Lords of the Realm II

Lords of the Realm II
Cover art for Lords of the Realm II
Developer(s)	Impressions Games
Publisher(s)	Sierra Entertainment
Platform(s)	PC, Macintosh
Genre(s)	Turn-based strategy
Mode(s)	Single-player Multiplayer

Lords of the Realm II is a computer game published by Sierra Entertainment and developed by Impressions Games. It was first released for the PC on October 31, 1996, and is the second game in the Lords of the Realm series.

The game takes place in a medieval setting, with rulers of several counties warring for the right to be king of the land. Players grow crops, accumulate resources, manufacture weapons, manage armies, build and lay siege to castles, and attempt to conquer their enemies.

Overview

Lords of the Realm II is very different from many medieval strategy games. The game has a strong medieval feel, but it is historically based. There is no magic, and unlike many strategy games, it has no technology tree. Perhaps its most remarkable feature is the need to carefully manage food, population and happiness levels in order to build population levels whilst avoiding Malthusian meltdowns. The large number of both random and player-generated events that can affect province happiness provides an almost constant level of challenge for the player, which is part of the reason the game is regarded as a classic by many players.

There are two major game types that the developers merged into a successful hybrid. The first is turn-based resource management. Players grow crops, accumulate resources, manufacture weapons, manage armies, build and lay siege to castles, and attempt to conquer their enemies. The battles are real time, with players able to control units individually or in group formations. Players may also allow the computer to calculate the outcome of the battle.

Compared to the original, Lords of the Realm II is much more robust, with better graphics and music, and an improved management system.

Gameplay

The game begins with the player ruling over a peaceful and unproductive county with a small population.

Diplomacy

Diplomacy can influence the course of events in the game, although there is little opportunity for its use among the mostly-violent interactions between counties. The player can engage in trade and communication by sending insults, compliments, money, or an offer of alliance to other nobles. Insults and miserliness will turn the noble against the player, but monetary generosity and compliments will have the opposite effect.

Closely related to the Nobles, diplomacy consists of the players' relationship with other nobles. The player send compliments, insults, bribes, or propose an alliance. Depending on the relationship with each noble, the player has a certain amount of leeway when attacking nobles. Ultimately, if the player attacks a noble enough times they will be irrevocably at war. If a player is allied with a noble, and attack that noble during a time of alliance, the player's relationships with all nobles are hurt, and the formerly allied noble is now at war with the player. The nobles will not attack you if allied, with the exception of the Countess. If the player is allied, the player may request assistance from attacking troupes, or ask to attack a specified county.

Computer Players

The game has limited diplomacy, where the player can make alliances and send money for bribery and to induce nobles to attack other nobles. The computer opponents are different characters with distinct personalities and strategies. There are four computer Nobles available. The game also includes LAN play with real players. The four computer nobles are:

• The Knight - Young, brash, and impulsive, the easiest of the computers. The Knight is very quick to muster an army, but prefers quantity over quality, usually filling it with peasants. He attacks often, and favors frequent expansion over developing a county. His constant army recruitment rarely allows him an opportunity to raise a massive army and he will seldom build a castle stronger than a Wooden Palisade. His strength lies is his speed, but does not manage counties very well and relies solely on cattle to feed his people.
• The Baron - A wise, experienced, and cautious man, the Baron is the polar opposite of the Knight and seeks to consolidate a very strong base of operations before further expanding his territory. Usually the slowest noble to expand or raise troops, filling armies with a mix of armed soldiers. He uses solely cattle to feed his people and prefers Motte & Bailey castles to defend his counties. He favors armies of archers, swordsmen, and knights.
• The Bishop - The Bishop is a clergyman who thinks he has a divine right to rule the land. While not as aggressive as the Knight, he raises the largest of armies, containing archers, pikemen, and absolutely massive amounts of peasants. He uses a mix of cattle and grain to feed his people. The Bishop loves to construct Royal Castles very quickly and is willing to sacrifice his people’s happiness to accomplish this via high taxes. He can be difficult to get rid of because of his large castles but high conscription and tax rates rarely afford him the ability to develop a strong base, sometimes even losing counties to revolt.
• The Countess - A cold and calculating opponent, the Countess is the most difficult computer. She excels both at managing counties and raises well-equipped armies favoring macemen and crossbowmen. She tries to switch to feed her people with grain only and is usually the quickest to build a castle or successfully conquer a county. She rarely loses a county and will stay powerful indefinitely if not dealt with, often eliminating the other nobles for you.

