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Lords of the Realm: Royal Collection
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Product information
Computer Platform | PC/Mac |
---|---|
ASIN | B00001LCDB |
Customer Reviews |
3.4 out of 5 stars |
Best Sellers Rank | #142,316 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games) #473 in Mac-compatible Games #6,445 in PC-compatible Games |
Package Dimensions | 12.6 x 10 x 1.9 inches; 1.9 Pounds |
Type of item | Video Game |
Rated | Teen |
Item model number | 70315 |
Is Discontinued By Manufacturer | Yes |
Item Weight | 1.9 pounds |
Manufacturer | Vivendi Universal |
Date First Available | April 1, 1996 |
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Product Description
Amazon.com
For Lords of the Realm II fans, Sierra announces more excitement, new combat, plus head-to-head combat on the Internet with other Lords of the Realm II fans. The Lords of the Realm: Royal Collection offers you everything you need. Get the original Lords of the Realm together with Lords of the Realm II and the Internet-ready Lords of the Realm II Siege Pack in the Royal Collection.
Review
Forget about chivalrous kings and courtly honor: The Middle Ages sucked. If you didn't come down with a severe case of the Black Death in those days, then your poor, starving, plague-ridden village was being ransacked by some neighboring tyrant. Sierra tries to capture the bleak reality of the bloody feudal struggles during these so-called "dark ages" in their recent turn-based/real-time strategy title Lords of the Realm II. Devout fans of strategy greats hoped that this would combine the best of both Warcraft II and Civilization II, and while it falls just short of being that ultimate game, Lords II still provides a challenging and entertaining experience for strategy enthusiasts. And challenging it is: The Middle Ages were tough times and similarly, Lords of the Realm II is a tough game.
The premise of Lords of the Realm II: The king has been axed, and you, along with other feudal lords, are vying to capture neighboring fiefdoms and gain rule over the land. The majority of the game takes place in a three-quarter perspective (like Civilization II), showing your village, surrounding industries (like mining, weapons production, woodcutting, and agriculture), and traders, who travel in and out of your territory periodically. The first part of a typical campaign is normally spent carefully managing agricultural resources and adjusting tax rates to foster more peasant growth and build up a decent economy. After a few seasons (each turn advances you a season) when industrial growth becomes more of a concern, you can simply adjust a slider that controls your farming vs. industry priority. This all sounds pretty straightforward in ink (or electrons, whatever ), but your peasants are fairly temperamental. They get ticked off by things like slight tax increases, food shortages, over-conscripting, and being overworked. A "happiness" figure located on the toolbar indicates the status of your village, and if your villagers aren't feeling hunky-dory about the way you're governing, they'll revolt at the drop of a hat.
Once you have a decent number of (happy) peasants, you can start conscripting them to build up armies. Different soldier classes - peasants, knights, archers, pikemen, and mercenaries - all become available depending on the storehouse of weapons you possess. At some point, you have to deal with the other power-hungry lords. These guys are real cocky bastards, and their continual, snotty provocations just make you want to "get medieval" on them all the more. Guide your troops over to meet an opposing lord's army or allow him to try to attack a garrisoned castle, and the screen automatically switches to real-time combat mode. Music gets a little more dramatic and, as happens in Warcraft, you select troops, point and click on enemies, and the chain mail flies. If you're defending a castle, you can be really cruel, dumping sizzling oil on enemies and perforating them with arrows while they try to break through your castle walls with siege towers, catapults, and battering rams.
I'll have to admit, it's pretty exciting to defend a besieged castle. But on the whole, the real-time combat in Lords of the Realm II could have been improved greatly. Your men are frustratingly difficult to maneuver, stumbling around at times as though they'd just had a frontal lobotomy. Also, just like a field of pre-adolescent soccer players, the combat field gets a little too crowded too easily.
Although the economic model of Lords I has been simplified to incorporate these action elements, it still adds a new spin to and makes more challenging a title which, for the most part, would have just been a resource management game. Some die-hard war strategy gamers may find that the new style of Lords II is too compromising and that the game spreads itself thin by trying to accomplish too much. But if you're looking for a new Civ-style strategy game that adds a new dimension to its gameplay, you may want to give Lords of the Realm II a try. --Tim Soete
--Copyright ©1998 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of GameSpot is prohibited. -- GameSpot Review
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***UPDATE***
After reviewing my own review, I realized I hardly mentioned anything about the game play, so here it is in a nutshell: The king is dead, and now everybody is fighting for the crown (including you). Each "level" is a country (Ireland, for example) that is broken up into different counties, or a region (the middle-east) that is broken up into different countries. You have to capture each county by attacking it with an army you have built up with troops and weapons gleaned from you other counties. After you capture all of the counties, you go on to the next "level," which is just another country or region.
Though the gameplay is mostly turn-based (a turn every season), the battles are all real-time (or can be auto-calculated if you don't want to fight them). After taking a county, you have to make and keep it happy by keeping taxes low, rations in good supply, people in good health, and war-mongering to a minimum. You control all of these elements. A happy county will attract and keep peasants, which are allocated to different production areas (stone, wood, iron, wheat farm, dairy farm, blacksmith, field reclamation). You need to produce wheat and dairy to feed your people (or reclaim fields to farm), and you use resources to build castles and weapons to attack other counties and defend against invaders.
Very addicting, and I play it even now, 13 years after I got my original copy.
For those of you who can't run it on a modern machine, get DOSBOX. I am playing LOTRII on a high-end gaming machine with an i5 2500, a gtx 590 and Windows 7, using DOSBOX. I had to monkey with the settings a bit, setting the fixed cycles to 50000 and the cputype to 486_slow. It's like pulling a trailer with a Mazerati, but it works.