King's Orders

Cute little game with a lot of potential but many problems that undermine it.

The Good:

The concept of sending messengers and having a delay in tactical overview of what is happening is a fresh take on strategy and interesting for a while

The Bad:

- The UI is inconsistent as someone else commented, the space bar doesn't always unpause-pause the game in every screen

- The game likes to unpause on different button presses (especially when reading messages) and I haven't found a way to turn it off. Worse unlike other games where the difference between a paused and unpaused game is a gray/color screen or a giant pause button over the entire display, here it's a tiny little play button along the top row, and because of the concept of messengers things don't move immediately so it can take days or months for you to notice that the game unpaused itself.. Either give us an option to disable autoresume on random buttons or make it visually in your face.

- Spies are just a pain in the ass, spies have different things they can do but most feel like flavor text, the only thing that matters is how much troops an army or a town has and thats an instant report, everything else is just for fun.

- There are no anti-spy actions you can take, for example tell your spy to hunt other spies, put him on counter-intelligence. This is more exaggerated when playing the free for all Europe map, because the AI will spam spies like there is no tomorrow. BUT they don't actually do anything with those spies except maybe disable a building or lower random morale. Which honestly doesn't even matter at one point, it's just annoying.

- What is more annoying is random message interception. Now someone might say thats the point in a game with messengers, but honestly I disagree, the message gets intercepted and nothing, you immediately get informed that it got intercepted and then just send 10 more messages to make sure they go through. Since the interception of messages is not a toggle or an action it just randomly happens when a spy is nearby (regardless if they are friendly or at war with you). And the AI loves to pile them on your capital.

- Even though this is supposed to be set in the middle ages, some use of terms (especially with spies) and the concept that the Europe map gets turned into a blood-fest hints that the developers wanted to make a ww2 game but then for some reason gave up and made a medieval one. Which honestly breaks the medieval immersion for me.

- The AI is crazy bad, especially on larger maps, I am guessing there are a couple of systems overlapping, namely different power groups that the AI is preset to join (Seljuks and the Abbasids, Holy Roman Empire and the Papal States, etc.) and then actions to improve or reduce relations impact the likelihood for the AI to declare war. BUT it's a domino effect, once one AI nation is sufficiently weakened the other AI start behaving like sharks, immediately lowering relations and then doggpiling that nation across the world, which then causes other nations (including the initial enemies of the nation that is being doggpiled on, which doesn't make sense) to immediately reduce relations. After a while this makes everyone at war with everyone, Abbasids at war with Poland, Wales attacking Novgorod, Sicily at war with Norway, etc. What is worse is that even if the other AI's don't declare war on the nation that is being attacked, at some point that defender nation gets crazy and starts declaring war on everyone even if they have no chance in hell of winning. For example Sicily that is at war with the Papal states, Tuscany, Venice, Hungary, Byzantine, Seljuks, France, England then declares war on the HRE! On the other hand it's really easy for the player to keep relations from dropping below 20-30 by just spamming raise relations every time it expires.

- The AI is really bad at economy. It will prioritize defensive and military structures everywhere and then run out of money. Forcing itself to run around the map with armies that have 50 peasants and some infantry and archers since they used all their money on buildings instead. They also like to immediately put all their cities on fortify when war starts which reduces their economy even further (fortify reduces taxes and trade by 25%). Honestly you don't even need to fight them, they will kamikazee their weak armies into your land where you have stacks with a few thousand soldiers of each type (because you didn't destroy your own economy) and then they will just implode because they ran out of money and automatically turn rebel. Since they will immediately buy another general to max capacity even if they have no money or troops to support it with or even have no use for it.

- Last but not least, the fact that the devs bundled the save and load game into one screen is plain old devious. You know what you did, and shame on you...

The core gimmick of the game just isn't good enough to make up for how slobberly the AI is.

I was really excited to try this one, as someone that's very interested in games using incomplete information, order delay and generals that have their own autonomy, but I refunded it within an hour.

There is nothing conceptually wrong with the game. The UI, however, is so badly conceived that I couldn't stomach playing it. To give an example, suppose you want to build a blacksmith. The game requires you to go in and draft an order for it, which involves clicking through several layers of menus. Even in games that have the same shtick as this, like Grand Tactician: Civil War (it has order delay), you would be able to - for a direct, single order - just click on the thing and move it/click on the UI and build it. There's nothing that would be changed mechanically if you could just press a button to build stuff, even if it took time (because of the order delay) for it to start, but making me go through this is just so tedious I can't put up with it.

If the devs ever come out with a sequel or another game that plays with these ideas I'm willing to try it.

Hands down the most realistic campaign movement and command logistics I’ve seen in a medieval strategy game. Instead of playing as an omniscient god with instant map updates, you're forced to make high-stakes decisions using delayed, spotty, and unreliable information—capturing the actual friction of historical warfare. Yes, it’s currently buggy and clearly unfinished, but the core concept is brilliant. If you like Total War, Crusader Kings, or Bannerlord but wish strategy games captured the true chaos and order delays of ancient warfare, give this a look. I bought this with my own money and nobody paid me for this review; I’m just genuinely excited for its future.

it should've been smaller scale, with retinues and forts, not cities and armies