose. As before, we needn't worry about what's beyond the coast; naval invasions are not a thing. The yellow is of course our first sighting of The Knight, probably the weakest noble in the game with The Baron not far behind. As you look around at the counties, the same visual indicators as before are useful. Villages indicate a large population, the state of the fields indicates economic prosperity, the castles obviously are notable, and so forth. Past me, uh, may have played this game for hundreds of hours without realizing this existed.  The other three icons by the minimap switch modes to, from the top down, Labor, Rations, or Happiness. This is the happiness display; we can see that it indicates we're doing decent in that, the pale blue is slightly above-average by the given scale. Labor displays in purple if you have idle workers or red if you have a shortage, so that kind of works but if neither of those are true then you just get nothing and my first impression was just ... ok, this isn't working. Rations are the worst for that as red is the only one of the colors it will ever display, when you don't have enough food to satisfy the requested ration amount. I like these 'minimap modes' conceptually, and they work ok practically, but having the scale of six colors when one mode only uses two of them and another mode only uses one color ... that could have been implemented better. They do accomplish a good gameplay purpose in allowing you to identify hotspots or problem counties when you have a sizable kingdom without having to check every.single.county in succession if you're reasonably happy with how most of them are running. Definitely another feature that can take a load off the micro. Stewards Say the Darndest Things, Part 2  Moving down the right-side panel past the nigh-unpronounceable name of the county, we have four buttons that either give us important reports or let us change something. This is the Population Report, top left of the four. 'Your people are in good health, my lord' we are told as we open this up. It's a useful summary of whether the population is growing or shrinking, and why. Actual health though is displayed elsewhere.  The Tax display is more helpfully displayed just as a percent this time around. We can also instantly see the impact to happiness based on the current level, and how much we'll get from the current tax leel.  50% is the max level. Note also that particularly high taxes punish other counties in the Kingdom as well, not just the current one. That penalty kicks in above 20%, and neutral happiness from taxes point is 5%. The ability to set taxes on a per-county basis is quite helpful as well. This whole feature is just an unqualified win in comparison to Lords 1.  Top-right with the heart icon is naturally the Happiness Report. Similar to the population one, we can see what's going on with happiness, why, and make an informed decision on what to do about it.  Then there is the Ration dialog. 'All your people are fed by dairy, my Lord' he says whenever that is appropriate for the situation. The Ration levels are exactly the same as we're used to, and the slider works the same as before except it's just simpler; Cattle on one end, Grain on the other. Sheep have been abolished from the Realm, and while they did have their moments, I agree with the conclusion of others that the game is better off without them. There does appear to be a significant minority of players that didn't like sheep being removed, but I'm not one of them. We also see health here, and again the direct impact of health and rations on happiness. Tip: The +1 happiness from normal rations and good health mean that the default 'happiness maintenance' tax level in a county is 7%. Assuming of course that everything is going ok, not exceptionally well or terribly. We're going to skip - for now - the slider and production display below these buttons on the right panel, but I should mention the thermometer in the middle there, currently a pukish green color. That's a visual representation of Health, without needing to go into any sub-screens.  Next up, we'll return to the five buttons above End Turn at the bottom right. We've already seen the Army screen, the one on the left. The right-most button in the row, represented by a scroll, is Diplomacy. We'll pass on that for now also, and look at the ones in the middle. As before, the gold coins are the Treasury. We have half the starting Crowns that we did in Quantville, 50 Iron/Stone/Wood - I wish they'd be consistent in calling it Wood, Timber, or Lumber, just pick one already - is pretty standard, as are the 25 Swords and Bows. And here is where we have access to the 'power rankings' under the Greatest Nobles arrow.  They apparently decided that this screen wasn't broken in the previous game and didn't fix it. Banners instead of flags, looks nicer of course, but the same basic idea. Our guide feels the need to announce the category Every.Single.Time you change it, including saying 'greatest noble' when you enter this screen. I do give them credit though in figuring out that a tie is possible and not just picking the first noble in the list, but going with undecided if there's no winner in a category. From left to right, we have Most Counties, Most Castles, Most Troops, Most Crowns, Happiest People, Most People, and Greatest Noble. We start out with no troops, but more money than the Baron and the Knight. Our people are also slightly more numerous and slightly happier. Overall then, Rose gives us a slight advantage but not as much of one as we had in Quantville.  The middle sacks button allows us to Send Supplies. This works basically the same as the Lords 1 feature, but there's no sheep or wool to bother with and instead of scrolling all over the map to find the county you want, you just click on the minimap selections above.  Then there's the Castles screen, which is important enough that it takes the whole view. There's enough of visual interest here that we'll look at all ofthem. We are of course familiar with the Wooden pallisade, having conquered one already and started out both scenarios so far with one. We can see here the maximum garrison size, cost is given compared to the current castle you have so naturally it's zero, time to build, and tax revenue boost. A quick video flyby/tour plays when you complete a castle, so naturally we'll have to make sure we build one of each eventually for completionism sake, though I don't think that'll happen during our time in Rose.  