Alliances

While you must be the last noble standing to win any map; up until then you can ally with anyone in order to reduce the number of enemies on the map and even gang up on nobles to eliminate them sooner. Every noble acts somewhat differently in an alliance, but keep in mind that every noble will end the Alliance after a set number of turns regardless of what you do. The good news is that you can immediately re-ally afterwards as if it never happened.

• The Knight - Will normally leave you alone unless he runs out of counties to attack. Will even attack other nobles for free.
• The Baron - Will attack counties for you, but often for a price. Will stay your ally until he feels you are growing too powerful.
• The Bishop - Breaks off the alliance when convenient as his divine mandate to rule overshadows any diplomatic allegiances.
• The Countess - Knows any alliance is temporary so will break this off almost at a whim and invade you right afterwards.

Town Administration

There are seven areas to which the peasants can be assigned: cattle herding, grain farming, wood chopping, iron mining, blacksmithing, castle building, or tilling. Citizens not active in one of these roles will remain idle.

Wood, iron, stone are measured in tonnes, grain in sacks, and livestock and weapons are measured in individual units. These resources must be managed in order to build castles, placate hostile neighbors, and sustain the populace.

Towns are situated in counties; usually a county will have between eight and sixteen units of land to allocate. The exact makeup of the land varies. Towns always have a blacksmith workshop and may also have lumber, mining, and quarrying, but never both quarrying and mining in the same town.

Counties And Maps

At the beginning, the player has only one county and a few hundred peasants. As the player conquers more counties, the first ones, now prosperous, can send armies and money to help the newly conquered ones. The game ends when the human player loses all counties and armies, or conquers the entire enemy occupied map and their armies. A player need only defeat the nobles, not all neutral counties as well.

The game consists of a map with several different counties, comprising a single nation or geographic area. These counties have a town, along with several types of industries available to utilize for conquering nobles and fields designated for food growth. Every map begins in the year 1268 in the winter season. There are four turns per year, beginning with winter, then spring, summer, and autumn.

There are a preset number of merchants per map. These merchants travel the land, and if they are in a player's county they may purchase from and sell materials to them.

Each county is either a neutral county or a county under the rule of a noble. The territory of each noble is colored to differentiate the board (for the Baron, it may be red; for the Knight, yellow, etc.). Starting out, each noble has one county as their own, and all other counties are neutral.

To expand a noble's lands, the noble must capture the county by either conquering the county town square, or if there is an existing castle that is currently manned, lay siege to that castle and overtake it. No neutral counties have castles naturally. If a noble has been driven from the county by revolt or other means, and the noble erected a castle, that will remain, but the county peasants will never man it in a neutral county.

On the map, all of a noble's existing territory must be touching. If player has four counties in a straight chain where each touches only the other, and an opponent captures one of the middle counties, the noble will automatically lose the weakest counties that have been sundered from the main body of his/her empire.

Resource Management

The proper mixture of resources is constantly changing to meet the demands of individual situations; stone will be needed to build castles at one moment, but then wood and iron may become more important.

Food

Food is the resource requiring most careful management. Each province has 8 to 16 fields (up to 20 in the siege pack), which can be used for growing grain, cattle, or left fallow. Soil can become poor or fertile by overuse or fallowing when advanced farming is on, and random seasonal events such as good weather, floods, droughts, plague and so on also play an important part.

