From: mmwang@adobe.com (Michael Wang)
Subject: Re: Castles II - review?
Organization: Adobe Systems Incorporated
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1992 02:05:03 GMT

In article <BxCy15.Fo6@mach1.wlu.ca> veen2976@mach1.wlu.ca (veenstra christopher) writes:
>  I was just at my local software store and saw Castles II.  If anyone
>remembers Castles I, I liked the build your castle stuff but not much else.
>It looks like the second one is a lot better, almost a cross of Castles,
>Civilization, and Warlords.  Of course, that was the only impression I could
>get from the back of the box.  So, could anyone post or email me a review of
>this game before I go shell out $60 for it?

The game is sort of a cross between a scaled down version of the
original _Castles_, Koei's strategy games like _Romance of the Three
Kindoms_, and Cinemaware's _Defender of the Crown_ thrown in for good
measure. I got it yesterday (Sunday) and played it for about seven
hours straight. Initial impression is that it is good, but not great.

The object of the game is to accumulate enough victory points to be
declared King by the Pope. The main way this is accomplished is by
conquering territory, which is very likely to be held by another
person (computer-controlled) bent on doing the same thing. Since the
main focus of the game is no longer building castles, I think the game
title is slightly misleading, since I would bet many people would have
expected a sequel to Castles to be something more like _Siege_.

In any event, the way the game works is that the world is divided up
into discrete territories, similiar to the way Koei's maps are
designed, and each territory contains one resource that you will need
like gold, food, timber and stone, and iron. You will need these
resources to perform various actions like building castles, recruiting
troops for your army, paying penance to the Pope, etc. The way you
manage your empire is by assigning "points" to various tasks. So you
may have some points assigned to the gold refining task, or infantry
recruiting task, or spying on a territory task. By managing your tasks
and points wisely, you can build up your empire.

Of course, there are four other computer-controlled players trying to
the same thing as you, so it is inevitable that you will bump into one
or more of these players as you expand. At that point, you have the
option of trying to conquer them militarily, or, if you are still
weak and you have lots of gold, you can send over lots of diplomats to
try to bribe them to be your friend. Managing relations with these
other players is tricky since at some point you probably will need to
attack one of your neighbors, but you don't want the other players
pissed at you since they will start trying to sabotage your empire or
even attack you directly.

Which brings me to my biggest gripe (so far) about the game. The way
armies are handled really sucks in this game. Instead of having
individual armies stationed in territories and moving them around to
defend or attack, you sort of have this abstract pool of men that
aren't located anywhere. When you attack a territory, you have to wait
the same amount of time to move your troops to that territory(which is
quite lengthy) no matter where your previous attack was. In other
words, if I attack one territory and then decide to attack a territory
next to it, the setup time for the second attack is the same as an
attack on a territory one the opposite side of the board as the first.
However, when it comes to defending, suddenly your army has rocket
boosters and will show up in whichever territory is attacked. Now
obviously this game doesn't strive for realism, but it really bugs me
the way they handled this. I would have much rather preferred having
armies that I could position where I needed them for attack or defense
like the Koei games.

Another gripe is that there seems to be an undocumented limit on how
big an army you can have at one time. It seems to be dependent on how
many territories you control, but I can't quite figure it out. The
limitation is a problem, because if another player gets ahead of you
in territory size later in the game, it becomes almost impossible to
defeat him militarily because his army will usually be bigger than
yours, and with the insta-teleport feature, he will always outnumber
you if you attack him.

As for the castle building stuff, you can still design your own
castles, but the building of it is handled automatically, you no
longer have to recruit builders, etc. You have some more control over
the positioning of your troops and directing them in combat, but the
titled-derived "Castles" part has been substantially toned down.

Though I made some mention of Koei's games, Castles II is less complex
than that genre. That doesn't mean the game is simple to beat though.
I've been playing on the "easy" level and have not managed to win yet.
There is quite a bit of strategy involved in managing your empire, and
the game looks to a good, but not brilliant, release from Interplay.
-- 
Michael Wang
mmwang@mv.us.adobe.com
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games