Majesty 2

[Lostinthewood]

Thanks Freejack!!!!!! for my new addiction......

Downloaded Majesty 2 fom steam for a paltry sum of something like 7.99 played the tutorial, tried playing the first scenario after tutorial and had to put it away for my trip.

Had a free evening and dug back in....

It is fun. It is a fantasy empire sim with your heros doing whatever they want, including watch your village burn down unless you offer them enough money. Sometimes what they do can help, sometimes hurt.

I have played through all the novice and a number of advanced scenarios(have not gotten to expert yet) and I enjoy it. Each scenario in the campaign can be completed more than once, so the first time you can actually use to learn what needs to be done at first.

Pluses: fun and addictive single play; can be played multi-player online; easy to follow directions from your assistant to complete quests;fun.

minuses: once you complete the requirements in an area, it closes. You can repeat it, but can't continue on. No manual, but a full pdf can be found online, and I need to read it if I want to do online multiplayer.

All in all I enjoy it and it is a fun little game, especially your advisory, who as FJ put it, talks in a bad Sean Connery voice.

[Freejack]

We bought it on sale for $7.50, but it's back up to the regular $29.99 price. I'm still not sure I'd pay $30 for it, but if it goes on sale again, I would heartily recommend you grab this one (if it's the sort of game you enjoy).

Filling in on what Lost said, it's very much a tongue-in-cheek game. Lots of humorous little quests and the mission text is generally funny. Even the things the villagers say are funny.

The basic premise is that you, as the king, construct buildings. The villagers who do the construction and repairs, the tax collectors who walk around collecting taxes from the buildings, the guards who (weakly) protect your buildings, and the heroes you hire all operate autonomously. The only way you interact with your heroes is by setting quest flags and awarding rewards to those quests. The available quests are explore (set a flag out in the fog-of-war and heroes will go explore that area and uncover the map for you), defend (set a flag on a building or person or caravan and your heroes will defend it), attack (pretty self-explanatory) and fear (set the fear flag on something and your heroes will sort of avoid the area).

What I find genuinely interesting about this game is the economic system. In most city-sim games, buildings cost upkeep, so the more buildings you have, the more it costs you to maintain them. Majesty 2 works a little differently. Each building of the same type costs more to build. So far, this has only been an issue when building defensive towers because you might have six or eight or more of these. However, it does not cost you money to have the buildings, in fact, you make money from each of your buildings in taxes. Additionally, heroes will spend the money they make from quests or treasure chests they find in the wild in your shops, which makes you more money. So yes, you have to spend money on your heroes to make them do things, but then you make money off them when they use their awards in your shops. It definitely makes you feel less bad about spending money on those quests.

Another interesting feature is at the end of every mission you get to make one of your heroes a lord. This basically allows you to carry over heroes from one mission to the next. The catch? You have to build a moderately expensive building to hire the lords. It's actually an interesting dynamic, though. In one mission I was fighting creatures that were very tough right at the beginning and every low-level hero I had was dying fast. I restarted the mission and instead built a Tower of Lords (or whatever it's called) right out of the gate. That gave me (very expensive) access to high level heroes right at the beginning of the mission. That allowed me to hold off the invading critters long enough to start leveling up the low-level heroes.

In fact, it seems like the missions are somewhat puzzle based. Which buildings to construct when to give you what advantages. At some point it's just about overwhelming the enemy with superior high-level heroes, but it can get very challenging early on as you struggle against the onslaughts of critters.

So yes, I have really enjoyed this little game. :)

[Corwin of Amber]

i loved the first one, the 2nd wasnt bad, but not as good as the first, IMHO.

[Avalloc]

I keep getting murdered on level with the Dragon.

[Freejack]

Avalloc, that's the level where I built the Hall of Lords right away to defend against the flying serpents long enough to build up second level towers.

[Freejack]

Also, wait until that first wave of attacks from the dragon are done or you'll lose your partially built investment when the dragon comes through that first time.

[Lostinthewood]

Also, wait until that first wave of attacks from the dragon are done or you'll lose your partially built investment when the dragon comes through that first time.

I found that out the hard way :( Losing a market and smithy

[Avalloc]

Yup, level 14 Ranger saved me. Took 8 tries before I got the proper startup.