Grand Ages Medieval

[JasonPratt]

On a completely incidental and yet perhaps relevant note: the game runs chuggy on the best Surface Pro 3.

[Gusington]

Sigh. I am sad.

[bobarossa]

Although I do not hate Grand Ages: Medieval, I believe there are games that are much more fun to play than it is. The keys cannot be remapped to my liking. The manual leaves a lot to be desired and the tech tree .pdf poster is practically impossible to be viewed, therefore gameplay is guesswork and planning is impossible. I simply refuse to view hours' worth of YouTube videos to learn how to play a game that should be easy to learn had the documentation provided with the game been adequately presented.

I didn't even know there was a tech poster!  GOG simply lists it as "poster" in their downloads section which I assumed it was some useless eye-candy like most downloadable extras.  I'm having no trouble viewing the tech poster.  I DO think it was horribly designed though.  The list of descriptions below the charts are only partly in order.  It's like someone reorganized the chart after making the list and then didn't bother updating the order of the list.  The descriptions also seem very poorly translated.  What the hell is "production of pomp"?  They have separate posters for USA and EN languages but they use the English word 'plough' in the USA poster when it's 'plow' in the USA.  Haven't actually played the game yet so any other comments will have to wait.

[JasonPratt]

What the hell is "production of pomp"?

Don't worry, it's only a circumstantial building.


(And now I wait....)

[bobarossa]

What the hell is "production of pomp"?

Don't worry, it's only a circumstantial building.


(And now I wait....)

The proper response would be to ask "under what circumstances is it produced?"  But I'm marching to a picky drummer.

[glen55]

I got it last night, played about 3 hours, and I am having a blast.  My only real fear is all this stuff I am hearing about how aggressive the AI is & how viciously it cheats.  I'm sorry, but I want a laid-back game like this to be kind of easy and not require perfect play the first time through, IOW, I like to WIN!  (Think the original Majesty.)  Question: once I get past the campaign into the sandbox mode, are there sufficient AI/difficulty settings to make it not quite such a cast-iron beeyotch as everybody seems to be saying?

Pro tip: when there is a fight going on, zoom out and there will be a little icon of the battle.  Put the mouse pointer on it and you will get a little box that gives you a running tally of the relative strength of the two sides.  You can zoom in and watch and listen to the battle instead.  DON'T DO THAT - it will hurt your eyes, ears and delicate sensibilities.  You  have been warned. 

In other words, anybody who is looking for a combat game, steer far clear.  Combat is laughably horrible.  But still, I am getting a very nice sense of regional strategy, kind of in-between operational and grand strategy.  At least once the city-building aspect of the game becomes available.  Tentative thumbs up.

[Gusington]

^Nice. I have renewed hope!

[Greybriar]

....I'm having no trouble viewing the tech poster....

How are you viewing it? I would think it would be awkward accessing the tech tree poster ingame. When I open the .pdf its display is at 39.3% of its normal size and the print is too small for me to read. If I enlarge it to 100%, it doesn't even display 1/6th of the poster on my 23 inch monitor. I thought about printing out the bottom half of the poster a third at a time so the Production, Infrastructure, and Military tech trees would take up about a page each, but the .pdf doesn't seem to allow any type of editing.

Obtaining the tech tree poster was the main reason I was considering buying the retail boxed version of the game, but I refuse to spend an additional $40 just for that.

[bobarossa]

....I'm having no trouble viewing the tech poster....

How are you viewing it? I would think it would be awkward accessing the tech tree poster ingame. When I open the .pdf its display is at 39.3% of its normal size and the print is too small for me to read. If I enlarge it to 100%, it doesn't even display 1/6th of the poster on my 23 inch monitor. I thought about printing out the bottom half of the poster a third at a time so the Production, Infrastructure, and Military tech trees would take up about a page each, but the .pdf doesn't seem to allow any type of editing.

Obtaining the tech tree poster was the main reason I was considering buying the retail boxed version of the game, but I refuse to spend an additional $40 just for that.

I'm using Foxit Reader to view it at 83% zoom (shrink?).  I agree the text is a little hard to read but I have a 26" wide screen at 1900x1200.  I can just get everything to show at that zoom level.  I wouldn't advise printing as with the dark background will use up all your ink.  You can use "Select Text" to copy out the text descriptions but that won't get you the images.  Of course if you rearranged the text to be an order related to the image positions, you could get away without the images. 

[Greybriar]

I'm using Foxit Reader to view it at 83% zoom (shrink?).  I agree the text is a little hard to read but I have a 26" wide screen at 1900x1200.  I can just get everything to show at that zoom level.  I wouldn't advise printing as with the dark background will use up all your ink.  You can use "Select Text" to copy out the text descriptions but that won't get you the images.  Of course if you rearranged the text to be an order related to the image positions, you could get away without the images.

At 75% on my monitor I can view the writing but the images and titles at the top of each of the three trees isn't visible (as well as the map, of course).

I agree with you about not printing the poster due to the ink usage. When I discovered there was no way to change the background from dark brown to white, I gave up on printing out any part of the tech tree poster.

[Anguille]

Just played a little with my campaign and the patch has made lost of improvements in terms of economics....my merchants finally bring in some money so i can continue the campaign and not start from scrach  :)

[undercovergeek]

As soon as someone says something definitive about the positives of the game I'm all over it

At the minute there's no one shouting from the rooftops about its awesomeness

[MetalDog]

IT'S AWESOME!!! 'GEEK SHOULD BUY ME!!!

[bob48]

Oh, don't encourage him.

..and come down off that bloody roof.....

[MetalDog]

 :-[  Ok.....