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| Bottom Line: Micromanagement fanatics may dig this title, but ultimately too much time is spent maintaining your empire as opposed to having fun. |
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Gameplay
If you've played Age of Empires, then you'll generally feel right at home. Dragon Throne has very similar gameplay mechanics, with a few twists thrown in. Dragon Throne takes the large amount of tweaks to the theme presented in Age of Empires II and The Conquerors, and integrates them well. For instance, your peasants don't stand around idly if there's nearby work to be done. If there's an empty field nearby that needs to be farmed, a peasant will go ahead and meander on over to get to work. Also, you can assign multiple peasants to do structure building, and nearby idle peasants will wander over and help out. In theory, this should help simplify things for you. Also, as was the case in the Age of Empires II expansion pack, your farmers will automatically plant new fields and construct new pig farms as needed.
Another new touch to the game is the idea that there's little difference between a laborer and a warrior. As such, you can create laborers, but when you need to build an army, send those same laborers over to the barracks, and they'll shortly be trained to fight. You can later send those same warriors back to the barracks and convert them back to laborers. As an added plus, whatever experience bonus the laborers had beforehand will transfer across to his warrior class, so if you have a farmer that has been working outside for two years, he'll be a stronger warrior than some laborer that hasn't even seen a month under the sun.
Unfortunately, while simplicity exists in such touches, it's utterly blown away by many of the other features of the game. While it is a novel new concept that you can swap laborers for soldiers, and vice versa, it becomes more troublesome when you have to selectively manage waypoints to generate new soldiers without having your harvesting suffer. And harvesting is really critical in this game. You can't just send soldiers out on a sentry mission and have them stay put for months on end - They'd eventually starve and die. Thus, you need to transport supply wagons with them so that they have food and wine with them at all times. Why a soldier *requires* wine, I won't venture to guess. Anyway, that means that you wind up having to spend a lot more time than ordinary managing your troops if you're trying to lay siege to an enemy establishment.
Furthermore, food and wine can't simply be collected. They're derived resources - You must first chop wood to create laborers and build structures. Then you must build fields and pig farms and assign laborers to them to collect corn and meat. Finally, you must build a workshop (Workshop? Why not a "kitchen" or somesuch?) to convert corn and meat into food and wine. The ratio of production depends on how many laborers you assign to what roles. For instance, in the farms, you can have up to five laborers per farm, split between fields and swine herding. Each is pretty straight-forward - the fields produce corn, and the swine, um..."produce" meat. The workshops, however, use different ratios of corn and meat to produce food or wine - Both are used in either case. This makes resource management a bit trickier, as running out of corn will stop production of both food and wine.
Also, you don't mine gold or anything along those lines. Instead you tax the population. Changing the tax rate would theoretically alter the morale of your troops and laborers, but this didn't happen to me. I just cranked up the tax rate and got more gold, period. That doesn't seem to make sense. Furthermore, you have to pay to train troops, but then you're making troops out of your indentured servants, so why are you paying them again? It just doesn't seem to make too much sense.
Finally, we come to the art of battle. Or, rather, the luck of battle. In the first mission of Liu Bei's campaign, you're trained in using Siege Ladders to assault the walls of another province. Unfortunately, due to the perspective of the castle images, you don't know right away that there's actually ramps that let your soldiers go from the castle walls to the inside of the castle. My soldiers spent about 10 minutes standing on top of the walls before I realized that they could enter the city that way. And if you don't have Siege Ladders, you can pretty much hang up on the idea of assaulting a city - the soldiers will all most likely have bows and they will tear an army apart that's three times their size. In general, without the provided plot devices given (like the "gift" of a supply cart in the same mission), assaulting castles is damn difficult, if not downright impossible. And be damned sure you don't take any of your important leaders with you when you go into battle - They're sometimes hard to differentiate between your other troops, and while they have skills and spells that your other troops don't normally have, *every* mission will mandate their survival, and woe betide you if one of them falls - The whole mission is instantly and ungratifyingly failed.
And finally, unit upgrades are...strange. I can see how cock-fighting would help to increase the speed of peasants, since they'd be chasing the little buggers around. I fail to see how "Five-bird show" increases troop defense, or how "Mount Tai Troops" would increase troop offense. To be blunt, the labeling of the skill tree is just silly. Object says that the skills are designed to be authentic to the period of the Three Kingdoms...but I say that's a load of hooey - This is just poor translation/localization.
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