Remember back when I mentioned that the game has two campaigns? Well you can
imagine how exciting the “Peace” campaign is in action. You’re given a goal to
produce certain quotas of items, you build the requisite structures, and then
you sit around doing nothing but watching while your peasants take forever to
make the items that you need. Occasionally you’ll face incursions by wild
animals and bandits, so there actually some fighting involved in the Peace
campaign. I suppose “peace” is a relative term.
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| A peasant economy running on all cylinders. |
Now back to our lazy peasants. Not only do you have to put up with their
lackadaisical work ethic, you need to make sure that they are kept happy. If
your peasants aren’t happy, they will begin to leave your castle and you’ll find
yourself with a bunch of empty, non-producing structures. This can send you down
an unfortunate catch-22 spiral. You won’t be able to produce enough food and
entertainment to keep your peasants happy because you don’t have the workers to
man your structures, which in turn will cause even more peasants to abandon
their jobs and leave the castle. Historically peasants were at the bottom of the
medieval social hierarchy and at the time no one in power seemed to give much
thought to their happiness. And even if peasants were absolutely miserable in
their miserable little lives, they couldn’t do anything about it, and they
certainly weren’t free to pull up stakes and move to a new castle every time
they felt a little downtrodden.
Most of you reading this article are probably more interested in the military
aspect of the game than the economic, but let me preface my look at this side of
the game by saying that the problems with the economic sim will affect you
militarily as well. To make a single military unit, you need to have a weapons
maker, an armory for him to carry the weapons to one by one, and barracks to
train the unit. If you have at least one weapon available in the armory and at
least one unassigned peasant, you can create a unit in the barracks – well after
the peasant makes his way to the barracks for training, that is.
While the issues with the economic aspect of the game have a lot to do with
design, technology is the culprit with the problems on the military side. First
of all, the game can suffer from horrendous slow-downs when battles occur even
on a high-end system above the game’s recommended specifications. The first
mission in the War campaign is a simple one – take two units from Point A to
Point B and fight a handful of units at Point B to end the mission – but as soon
as the minor skirmish at the end of the mission begins the game can start to
pause, lurch, and hiccup. You can probably guess that this does not bode well
for siege battles and you’d be right. There are times when it can take the game
several seconds to work its way out of a freeze which makes issuing orders a
frustrating affair, to say the least. Good thing the AI isn’t smart enough to
take advantage of the situation.
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