18-08-2004 21:36									#1
	Lords of the Realms III Lose 30 kilos (of popups)

It's pretty cheap, $20 right off the shelf at Wal Mart and most other places. Kinda queasy about getting it as LotR and LotR2 were two sides of a coin, one great, one sucky.

Got it, installed it. Art is pretty decent, terrain graphics are beautiful. Game..... isn't at all like I expected.

Micromanagement is gone, looks like the MoO3 philosophy is going to be an industry wide trend. Arghhhh! Anyway, I gave MoO 3 three shots and winning me over (the equivilent of giving Firaxis/InfoGrames three shots at making a bug free playable game, they just aren't going to succeed) and lo and behold its a pretty darn good game.

It's not like the prior LotRealms games though, its actually more realistic. You have Counties, which are cut up into 3-8 subsections. You have a court of various vassals, Warriors, Clergy, Serfs (farm and generate food and labor), and Burghers (generate gold and Mercenaries for hire). You then pick from these vassals and assign one to a subsection. In the case of Warrior they then build up their band of troops and you call them up to do your bidding, consolidate them into larger armies, sack your neighbors, etc.

You have three attributes, Christianity, Chivalry, and Honor. These affect which vassals join your court etc. I had a very high ratings in all three and had 4 Templar Knights as vassals and then the Templar Master entered my vassal pool! Can anyone say Templar army?

There are levels that by taking in several initial vassals you then get higher vassals (ie, after you have so many Knights, you get Captains (more troops, better skills), whith so many Captains you get Marshalls, etc.

Unfortunately, some rat-bastard recruited a Corrupt Cardinal to destroy my Christianity rating dropping it to 1 (was 7, which is the highest and I had slowly disbanded all my Cathedrals as it couldn't get any higher) and all of my Templars left me. I'm stuck with lots of unassigned land. And all these other lords start declaring Crusades on my craven lands!

Anyway, its the best medieval era game I've played. Its very realistic and offers a lot of different elements of gameplay if you give it a chance. Just don't expect it to be like the prior versions.

	18-08-2004 21:57									#2
	Inflate your Upload Space

IT SUCKS.

IT DESTROYED A BRILLIANT GAME, AND I WILL NEVER FORGIVE THEM.

All I wanted was a LotR2 with better graphics, improved multiplayer, and maybe some more unit diversity, THATS IT.

It's too much like an RTS now. FREAKING WRONG. DIE.

	18-08-2004 22:21									#3
	Support Apolyton, buy Call to Power 2

Give it another chance, and don't think of it as LotR III.

Seriously, Uber, we should look at taking the $MiniGame concept and making our own Feudal TBS game. The entire game industry has ditched TBS for RTS and we could corner that nitch market. I have a game pretty much worked out and could do the graphics but I don't have a clue about the code writing.