Although unit AI is relatively solid, there are certainly occasions where your mage will attack a single enemy and then wander off, oblivious to the fact that six more goblins are clinging to the hem of his robe.Īdditionally, the incentive system quickly becomes problematic when your heroes reach the higher levels, with rewards soon reaching into the thousands before enough of your units will respond to whichever mythical monstrosity is besieging your palace. The goblins tend to attack in swarms of between five and ten units, yet you can only place attack flags on single enemies. It is in fighting such a large number of enemies that cracks in Kingmaker's indirect unit control system begin to appear. Ten minutes into the very first mission Kingmaker begins throwing enemies at you, and from then on the flow is pretty much endless. The new eight mission campaign pitches you against the nefarious Lord Blackviper and his pet goblin horde “horde” being very much the active word here. Your back is pressed against the wall from the start. Goblins, you will grow to hate them very quickly.Īngering the ranger's guild was a mistake Andy lived to regret. This system worked well in Majesty 2 mainly due to the gradual learning curve and the fact that the majority of the game concentrated on the expansion of your territories. The quasi-autonomy of your units effectively removes much of the micromanagement that drags many RTS' into the mire of mediocrity, your job in being to ensure that your units are equipped with the best weapons, spells and armour the game's economy has to offer. Increase the reward, however, and rangers, wizards, and eventually even rogues (who are averse to direct combat) would dive into the fray. For example, placing an attack flag with a low reward would only result in a response from your warriors. The more gold you placed on a flag, the more units would respond to it. Instead controlling your motley crew of fantasy stereotypes was done indirectly by placing various types of objective markers (known in-game as “flags”) around the map, before offering your heroic minions a monetary incentive to do your bidding. Majesty 2's major feature was that you didn't have direct control of your units. Mike Tyson's new boxing gloves were immediately outlawed. Yet the manner in which they have gone about it seems entirely at odds with the mechanics of the original game. To be fair, Paradox's intention with Kingmaker was always to provide a new challenge to existing players, a goal which they have certainly accomplished. In fact, they should have called it Kingbreaker. I can say without exaggeration that Kingmaker is the hardest game I've played in a very long time. Instead, it builds a third road running parallel to the second, which involves providing a virtually identical experience to the original game and then ramping up the difficulty to astronomical levels. Yet at the same time, it sort of doesn't. Majesty 2: Kingmaker very much goes down the second of these roads. The second, and considerably more heavily trodden is to tailor the expansion around your core audience by fixing the problems of the original and throwing in a few extras, which in the case of an RTS is usually new units and new strategic opportunities. The first road is to alter the experience of the original game significantly enough in an attempt to entice players who ignored the game first time around. When it comes to expansion packs, there are two roads that developers usually go down.
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