Lords of the Realm 2

The Short


Pros
- Hybrid turn based / real time strategy
- Part country sim, part resource management sim, part siege sim, and more
- Music is fantastic
- Battle against AI or over "Modem Network" (works on modern networks, too)
- Tons of scenarios, adding the "Siege Pack" throws even more into the mix
- Lots of unit types, each with their own strengths and weaknesses
- AI opponents are fully voiced and say some pretty great stuff

Cons
- After a few games you can figure out exactly how the AI works
- "Autocalculating" battles can be influenced if you know what units count for "more"
- Knights and macemen are stupidly overpowered. Crossbows during sieges are as well
- Sieges against AI opponents are too easy; capturing the flag to win instantly breaks it (the AI never guards their flag)
- Alliances are totally useless with AI opponents
- While financially ruining somebody is a viable strategy against other humans, you can never out an AI opponent by burning all his fields and starving him out. It just doesn't work.
- The sequel, Lords of the Realm III, was so awful it killed the franchise. Thanks a lot, Sierra.

Your county, my lord. Don't screw it up. 

The Long

The king is dead, and he has left no heir. You are one of a handful of lords vying for the throne, and stuff is about to get bloody. You all start with the one county you ruled over while the king still lived - the rest of the counties claiming neutrality - and now is the time to raise an army, build a castle, and conquer the land. Oh, and make sure your people are getting fed, staying happy, paying taxes, and gathering resources to make more weapons for the ongoing war effort. That's important, too!

Lords of the Realm 2 is an interesting hybrid of county management and real-time battles and sieges. The general gist of the game is simple: build up a powerful county, form an army, and crush all opposition. The difficult part comes in managing all the resources required to pull this off, and that is where Lords of the Realm 2 really shines. It's neither too hard (Civilization) or too easy (Command and Conquer) to figure out, and it fits its unique groove very well.

Sieges can be bloody affairs. Sorry for the blurry screenshot. 

Lords of the Realm 2's county simulation can be either as complex or simple as you want it. You basically are given a group of peasants (the number you have is based on population), and you can designate where exactly you want them to focus on. Some can work the fields. Others can tend the cows (boo cows! Go straight grain from the first season!). Some might work on reclaiming fields your enemies have burned, or work on the castle. Others can cut wood or mine metal or stone. They could forge weapons from your resources, and then you can enlist them into your army. The game gives you the ability to pick and choose exactly how many go in which spot.

Or, if this is too complex for you, you can use a slider to auto-assign. Again, only as hard as you need it to be (and when it's endgame and you have 20-odd counties, the slider comes in real handy to prevent hour-long turns). 

Every turn is a season, meaning you plant in winter (or spring, but your harvest will suffer for it) and harvest the following fall. You'll have to make sure you have enough food to feed your people between those two points, or else they'll lose faith in you and drop in happiness (taxes also make them pissed off). Drop happiness too low and they'll kick you out and start marauding other counties for food in a bloody, violent swath. Crazy stuff.

This game looked pretty good back in the day, and still holds up

Once you think you have all that stuff under control, you have to build an army and go kick the other nobles right back to where they came from. Army building hurts your county's happiness, but you can recruit from any county you own, making each a sort of self-sustaining city-state (though you can send supplies to and from your counties, but they have to make the trip there safely and over several seasons). You can pick from a lot of unit types: swordsmen with armor, macemen with IMBA attack power, archers, high-defense pikemen, crossbowmen, or the super-elite knights. You can also just enlist peasants to fight if you don't have the weapons, though they'll suck worse than archers in melee.

The game is a weird mix of turn-based and real time. Once you enter a season, the game proceeds in real time until everyone is finished. Armies move, changes to counties are made, etc. The battles are also in real time. However, once everyone is finished the game waits until everyone is done with the turn, and then it proceeds to the next season and the cycle repeats. It's an interesting mix, and I think it works well.

