An innovative take on the RTS genre with a very distinct feel and look.

User Rating: 8 | Warrior Kings: Battles PC
This one could have been perfect had it been polished some more, the main drawbacks are the clunky GUI and performance issues.

To put it simply the game was coded very roughly, and the result being you won't see any performance change from using a 10 year old PC as opposed to a new one.

Considering the rather average textures used for the game maps the game runs very slow in comparison to any new RTS titles.

While extrememly fun to play, especially if you like defensive combat techniques and long battles, the game does get a little too easy, mainly due to overpowered unit classes like the Holy warrior which is a heavy cavalry unit that can heal, much like a palladin. add this to the rather daft AI and its very easy to to dominate in the main campaign.

Much work needs to be done on increasing the AI armies efficiency in battle if they stand to deliver any challenge to the player. If you are playing defensively which most likely you will be unless you want the battle to last 10 minutes, the enemy will send raids into your province, the AI actually does a good job of finding weak spots in your defenses and will alter their attack paths according to where you situate your defense forces. if you heavily defend a position on the map they will learn not access that point and look for other ways into your province which is pretty neat.


However, comming back to the AI flaws, another problem is AI economy - they start off strong most of the time depending on the specific General you are up against and very quickly run out of resources resulting in very weak raids that drag out for hours, while the player could easily destroy the enemy it harms to longevity of the battle and nagates from the initially fun defensive strategies the player can use.

After a few campaign maps and advancing in the techology tree of choice the player can easily advance to the highest level in that tree before the enemy and destroy 3 enemy provinces whithout loosing a single troop, but thats not what this game intended players to do, its much more fun to play defensive combat in WKB and although it still delivers some good elements of strategic gameplay, the AI fall well short of giving enough challenge to the player.

Given some more work on improving performance issues and fixing the GUI and AI flaws this would have been a very strong title.

One last thing about performance - if you are on map with more than one opposing force and you have a relatively big population the game struggles to keep all your units active resulting in units frozen and unresponsive units .. this needs to be fixed !!