Great Houses of Calderia

A 'deep political strategy game' with events every 10 sec and constant 'dice rolls' on random attributes. Family members become rivals and friends randomly with no feedback or purpose. Characters gain traits constantly through events. Its like Sheogorath created a world after reading Game of Thrones...terrible

Abandoned great game with huge potential. Don't even try to reach late game there is a bug with a civil war and the devs don't care! It's just a crash grab, save your money and your time! I am not sure about their other games but I am sure they are abandoned slops also, save your time and money from this monsters!

This game deserves like a 50% rating. You start the game and understand nothing - then when you understand the game, you are already done with it. Which is like 10 hours. Gameplay: You basically figure out how to grow your city, then send spys to other states and drain them of their workers with war which is wayyy too easy and then you do that for 10 more hours. After the 5th hour, this gets tedious. Game also begins lagging after 30 mins so you gotta restart it. Also didnt get the achievements for winning the game and becoming the king since i didnt become a baron yet. So in the end - its a budget Crusader Kings that costs 25 Euros.

Would I recommend this game? Sure, if you can get it at a deep deep discount. Otherwise, stay away; it just has too many flaws to be considered a good game. It mostly resembles an event generator with random events occurring constantly. Said events are then resolved through RNG based on some arbitrary stat. Even given all that, however, I could work with it to some degree, but the totally bizarre design decisions left me bewildered. Some examples: You want to become a count (one of your objectives)? First you have to declare war on your current count and defeat them. Yay, we're now a count! Wait, not so fast. Beating them only gives you the "right" to be count, it doesn't actually make you a count (they're still the count). So, you now have to declare war on them again, and defeat them a second time. Now that you're the count, you have vassals at your disposal. Oops, not true. In order to get your vassals in line, you have to (you guessed it) declare war on them and bring them to heel. Once again, this only gives you the "right" to vassalize them. Now you have to rinse and repeat to actually subjugate them and make them vassals. All of the declaring war nonsense can only be done if your relationship with them is bad. This involves hiring spies to spread negative propaganda so your relationship goes down. If you spent your early game trying to make nice with everyone, your relationship with them may be so high that you'll need to do the whole spy thing several times. This is further complicated by the fact that you can only do this every so often, and while you're waiting for the timer to countdown, your relationship is improving automagically. Another "huh?" design decision is that you can not reenforce armies that you created (at least I didn't find a way). Instead, you have to disband the entire army and recreate it, which can be a drain on your resources. This game did have some good concepts, but they just weren't fleshed out very well, and the whole thing just seems to have been put together in a very haphazard fashion. Last gripe: The achievement system rewards you for completing objectives, but laughably does not give you an achievement for winning the game... go figure.

Dead game, no updates in over a year

It's a tough call, but ultimately no: there IS so much about the game that DOES work -- I especially love the skill-tree system they have -- but there's also so many basic features that either aren't present or aren't accessible. The tipping-point for me was (spoiler) when the civil war started and I had no way of telling which side I had previously agreed to be on or which side my neighbors said they would be on -- wound up surrounded by enemies and it felt completely unfair since I had no way of telling which side would have been strategically sound to join. That's the biggest example, but there are tons of situations like this where you know HOW to make a decision but the game just won't allow you to access the information you know is available, and it stings every time to know that you COULD have made a good decision if the interface wasn't so opaque. Combined with that, various technical issues: bugs with the cursor vanishing or in-game events not triggering, and I have no idea how to delete the save file.

Passable grand strategy game based on simple RTS minigame. Not bad, but feels unfinished and not well balanced. After one victory I really do not feel interest in replaying, which is not a good sign for grand strategy, I am on the fence for this one, but given the price and lack of replayability I move to not recommend. But there is value if you really like grand strategies, especially focused mostly on economy and diplomacy.

A lot of mechanics that work, but at the end of the day amount to nothing. The combat system is a breath of fresh air, but overall this game is a slug. Overall is not bad but tedious enough to cause me to not care about anything that happens. Probably a game for the hardcore players that are still looking for that game of thrones subterfuge. For me this is far from it.