Unlike Lords of the Realm, which has three main food types (grain, sheep, cattle), this game features only cattle and grain for food. The player can run three types of food economy: allocating all fields to grain, all fields to cows, or running both cattle and grain together.

• Cows - The primary food source used by neutral counties, the knight, and the baron; cows require a large workforce to maintain its status as a substantial food source. Each cow provides enough dairy to feed five people, but can also be consumed for meat feeding ten people. There are four varying levels of herd crowding that determine how many cows are gained or lost each year, shown by the amount of cows grazing per unit of land, ranging from one to three. The fourth level(massive overcrowding!!) can result in a large number of cows lost per season, regardless of the amount of dairy maids allocated.
• Grain - A less labor intensive food supply to maintain throughout the year in comparison to cattle. Grain is planted in the winter and harvested in the autumn. Under normal game settings, one seed of grain planted yields twelve times as much when harvested to a maximum of 10 units planted yielding 120 units of grain per field. Each field takes sixty farmers to maintain throughout the year, otherwise the output will drop. Under advanced farming, during the winter, spring, and summer, grain requires little labor to bear a bountiful harvest allowing the player to allocate most of the population to other industries. The autumn harvest is very labor-intensive, and demands a very large portion of the population to complete. Also under advanced farming, the grain output varies by soil quality. However, in comparison a player gets much more industry-production out of a population by using a pure grain food economy.
• Fields - Like industries, there are a preset number of fields per county in various states of usability. A field can either be barren or fertile. If a field is completely barren, it appears as a solid grey square. If peasants have been allocated to work on the field to make it fertile, it will have either one, two, or three fertile mini-squares filled into the overall square, indicating its progress to rehabilitating the field into a restored fertile status. Most counties starting out have some barren fields.

There are four ways a fertile field may be made barren, barring the advanced farming option (dealt with later). The first two ways are drought and flood. If a drought or flood occurs (prompted by the computer and determined within the game's code one turn previous), a field will be lost. For example, in the summer the game determines you will lose a field but does not tell you. The player selects End Turn, and in autumn the player will be notified of the lost field. To escape this fate, the player must go back not to the summer save file but the spring save file (if such a file does in fact exist). If a drought or flood occurs and it is a grain field, then a significant amount of the grain output for that year will be lost. The third way a field may be lost occurs when locusts strip the field bare and the fourth way to lose fields is if they are destroyed by enemy troops invading your lands.

There is a glitch which can be abused for the whole game regarding rationing food. It works best when your county is only fed with grain, although it works with cows also. It does not work at all if you use both. To use the exploit, set Rations to Triple and then drag the slider bar right (for grain) until the rationing is set as red Double or red Normal. If you drag the bar around you'll see that the amount of grain needed varies although the red double or normal rationing remains (to a point until you hit red Half Ration etc.). Normal set Normal Rations may use 300 grain to feed your peasants, but Triple set rations with the slider sitting one step above Half Ration (so that you are feeding your populace with "red Normal") will only use 100 grain. If Army Foraging is on, the ration slider may need to be tweaked each time an army moves through your lands.

Population

Each county has a population. This population is affected by many different factors: overall happiness, tax rates, health, food supply and other random events such as plague. Players know exactly how many peasants they have, and how many births, deaths, immigrants, and emigrants they have each season. Overall population trends can also be traced via the population information screen for each county.

