Rising Lords

by Aethyna Jun 2, 2020 | 1 Votes | 38 Played | 0 Reviews

8 rate

Genres:

Strategy

Graphics:

Labels:

Turn Based , Empire Building , Medieval Age

Platforms:

Publishers:

Argonwood Featuring a tabletop look and feel, and interesting cards-supplemented battles, Rising Lords is a medieval-themed turn-based strategy game where you’ll play as a lord in control of a town of your own with the ultimate goal to build up your kingdom and conquer every other player on the map. Play Now Similar Games

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Summary Gameplay Community Graphics/ Sound Conclusion

Summary

Featuring a tabletop look and feel, and interesting cards-supplemented battles, Rising Lords is a medieval-themed turn-based strategy game where you’ll play as a lord in control of a town of your own. Like most empire-building games, the ultimate goal is to build up your kingdom and conquer every other player on the map while making sure your peasants who make up your army and fill your coffers are, at the very least, content.

Gameplay

Gameplay-wise, Rising Lord can be separated into two formats. One being the overall “world map” and the other is what I like to call “the battleground”. Both maps are set on a hex-gridded board and that is probably one of the main reasons why the game has a strong tabletop feel. The world map itself is segmented into different sections with each section being controlled by a faction, including yours. I should also point out that you can only see neighboring rival sections and what buildings or armies they have thanks to the fog of war.

Now, the control of a section is important because you’ll need it in order to build anything on the piece of land. Even “uncontrolled” sections are marked as being controlled by “The People”. This, in turn, means that if you’re looking to take over a section, be sure to have your army ready. However, you can’t have an army if you don’t have the armor or the weapons, or even the people to take up those arms, and this brings us to another crucial part of the gameplay – town-building.

You’ll start each game in Rising Lords with a small village, two food-producing farms, and 2 workers. If you skipped over the YouTube tutorial like I did, you should still be able to quickly realize that the limiting factor in determining how big of a city or army you can have all boils down to the number of workers you have who are gathering, generating or crafting all those precious resources you’ll need. Trust me when I say there are plenty of “worker micromanaging” that you’ll need to do in order to make it through the first ten rounds.

In this game, you’ll get an assignable worker for every 250 increase in your population and in order to get a population increase, you’ll need to provide them with basic necessities like food, accommodations (by building houses), taxes, and of course, security – nobody likes to live in a war-torn place, after all.

Considering the way this game is designed, there isn’t a lot of stuff happening first few rounds of the game mainly because you’ll want to first increase your number of workers just to do anything else. This is why the turtling-in strategy that I used worked so well. Let the AI battle it out among themselves and ruining their respective kingdoms’ population happiness (due to the security factor) and their people will start pouring into your country as refugees. Once you have enough workers to staff all your farms (this is important because, without workers, your crops and your cows will slowly, but surely, die) and still have several to spare, you can then stop micromanaging your workers, and start gathering non-essential resources like iron which you’ll need, in addition to wood, to craft weapons, as well as building up your garrison… well, at least that what I did which led me to victory.

Besides upgrading existing structures, there are plenty of other structures that you can add-on to your village, such as walls which will let you defend your town better. There are some that will allow you to house more people and gather more resources simultaneously, while others will help you expand your garrison, allowing you to recruit more peasants into the army, turning them into either the militia or, if you have enough equipment, a well-armed battalion. To get battle gear for the enlisted, you’ll need to assign a worker to the smithy – you’ll start with one smithy in the game - and set the type of equipment you want to craft, whether it is the bow and arrow, light wool-made armor, or pikes.

Since tiles where you can set up a farm are very limited in this game as well, you might not be able to recruit mounted units, which will require plenty of horses and stables to house them, until much later if you plan on bred your own horses. Of course, if there is anything you lack, you could always scrounge up the coins needed and buy them from the trader who will move from faction capital to faction capital once a turn is ended.

Depending on the gear you have, you will be able to recruit different units to make up your army. In this game, the peasants who joined your garrison aren’t instantly assigned a role; think of them like Playdoh. When you decide you want to start a-conquering, you can then assemble your army by choosing how much of your stockpile of weapons and armor you’ll want to use. The equipment you provide will then determine which types of units you can recruit and how many of them you can have. For instance, if you only have the bow and arrows, you can recruit archers, but if you have enough light armor and bow and arrows, you can get arbalests who don’t die as easy and (probably) deal more damage.

Once you have all the different specialized units you want for your army, you can then fill up the remaining ranks with the militia which requires no weapons or armor, though they will require upkeep like the rest of your army. Naturally, it’s best to have a good mixture of melee units and ranged. Most early game armies would likely be made up of mostly archers since they are the easiest units to recruit, but as more turns go by, you’ll need to be prepared to encounter more heavily armored units as well.

The army will also be automatically helmed by one of your three commanders – you can’t customize your commanders. Now, Rising Lords has a nice skill tree for commanders that you can invest into as they gain more experience on the battlefield. So, in some way, although all commanders start off the same, you can eventually customize them based on skills, allowing them to provide the most suitable bonuses to the units they command and cards for you to do battle with.

