[Brian Swartz]

Herein shall be documented the most likely .... scratch that, almost certainly boring events of Germany in the late 13th century. LOTR means Lords of the Realm, not Lord of the Rings, in this case. Why am I doing this? Well, Lords of the Ream II is a Sierra game from the early 90s, one of the first(along with one of the Caesar games and a couple of others) to use the now exceedingly well known turn-based strategic map and real-time battle tactics combination of strategy gameplay.

At the time, I was much younger naturally and didn't have the patience to really learn how to be good at it, but always enjoyed it. In the lens of history, there is a certain addictiveness to it, but it's mostly repetitive with shockingly bad AI(it's almost difficult to lose a castle siege when defending, for example). I picked it up some weeks ago again and have reached the final campaign, far better than I managed to do when I played it 15 years ago or so, making only the third campaign in Ireland which I narrowly failed on multiple occasions. This is really just an exercise is exorcising some gaming demons of my youth. It may well be of little interest, but I'm interested in writing about it, so ...

here it is.

So I, Earl Huntington, am in Germany, and these are my pointless, boring, text-only adventures(no method of screenshot capture seems to work, PrintScreen and Fraps both fail with the version of the game I have).

Our journey beings, with all advanced options on except Fight Humans Only naturally, in the Winter of 1268. The previous few campaigns have taken me about two decades each to complete, for reference. Germany has 16 counties, as many as any of the eight campaign maps. We control Silesia, in the northeast; the Countess, often the most dangerous opponent, has Carinthia in the southeast. Bunched up together in the northwest, hopefully spoiling to beat each other up, are the other three nobles: the Knight, the Baron, and the Bishop.

Naturally, we'll butter the others up with compliments -- it can't hurt -- and then turn our attention to Silesia. We have a royal castle, which is the strongest that can be built, complete with drawbridge, inner keep, a number of pots of boiling oil, and a garrison capacity of 600. Naturally, there's no troops there at the moment.

Population: 165
Happiness: 47

Well, that's rather horrible actually. A decent county population is over 1k, and I generally keep happiness at 70 minimum even in maximum war-time. Making matters better, 7 of 13 fields need reclaiming: of the remaining six, two are set to fallow, two to grain and two to cattle, as I always maintain a balanced approach to farming.

Silesia's two resources are wood and stone, meaning no ore which I need for weapons save bows. But first we must reclaim fields and build up our economy -- we will need about a 500-man army to expand at all, and that's three times our total population at the moment. So it's time to get to work.