Castles II: Siege & Conquest

This is the first video game I can remember playing as a young kid, it was great to take a trip down nostalgia lane. Castles 2 is a game where you must balance resource accumulation, military advancement, build castles to prevent peasant revolts, please the pope with indulgences, and increase your stake for the title of King of France. I enjoy this game because I grew up with it, Castles 2 is older and does not have a tutorial to take your hand and explain the game, however after a few play throughs the game mechanics and strategy is easy. I do want to warn people that my opinion of this game is biased largely by nostalgia. I do think for its time it is an excellent strategy game but compared to contemporary games in its genre is simplistic and lacks intricacies that strategy game buffs come to expect for exciting gameplay. I recommend this game, but if you are on the fence about it, I would wait for the price to come down, I argue that 10$ for this game is too high. Also hold down the right mouse button to speed up gameplay.

Nostalgia? wonderful. Quality? questionable. So many in-game messages were blank. It ruins the flavour. Nostalgia? still wonderful. Price? ridiculous. This game is almost 30 years old. *If* the steam version worked perfectly, maybe half of what I paid would be appropriate. Nostalgia? I am about to play it again. So, if you want to pay for something you already owned many many many years ago, it is fun to revisit. If not, don't be insulted by paying for an ancient game that does not work properly on steam.

Fun game that brings back a lot of great memories! However, right now the game is broken. Whenever I try to "design" a castle, the screen goes black and it locks up. I can't find anything about how to fix this, so I guess I'm out of luck :-( The only reason I don't recommend this game is for this reason. EDIT: Discovered how to get around the crash. Save a castle or make your own and then load them all out from the saves. Haven't had a crash since! Changing my recommendation.

pure nostalgia the gameplay is as shallow as a puddle but it is just like i remember it from the 90s

As a huge fan of the original disk based game I'm rather disappointed in this port for steam. Some highlights. Yes the game is functional, but the music will randomly speed up and stay there turning the once pleasant soundtrack into a nails on the chalkboard type sound. When you attack a player that's blessed by the pope it doesn't let you know that he's angered by it. I'm sure it does the same with the other players but I smashed them all so quickly it didn't even matter. The following are probably just flaws with the CD version of the game and not the port itself. You have to wait and listen to hear how much gold the diplomat is requesting instead of seeing it on the screen. This wastes time and doesn't add any enjoyment to the game. In fact all of the not being able to read the dialog and being forced to listen to it wasn't fun. I think the next time I want to play Castles 2 I'll just do it on my old DOS machine. I don't think this port is worth the $10 unless you don't have a machine capable of playing the original version.

An old favorite. I don't think it has all of the soundtrack of the original, but it works fairly well. This is a good little strategy game and rewards patience and diligence. Tips. Right mouse speeds up progress bars. Castles worth over 100 points stop revolts in their own and neighboring territories. Don't think because you've got excellent diplomatic relations your neighbors won't stab you in the back. At a certain point, expansion is the only win condition and if your army is weak, they're going to come after you.

Действие игры разворачивается в 1312 году во Франции. Историю немного исказили: король Франции Карл умер в 1311 году. И не оставил этой земле наследников. Здешний Папа готов передать власть одному из 5 дворян, как только один из них получит достаточное влияние над землями Франции. Короче говоря захватывай и властвуй. Чем больше территории под твоим контролем, тем больше ты сможешь: добывать ресурсов, увеличивать армию и сооружать замков. Кажется всё просто. И вот тут начинается жесть. Играть в это сложно. Пока прочитаешь и переведёшь огромный мануал (который находится в папке с игрой), пока отыщешь все горячие клавиши, пока разберёшься с геймплеем, пройдёт не один час. А сама по себе игра короткая.

Great strategic retro 90's game. Helps to have the plots on but you should read the manual before you do. Build your army ASAP and make getting blessed a 3rd priority after building your happiness. try to build a large castle on your gold territory in between you other 3 main resources. 2nd priority should be food, then iron, and last being timber as it is the least used resource.

I love this game. Probably more for nostalgia than anything else. So for those ten or so other people that played this in the 90s and loved it then, it is a must buy. If you are interested in general in classic old-school overly simple games, you may like it too. For the 99.9% of the rest of you, you probably would not like this game. Still for those fortunate few of us that would enjoy it, this game is and was amazing.

20 years and I still cannot beat it. And damn it am I trying hard