Reign: Conflict of Nations Review

Just this week, I had the opportunity to try out 1C Company’s latest RTS adventure, Reign: Conflict of Nations. I’m a big fan of this type of game, so when I was given the opportunity, there was no question that I would love to try this out.

Installation was fairly quick as the entire game is only 459 Mb in the full install. I tried to bring myself to read through the readme files and manual, but I really only glanced at the readme file, if opening it and then closing it counts as “glancing,” and the manual, just 30 pages long, was about 29 pages more than I had patience for.

Reality check - I was looking for this to be similar in construct to “Civilization” or the like. Build an empire building by building, city by city, building an army and advancing technologies. Yeah, it has these elements, but employed in a different manner. I was also expecting something more along the lines of the Command and Conquer or Warcraft type of real-time strategy games, as I’ve played a multitude of these, RTSs, and they are all the same concept with a different skin. This was neither.

1C Company, an Eastern and Central European game developers, describes Reign: Conflict of Nations as a “large-scale real-time historical strategy game covering three centuries of medieval Europe. The player becomes a monarch testing their skills by controlling one of 26 unique factions as they develop economically, work on politics, maintain diplomacy, take care of resources and wage war.”

In the first few minutes that I spent playing Reign: Conflict of Nations, I was not sure entirely what to make of it. There is no tutorial game to start off with, and though I often skip these, as I’m sure most gamers do, I was looking to at least get a basic understanding of the mechanics. To my surprise, the tutorial is built directly into the game engine! Fantastic! No wasting time on a tutorial game, to only have to start over from scratch with a new game.

Time to choose a King; whose shoes I am to fill. First off, I can’t pronounce half of these names. Naturally, this being an eastern-European historical strategy, there are names like “Vinrih von Kniprode” and “Olgerd Gediminovich.” These are some of the easier ones.  But names aside, setting up the new game was easy.

I started out by selecting from one of 26 kingdoms- I chose Transylvania. I chose at random because I didn’t know what strategy, if any, there might be in choosing. On starting a second, third and fourth game, I tried to play in the middle of the map, on the edge of the map, and based on the number of units exclusively available to that kingdom, and there seemed to be no significant difference. There are a number of neutral kingdoms that are off limits to starting the game in, but I was later able to take over several of these without risking a war with several of the other 25, as a war with any of them might bring several of their friends into the battle, where the neutrals are a little less risky to attack, especially earlier on when my military was not so well populated.

The tutorial system gave me a series of very simple tasks to accomplish in order to show the gameplay system. There are no “hint boxes” as you often get early on in many games. The tasks that I got would show me where to click and tell me what to do to complete them. The tutorial was quite helpful on several levels. I learned the interface easily, and I more or less mastered this in the first hour. I also learned about the various “characters” players and their roles. In addition, I got a general idea how to battle opponents on the field of war. I also later discovered that the tutorial mode could be disabled, but I didn’t bother.

But now getting into the real action, one question remained… “Where do I set the difficulty level??” I found the difficulty level imbedded in the options menu. You can change difficulty level in the middle of the game! HOW COOL IS THAT?

The core goal in Reign is centered on one singular task – which is to control 40 of the total states on the map within the 300 game years allotted for play. Secondary to this, all of these small tasks that the game provide, seemingly at random, give rewards as incentive to meet certain markers in the game, such as achieving a military with so many units or making political connections with other factions, taking over certain kingdoms. This kept me attempting to expand the empire rather than just sitting around maintaining the status-quo and collecting 1000’s in gold and resources.

As the game progressed, I was given more tasks to complete. So many tasks and so little time to think of them all. I had to make sure I sent ambassadors to the neighbors and keep good ties with them so that I could marry their daughters and ensure an heir to the thrown. I discovered quickly that not having an heir to the throne when the King dies is a very bad thing, and I had to remember to check this periodically as the game did not continue to remind me. I was trying to build an army to defend my cities and villages, build structures to produce more of the things the city and people in it need to survive, and try to keep the plague at bay. There is inter-kingdom commerce to consider, espionage and assassinations to attempt and to thwart. The list goes on.

I had to govern each of the cities I ultimately took control of, and individually control the ratios of production for food, gold, knowledge, religion and “well being.” Gold made it possible for me to build structures and hire a military, food to sustain the population as well as feed the mouths of the army. Knowledge aided technological advances to make available a growing number of structure and units. Religion and “well being” had an impact on preventing discontent and discord amongst the population, and ultimately helped keep my citizens from raising a rebel mob and attacking me.

Once I was able to successfully manage these, I was able to grow the population and my army, and move on to tasks outside of my borders, most significant of which was trying to taking over other states and forming economic and military ties with other kings.

In addition to the general populous and military units I was able to purchase, I had to hire and control a number of “character” units to do various tasks. I started the game with a King (which can not be hired) and a commander. All of my military units that were not stationed in my cities or towns had to be assigned to a commander before it would do anything other than move. The King, Commander and the other characters all have access to a specialized set of abilities they can learn and use on my own cities and characters, or on enemy cities and characters.

After the King and Commander, there are Governors, Priests, Spies and Alchemists. These help encourage economic growth, deter heresy, and help stop plagues, just to name a few of the special abilities available to me through these characters. None of these elements of Reign could be ignored for too long. I failed to notice a plague that set in on one of my cities and found that after a few season, some 60% of my population was dead or had left.

After hours of play, I found that there were small details that really made the game interesting. I found my army would starve to death if I marched onto foreign soil without bringing supplies, and that food consumption in a particular state of my own was drastically affected by stationing three of four legions of the army within its borders, both which mimic the realities of a medieval era army (or modern era army for that matter).

The multiple elements of the game were woven together well in a logical fashion, and all elements of Reign had an important place in the grand scheme of things. It was this attention to the finer details that really stood out. For this, I give the creators of Reign kudos. In similar games such as Civilization, for all its complexity some of these more basic problems are brushed under the rug.

On the more technical side, the field of play was nice looking, but the graphics failed to wow me. The map is in 3D, but with only the ability to zoom and pan. There is no rotation of the angle of view and no ability to adjust the vertical angle of view either.  There is very little in the way of character animation. They walk. That is all. There is no animation of the battles between two armies. I felt that for all the attention spent on fine details, the developers ignored entirely what should be one of the most gratifying parts of the experience: seeing my army actually slaughter the enemies. Rather, it is just a bunch of unit-representative icons change from green to yellow to red and to dead.

I was disappointed in the lack of control over actual battles. The AI completely controlled the outcome of all the battles and there was no intervention I could take once I started a battle. At starting a battle, I was only presented with a limited number of battle strategies, and once entering my choices, it was basically on autopilot.

In my overall experience of RTS games, I estimate that I will continue to play this game for another two or three weeks before I wear it out running through several more games before I grow tired of it and put it on the shelf. This is hardly a criticism, as this is the way it is with most games. The true test for this sort of game is whether in 3 or 4 months from now, will I pick it up and play it again? How about a year from now? There is a good change I will.

One thing I do wish is that Reign had a multi-player engine. I would love to get online and play against a few human competitors to really test this system out. Perhaps in the first update or an expansion pack?

If you like RTS games and love the strategic challenge that they bring, than I recommend this game. Reign sought to produce a game that brings the gamer into an historically lifelike role of managing a kingdom in medieval eastern-Europe, and delivered on this. The issue of graphics aside, I liked this game.