• Emigration & immigration - People will leave one county and go to another emigrating out of areas of low and into areas of high happiness. This is based on the difference in happiness between two neighboring counties, with the amount of people based on the magnitude of the difference between the two counties. The maximum amount of emigrants out of a county is 100 per season.
• Food supply - The amount of food rations given to a population can range from none to triple. Feeding people below a normal amount of food may result in a decrease in health and feeding double or triple rations will eventually result in an increase in health.
• Happiness - The most powerful detriment to the happiness of citizens is army recruitment. Recruiting massive or frequent armies will have a large decrease in happiness even with the smallest of armies. The amount of people recruited for the army per units of happiness is proportionate to the county’s population. An army cannot be raised if happiness is zero. Other influences on citizen happiness include food rations, health, and taxes. Food rations affect happiness in the following manner: none(-8), quarter(-5), half(-2), normal(+1), double(+4), and triple(+7). Health in the following: diseased(-10), sick(-5), okay(0), good(+1), perfect(+2). Citizens’ happiness may also be increased through the purchase of ale or lowering of taxes, each to a maximum of +5 per turn. If happiness is below 25 for four consecutive turns, its population will revolt.
• Health - Health determines how quickly a county’s population grows. Average health results in a fairly slow rate of growth with the amount of births and deaths being relatively similar. Good health results in steady increases, with perfect health resulting in large increases. The game will randomly assign a county the Black Plague, which will kill off a large portion of the population and make the population sick. If rations are not increased immediately to increase the citizens’ health, its population can be decimated very quickly.

Taxes

Each county has its own tax rate as determined by the noble, or general population if it is a neutral county, to generate income to fund the noble's campaign for the crown. The higher the tax rate, the less happiness the population of that specific county. Overall, if a player has a county that has normal health with a normal food supply, the tax rate can be set to 7%, which penalizes the county two happiness points, and barring other events the happiness can be maintained at 100%. If you reach a tax rate of 19% and above, then happiness across all of your counties will start to decrease as well.

The tax collected is calculated as follows (no castle): (Population x Tax Rate) x 3.2 = Crowns Received

• any decimal quantities are ignored.
• castle percentages are based on the 3.2 ratio (x1.5, x1.75, x2.0, x2.25, x2.5)

There is a glitch that causes the tax rate to operate incorrectly. If you have a large number of counties and you put the tax rate up to 50 percent in all of them, the integer that is supposed to subtract points from happiness actually becomes positive, meaning your people will be happy despite astronomical tax rates.

Industry

In many ways, industry is the heart and soul of any winning strategy in Lords of the Realm II. With the four major industries (blacksmith, forestry, iron mine, and stone quarry), the player must correctly manage these resources to build his/her strength to win the game. A successful player must carefully allocate the working force to rehabilitate fields, grow food, cut wood, mine iron, and quarry stone. There is a delicate balance between growing enough food to keep your people healthy, and managing the individual industries successfully enough to not be conquered.

Industries can either be turned on or turned off. If they are on, then you see the industry icon on the map moving and showing activity. The iron mine, forestry, and quarry have a maximum output per season of 999 pieces. Everything produced from the industry can be sold to the merchants for half of its retail value. For example, to buy iron, it costs two crowns, while it sells for one crown.

The different types of industry are:

• Blacksmith - Responsible for making weapons. This industry uses the iron and forestry industry for its supplies. There are six major weapons types manufactured by blacksmiths (pikes, swords, maces, crossbows, bows, and knight armour). Each weapon requires different combinations of wood and iron to assemble. For example, maces require 4 pieces of wood and 4 pieces of iron, and bows require 13 wood. Bows are the only weapon to require only one type of resource; all other weapons require both wood and iron.
• Iron Mine - Manufactures iron. Used exclusively for weapons building
• Forestry - Manufactures wood. Used both for weapons manufacturing and castle building.
• Quarry - Manufactures stone. Used only for castle building and repair.

Resource Availability

Resource availability affects food and industry differently:

• Food - Each county's food supply is specific only to that county. For example, if a county has 300 cows and 1500 grain and its neighboring county has a sizable population starving with only 20 sacks of grain and 10 cows, it cannot share or make available its resources to that county. It can send a shipment with a courier that will leave the season the player sends it and get there to the needy county respective of how far away the shipment is going.
• Industry - Any industry activities from the previous season is immediately available to all counties regardless of distance. At the beginning of each season, after the turn is ended from the previous season, active industries add to the store of available stone, weapons, wood, and iron. These resources are available across the board.

