| Lords of the Realm II | |
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Cover art for Lords of the Realm II |
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| Developer(s) | Impressions Games |
| Publisher(s) | Sierra Entertainment |
| Platform(s) | PC, Macintosh |
| Release date(s) |
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| Genre(s) | Turn-based strategy |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
| Rating(s) |
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| Media/distribution | CD-ROM |
| System requirements
PC: 66 MHz processor, 8 MB RAM, 34 MB Hard-disk space, Windows 95/MS-DOS |
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Lords of the Realm II is a computer game published by Sierra Entertainment and developed by Impressions Games. It was first released for the PC on October 31, 1996, and is the second game in the Lords of the Realm series.
The game takes place in a medieval setting, with rulers of several counties warring for the right to be king of the land. Players grow crops, accumulate resources, manufacture weapons, manage armies, build and lay siege to castles, and attempt to conquer their enemies.
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Lords of the Realm II is very different from many medieval strategy games. The game has a strong medieval feel, but it is historically based. There is no magic, and unlike many strategy games, it has no technology tree. Perhaps its most remarkable feature is the need to carefully manage food, population and happiness levels in order to build population levels whilst avoiding Malthusian meltdowns. The large number of both random and player-generated events that can affect province happiness provides an almost constant level of challenge for the player, which is part of the reason the game is regarded as a classic by many players.
There are two major game types that the developers merged into a successful hybrid. The first is turn-based resource management. Players grow crops, accumulate resources, manufacture weapons, manage armies, build and lay siege to castles, and attempt to conquer their enemies. The battles are real time, with players able to control units individually or in group formations. Players may also allow the computer to calculate the outcome of the battle.
Compared to the original, Lords of the Realm II is much more robust, with better graphics and music, and an improved management system.
The game begins with the player ruling over a peaceful and unproductive county with a small population.
Diplomacy can influence the course of events in the game, although there is little opportunity for its use among the mostly-violent interactions between counties. The player can engage in trade and communication by sending insults, compliments, money, or an offer of alliance to other nobles. Insults and miserliness will turn the noble against the player, but monetary generosity and compliments will have the opposite effect.
Closely related to the Nobles, diplomacy consists of the players' relationship with other nobles. The player send compliments, insults, bribes, or propose an alliance. Depending on the relationship with each noble, the player has a certain amount of leeway when attacking nobles. Ultimately, if the player attacks a noble enough times they will be irrevocably at war. If a player is allied with a noble, and attack that noble during a time of alliance, the player's relationships with all nobles are hurt, and the formerly allied noble is now at war with the player. The nobles will not attack you if allied, with the exception of the Countess. If the player is allied, the player may request assistance from attacking troupes, or ask to attack a specified county.
The game has limited diplomacy, where the player can make alliances and send money for bribery and to induce nobles to attack other nobles. The computer opponents are different characters with distinct personalities and strategies. There are four computer Nobles available. The game also includes LAN play with real players. The four computer nobles are:
While you must be the last noble standing to win any map; up until then you can ally with anyone in order to reduce the number of enemies on the map while ganging other nobles to remove them sooner. An Alliance allows 2 nobles to gang up on another noble and remove them faster. But since every A.I is different, they act differently in an Alliance. But keep in mind that every noble will end the Alliance after a set number of turns regardless of what you do. The good news is that you can immediately re-ally afterwards as if it never happened.
There are seven areas to which the peasants can be assigned: cattle herding, farming, wood chopping, blacksmithing, castle building, tilling, or mining. Citizens not active in one of these roles will remain idle.
Wood, iron, stone, and wheat are measured in tonnes; livestock and weapons are measured in individual units. These resources must be managed in order to build castles, placate hostile neighbors, and sustain the populace.
Towns are situated in counties; usually a county will have between eight and sixteen units of land to work. The exact makeup of the land varies. Towns always have a blacksmith workshop and may also have lumber, mining and quarrying but never both quarrying and mining in the same town.
At the beginning, the player has only one county and a few hundred peasants. As the player conquers more counties, the first ones, now prosperous, can send armies and money to help the newly conquered ones. The game ends when the human player loses all counties, or conquers the entire enemy occupied map. A player need only conquer the nobles, not all neutral counties as well.
The game consists of a map with several different counties, comprising a single nation or geographic area. These counties have a town, along with several types of industries available to utilize for conquering nobles and fields designated for food growth. Every map begins in the year 1268 in the winter season. There are four turns per year, beginning with winter, then spring, summer, and autumn.
There are a preset number of merchants per map. These merchants travel the land, and if they are in a player's county they may purchase material from them.
Each county is either a neutral county or a county under the rule of a noble. The territory of each noble is coloured to differentiate the board (for the Baron, it may be red; for the Knight, yellow, etc.). Starting out, each noble has one county as their own, and all other counties are neutral.
To expand a noble's lands, the noble must capture the county by either conquering the county town seat, or if there is an existing castle that is currently manned, lay siege to that castle and breach its defenses to overtake it. No neutral counties have castles naturally. If a noble has been driven from the county by revolt or other means, and the noble erected a castle, that will remain, but the county peasants will never man it in a neutral county.