Motte and bailey. 'A Motte ... and bailey' declares the Steward, who announces the name of each castle type as you select it. More expensive, twice as long to build. Each successive castle adds another 25% to the tax bonus.  The Norman keep is the first one that requires a sizable amount of stone. Since stone is only useful in castle-building, it represents a sizable investment. We do get a wood refund though.  Stone castle is the first one that is completely surrounded by a moat.  The Royal castle is the final word in excessive edifice, housing an interior keep inside the perimeter walls. Defense in depth and all that. A well-defended one is painful to attack. One aspect not listed here for each castle is the number of oil cauldrons. Starting with one at the wooden palisade, one additional cauldron is added for each upgrade in the series. Royal castles get one extra beyond that, for a total of six. Next, we'll learn how to assign peasants to do things.
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Jul 23, 2023 17:49
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Wampanoag, eh? An odd choice of name to say the least.
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Jul 23, 2023 17:58
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I'd comment on the AI castle preferences I remember, but I'm sure OP will mention them as they become relevant. That was the first sign I noticed that the various AI opponents weren't just reskins of the same script, though.
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Jul 23, 2023 18:19
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I remember always using peasants to give my armies more troops "because it was the Middle Ages" and eventually phasing them out 'cause they kept dying so much. I also remember always skipping the wooden forts on account of an irrational fear the game would pull a stunt like letting an attacker set fire to my very flammable buildings. So I never, ever build any castle type below the Norman Keep. And I certainly noticed that swordsmen are poo poo, because over time my armies tended to become large blocks of pike men protecting crossbow men, with small squads of mace men and knights for flanking maneuvers. A general army of mine would end up being something like this: 2 swordsmen 12 peasants 50 mace men ~a shitload of pikes, crossbows and some knights in the middle~
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Jul 23, 2023 18:51
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Bows are also amazing because they just need wood. So regardless of your access to iron, you can rain down death on your enemies from afar, and get a merc company of pikes or maces or knights to do some tanking for you.
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Jul 23, 2023 20:12
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Strategic Sage posted:Some people have commented that the line to confirm you want to close it out 'Exit the game, my lord?' felt to them like Lords 2 was mocking them, calling out their gaming addiction and reminding them that there is a whole real world they aren't paying enough attention to.
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Jul 23, 2023 22:27
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Dirk the Average posted:Bows are also amazing because they just need wood. So regardless of your access to iron, you can rain down death on your enemies from afar, and get a merc company of pikes or maces or knights to do some tanking for you. Or just a giant meatwall of peasants if you've got the extra bodies.  In all seriousness, I found that the best use for peasants was screening my archers from enemy archers. You absolutely want better things in your army for an actual clash, but those remainders when you don't have the perfect amount of weapons? (Or if you've got army foraging off and are raising peasant armies just so the commoners will stop demanding to be fed for their work.) Still useful for catching arrows instead of the people who can fire back.
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Jul 24, 2023 00:51
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I had the royal edition on CD and read the manual, the Devs actually addressed the loss of sheep in an Q&A section in the back with the conclusions that came up in the thread - another bit of micromanagement that didn't really add anything to the gameplay - and aware some people are just going to be upset by it. Bows and Maces ended up being the bread and butter for my armies because of their low material cost and generally higher per-turn-production rates compared to anything else.
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Jul 24, 2023 01:22
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I always recruited peasants mainly because I didn't want to feed them anymore. My sister and I referred to it as "the economy draft."
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Jul 24, 2023 07:57
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I haven't played this game, but I can see that Stronghold has many inspirations from it. Mechanics lineage is felt in every explanation.
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Jul 24, 2023 08:41
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CptWedgie posted:I'd comment on the AI castle preferences I remember, but I'm sure OP will mention them as they become relevant. That was the first sign I noticed that the various AI opponents weren't just reskins of the same script, though. Feel free to say words about it if you want; it'll be another scenario or two before that really becomes noticeable. The other main difference of course is the way they develop their fields. Akratic Method posted:I always recruited peasants mainly because I didn't want to feed them anymore. My sister and I referred to it as "the economy draft." This causes me mental anguish.
