Only one person can win by being first to get seven castles, but you can't win without bargaining. Each round players secretly give orders to every region on the map with their troops in it: They move to another region, defend, support other troops, consolidate power to gain resources, or raid to disrupt enemy orders. I might order my knights to march into enemy territory, my ships to support the attack, and my infantry to raid and disrupt the enemy's defenses before I go in.
The effectiveness and variety of orders is often determined by one of three power tracks, which no one house can be the master of: Iron Throne, Fiefdom, and King's Court. The holder of the Iron Throne breaks ties outside of combat, the holder of Fiefdom breaks ties in combat, and the master of the King's Court gets to change an order after they see what others are doing. Combat is simple and deterministic. You add up the strength of the units involved and add one of the character cards from your hand for a total.
Hands are open, so you always know whether you can win a fight or not. An option, deeply divisive among players, adds some randomness to fights, but not enough to sway them if one side has overwhelming advantage. Orders are the only thing you can truly control. Recruiting units, gaining lots of resources, and pushing yourself up the political turn-order and power tracks are all down to draws of random event cards at the start of each round.
Some factions can rely on these draws to win or lose, and if the card you want doesn't show up until round five then tough luck. The simplicity of the rules is generally to its credit.
Equal-sized forces will often stalemate, and your soldiers and ships are precious commodities it's not easy to get more of, so the choice of when and where to fight is crucial.
Each territory is only going to give you some of what you need out of the three main resources: Supply, power, and strongholds. It's tightly balanced so that no one player can overwhelm another without their full army, but you can't focus your full army on another player without leaving yourself open to the other houses. The only choice then, is to strike uneasy alliances for temporary goals. The enemy of your enemy is never your friend, but maybe you can jointly murder the common foe first.
But it's not a lot to cut your teeth on if you want deep simulation and mechanically complex strategy. It's more of a planner and plotter's strategy game than a logistician or thinker's. Instead, you get long and tedious games of hide-and-seek, where you either send a single army across the map in search of friends and foes or command a single unit that must avoid the watchful eyes of roaming guards.
In other cases, you accompany an automated unit as an escort--which is neither strategic, nor much fun. You spend far too much time clicking and waiting, without having anything actually happen. The final mission is not an explosive, nail-biting conclusion that unites the game's mechanics into a satisfying whole but another "click until stuff dies" embarrassment.
The campaign is an odd mishmash of random, unrewarding objectives without any sense of momentum--and it rarely uses the game's most interesting elements. In this game of hide-and-seek, you play the seeker. Instead, the campaign turns your attention to the action, which might have at least been entertaining if Genesis' combat were good.
Instead, battles are poorly animated messes that don't resemble a clash between mighty forces but a handful of army men thrown into a bingo cage and rattled around until one of the militias emerges victorious.
Defeated units might stand upright, and there's no sense of impact between forces; they just wander amid the chaos, swinging swords at nothing in particular until they fall over.
These battles aren't given a worthwhile narrative context either. The game acts as a prelude to Martin's series, and if you're a A Game of Thrones fan, you might appreciate having some gaps filled in for you. But the wan storytelling doesn't offer more than a two-page synopsis of the game's events might. You aren't shown the most important events; you are only told of them in end-mission text summaries. Characters banter here and there, but the voice acting is unenthusiastic and the dialogue only serves to move the plot rather than draw you into the world.
Furthermore, the script was in dire need of copyediting. This is a game based on literature; it's inexcusable that the written dialogue would be rife with spelling and grammar errors.
Genesis' strongest elements come to the forefront in stand-alone skirmishes against other players and the AI. There are concepts here never explored in the campaign. You must purchase certain moves, such as the assassin's ability to automatically execute enemy units that come near or the spy's secret agreement skill. You win by accruing prestige points, which are earned by forging alliances and performing other tasks, and pulling off some of these tasks can make you feel deliciously devious.
Using an assassin to eliminate an opponent's noble lady not only breaks a blood pact, but it's also accompanied by the assassin's wonderful and insincere "I'm so sorry" line.
Infiltrating an enemy's feudal home with a spy so that the next unit he produces is a turncoat can make you feel like you got away with murder, but without shedding a single drop of blood. This is where you see what A Game of Thrones: Genesis might have been: a complex strategy game that prizes deceit over full-on fighting--or at least, until one house declares war. Unfortunately, fascinating features don't necessarily make for a fun time. Having so many units that require direct manipulation leads to frantic micromanagement as you struggle to keep up.
Poor AI and a surprising lack of automation elements force you to keep a close eye on every single unit, and the game just doesn't offer the tools or interface elements that you need to keep everything under control.
By Nathan Meunier Updated: 18 Jan pm. Secret alliances. These are all tasty elements that can sex-up any good old medieval tale. A Game of Thrones: Genesis sets itself apart from other fantasy real-time strategy offerings by placing a much greater gameplay emphasis on politicking and treachery than on brandishing swords and resorting to outright warfare.
It's an interesting experiment that yields an impressive level of depth but very little of the fun that comes from conquering your foes by setting carefully planned strategies into motion. I love the fact Genesis encourages attaining victory over other warring noble houses through seedy, underhanded means, and it gives you plenty of nefarious methods to tinker with.
Rather than churning out military forces from the get go, the early game of most maps plays out with envoys, spies, assassins, and other units designed for specific feats of trickery.
Gaining the favor of neutral towns increases your influence, prestige, and gold production, but your rivals covet the same resources and will also work behind-the-scenes to thwart your plans.
This is where things get a bit crazy. Alliances with nearby towns can be undermined by rival envoys or covertly taken over by spies without the other side knowing until it's too late. To protect against this, you can send spies to scrutinize your own units and towns to uncover possible subterfuge, post guards at the gate, or even seal an alliance by sending a maiden to wed the locals in a village.
Other tactics include sowing the seeds of rebellion to hamstring gold production, assassinating rival town officials, and even bribing enemy units.
Co-opted units will report fake results like false assassinations, town takeovers, etc. It's great to see so much effort poured into crafting such a deep and dynamic subterfuge system. On paper, these numerous options are simply awesome. But when it comes down to juggling all of these moving parts in real time on top of the game's other varied nuances, the flow of gameplay gets overcomplicated in a hurry.
Genesis also lacks some much-needed balance between its espionage and combat elements. With all of the factions on a given map working secretly to stab each other in the back, the onset of war is inevitable.
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