Unlocking structures is as simple as building a single resource like a carpenter or mason, but although these technology branches are loosely interconnected, the challenge in attaining new levels is arbitrarily economic. Even if you can afford to build and maintain a blacksmith, for example, the game may not let you based on the population numbers or size of your kingdom.
This takes any real skill out of strategically climbing the technology tree and forces a patience-based gameplay that will piss off those who like to experiment. They take the strategy out of the game by forcing every player to take the same steps, in the same order, at the same point in the game.
This same problem is glaringly obvious in the real-time strategy aspects of the game where the military options are limited to a very few man-powered units that can be moved at will and siege based weapons that remain stationary once built. Attacking your opponents isn't so much an exercise in military strategy as it is a struggle to make your villagers content enough with their pathetic lives that they will let you recruit more soldiers.
You don't have to pick the right assortment of soldiers to win a fight, either. The units you choose seem to make almost no difference.
You just have to recruit more of them than your opponent, and even this challenge can be minimized by building a ton of siege weapons and towers that have no man-power cost and can be destroyed once the battle is completed.
In Medieval Lords, combat is nothing more than a mechanism for acquiring and holding territory with a dungeon, the center of power. If your main stronghold is overrun, you immediately lose the game. Borders are drawn in colored outlines that surround each village's region of control. In that region you can build new structures, station troops, and collect taxes. Each map has several computer-controlled civilizations that range from the mindless brute of barbarians to the more advanced opponents of other European nations.
There are some roving invaders that might show up to demand homage, and you are given the option to pay up or fight them off. But be warned. They fight dirty! The Vikings, for example, attack by sea and will pull up next to your stronghold, bypassing your carefully laid defenses, and attack your stronghold directly.
Paying them off, for any well-maintained economy, is a pittance compared to the headache of tying up the only scarce resource…troops. You initiate an attack by positioning your troops on the outskirts of an enemy's territory, but you can't sneak up on them or launch a surprise attack. That wouldn't be very lordly. Once your troops cross the border, the game counts down a second grace period where you can build siege weapons, raise walls and construct towers to defend your army on the open field.
While you're getting set up, the computer-controlled enemy positions his armies and builds counter-intrusion forces to keep you at bay. It's a positioning-the-pieces system that sucks the excitement out of the battle because once the clock hits zero, the computer takes over and steers the troops.
I guess your thrill is to watch a computer-controlled, generic animation charge into battle. Each unit is represented by a fraction to show you the group's numbers. When you take casualties, your only options are to disband the unit all together or deploy them at depleted strength. You cannot combine your 20 remaining units with the next to them, which is cumbersome because stationing each platoon takes as much space as a house.
Combat just isn't fun. There isn't much variety in the armies to begin with, and the few that you're given are completely computer run. They are about as smart as your average peanut, which is at least staying true to the heredity of the villagers. They will attack any bad guys that wander nearby, but they won't chase them through your village. Instead, they'll let them run right by and attack your houses. You can order your soldiers to invade a city, but like lemmings, they charge straight to the enemy stronghold in the most roundabout method they can find, oblivious to all the armaments that shoot at them on the way.
By the time they actually start working on your target, you'll be lucky if they're at half strength. The icing on the cake was that, despite the patch that must be installed out of the box, the game is plagued with bugs that had me wishing I could raze my own city to ashes.
In one of the first campaign scenarios, I spent two hours taking over the entire map only to encounter a bug the kept me from completing the level and, ultimately, forced me to start over. In the next go around, I had worked for an hour and half to soothe my citizens and arm my forces when the interface completely crashed on the cusp of battle.
In more than a dozen hours of gameplay, I experienced a total of 10 bugs that required me to either reload or completely restart the campaign I was playing. Medieval Lords isn't all bad, but it offers extras that I don't think most gamers will enjoy. The foundation of the modern western world was the middle ages in Europe. The barbarian tribes that overran the old imperial Rome built a thriving society, and introduced new concepts in both government and science, that helped shape the world we live in today.
For many of us, there is a boundless fascination with this period, that game companies are only to happy to attempt to fill. Medieval Lords is the latest attempt at this, and it is a very good effort at filling that interest for gamers. Many of us are familiar with the city building series that culminated in games such as Caesar III. Like that aforementioned title, players of this game must build their city, improve buildings, make the population happy, and eventually expand and take other nations, so you get bot a city building element and an empire building one as well.
You will select where to construct your buildings, and what good and services they will have access to, based on building availability, and distance in the road net. Terrain effects as also taken into account, building next to a river improves health and water supply, while building near a bog might cause plague and wide spread sickness. This is an important consideration, often left out of city builders, that usually let you build where ever you like, with few consequences.
As population increases, your buildings will expand and evolve, as is the standard in this type of game. They wanted to make a realistic medieval simulation, and they managed to do it. Anyway, you aren't supposed to be playing a kingdom, or a dynasty. You are supposed to be the advisor of a ruler.
And every time the ruler dies, you can go to serve another. In the intended gameplay, you can just have fun with a domain, pushing it has hard as you can until it inevitably explodes, then switch to another. But of course, you will want to stick to a single Kingdom and lead it to Glory. Don't expect it to be easy. Your careful plans will get twarted by random factors. Your slugglish advances will get reverted by unexpected and unpreventable disasters. One day you have a crack King leading an ustoppable host, conquering county after county.
The next day he dies without notice and gets replaced by his young idiot son, who dies a few turns later and you got stuck with a baby king tutelated by a lame Regency. Townsfolk of once loyal lands no longer want to pay taxes and rebel. Ambitious nobles who once rode loyaly by your side see their chance to cut ties and run their own independent domains.
Inhabitants of recently conquered provinces will uprise to throw away your yoke. Heretics and Infidels will attempt to undermine the authority of the One True Faith.
Neighbouring kings who once cowered in fear at the mention of your name now begin to pillage your borders. The Emperor of Byzantium decides it's a good time to nibble on your remains and sends a fleet of four hundred ships to your place.
When the Black Plague comes, you can't help but greet it as a blessing. Welcome to the Middle Ages. Disclaimers having been issued. If you still have the guts to play this game, make sure you read the Manual first.
Plan very careful in advance, be prepared to take maximun advantage when you get a crack lord, and have reserves to survive the inevitable times when you get a lame one and have to perform damage control. Don't expect to waltz your way through Europe. Advances will be slow, often reverted, but you have hundreds of turns ahead of you. Good luck. AverageJoe 1 point DOS version. Kyle P 3 points. The c64 version is buggy slow and not worth the time. The Dos version is far superior.
Christmas Skeleton -4 points. Whoever calls this travesty of a game the "DOS version of Crusader Kings 2" or "Awesome" needs to be ashamed of themselves. I mean literally this game is so fucking shitty, even for the DOS era, which you know technology was limited, and worst of all this was made in for Christ's sake, there were way better strategy games made at the time take a look at Clash of Steel or HICOM that were made in the same year or earlier, and they were 10 times better than this petty excuse of a game.
Second of all the war system does not work, i mean the percentage chance bit is just fucking lame, i mean who thought of coming up with that shit in the first place, instead of putting more time and effort into the Battle mechanics and War system the game's creator instead decided to use a cheapass percentage system, that no game even used anymore, and he fucked the percentage chance system too, i mean i invaded IL as Anjou alright, i had an army of about
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