Grand Ages Medieval

[Greybriar]

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. I may actually attempt to play Grand Ages Medieval again.  O0

[tgb]

I just picked it up last night, but I thought the whole military-breaks-your-economy business had recently been fixed.

[Gusington]

Yes thanks Glen - another quick question - is there music in-game?  Is it apprpriate/medievally?

[tgb]

Question - in the videos I've seen sooner or later the focus of a trade route gets changed, usually from "balanced" to "production", or whatever - but I can't find a way to do it.  I don't see it mentioned anywhere in the manual or the in-game help, and I've tried clicking on everything that makes sense.

[glen55]

Yes thanks Glen - another quick question - is there music in-game?  Is it apprpriate/medievally?

I always just listen to itunes.  My weird mixture of the Beatles, Kanye, Taylor Swift and Radiohead may not be all that medieval.

[glen55]

I just picked it up last night, but I thought the whole military-breaks-your-economy business had recently been fixed.

That patch was in before I started playing.  Military units are still quite expensive and during the first part of the tutorial, your economy is hanging by a thread.  Apparently the hidden point of the tutorial is to absolutely force you to balance supply and demand.

It must've been pretty horrible before the patch.

[Gusington]

Kanye...oh my.

[DennisS]

I just picked it up last night, but I thought the whole military-breaks-your-economy business had recently been fixed.

That patch was in before I started playing.  Military units are still quite expensive and during the first part of the tutorial, your economy is hanging by a thread.  Apparently the hidden point of the tutorial is to absolutely force you to balance supply and demand.

It must've been pretty horrible before the patch.

The tutorial was almost unbeatable..but if you don't master the basic economic game balance, the sandbox game WAS unplayable.

[glen55]

Question - in the videos I've seen sooner or later the focus of a trade route gets changed, usually from "balanced" to "production", or whatever - but I can't find a way to do it.  I don't see it mentioned anywhere in the manual or the in-game help, and I've tried clicking on everything that makes sense.

Select the trader, and you can cycle through foci under the "Route Settings" tab.

[JasonPratt]

In reply to an earlier question, yes there is in-game music, yes it has a CK2ish sort of flare and is quite pleasant (Mom remarked on it in passing while I was checking how well the game would play on my Surface Pro 3 -- answer, not well, but that's okay, the house is fine).

No, it is not really medieval style music, but it's the kind of music that sounds period-appropriate. I gather from some Steam comments that there isn't nearly enough of it, and that it gets repetitive fast, but everyone who mentions it seems to agree with me that it sounds good.

[glen55]

Well, I played a bunch more . . . my enthusiasm is waning a bit, just because it's so damned hard.

First, I never finished the tutorial.  Maybe I was close, but after I built up my economy to overwhelming mass, with 30 million in the bank, I was tasked with a new sort of goal, also seemingly difficult, to start a city basically behind enemy lines and grow it to be larger than any of my current cities.  I think I know how to do this - basically, found the city, destroy a bunch of my existing production facilities, and rebuild them in the new city, but jeez, it was going to be a huge job, and I could only think there was going to be another and another and another huge job waiting behind those.  I usually don't think of playing a tutorial as being a way of life (like, e.g., WITP/AE).

So I gave up on the tutorial and fired up a sandbox.  There are a number of difficulty settings, and I gave myself all the advantages I could, and played a fair bit of the weekend . . . only to lose TWICE because I just couldn't turn a profit with my startup economy.  Even when I took a million gold as my startup stakes, and placed my cities with great care on a meticulously-explored map, I then proceeded to lose the whole million.

I love the map and the scale, but it's just too damned hard to figure this thing out.  The manual tells you practically nothing about what you need to know to win, and so does the tutorial.  There are a few youtube how-to videos, but there are not enough obsessive nerds playing this game and spilling all its secrets on the internet.

And there also just isn't enough information in-game.  I want reports!  Which items are raking in the big profits?  Where is the bottleneck?  Where exactly do my costs come from?

Maybe there are answers to these questions - obviously, I'm still in the tutorial phase, so I'm hardly a font of all GMA wisdom.  But if there are answers, I'm just having too much trouble finding them.

[Gusington]

^This...this is not good.

[Huw the Poo]

Yeah, sounds like those of us who waited dodged a bullet.

[Anguille]

With the little gaming time i have, i am still in the campaign and still Learning. While, at least since the patch, i don't have too many problems, i find that the gameplay is very very slow. Maybe it's because i don't get everything but at this point i am supposed to reach a population of 4000 and it takes me forever to get there. You need a lot of time to play that game.

I like the map, the music, the trade. There's a lot of nice thing in the game but it requires a lot of patience.

I don't like too much the time needed for battles.

[Rayfer]

Yeah, sounds like those of us who waited dodged a bullet.

My thoughts exactly. Whew!