Combat in this game is fairly typical, especially if you are a well-seasoned veteran of turn-based games. For example, you’ll get to move your units based on their “initiative” stats and that each turn allows you to only perform a single action, whether to move or to attack. However, there are several other mechanics added in that really gives the combat system here its depth.

For starters, the game uses papers-scissors-stone-style combat whereby using the correct unit counter would give you a nice advantage over your opponent's units, such as using mounted units against archers. The game also has an army morale system like in Total War. This means that sometimes, you might be able to win the battle just by defeating the battalion with the commander in it and routing the other units. There are also some tricks that you can take advantage of such as razing an enemy's outpost or castle or dealing bonus damage thanks to well-executed card use to drastically lower morale.

Talking about cards, as I’ve mentioned before, Rising Lords supplement its combat with cards. This doesn’t mean that you’ll need cards to deal any damage much like Slay the Spire; in the contrary, you can think of these cards like “buffs” or bonuses. The cards you get depends on the skills you’ve invested in your commander. The game has a bit of deck-building aspect too, but I mostly use the default deck which basically includes all the cards I have. I reckon, you might only need to customize your deck if you have too many cards – not sure what’s the limit for each deck is though.

Now, during fights, you’ll start each game with your entire deck in hand. Playing cards don’t cost you anything and you can play all your cards in a single turn (and on different units too) if you want. However, you’ll want to wise and keep your aces up your sleeve. Only use the cards when you’re about to pull off some maneuver that will, if executed properly, help you turn the tide of battle or destroy the opposing army a lot faster. Terrain also plays a role in battle and it’ll do you well to keep these little advantages – they really add up quickly – in mind whenever you’re on the battlefield.

As entertaining and promising as Rising Lords is, it’s still in early access and hence, there’s still some balancing that needs to be done. One prime example is its random events. After every turn on the world map, there’s a chance a random event may pop up. The event can be good or bad and what the world gets – yes, most events, especially those seasonal ones, will apply to everyone on the map – will force you to adapt accordingly, either by capitalizing on a population boom or going into damage control mode to mitigate the massive drop in crops yield due to extremely dry weather.

This is good and all, and these events do spice up the gameplay quite a bit, but there are just times when you might get hit by a literal series of unfortunate events, some of which may not even affect the entire game world but only your town. When that happens, it can sometimes be almost impossible to mitigate all the damage you’re getting – events that destroy your crops or decimate your herd of cows hit particularly hard - and hence, the game is basically lost. It doesn’t matter if you’re only 10 turns or a whopping 50 turns into the game.

Certain events can also be incredibly hard to overcome like having your farms invaded by wolves or bears. Yes, you can send a maximum of 5 workers (provided you have that many available) to try to kill it, but if you failed, that’s 5 whole workers gone and you can say goodbye to your economy – it’s shot. You can get a hunter to defeat these animal invaders if you have one and it does seem like there’s a higher chance of success if you do so, but the game doesn’t let you recruit hunters yourself. Instead, you’ll need to hope for the blessing of RNG to deliver a hunter via a random event to your doorstep.

Considering that there are times when you’ll want to basically end several turns in a row in quick succession, it might be a good idea to make the transition between turns a bit smoother and faster. The devs could also add in an “end turn until next important event or notification” button? Like what they have on 4x strategy games?

I’m not a fan of its waypoint-based army movements on the world map, but I can understand why that is necessary. I’ve also noticed that there is currently no way to storm a fortified position during battle, for some reason. I can only use my ranged units to deal with enemy units that hide in forts and refused to come out.

I’d like to point out that at the moment, Rising Lords only has a “scenario” mode (custom battles/skirmish mode) where you can customize your games like choosing the map to play on or setting the number of AIs to play against and a cool editor where you can make your own maps and scenarios. Don’t get me wrong - It’s still fun to play several custom battles and make maps, but what most of the players, I dare say, are waiting for is its campaign mode. The dev mentioned that there will be more cards, events, etc, and that diplomacy would be added in soon enough as well, so players have plenty to looking forward to.

Community

If you have friends to play with and they are all fans of turn-based strategy games, Rising Lords is the perfect new game to play. It supports local and online multiplayer in addition to its robust single-player mode. However, since the game doesn’t have Steam remote play, your friends who are interested will need to own a copy of the game first before they could play with you.

Graphics/ Sound

I can’t say for other people but personally, I love the tabletop look that the game went for – after all, the game does feel like a board game. The hand-drawn art here is pretty fantastic as well. I have a penchant for medieval/Celtic-style music too and this game has a really nice tune playing in the background as you play. There’s some variety to the music too – the music in the game’s “battleground” map is different from the one playing in the world map.

Conclusion

All in all, Rising Lords is a very promising and unique, turn-based strategy game. The game might take a while to ease into, especially if you skipped the tutorial, but the learning curve isn’t too steep unless you happen to encounter a string of bad events thanks to RNG. The game’s roadmap is still fairly long though considering that there are still many “to-dos” that the devs are planning to implement and there’s still some balancing work to be done as well. However, the game can be a bit costly to buy at the moment due to its lower amount of content. It might be worth its price once the campaign and some of its more requested features are added.