Kingdoms - an over-ambitious medieval Kenshi-lite - now available on Early Access

[Galdred]

Indiegogo: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/kingdoms--3#/



The game appeared on my "more game like this" section for Kenshi, on Steam. Given how much I loved it, and because I need to research kingdom building RPGs for my own game, I decided to try it.
It is an overly ambitious title (well, the title itself makes the game hard to find in the first place...), that lets you create your own medieval city from a first person perspective.
You can then wage war against other settlements, explore caves, or just randomly murder citizens of other settlements to inject gold and goods into your own.

The game is still in early access, and has a lot of wonkiness, but it really feels like a labor or love, and the developer seems to be devoted to make it great.

Unlike Kenshi, the game is currently more about crafting than anything else (most perks are about crafting stuff, and you end up spending a lot of time harvesting resources, crafting stuff, but you can tweak the settings to anything you like, so I put harvesting and crafting speed to 1500%).
Citizens are a bit more independent than in Kenshi : you can tax them, but they will build their house on their own, unless you forbid it in your city, and force them to purchase the ones you built. That also means you cannot really make them work for you, and they can have troubles making the things you want them to. But you can tax them. Which other RPG lets you extract taxes personally(or through a tax collector) from your NPCs?

Combat is not good : it takes ages to kill any animal, but human AI is laughably easy to bait and exploit. Also, for some reason, the game doesn't have shields, but it seems to have trebuchets.

(Note that I didn't have time to experiment with warfare yet, as I have 2 soldiers in my city in total...).

Quests are currently pretty boring (I need some wood! please bring me 10!), and caves are empty, but the game has a lot of potential.

 

[Tavernking]

Jesus christ of all the generic forgettable names this one just about takes the cake.

 

[deuxhero]

According to the screenshots, the walls have no machicolations.

Other than that I see age slider seems to default to somewhere above the leftmost. Can you play as a kid?

 

[Galdred]

Jesus christ of all the generic forgettable names this one just about takes the cake.

Yes! It also makes it very hard to google!

According to the screenshots, the walls have no machicolations.

Other than that I see age slider seems to default to somewhere above the leftmost. Can you play as a kid?

The lack of machicolations does trigger me, but the worst is that you cannot really get on top of walls, so they are more like huge fences than city/castle walls.
But like in Age of Kings, you can place towers right against the walls. It is still a pity (and a work in progress).

I played a little more, and the combat could use more balancing than I first thought. I declared war to a nearby city because it attracted potential taxpayers. So I had to place a war camp on the map close to my city. I ordered 1 trebuchet, 1 supply tent, and 1 "plain" tent to be made, then ordered my army of 5(!) to get to the target city.
Meanwhile, I went there on horseback (the AI never uses horses), dismounted, because fighting in melee from horseback is a pain, proceeded to kill 2 of the defenders of the city, when back to my horse as 4 gave me chase.
I used the Mount and blade maneuver to kill them, using arrows from horseback while they would run behind me. When my army arrived, there was 1 defending citizen left in total.

So 4 of my 5 characters manned the trebuchet, while the fifth guarded it.
I got bored of waiting for the city to get leveled, so I started to hack the gate with my axe. After some time, it broke open, and I murdered the last citizen, and the city was ours.
It appeared where was 1 citizen left in the city who hated me.

Second city went down the same way.

So, combat is horribly imbalanced, and mounted archery has no counter, as I have yet to see an NPC use a bow (hunters are supposed to do so, but maybe they auto gather food and you never see them use their bow) or horse.
The combat perk lines are a bit simplistic with:
- Do more damage in melee/ranged
- Better stamina regen
- Command more troops and bonus to soldiers

On the economic side, the game lacks a job system IMO:
You cannot get NPC to work on your farms, or constructions (except in the war camp) or produce the items you need, so you need to go to the trader and hope someone had built what you needed and sold it here, or do it yourself.

Another issue I had is that you can start with an empty island, or a populated one.
On an empty island, the opponent's don't put much of a fight (I started by murdering random people to get more money to be able to afford training in the skills I needed).
On a populous one, it is a pain to find a free spot to settle (you need to have no other settlement in a radius of 500, and there are no mechanisms to take over an existing settlement if you don't have one yourself (you can murder everyone, then destroy the town board to rebuild it, but that's about it).

