Dead-Lands

So I just saw this was available and decided to give it a go. I loved the original Majesty. Something about not being able to control your people except through motivation made a whole other challenge. And you had to spend money to make money. You drop rewards and your heros get it, they can buy potions and equipment and live longer (so you don't have to res them) and that money gets taxed and returned back to you.

It's an intersting SIM game that had all sorts of meta games to it. For example there where three non-human races you could pick from, but only one per map. The Gnomes would repair your buildings and spend lots of time in your gardens and training grounds, and any other shop you had available. plus you would build one hovel and the rest would just show up. You'd have an army of fixer uppers, but they die terribly easily. I mean their upgrades went from stick, to board, to board with a nail in it. yeah not very tough

Then you got dwarves, who give a discount to your Blacksmith upgrades, can fix things themselves, and give you ballista towers, but are slow, only do melee and have no real upgrades, still they can be pretty tough bashers on magic users

Finally you can pick the Elves, which make your marketplace go nuts, giving you lots of gold, but they make gamble houses and leisure houses that all the heroes waste time in instead of protecting their guilds. Very annoying but you just turn off the repair cycle and let those houses burn to the ground


Majesty 2 has just two races, Dwarves or Elves. Neither add any change to other mechanics (though dwarves do add balistas still) Instead you can have both races (though they don't like each other, I don't know what that means yet). The nice thing is Elves love doing explore quests, which seems like in Majesty 2 everyone just quites doing about halfway through a mission. Dwarves never repair buildings any more, but they beat the snot out of everything. It's like dwarves are warriors on crack, and elves are rangers on speed. Though how fragile elves are makes me a little crazy.

Oh another difference.

So in the first Majesty you could build Trading posts and Temples anywhere you want, to an unlimited number. The Maps where actually very flat and the caravans (from the trading posts) would shoot a straight line for your market place.

Why build trading posts? Each trading post would send a caravan to you're market place, laden with gold, after a certain amount of time. This is pretty much free gold you just got to keep them alive. In 2 you still can make trading posts, but now you not only get a timer to let you know when they are about to leave. Plus in two you can upgrade the trading post so they can defend themselves. It's not amazing, but nothing was more annoying then loosing your 1k+ trading post to a stupid rat.

Also in 2 you can only setup trading posts and temples at designated area's. For the trading posts it's along roads and the caravans follows these paths. It actually gives the game a more sim like feel using these as the posts get setup in logical places and in logical order.

The temples are similiar, only on holy ground, and there are a limited number of those. In the previous version there where certain temples that if you had one you couldn't have the other. For example if you had life priestesses you couldn't have death priestesses. In 2 you can, but it would take up a holy ground spot to do it, so you are limited in a different way.

All around (other than how much more gold it costs to do everything) 2 is much much better than one.

Oh except that the heroes wont attack or explore where I want to unless they are elves, or blademasters (Warriors of Khrom turned into blade masters )

No Khrom? That is terrible. No wonder it got poor reviews.

No you still have Khrom, they are just called blademasters instead of barbarians. They all sound like the Govenator. And you still have the rage of Khrom, but it's not as good as the one in the original, mostly it makes them move faster, which does help with getting people to the baddies, or getting them from the baddies.