Castle Building And Management

The building of castles requires particularly skillful resource management. The construction of a castle is a high priority because it will help protect the town from enemy armies. Castles boost tax revenues when completed ,thus, covering their costs in the long run.

The castles that may be constructed, in order of least resource intensive to most resource intensive, are Wooden Palisade, Motte and Bailey, Norman Keep, Stone Castle and Royal Castle. The more expensive the castle, the more difficult for the enemy to successfully attack and the higher percentage of tax revenues collected.

Castle Defenses

There are five different castles types that can be erected and is highly recommended to defend against oncoming enemy troops. If a county does not have a castle garrisoned with troops, then enemy troops can simply attack the county’s town square. Once troops are garrisoned inside the castle, opposing forces must siege that castle to take the county. The computer opponents will build various types, depending on the noble. All castles have boiling oil available.

Castles also affect tax rates, although it does not have to be garrisoned to do so. The stronger the castle type, the higher percentage the castle adds to the tax income for that county. Free archers are also gained from the construction of castles as an immediate garrison.

• Wooden Palisade - Requires 40 Stone, 400 Wood, and 200 workers to build. A wooden castle with only one gate to breach, room for 150 troops, and one barrel of boiling oil. Gains 50 archers upon completion and grants a 50% boost to tax revenues.
• Motte & Bailey - Requires 80 Stone, 800 Wood, and 400 workers to build. A wooden castle with two gates, with the back half surrounded by a moat, room for 200 troops, and two barrels of boiling oil. The most common type of castle erected by computer controlled opponents. Gains 150 archers upon completion and grants a 75% boost to tax revenues.
• Norman Keep - Requires 1000 Stone, 200 Wood, and 800 workers to build. A stone castle with two gates, room for 200 troops, and three barrels of boiling oil. Gains 150 archers upon completion and grants a 100% boost to tax revenues.
• Stone Castle - Requires 2000 Stone, 400 Wood, and 1500 workers to build. A stone castle surrounded by a moat, room for 400 troops, and four barrels of boiling oil. Gains 200 archers upon completion and grants a 125% boost to tax revenues.
• Royal Castle - Requires 3000 Stone, 800 Wood, and 2500 workers to build. A stone castle surrounded by a moat with an inner gate that must be destroyed by troops as a battering ram cannot fit inside the castle. Has room for 600 troops and contains six barrels of boiling oil. Gains 300 archers upon completion and grants a 150% boost to tax revenues.

There is a well-known bug regarding castle building. A Royal Castle needs 3000 stone and 800 wood for construction, however, if you start to build the Wooden Palisade first, then the Motte & Bailey, then the Norman Keep(and so on), the resources needed to build the next castle are as if you have the existing castle in place, despite the previous castle never being completed. Which ever method you use, wood will be first allocated to the castle before the blacksmith.

Raising An Army

Armies take townsmen and train them into one of the seven classes of soldiers: peasants, archers, pikemen, macemen, crossbowmen, swordsmen, and knights. Various types of mercenaries can also be hired, but will desert if the player doesn't have enough to pay them. Armies with different types of mercenaries cannot be combined. The size of an army being created is determined by the town's population and happiness. The game limits the creation, splitting or merging armies at minimum of 50 and maximum of 1500 soldiers.

There is a glitch which can be abused which enables creation of less than 50 man armies. Since a castle holds a certain amount of troops, trying to garrison a castle with an army larger than what will fit, the game prompts you to split the troops so that some may enter for garrison and the others remain behind outside. The glitch is that you can move a single unit into the castle, then extract this unit as a single (or more specifically a 'less than 50 man") army. Swarming (sacking and pillaging the county's hamlets, fields and industry) and stalling a large enemy army is what these mini armies do best. It is worst still since splitting a large army like this does not use up movement points.

Another glitch enables the creation of an army (much) larger than the 1500 maximum. If two army units (with unequal unit totals) on the field are merged, this new single army (limited by the rules to 1500 troops) will originate from where the larger portion of the troops were originally from. This can be abused by disbanding many newly merged armies and then creating a new single army from the very much larger populace in that originating county. Disbanding many large (normal limit) armies (as long as they all go to the same county) enables that county to make an army limited only to the happiness (once at zero = no more troop created). It is possible to make a 10,000 troop army, or larger.

