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I am a huge fan of grand strategy games. With more than a thousand hours in the main Paradox Interactive games, and something close to that in other strategy games added together, I was really excited when I received a review key for Renaissance Kingdom Wars. The game looked very interesting from all the images and I love the idea of playing as your own character and rising in the ranks, similar to what you can do in Crusader Kings.
The only problem is that the game might be too ambitious for the resources it has at its disposal. There’s city management, tactical battles, and a strategic view on the world map. Though this all sounds amazing, it’s just too much for a game with such a small budget.
Strategic Map Mode – 8/10
The first thing players will see when they start the game is the strategic mapmode. Here, you will see the huge world of the game, with its many countries that you can play as or against, and the hundreds of settlements in each one. The map is one of the most impressive things Reverie World Studios have created, as it can really fulfill any strategist’s fantasy of conquering a huge world. The locations of most towns and villages are relatively accurate, as some around the map can have wrong names or slightly weird positions, but this will likely be fixed once the game gets out of Early Access.
There are also many lords on the map with their own settlements and armies, that walk around fighting and conquering each other, making the world feel real. In this mapmode you can control your armies to move them around, develop your hamlets and towns, and interact with other countries or lords from your country.
The overall gameplay on the strategic map can be a bit clunky at times. The armies of the AI can be a bit dumb, attacking villages with less troops than their targets or cities that have an overwhelming amount of power compared to them. It just seems like the game occasionally decides to send armies your way just to keep you on your toes, but the armies themselves aren’t really prepared for the fight.
Diplomacy is also very underdeveloped, as you can’t really interact that much with other countries to do interesting moves. At the start of the game, as a lord, all you can do is negatively influence relations with a country to cause a war and have a reason to fight them. Otherwise, you can just befriend everyone by sending them silver, but doing so is generally pointless. Countries won’t attack you based on your personal relationship with them. Once you become the king by completely conquering the territories of your old king, you can start interacting properly with the other kingdoms, establishing alliances and defensive pacts.
Tactical Map Mode – 7/10
The tactical part of the game, where you control your troops on the battlefield, has me torn. On one hand, it is extremely clunky. Troops will very often decide to turn 90 degrees while facing the enemy, completely ruining how you’ve positioned them, and they don’t really like listening to attack orders. They also often don’t fight troops right next to them and have many problems finding their position on the battlefield.
The way battles work is that both you and your enemy have a camp, which is called a Manor, and you have to conquer it or destroy all the enemy troops to win. In this camp you can build a lot of constructions that would help you win, which are generally useless if you prepare accordingly on the strategic map first.
All melee troops in this game, besides heavy cavalry, are useless. You will never need them to do anything besides stand in front of your ranged troops to make sure the hoards of enemy units reach your best units. Range is king in Renaissance Kingdom Wars. Even the most powerful army you can field will be completely destroyed by a bunch of archers, as most of your units seem to be made out of paper.
The siege mechanics are very interesting and there are many ways to get past enemy walls in the game, but the best one by far, which also kinda makes everything too easy, is artillery. Artillery in Renaissance Kingdom Wars is just a cheat code that will allow you to win all offensive battles. When attacking a city or village, the defenders just wait in their territories patiently for you to move. Artillery has a disgusting range, which is kinda realistic, so you can just line up the artillery in front of the city and wait for all of the armies inside to die. Since I’ve discovered this method, I’ve realized I can conquer all villages in the game by just putting my artillery next to their walls and leaving the game to do something else. When I’m back, the whole hamlet’s army has been destroyed, alongside the Mansion.
This is when the clunk comes back to annoy me, as this cheesy method also works in large towns, but just with annoying problems caused by the game’s back pathfinding. I use my cannons to destroy the enemy walls and armies on the outer layers of the town. Great. Then I try to move my cannons inside the city. They stop in front of another gate they have to destroy and they end up destroying each other by accident because the cannons cannot be properly positioned and they all stand in weird lines, where the line of sight only allows them to destroy each other.
Still, battles can still be entertaining if you find what is overpowered and only use that every time. Otherwise, you could just press the Auto-Resolve button and get over with it, since the results are usually quite good for your side if you have more power.
City Management – 7/10
All hamlets are used to create economic buildings that can make you resources and the towns are mostly used to create advanced units for war. You can open up the hamlet or town to see how it looks and personally decide where things are built in set places and how to use the resources at your disposal to quickly evolve the place.
You will get a few minutes every season that can be used to directly manage your cities, when time in the strategic map actually stops, allowing you to basically cheat and evolve your settlements overnight.
First of all, I’ll start by saying that the city building part of the game can be fun. It’s a nice gimmick and you will have to use it if you want to gain the upper hand over the AI. However, there are some things that really annoy me about how this works. On the strategic map, an upgrade for a building will only cost silver, however, in the city management mode the same upgrade can only cost wood or a combination of silver and wood.
You also have no idea what you get from upgrading a building. When constructing a building, you get the exact details for the amounts of resources you’d get when it’s completed. But not when upgrading, which is a weird oversight.
Still, it’s really nice to see one of the cities you’ve built up from the ground up to become a fully developed settlement that can withstand a full siege from giant armies.
AI – 6/10
The AI is bad. It’s not the worst, but it’s not impressive in any way. In normal battles, they will just charge head on into your artillery or spearmen, and will likely fail the attempt. In siege battles, on the defensive, they just hide inside their walls. So, using siege engines such as catapults or cannons will result in a total win, since the enemy won’t even attempt leaving their walls to attack undefended artillery units.
To be fair, the AI is pretty relentless when attacking a city. They will attack with everything they have and it will be very hard to keep them behind your walls. However, once they’re inside, they will get a bit lost trying to reach your Mansion to destroy it.
On the world map, their towns seem to develop at a relatively quick pace, so it won’t be too easy to take them over (unless you abuse the siege mechanics). The armies they use to attack your towns are also very different, as you can sometimes expect an easy fight or the worst fight of your life.
They also never seem to want to peace out of a losing war, even after destroying all of their settlements.
Enjoyment – 8/10
Though the game has many problems, it has a certain charm to it. Without realizing it, I spent many hours trying to increase my renown to become the king of my nation and also conquer enemy lands. It feels good to see how your poor cities become industrial powerhouses, but at some point the game seems to stagnate a bit.
Making a lot of money isn’t hard, especially in the Campaign mode, where you get a lot of money for free by completing missions. So, going down the research tree also becomes relatively easy. The cities quickly get their slots filled, and you end up in a position where you don’t really build anything anymore. You also don’t need to care that much about your economy, since it’s likely booming.
The late game is just a constant process of selecting your army and sending it to the next city to continue your world conquest, as nothing can stop you from building the most powerful armies in the world anymore.
Renaissance Kingdom Wars