So, the game is clunky, imbalanced, and there is a ton of work left to do, but it still shows a ton of potential, and I had fun with it.

The amount of settings customization you can do is amazing too (you can set up construction/gathering speed, but not crafting for some reason. However, crafting just 'skip' time on the map, and doesn't force you to wait. You can also forbid NPC to build stuff in your city, set the minimum distance between buildings, your initial perk points, XP rate, arrival rate of new colonists...).

 

[Major_Blackhart]

I'm gonna watch this one and see.

 

[laclongquan]

Kingdoms is such a generic name I am surprised anyone would choose it as a tittle nowaday. ten years ago, might be, but not now.

And from the look of it, Kingdoms is also a pretentious tittle for any settlement/faction to name themselves. A barony is barely it. Mostly it look just like a knight fief...

Seriously Knight Fief would be a more memorable name.

All nine settlements would barely make a kingdom for a king with delusion of grandeur~ They dont even have roads connecting each other~

 

[Sandsch]

When I searched what else the dev has done, I found some abandoned early access tycoon game. Think he will stick with this one?
Btw that map really reminds me of Mount & Blade.

 

[Galdred]

When I searched what else the dev has done, I found some abandoned early access tycoon game. Think he will stick with this one?
Btw that map really reminds me of Mount & Blade.

He was inspired by Mount and Blade actually. I don't know how complete he thinks his game is currently but he seems to have pushed 1-3 updates a week for the past 6 years, so he is dedicated for sure.
His latest roadmap was:

• Wars (mid-end September);
• Diplomacy (end of Autumn);
• Family mechanics (end of Winter);
• Guilds (end of Spring);

He is still working on Wars and Diplo, and added quests lately. He said he would also need 6 months for polish afterwards. I may be wrong, but I doubt he would abandon it.

Actually, he stickied a thread on steam about him wanting to give up, so I think he got past that point.

 

[Sandsch]

When I searched what else the dev has done, I found some abandoned early access tycoon game. Think he will stick with this one?
Btw that map really reminds me of Mount & Blade.

He was inspired by Mount and Blade actually. I don't know how complete he thinks his game is currently but he seems to have pushed 1-3 updates a week for the past 6 years, so he is dedicated for sure.
His latest roadmap was:

• Wars (mid-end September);
• Diplomacy (end of Autumn);
• Family mechanics (end of Winter);
• Guilds (end of Spring);

He is still working on Wars and Diplo, and added quests lately. He said he would also need 6 months for polish afterwards. I may be wrong, but I doubt he would abandon it.

Actually, he stickied a thread on steam about him wanting to give up, so I think he got past that point.

Well, that's reassuring. But in your honest opinion, is there currently enough content in the game to justify the asking price?

 

[Galdred]

Well, that's reassuring. But in your honest opinion, is there currently enough content in the game to justify the asking price?

The price is currently relatively low (9.99 €). But the game lacks challenge more than anything else I would say. As I said, combat is badly balanced at the moment, but more than that, there is little danger to your colony early on: brigand dens are sparse, and easy to cull (if you start on a blank island, but otherwise, you will have a hard time finding a free settlement spot), and other settlements won't declare war on you (I think it is not implemented yet). The main danger could come from wildlife if you picked an area with a lot of bears and wolves, as they will murder your careless citizens who try to get ore or wood outside of the walls.

Mount and Blade and Kenshi make it much harder to make your new colony/fiefdom survive.

I would say it is probably better to wait, unless you want to support the developer, but discovering what was possible in the game was a fun experience for me, and it's not like there are many other kingdom building RPG around (except Kenshi and Mount and Blade).

 

[luj1]

Jesus christ of all the generic forgettable names this one just about takes the cake.

It looks very 2008 as well.

 

[Takamori]

Besides the title, all you described I didn't see much Kenshi in it.
Unless we are talking about jank, bad rendering and pathfinding.

 

[Galdred]

Besides the title, all you described I didn't see much Kenshi in it.
Unless we are talking about jank, bad rendering and pathfinding.

There are not that many other RPG that let you build your own settlements, but yes, apart from that, they are very different, as Kenshi has death waiting around every corner, and a very nice exploration.
It also lets you play the way you want (murder people and have your own brigand haven, create a city and conquer the island, or just play real estate tycoon).