Military

To wage a successful campaign and conquer enemies, a player must successfully manage the military. Armies are raised by drawing from county populations. The more people that are conscripted per season, the more happiness is deducted from that county's happiness. When people are drafted, you can either give them a weapon you own, turning them into that class, or leave them as unarmed Peasants who will run into battle with pitchforks.

Weapons can be made by Blacksmiths or bought from Merchants.(But keep in mind it would cost less to buy the iron and wood then make the weapons yourself) Once you give the weapon to a Peasant on the Army Creation screen, he permanently becomes that class and will fight as it until he either dies or gets disbanded.(When you disband an army, all units go back to Peasants and you get your weapons returned.)

These are all of the unit classes you will use in combat. Hand-to-hand:

• Peasants - These are the default soldiers who are not given weapons. They are cheap, but very poor in both defense and offense and fall quickly to armed units on any battlefield. They are only truly useful at filling in moats or serving as cheap arrow fodder while better units move in for the kill. The best strategy with Peasants is to not use them at all for combat unless you are desperate, since they are better put to work at fields or other labor. If you do use Peasants, try to use hundreds of them so you can swarm the enemy and decoy attention away from better units.(Which the Bishop loves to do) Keep in mind that if you know you're going to lose a County, it isn't a bad idea to recruit all Peasants(Even if it just so they can die as fodder) so that they can't be used by the enemy after it is conquered.
• Macemen - Inexpensive to produce, Macemen are a step up from Peasants and quite cheap to produce. Macemen are quite agile and are especially effective against lightly armed units such as peasants and archers. They fair well in open field fights due to their very quick movement speed and attack speed but fair horribly in tight keep fights due to their pathetic armor. They can fill moats, but ranged will rip them to shreds in seconds. Keep in mind that this is a speed and swarm unit, made to flank, run down, or surround enemies. They are not ideal at all for filling moats or tight close corners combat. They will also drop really fast to any ranged. Macemen are made to quickly close distance with ranged on the open field with their superior speed. If they can't do this, the ranged will slaughter them.
• Pikemen - Heavily armored, Pikemen are the opposite of Macemen. They are very slow but their armor withstands many hits, making them more effective as a defensive unit than an offensive unit. Their high armor and slow speed makes them ideal to block doors in a castle defensive or fill moats on an offensive. In open battles they can be used to block bridges or tight paths, but are largely ineffective in open areas due to their slow attack speed and slow movement speed. Their high armor excels at blocking tight paths for long periods of time while your ranged tear up enemies. Their armor is also very good at allowing them to fill moats. This is the best melee unit to get in siege battles. If you are garrisoning melee in a keep with no plans of ever taking them out, make them Pikemen. Pikemen cost less iron than Swordsmen or Knights, so massing these can be ideal if you have a great deal of wood with no iron to spare. Just keep in mind that in open field fights they will drag you down due to their slow nature.
• Swordsmen - For the investment, these are the overall best hand to hand unit in the game, with a balanced range of stats all around. They hit good, have good armor, and move fast. This means they are tougher than Macemen(But hit for less), faster than Pikemen(But with less armor), and not as costly as Knights. They still cost more than Macemen or Pikemen, so massing up many can be difficult. But they are the most well rounded units for non siege battles. In siege battles they are almost as good as Pikemen for holding the line or filling moats. This is the "middle ground" unit you can produce if you don't want to bother with other units that have strengths and weaknesses. This is a good unit to mass if you want to dominate open field battles. But keep in mind that they cost more iron than any other unit except Knights. This is not a good unit to start off a map with due to their high cost, but are great to mass later when you can afford it. At the start of the game, it's better to mass Mace or Pike then switch to Swords later.
• Knights - The most resource-intensive unit for the blacksmith to manufacture, Knights are the ultimate unit. They have the highest damage, armor, and even speed in the game(Due to their horses), but they cost the most too. Their downsides to producing is the massive cost to mass them and the fact that they cannot fill moats due to their horses(So Pikemen are actually a much better deal for keep sieges). But if you can afford it, these units are the kings of melee combat, just remember to bring some Pikemen to fill those moats.

