Kingdoms Reborn Review (ZOOMER)
If this game interests you at all, buy it. It's fun and absolutely worth the money.
Pros:
- Very fun gameplay
- Reasonable variety and replayability
- Can play with your friends
- Fun and dynamic global economy mechanic. Trading companies are so much fun, I love them.
Cons:
- The card system doesn't make much sense at all. Once you've built something, you can just ctrl+c and paste it as many times as you want. By the end of the game, I have over a hundred wild cards that no longer serve a purpose.
- The AI basically does nothing. In my 200 hours, I've never once been attacked. Only the Sven Agnar AI uses his steal cards on me maybe 5 or so times over 20-30 in game years.
- Late game performance issues. I typically crash around 1,000 population which is more than necessary to win, but I like the city builder aspect of the gameplay and find it fun making the largest empire I can. It ends up using upwards of 20-30 gb of ram lol
- Playing on high difficulties feels wrong. Once you know how to play, it's almost impossible to 'lose.' At the highest difficulties you just have to let your population partially die off as you slowly build up a critical mass of upgrades and efficiency stacks. This is 'fine' I just don't find it fun, personally. The brutal difficulty feels about the perfect balance of fun/challenge.
- Bear/deer spawns and ruin spawns to fully fill your museum/zoo are usually rough. You kinda have to spend an uncomfortably large amount of time going through the map every so often to find them. I've only found all three bears one time and only ever filled my museum one time as well.
A few tips for new players: Prioritize food, always
Farms are the best source of food. Build them. Build a lot of them. Build more of them than you think you ever should.
If you start in a grasslands or savanna biome, pig ranches with the biome buffs for ranching productivity are excellent. Build a lot of them, more than you think you should.
In the boreal/tundra biomes, arctic fishing pairs great with deepsea fishers as well as the cooperative fishing card. Build many of them!
GRANARIES BUFF SO MANY THINGS-ranches, fisheries, farms, fruit gatherers, bee keepers, hunting lodge, mushroom farm, ramen shops, sushi bars, etc.
When you're getting to a large population, start utilizing port colonies to make use of other starting biomes bonuses. Pig Ranches are good starting off no matter where you are, but they fall off in the mid game without the biome bonus. Deep sea fisheries are always pretty good, they're just even better with their biome bonus as well.
The AI's (other than Sven Agnar unless you really try) are your friends. If you gift them and gain their favor for diplomacy, you'll be able to get good trades out of them. Sometimes the Japan AI will build 800 pig ranches and have a stockpile of 600,000 pork so if you ever find yourself in need of a metric ton of food, he's your plug.