Castles & Castles - The Northern Campaign & Castles II - Siege and Conquest [interplay] [Retro] [Dos] [adamantalias]

Perhaps the first truly accessible strategy game about the Middle Ages, Castles is a classic from Interplay that offers many hours of addictive gameplay.

As a prominent English noble living in the 12th century, your mission is straightforward: build a castle and defend it from the Celts. What makes Castles a lot of fun is the variety of castles parts (walls, gates, towers, etc.) that effectively allows a limitless number of designs you can implement. There are some inconsistencies in the times it takes to build different parts, but they do not detract from the fun.

True to the intense political turmoil of that era, you will also have to make decisions (by answering multiple-choice questions) that will affect your favor with the Church, nobles, and peasants. Throughout the game, your constant task is to maintain a strong military and a large workforce while watching the level of your treasury.

Although Castles is easy to learn and lacks complicated options, it is by no means an easy game. The game is quite long, and if you don't build up your army early in the game, you will find yourself at a severe disadvantage in later stages when each new invasion by the Celts brings more and more soldiers. Worse, battles are not as much fun to watch as when you are building a castle.

Follow-up to Interplay's classic Castles, Castles II: Siege and Conquest is an excellent sequel that expands both scale and scope of the original classic. No longer are you a noble who is content with defending your own territory from the Celts and other nobles, you now have a grander ambition to conquer the whole of historical Brittany.

Fans of Castles will be happy to find that the addictive castle-building gameplay is not only intact, but enhanced with new building parts and soldier types. Because the scale of the game has been enlarged, you will spend most of your time looking not at your current castle, but at the map of England. From this screen, you have access to three categories of tasks: stock, army, relations, as well as the options menu. You are given a specific number of 'points' for each category, so you can allocate all of them to finish one task quickly, or apportion them to do several tasks at once. Tasks range from acquiring resources, such as refining gold, recruit and train different types of soldiers, to diplomatic options, one of the best new features of the game. Diplomatic orders (accessed from 'relations' menu) allow you to sabotage or spy other nobles' lands, cater to the Pope's favor, and so on. As in the first game, special historical events occur periodically, requiring you to choose an action from multiple choices. Your decisions, naturally, affect the game in varying degrees.

Castles II is, like its predecessor, a long game. But you now have a concrete measure of your progress: the points system. Most actions in the game yield points, some (e.g. conquering a province or wiping out a noble completely) more than others. You have to reach 7,000 points to petition the Pope for the throne, and then you have to maintain those points for 4-5 computer months to win the game. Castle building is more efficient and easier to deal with. You can even set up pre-made castles on file so that you can place them quickly. Battles are set in a full alternate screen with the ability to place and command each unit, a welcome change from the passive, watch-it-unfold battles in the first game.