On the map, all of a noble's existing territory must be touching. If player has four counties in a straight chain where each touches only the other, and an opponent captures one of the middle counties, the noble will automatically lose the weakest counties that have been sundered from the main body of his/her empire.
The proper mixture of resources is constantly changing to meet the demands of individual situations; stone will be needed to build castles at one moment, but then wood and iron may become more important.
Food is the resource requiring most careful management. Each province has 8 to 16 fields (up to 20 in the seige pack), which can be used for growing grain, cattle, or left fallow. Soil can become poor or fertile by overuse or fallowing when advanced farming is on, and random seasonal events such as good weather, floods, droughts, plague and so on also play an important part.
Unlike Lords of the Realm, which has three main food types (grain, sheep, cattle), this game features only cattle and grain for food. The player can run three types of food economy: allocating all fields to grain, all fields to cows, or running both cattle and grain together.
There are four ways a fertile field may be made barren, barring the advanced farming option (dealt with later). The first two ways are drought and flood. If a drought or flood occurs (prompted by the computer and determined within the game's code one turn previous), a field will be lost. For example, in the summer the game determines you will lose a field but does not tell you. The player selects End Turn, and in autumn the player will be notified of the lost field. To escape this fate, the player must go back not to the summer save file but the spring save file (if such a file does in fact exist). If a drought or flood occurs and it is a grain field, then a significant amount of the grain output for that year will be lost. The third way a field may be lost occurs when locusts strip the field bare and the fourth way to lose fields is if they are destroyed by enemy troops invading your lands.
There is a glitch which can be abused for the whole game regarding rationing food. It works best when your county is only fed with grain, although it works with cows also. It does not work at all if you use both. To use the exploit, set Rations to Triple and then drag the slider bar right (for grain) until the rationing is set as red Double or red Normal. If you drag the bar around you'll see that the amount of grain needed varies although the red double or normal rationing remains (to a point until you hit red Half Ration etc.). Normal set Normal Rations may use 300 grain to feed your peasants, but Triple set rations with the slider sitting one step above Half Ration (so that you are feeding your populace with "red Normal") will only use 100 grain. If Army Foraging is on, the ration slider may need to be tweaked each time an army moves through your lands.
Each county has a population. This population is affected by many different factors: overall happiness, tax rates, health, food supply and other random events such as plague. Players know exactly how many peasants they have, and how many births, deaths, immigrants, and emigrants they have each season. Overall population trends can also be traced via the population information screen for each county.
Each county has its own tax rate as determined by the noble, or general population if it is a neutral county, to generate income to fund the noble's campaign for the crown. The higher the tax rate, the less happiness the population of that specific county. Overall, if a player has a county that has normal health with a normal food supply, the tax rate can be set to 7%, which penalizes the county two happiness points, and barring other events the happiness can be maintained at 100%. If you reach a tax rate of 19% and above, then not only is that county's happiness penalized, but all your counties are penalized, though not nearly as heavy as the overtaxed county. The further a county is from the over-taxed county, the less influence the negative happiness multipler has.
The tax collected is calculated as follows (no castle): (Population x Tax Rate) x 3.2 = Crowns Received
There is a glitch that causes the tax rate to operate incorrectly. If you have a large number of counties and you put the tax rate up to 50 percent in all of them, the integer that is supposed to subtract points from happiness actually becomes positive, meaning your people will be happy despite astronomical tax rates.
In many ways, industry is the heart and soul of any winning strategy in Lords of the Realm II. With the four major industries (blacksmith, forestry, iron mine, and stone quarry), the player must correctly manage these resources to build his/her strength to win the game. A successful player must carefully allocate the working force to rehabilitate fields, grow food, cut wood, mine iron, and quarry stone. There is a delicate balance between growing enough food to keep your people healthy, and managing the individual industries successfully enough to not be conquered.
Industries can either be turned on or turned off. If they are on, then you see the industry icon on the map moving and showing activity. The iron mine, forestry, and quarry have a maximum output per season of 999 pieces. Everything produced from the industry can be sold to the merchants for half of its retail value. For example, to buy iron, it costs two crowns, while it sells for one crown.
The different types of industry are:
Resource availability affects food and industry differently:
The building of castles requires particularly skillful resource management. The construction of a castle is a high priority because it will help protect the town from enemy armies. Castles boost tax revenues when completed ,thus, covering their costs in the long run.
The castles that may be constructed, in order of least resource intensive to most resource intensive, are Wooden Palisade, Motte and Bailey, Norman Keep, Stone Castle and Royal Castle. The more expensive the castle, the more difficult for the enemy to successfully attack and the higher percentage of tax revenues collected.
There are five castles types that can be erected per county, and is highly recommended to stage a defense against oncoming enemy troops. If a county does not have a castle with stationed troops, then the enemy troops must attack the county town. There are only five castle types, from weakest(cheap) to strongest(expensive). The computer opponents will use all five types, though a Norman Keep or a Motte & Bailey are preferred. Once troops are garrisoned inside the castle, opposing forces must siege that castle to take the county. At the start of the turn when the siege takes effect, the player can either autocalc the battle or fight it in real time. Motte & Baileys, Stone Castles, and Royal Castles are defended by moats as well, and all castles have boiling oil available to attack.