Long-range:

These units are ranged and excel at adding damage upon units that cannot reach them in melee range. In melee range however, they lose their potential and are easily killed.

• Bowmen - These are basically Peasants with bows. They are effective as long range fighters used to pick off enemy troops while hand-to-hand units are holding them up. The most effective use for them is in keep sieges, as you have plenty of walls and tight doors to use to keep enemy melee away from them while they rain down the arrows from safety. While being gold to keep battles, they aren't as effective in open field fights as enemies can usually close distance easily in open areas. Once in melee they are barely better than Peasants. This unit is ideal for keep sieges or anywhere you can bottle neck. In open fields they need to be used carefully.(It really helps to keep a line of spare melee to shield them from charging enemies that try to get to them)
• Crossbowmen - This unit is different than Archers. They hit much harder, but only have 1/3 of the ranged and fire rate. Crossbowmen are far less effective than Archers in keep fights due to their limited range but are far more effective in open field fights due to their superior melee and higher ranged damage. In open field fights enemies can usually close melee range easily, making Crossbowmen a much better unit than Archers. When enemies close distance and force your ranged in melee, Crossbowmen will fair better than Archers as they have higher melee damage and higher armor than Archers(Or rather armor vs the no armor Archers have). So they are like hybrids while Archers are purely ranged. But keep in mind that Crossbowmen cost more than Archers. Archers remain as the better deal for any keep fight since you can easily keep melee away in those situations and they have 3x the range, but in open field fights Crossbowmen are the better deal. It is ideal to focus on Crossbowmen early on for conquering neutral countries and brawling with enemy armies out in the world while switching to Archers later on when you siegeing enemy keeps. It is also ideal to always use Archers to garrison your keeps, never Crossbowmen.

Movement And Battle

After an army has been created, the player can garrison it in a castle to protect the town, disband it, split it in two, move it, or keep it still. An army has 15 “points” of movement each turn. The amount of points required to move a given distance depends on the terrain; difficult terrain requires more points than easier terrain.

If two enemy armies meet, a battle will begin. Unlike the county management part of the game, battles take place in real time. The player has a complete view of the battlefield and can individually manage units or groups of units.

If an army moves against an enemy castle, a siege will take place. A siege battle is won if either all the defenders are slain, or if the castle flag (in the most defensible part of the castle) is captured. Siege tactics differ from open-field battle in that the player may need to take into account the enemy's fortifications and, in three castle designs, a moat. The sieging army may build battering rams, catapults, and siege towers to aid its assault.

An army can also destroy fields, industry sites and hamlets in an enemy county. This can soften up a county for capture, or lower its morale to the point that it revolts from its current overlord, rendering it neutral.

The A.I. can be stalled by removing a garrison from a castle. For an army to attack a county, it must either siege the castle or combat the town. If the army is heading for the town center, garrison a castle and it will force the computer army to turn around next turn to go siege the castle. If you remove the garrison before the siege commences, it will force the computer player to turn around and go back to the town center.

Custom Battle

The game offers an option where the player can create a game designed to test his or her skills. Several factors such as beginning the game with limited resources, limited map view, or other handicaps can be set to make victory rather difficult.

Sequels

The game had an expansion pack released in 1997, Lords of the Realm II: Siege Pack, consisting of new combat scenarios. It was followed years later by a supposed sequel, Lords of the Realm III, which was in effect a completely different game.

External links

• Lords of the Realm II game information at Gamespot
• Lords of the Realm II at GameFAQs
• Tom's Lords of the Realm II site featuring all patches and tools for LOTR2