You have to have the resources to make different weapons, or you can just buy them from a merchant

Essentially, that's the game. As your empire expands it gets harder and harder to keep everything well defended, so castles are required to give you an edge. AI opponents can be bribed, complimented, or insulted, and often times they'll ally with you if they like you enough. Don't expect them to help you out ever, though, since form alliances basically means they just won't attack you (and some of the more devious opponents, like the Countess, will stab you in the back when she thinks it benefits her). The AI have four different personas: The Knight (who is aggressive and abandons county building), The Bishop (who focuses on building castles and obtaining wealth), The Baron (who is probably the smartest opponent in terms of military might and county stability), and The Countess (who is sort of a mix between the other three, and the most annoying ally of all). You unfortunately can't determine exactly who is in your scenario with you (it is all pre-determined based on the map), but the variety is enough to keep things somewhat fresh.

The game has lots of maps. The only way to get this game currently is through Good Old Games, which includes Lords of the Realm 1 (which isn't that great) and the Siege Pack expansion for Lords of the Realm 2 (which is awesome). The expansion adds scenarios that are basically just battles for you to attempt with pre-set rules, as well as a bunch of new maps including some silly ones. Ever want to battle across the United States in a medieval setting? No? Well, too bad, because it's in the game, and it's hilarious.

The multiplayer has a plethora of options available

If you think the game is too easy, you can change it up with a bunch of options. Want it so armies have to forage in the counties they are currently occupying? You can do that (and starve your enemies out by camping out on their lands). Want everybody to start with destroyed fields and no money? You can do that. Want to be forced to employ crop rotation, least your fields fall barron? Yep, that's an option too. There's a lot of cool bonuses that ramp up the complexity of the game, and doing an Impossible run (where all fields are barron and your counties start off starving to death) with everybody starting with Royal Castles (basically the biggest, most impenetrable castle in the game) is a fantastic challenge. 

There are a few issues, though. While the AI opponents are unique, they tend to employ similar strategies. Once they start losing they'll make 10 man peasant armies and just run around burning your crops out of spite, which is especially annoying since you can do that to them but they never seem to suffer any consequences. While the army mix is useful, you can also just go "all knights" if you are good at resource management and basically sweep through most battles. The "autocalculator" for battles (which you can employ if you don't want to fight them) can also be broken: it counts crossbowmen, swordsman, and knights way higher than other units, so if you stuff those in a castle you'll basically win any auto-calculated siege. When you are besieging, you can win the battle instantly by capturing an enemy's "flag" (usually in the middle of a base), but they don't do a very good job of defending it; bash down the gate, send a speedy knight, and end the battle with minimal casualties. 

Maceman are also super-powerful if you choose to fight out a battle. Their low armor is easily compensated by their insane attack power. 

The music is also a standout. Harkening back to the day when RTS games actually cared about their soundtracks, every song in the game is moody and memorable. I used to extract the .wav files from the CD, convert them to mp3s, and burn them onto CDs for my Discman (back when a CD burner was 2x and cost like $400). The battle and siege music is particularly memorable, but what was neat was the overworld songs: they changed as the situations got more and more dire, the songs getting darker and more foreboding. It was a neat touch, and really helped ramp up the excitement as you knew you were finally going to knock the stupid Baron from the game.

The early music is nice and quiet. It gets crazier later. Also, awesome CG!

I love this game, not going to lie. It was pretty much this and The Incredible Machine 2 that made up the bulk of my childhood. I still remember arguing with my mother that she should let me buy the "T" rated game (it's been re-rated to "E" now) since I was only 10. I won the battle for this game (and lost it for Warcraft 2. I might be singing a different song had that been the case) and am so glad I did. Lords of the Realm 2 is one of my favorite strategy games ever, and I still go back and play it all the time. 

It's available from Good Old Games, right now, with the expansion and the (mediocre) first game for $6.  You should go buy it right now. No, I don't get commissions off of it or anything, but I really freaking love this game and you will too. Look, I'll even provide a link; I never do that in my reviews: Click me!

Five out of five stars. Seriously, did you expect any less? Now to go punch Sierra who got bought by Vivendi who got bought by Activision right in their stupid face for releasing that atrocity that was Lords of the Realm 3 and killing one of my favorite series ever. How could you mess this up?

They won't win any awards for boxart variation, though. Did they seriously just take the original picture and Photoshop the backdrop red? I guess Warcraft II did that too, but come on...lazy!