King's Orders

So I got it on sale for 6$, i think thats about right for the price of the game. At that price it gets a thumbs up, barley. For a long time I've wanted a medieval strategy game that has delayed orders, so you dont have perfect control. More like it was in real life. This game takes a step in that direction. Unfortunately, I think its held back by 3 things. Firstly, the UI sucks. Actions that should take 3-5 clicks take 9+ clicks. Things are oddly buried in menus within menus at times as well. 2ndly, using messages in such a strategic view....doesn't really change much. The interesting way to use the delayed messages and imperfect information mechanics I think would be a more tactical view. As a general instead of a king, but more turn based instead of the RTS style of Strategos. 3rdly, the AI sucks. It has no idea how to build a city or be aggressive. Overall, I think he could take this concept, build and refine, and make an interesting game. As it is, its extremely niche and needs polish.

King's order's mail-ordering system starts off feeling novel and exciting, but the novelty soon wears off. It's fun for the first five seconds, until you realize you receive thousands of notifications and will need to click hundreds of times, navigating menus. You won't ever read them all and by the end of the first five minutes, you quickly realise it's just a less navigable version of a paradox game. All in all, this outlines king's order's problems with lack-of-polish, gameplay balance issues, poor AI, difficult UI, and not very fleshed out features. This contributes towards a lack of replayability. You might play for an hour - then get sick and tired of letter inbox spam. You've seen the entire game at that point; so why bother playing a different state, or continue building your state into an empire? You'll just spam economy, build up a big enough army of heavy infantry/archers and hire all the best generals, to the point that you don't even have to care about the spy mechanic or how many troops the enemy has. It then becomes a eu4 style siege game that's incredibly tiresome, especially with the delayed order mechanics. Only get on significant sale ( reference frame: I bought it for £6 and still felt like I had not gotten my money's worth) The order mechanic fundamentally discourages large empire building - (you have to move your capital, but this doesn't solve the problem of AI just attacking or naval invading from an annoying location)