Rising Lords Reviews

It is a great idea with a great foundation and some good ideas in their combat. However the economy falls flat after you play a SINGLE game and realize there is nothing to it really, it is very linear and will be every game. However what is even worse is that making gold in the game is EXTREMELY easy. Once you get a bit of gold you can ignore ALL other buildings, just buy a few hundred weapons and armor, make and army and it will roll over the entire map. The AI feels AFK. My final issue is that we can only have 4 players max on a map which includes yourself. A lot of maps do not even support that much so between 2-4 players (which includes you). This makes diplomacy honestly kind of non existent even though they have implemented a very basic version of it.

This game is a spiritual remake of a classic strategy 4x game known as Lords of The Realm. Specifically Lords of the Realm 2. This game has more cattle types, more complex system for making soldiers, and reintroduced a small level of castle design that had been cut from lotr 1. There are no siege engines but there are more cavalry types. Combat uses a turn based initiative based "I go you go" type of combat. it also uses skill cards which represent the skill of your individual general to setup things like traps and build ladders. XP for units is also introduced which is generated from victory as well as passively if you build troops and do nothing with them. this gives you an incentive to build armies early even if you don't yet need to use them. Diplomacy is about as bare bones as in lotr 2. Techincally a bit more complex as you now have a more varied array of deals you can cut. Troop movement is also very streamlined, in a way I REALLY like. units are either in a county or in a boarder, so you can move from boarder to boarder or boarder to county etc. This speeds the game up and makes larger maps more manigable as well as removing some of the movement exploits that lotr 2 had. One of the cooler aspects is the battle map you play on is the same as the county map. so as you expand your town/castle it has direct effect on the battle map you might be fighting on to protect it. Which is fun and explains the abstraction of movement. Overall I'd say if you like Lords of the Realm 2 you will like this game. The campaign is under baked, you have to save scum as there's no inherent auto saving, and it has a lot of false choices and scripted events as well as combats which are more puzzels than strategy games. But if you are getting a game like this you are getting it for the custom games which are quite good. Honestly a dream come true for and avid Lords of the Realm fan.