On top of that, multiple unhappy cities can set off a chain reaction. The game has several types of military unit, including nobles, regulars, and militia while militia are cheap, they tend to defect to nearby rebels.
When rebellions do break out, they can be very dangerous. And crucially, whereas most 4X games encourage the player to build and improve their cities, doing this in Oriental Empires produces unhappy commoners: when tile improvements and buildings go up, Oriental Empire assumes that the work is done by commoners drafted for corvee labour. Drought - a random event - produces unhappy commoners. Each city has a separate unrest level for nobles and commoners, and while the nobles are easy to keep happy, the commoners are dangerous. Instead, Oriental Empires’ most interesting mechanic (and its greatest challenge) is the way it handles internal dissent. The trick is that the other players aren’t the real challenge: I won a cultural victory without going to war against a single other player. Most of the game’s tech tree is pre-imperial - a thousand years of imperial history are relegated to the final era. Nobles are still implied to be a powerful force within society, as they were in the Warring States. The map is filled with multiple civilizations, each of which represents a kingdom or tribe that existed before the unification of China. On its surface, Oriental Empires is very much about the Warring States.
Hidden inside is a more radical idea: a game about maintaining the internal stability of an empire. Its overall structure is that a conventional 4X game like Civilization, depicting the Warring States of pre-Imperial China. In particular, it feels caught between two conflicting paradigms. Completing a task in Romance of the Three Kingdoms XIII.įlawed and fascinating, Oriental Empires (currently in Early Access) is a bundle of interesting ideas that - based on a playthrough in late September/early October 2016 - fail to cohere into a good game. (More subjectively, I didn’t like XIII’s art style compared to its predecessors, or for that matter, Nobunaga’s Ambition.)įor those interested in the ROTK series, I would recommend XI, which is available for digital purchase. I spent my time clicking through menus to fulfil orders, waiting for progress bars to fill up, and occasionally networking with fellow officers. In practice, life as a junior officer in ROTK XIII plays out as Ancient Chinese Workplace Simulator. Like some of its predecessors, XIII is a RPG/strategy hybrid that allows players to play as low-ranking officers or governors, as opposed to faction leaders, and work their way up. Unfortunately, I was disappointed by ROTK XIII, the latest in the series. I have very fond memories of playing ROTK XI, a micromanagement-intensive but engaging game whose cel-shaded graphics and hand-drawn art remain lovely today. Within the series, individual games vary. ROTK’s characters form a cast of thousands, taken from history and the pages of the novel (there is also the potential to create custom officers) Every action in ROTK, from building a granary to leading an army, is assigned to (and performed by) named characters.
#Emperor rise of the middle kingdom review tv#
Set amidst the civil war that followed the fall of the Han Dynasty - the same period that inspired the Chinese classic novel, the Dynasty Warriors games, and assorted movies, TV shows, and anime - these games are mechanically as well as thematically notable.Īlong with KOEI stablemates such as Nobunaga’s Ambition, and Paradox’s Crusader Kings, these are some of the very few character-driven strategy games in existence. This post discusses some of the notable games that explore the history of China – a fascinating subject crying out for more attention.Īny discussion of strategy games set in China must begin with KOEI’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms series, whose first game dates to the NES.