Lords Of The Realm

[Ecthy]

THE old school DOS economic simulation game schlechthin

Discovered it a few weeks ago. the first time I played it, I was more than baffled by the apparent complexity, but after getting into it, it's simple and addictive

anyone else playing Lords?

[loinburger]

A few years ago I'd get together from time to time with a group of friends and have a Lords of the Realm multiplayer game. Totally addictive, and tons of fun. It's a pity that you couldn't control the battles in a MP game, though, because the auto-calc was ridiculously in favor of peasant armies (there's NO WAY that my 200 knights could be defeated by 400 peasants, but the auto-calc claims that this was how the battle turned out. Ridiculous).

Lords of the Realm II was pretty good, but the inability to make a customized castle and the inability to starve out your opponent when laying siege were real turn-offs for me. They also eliminated the efficiency rating of your peasants when given new jobs; in LOTR if you take a hundred peasants and suddenly turn them into Armorers then they start work at 9% efficiency, and increasing that number is a long, slow process (and reset if you reassign your Armorers to become Serfs or Builders or something else), while in LOTR II your 100 Armorers automatically work at 100% efficiency (an oversimplification of the original's economic system). The original was much better.

[Ecthy]

WOW, now I know what those % things are meant to be.... I never figured it out.... well, it means it IS stupid to take armorers on the fields in autumn and winter.... that makes economy even more interesting

[loinburger]

Originally posted by Ecthelion
WOW, now I know what those % things are meant to be.... I never figured it out.... well, it means it IS stupid to take armorers on the fields in autumn and winter.... that makes economy even more interesting

Exactly, while in LOTR II there is no problem with moving your workers around randomly.

It would be nice in LOTR if your workers didn't lose all of their experience at once; for example, if you could take your 100% armorers to the fields for a season, and then be able to return them to the blacksmith functioning at 80% capacity. There were a lot of small improvements like this that I was hoping to see in LOTR II (rather than the oversimplification that LOTR II turned out to be).

The combat in LOTR II is very fun, though, especially siege combat.

[Ecthy]

well, it actually means you shouldn't bother putting your field workers back into armories for spring and summer, since they're efficiency would suck big time... but putting them into the forest (14% starting efficiency I think) makes sense, eh?

hey, I'm just playing a game where 2 of 4 provinces are COMPLETELY feeded with dairy production... all fields are filled with cattle, what a nice look... pity is, the province grows and grows, and one day the fields will be full, with no chance of getting the cattle growing .... well, I still have my 2 big other provinces, which produce more than enough grain for their people... too bad it takes almost a year to transport stuff from one province to another.... are there ways to invent new transport means, like railroad?

[loinburger]

One of the best ways to deal with a province getting too large is to conscript a load of peasants and ship them off to their deaths, or at least to an enemy/neutral province where they won't be foraging off of your land. (If you've got some weapons stockpiled then by all means arm them, but otherwise don't let it bother you if they're wiped out in their first battle). Peasant armies like that are great for pillaging enemy provinces (destroying fields and villages).

[Ecthy]

doesn't building up a peasant army do bad to that province's happiness?

[loinburger]

Yes, but lowering happiness to moderate levels can also help reduce population growth. A happy population reproduces more quickly.

If your province is overpopulated and your people are unhappy, then you're screwed. As soon as your population exceeds the capacity for your province you'll have to cut rations, your people will become sick and unhappy, and soon you'll have a peasant revolt on your hands. If you're in this situation then your best bet is to strip all of the resources out of the province, raise a huge peasant army to go marauding through an enemy province, and give up the province as lost. Once the peasants revolt you can kill the pitiful peasant army with a real army (either your own or a mercenary army), give the province a couple of years to recover, and bam, you can then ship all of the stripped resources back into the province and start over again.

Keep your population in good health and your people will be happy enough that you can conscript the occasional army from their ranks without going through this nightmare scenario.

[Urban Ranger]

Nah, I don't like LotR. For starters, the program has a tendency of saying "screw you" to a human player by having nasty crap happen to him even if he's not leading. Another one is I found out how to destroy an enemy army of any size with just a small group of archers, with the exception that if the enemy army is a larger group of archers.