Overview
Get ready for the rant of your lives, I cut myself 8 times writing this.
The Rant
This game has to be simultaneously the absolute worst hot steamy pile of doo doo i’ve ever played, but also one of the more entertaining ones. The game has so many ridiculous issues that are just inexcusable and more frustrating than fun. I’ve gotten to the point where i was a vassal of the Aseria, got extremely pissed off when for around the 8th time I captured a castle/village the dickwad of a king decided to give all of them to the same ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ guy that kept losing his fiefs over and over again. I kid you not, every single time this guy got a fief that I took or rarely someone else took he would lose it within 3 days. This being frustrating enough, it prompted me to finish the main questline and leave and my previous issues have just been further exacerbated.
1. There are absolutely way to many armies roaming around to ruin your day, i had countless times where I would use a ton of influence to recruit the entire available army I could just to have my 800+ power army randomly run into a never before seen army of 1400+ which for god knows what reason seemingly didn’t exist before I decided I wanted to have fun myself. So the game decides to bring along the fun police and when you attempt to do ANYTHING including moving around the map they track you like a hawk and run you down like the dirty dog you are. Even when I AM the presumable biggest army around, the game decides to throw another ♥♥♥♥ you my way and when I try to raid anything it will decide “Heh, look at this fool attempting to enjoy a good besiege let’s go send the entire opposing force on him so that they rack up 8 armies waiting on him before they all join together and attack him while he is sieging. Seriously, the ridiculous all knowing knowledge of the AI and amount of armies with insanely inflated numbers that pop out of absolutely nowhere is my single biggest issue with this game. It has single handedly ruined most of my fun, and I don’t see how anyone could have fun with this issue. Someone might say “Oh, well just git gud and use good tactics to beat your enemy 3:1. Yeah, let me just go look at the games tutori—oh wait literally NOTHING is explained to you in this game with more ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ gameplay systems then stellaris. Even when I do watch a youtube video, the solutions are atrocious like running across the map to get the best troops in each category and doing a single tactic which is shield square and absolutely NOTHING else. If that is the only solution to getting shafted by random armies that come out of thin air anyone attempting to respond like that should rethink. Hell, even if you do find some good tactic you are going to lose a bunch of soldiers anyways with uneven odds or even when you have 2:1 odds against the enemy you still end up losing a few. While you as the player have to go spend time running from town to town recruiting 4 people a stop the enemy seems to magically find 30+ soldiers per settlement they stop at and amass their new army in 2 seconds flat. I resorted to comitting genocide against the enemy clans, and I’ve probably murdered about 40 lords in my past 5 hours of gameplay alone and they just keep popping up like flies on ♥♥♥♥, it’s literally impossible to get rid of these guys. I went from having 1000 total strength vs the 5000 total strength of the aserai when I went to war with them to having 1000 vs 2000 after I kicked their collective asses a multitude of times and left them with 3 clans from their previous 8. Guess what? In about 1 day of game time they regained 4 clans and their total kingdom strength was again 5000.
2. Jesus christ almighty, the cost of getting vassals for your kingdom just…doesn’t make ANY sense. I’m sitting at 700k right now and when I originally defected from the Aserai I had 100 relation with the king and 3 clans. I attempted to convince all of these clans to leave and join me, and when I succeeded on these skill checks mind you i still had around 50 relations with each of them after leaving they all wanted an amount of money I can’t even comprehend. I dropped my entire stack of money which was 1 million at the time and the bar for recruiting these guys didn’t even fill up half way. What in the actual monkey ♥♥♥♥ is this crap? How am I supposed to get damn vassals if they want more money than exists in the game, so I went to google to try and figure it out. People said if they have a lot of fiefs they will want more money, they each had no more than 2 fiefs so that’s a no, people said if they are rich they will want more but they never had more than 100k in their cash stack so once again not it, and then people said the bar doesn’t need to be full the offer button just needs to light up so I checked again but even with my entire ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ inventory worth probably 1.3 mil the bar still didn’t fill up even close to half way and the offer button never lit up. This game just…doesn’t make a lick of sense.
3. Finally, the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ bugs in this game are absolutely insane and everywhere. This ♥♥♥♥ is worse than cyberpunk, because at least in cyberpunk most of the bugs were funny with rarely a game breaking or ruining one. No, this game is purely game ruining bugs and crashes absolutely all the time. Absolutely horrendous AI the likes of which i’ve never seen during a siege in my biggest gripe, what is so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hard about using breaking down a door after you just lugged a giant ram to the door but “naw lets just go to a ladder even though we broke down the first door instead of breaking down the second. You know what, even better let’s use a single ladder and even when using the single ladder let’s give the enemy enough time to recoup after each of us goes up, so make sure to give a wide birth to your ♥♥♥♥ buddies and only have 1 person go up the single ladder at a time guys we wouldn’t want to overwhelm the enemy or anything. Oh, ♥♥♥♥ the commander build us siege towers with even more ladders on them to help us? We better only send up 2 people at a time and use half the ladders on it, the enemy might lose 1 or 2 troops if we send 3 people at once and use all the ladders.” Seriously, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ this is genuinely some of the most garbage pre school AI i’ve ever seen, the AI would probably be more effective if it was just written to run towards the enemy and not even bother pathfinding. Actually, now to think of it that’s exactly what it does, as the game seems to forget walls exist and will run half your ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ army into a wall and not even attempt to circumnavigate it so half your force is just stuck for the siege. Next is enemies getting stuck in walls, this one doesn’t happen a lot but it happens ALL the time in the same few places. I literally can’t go a siege without enemies or my soldiers getting stuck in this little wooden ramp on top of a wall at Razih. They just straight up cage themselves inside of this ramp and the entire troop squad they are in will have their AI break because of it. The AI will try to have all the soldiers be together, but because they can’t the entire rest of that squad will sit on top of them or below them at the bottom of the wall and never move.
In conclusion, I don’t know why i’m still playing this game but it’s genuinely one of the worst experiences i’ve ever had and I can’t stop playing it.