To build a castle, you select the castle building option, and select whichever castle you want to build. Castles also effect tax rates. The stronger the castle type, the more percentage the castle adds to the tax income per each county.
There is a well-known glitch that is greatly beneficial in castle building. A Royal Castle needs 3000 stone and 800 wood for construction, however, if you start to build the Wooden Palisade first then the Motte & Bailey then the Norman Keep (and so on) the resources needed for the previous castle will be credited back to you. The glitch is that you haven't actually built the previous castle, but you get resources returned. You can get 600 wood for free for upgrading to a Norman Keep and if you upgrade to a Royal Castle, it will only cost 1000 stone (and some wood depending what you did with the free load). To maximise the free resources, sell all your wood and stone at the beginning, build up to a Norman Keep then use or sell the wood (for food!). You can then choose to commence towards a Royal Castle once you have a surplus of wood. Which ever method you use, wood will be first allocated to the castle before the blacksmith.
The player can raise an army when the time is right to attack, or if threatened. Armies take people from the town and train them into one of the seven available classes of soldiers: knights, archers, pikemen, macemen, crossbowmen, swordsmen, and peasants. The player also has the option of hiring mercenaries, though these are loyal only to money and will desert if the player doesn't have enough to pay them. Mercenaries will not fight alongside other mercenaries due to past rivalries. The player's recruitment strategy should be based on the necessary power, speed, ranged attack abilities, and number of the army. The size of the army is determined by the town's resources and citizen happiness. The game limits the creation, spliting or merging armies at minimum 50 and maximum 1500 soldiers.
There is a glitch which can be abused which enables creation of less than 50 man armies. Since a castle holds a certain amount of troops, trying to garrison a castle with an army larger than what will fit, the game prompts you to split the troops so that some may enter for garrison and the others remain behind outside. The glitch is that you can move a single unit into the castle, then extract this unit as a single (or more specifically a 'less than 50 man") army. Swarming (sacking and pillaging the county's hamlets, fields and industry) and stalling a large enemy army is what these mini armies do best. It is worst still since splitting a large army like this does not use up movement points.
Another glitch enables the creation of an army (much) larger than the 1500 maximum. If two army units (with unequal unit totals) on the field are merged, this new single army (limited by the rules to 1500 troops) will originate from where the larger portion of the troops were originally from. This can be abused by disbanding many newly merged armies and then creating a new single army from the very much larger populace in that originating county. Disbanding many large (normal limit) armies (as long as they all go to the same county) enables that county to make an army limited only to the happiness (once at zero = no more troop created). It is possible to make a 10,000 troop army, or larger.
To wage a successful campaign and conquer enemies, a player must successfully manage the military. Armies are raised by drawing from county populations. The more people that are conscripted per season, the more happiness is deducted from that county's happiness. When people are drafted, you can either give them a weapon you own, turning them into that class, or leave them as unarmed Peasants who will run into battle with pitchforks.
Weapons can be made by Blacksmiths or bought from Merchants.(But keep in mind it would cost less to buy the iron and wood then make the weapons yourself) Once you give the weapon to a Peasant on the Army Creation screen, he permanently becomes that class and will fight as it until he either dies or gets disbanded.(When you disband an army, all units go back to Peasants and you get your weapons returned.)
These are all of the unit classes you will use in combat. Hand-to-hand:
Long-range:
These units are ranged and excel at adding damage upon units that cannot reach them in melee range. In melee range however, they lose their potential and are easily killed.
After an army has been created, the player can garrison it in a castle to protect the town, disband it, split it in two, move it, or keep it still. An army has 15 “points” of movement each turn. The amount of points required to move a given distance depends on the terrain; difficult terrain requires more points than easier terrain.
If two enemy armies meet, a battle will begin. Unlike the county management part of the game, battles take place in real time. The player has a complete view of the battlefield and can individually manage units or groups of units.
If an army moves against an enemy castle, a siege will take place. A siege battle is won if either all the defenders are slain, or if the castle flag (in the most defensible part of the castle) is captured. Siege tactics differ from open-field battle in that the player may need to take into account the enemy's fortifications and, in three castle designs, a moat. The sieging army may build battering rams, catapults, and siege towers to aid its assault.
An army can also destroy fields, industry sites and hamlets in an enemy county. This can soften up a county for capture, or lower its morale to the point that it revolts from its current overlord, rendering it neutral.
The A.I. can be stalled by removing a garrison from a castle. For an army to attack a county, it must either siege the castle or combat the town. If the army is heading for the town center, garrison a castle and it will force the computer army to turn around next turn to go siege the castle. If you remove the garrison before the siege commences, it will force the computer player to turn around and go back to the town center.
The game offers an option where the player can create a game designed to test his or her skills. Several factors such as beginning the game with limited resources, limited map view, or other handicaps can be set to make victory rather difficult.
The game had an expansion pack released in 1997, Lords of the Realm II: Siege Pack, consisting of new combat scenarios. It was followed years later by a supposed sequel, Lords of the Realm III, which was in effect a completely different game.
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