tryed to stay awake
there is any number of ways this game could have gone and been , if not great, then atleast not bad. but my feeling is that in trying to be so many different things to get as big a market as possable, that it just fails at all of them.
as a RTS 'war game' its horrible. you have swords-men and archers, with a few generic seige engines tossed in for good measure. there is no possable way to use tactics of any kind in combat. its just 'get there the fastest with the mostest ' to win. the idea of controlling segments of the map was a nice idea, implimentation was horrible. if you do manage to capture an outpost all the buildings in the segment are destroyed. not that that is a real problem since it takes about 8 seconds to build your OWN buildings in their place but ive yet to hear of any midevil warlord that would totaly raze a chunk of land they intended to take over for their own use. most of the combat in the game just makes no sense.
as a city builder, well the best thing i can say is that the city kinda looks cool. the FIRST thing that jumps into my mind is that your starting out with preset buildings that you cant move. so instead of scouting a map and deciding for yourself the best place to start your city your stuck with what ever location the game plunks you down at. the second thing that jumps out at me is the total lack of information about basic city stats like how much of a given thing is to be consumed by your present population so your left by trial and error to guess what you need to build more (or less) of, is your two hunters huts enough for a population of 40? are they going to starve this winter? or are you going to have a glut of meat instead? do you need more wheat farms to keep your bakers working all winter? or are you just filling up valuable store house space with more wheat that you can use in 5 years? just how many fields does 1 level 3 wheat farm need to be efficent? do you build 2 fields? 3? 4? same goes for other food related buildings, how many fishing huts do you need to keep a smoke house going without either a shortage or a back log? its all trial and error. horrible.
add to this the seeming random way that raw resources are either limited or unlimited and its gets worse. trees seem to grow like weeds so you never run out of wood, on the other hand, stone. STONE is limited. it can take a hunderd years to grow a good sized tree to replace the one you just choped down , but rocks that are litteraly every place you look everywhere in the entire world are limited. i could go on losts more but this is a good start on the basic flaws that make this game a waste of money in the $50 range. the whole game just seemed to me to be a collection of 'wouldnt it be cool if we did this' ideas all smashed together put in the microwave for 45 minuts and served on a fresh bed of pickled cow toung. on paper it all sounds great , in practice its just trying to be to many things at once and failing in ALL of them because of it. in the campaign your basicaly driven into a combat situation in every mission, but the combat stinks. the city building is horrible because your NOT building a city it more like your building a base just to churn out the millitary units you need to get the green check mark on the random list of 'do this' crap you need to move on to the next mission.
i rated this a 5 simply because ive played some truly craptastic games in my life and this one isnt QUITE that bad. but id certiany wate untill it drops to the $20 range max before id pick it up. perhaps the worst thing in this games case is that no ammount of patching or expantions will make it any better. the whole game is flawed from its basic foundation and there is no way to fix it short of starting over from scratch. a typical patch might get rid of some of the bugs, but it wont fix the basic nature of the game that is the true heart of the problems.