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Jul 24, 2023 16:00
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Strategic Sage posted:Feel free to say words about it if you want; it'll be another scenario or two before that really becomes noticeable. The other main difference of course is the way they develop their fields. Since I've been invited to comment, though: For all practical purposes, the Bishop does not build castles; either he's been killed off and left the map, or you've lost and the map ends immediately- there's basically no scenario where he gets enough resources to actually build any of the castles he demands aside from you turtling for in-game decades. ...I also vaguely remember one time where I tried to start a high-difficulty custom map and the game went maximum "screw you" by starting me directly adjacent to the Bishop; I started with nothing, he pulled like a thousand soldiers out of nowhere and flattened me somewhere around turn 2, before I could even dream of raising an army at all.
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Jul 24, 2023 17:29
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my experience (in the later scenarios) was that the Bishop always built up to Royal Castle in EVERY county he had control of, the Countess would build up to at LEAST a Stone Castle in every county she controlled, the Baron and Knight would do Motte and Bailey or Wooden Palisades, depending on how many years it's been. I always found the Knight to be the easiest of the AI to defeat, but also super aggressive, so if you're not up to snuff on cheesing battles, you will get ground down quickly by the Knight
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Jul 24, 2023 18:57
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Aces High posted:my experience (in the later scenarios) was that the Bishop always built up to Royal Castle in EVERY county he had control of, the Countess would build up to at LEAST a Stone Castle in every county she controlled, the Baron and Knight would do Motte and Bailey or Wooden Palisades, depending on how many years it's been. I always found the Knight to be the easiest of the AI to defeat, but also super aggressive, so if you're not up to snuff on cheesing battles, you will get ground down quickly by the Knight
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Jul 24, 2023 19:16
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I definitely remember the Bishop actually building castles. But it's been many years since I played the sharp end, so ... we'll see what happens when we get there. It'll be fun to see who is right, and who gets wear the dunce cap of horror at being wrong in a trivial matter about a game that's pushing 30 years old.
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Jul 24, 2023 19:27
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I remember one of the AIs building Norman Keeps, but I don't know which one. I'm pretty sure the AIs favor different army compositions, as well
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Jul 24, 2023 20:05
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I mostly just remember that one of the AIs had a nasty habit of going for Royal Castles only, and typically ended up with those construction piles in more than one of their counties because they couldn't afford the resources. Then when you take the castles off of them I think you basically got free progress as a result, the same way capturing a county with a castle lets you have the castle (after repairs for any damage you did, of course), with them never having gotten any use out of it.
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Jul 24, 2023 21:09
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Kanthulhu posted:I remember one of the AIs building Norman Keeps, but I don't know which one. Oh they definitely did. It's one of the things I appreciate about this game is each AI have their own distinct way of approaching the different aspects of the game.
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Jul 25, 2023 03:03
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Strategic Sage posted:GoG has it as well. Even on sale right now! (not to shill or anything). You are right, it has 1 and 2 coupled together for 6 bucks.
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Jul 25, 2023 09:07
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Robindaybird posted:Oh they definitely did. It's one of the things I appreciate about this game is each AI have their own distinct way of approaching the different aspects of the game. It sounds like this is also showcasing the weakness of such an approach to AI - six different sets of scripts means you've got six times the potential problems (EG: Slapping down unaffordable Royal Castles everywhere because you've got the "Royal Castle Guy" AI script)
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Jul 25, 2023 11:41
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Well I did misspeak a bit. It's not stone and lumber resources, but manpower resources you can run short on for this example. You need to have all the stone and lumber to even start construction iirc, but then you need X builder-seasons to actually build it out of those materials. And often the Royal Castle Guy would end up with only backwaters with <100 plague victims to put a new one on, and they'd only be able to afford 1 or 2 builders at first when you need many hundreds of builder-seasons, so the construction pile would just sit there for a decade, or until the player decided to come in and spruce the place up. You can't just go to a merchant and purchase peasants for a county. Getting a county to recover from heavy population hits like plague or you invading them takes a dedicated rebuilding process that can be very complex and has to account for knock-on random events, and AI scripting can't account for everything without building an entire intellect (to say nothing of the scripting abilities of the day) so sometimes they hit something that wasn't coded for and just...failed.
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Jul 25, 2023 13:35
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