I feel that it is necessary to temper the enthusiasm shown for this game by the reveiw here and by the comments in this forum.
I started playing it earlier this year and to start with I rather enjoyed it. I liked the fact that there are quite a few factors that you need to juggle with to gain success. I liked the fact that the characteristics of your generals affected the success (or otherwise) of your endeavours, that you had to keep them happy in order to retain their loyalty and the fact that you could develop their skills. I also liked the fact that you need to do things for you peasants such as undertake flood reduction works and develop land in order to increase its value. Also the other elements such as searching for metals that can be used to fabricate weapons and various acts of diplomacy, including marrying off your daughters to create alliances.
However, as your power increases there comes a point where it becomes necessary to use force to achieve your objectives. It was at this point that I became disenchanted with the game. Prior to going to war I would do all the necessary research to discover the loyalty of my opponent's generals and the strength of their armies. However, when I got onto the battle field I found that the computer had cheated: the number of men in my opponent's armies had magically increased quite significantly. During the battle there would be various other cheats. For example, the computer players forces could withstand fire for significantly longer and with fewer losses than mine. Also, if the battle had not been resolved within one month then towards the end of the month up to a third of the computer player's generals would retreat from the battle field only to return a couple of days later with much larger, revivified armies. Of course this option is not available to mere human players.
All these blatant cheats by the computer side makes it very much harder to win large battles than otherwise. When I play a game I very much like to see the computer abiding by the same rules and restrictions as those applied to human players. In the end, I got so fed up with all the computer players' cheating and stopped playing this game.
If it wasn't for the cheating I would join in with the general enthusiasm for RTK. However, the cheating has resulted in me giving it a score of 2.
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