The massive AI Kingdoms update for Kingdoms and Castles has finally hit Open Beta for anyone who owns it, so you can now see what the developer has been working on for quite some time.
Kingdoms and Castles is a city-building simulation game about growing a kingdom from a tiny hamlet to a sprawling city and imposing castle. It has gradually grown from quite a small and relaxed game into a much bigger city-builder / RTS hybrid, although you can still pretty much play how you want and AI Kingdoms are optional to add in.
Here's some highlights of what's in the current Beta:
- AI Kingdoms you can add when starting a new game
- Talk, trade, or fight with these AI kingdoms
- Hall of Diplomacy where you can make diplomats used to interact with the AI Kingdoms
- Fog of war system
- Siege Workshop which builds Catapults
- New harder 'Survive 250' game mode
- Theatre and Jousting Arena
- Transport carts
- Minimap
- Ability to set maximum workers per job category
- Lots of other various improvements
I managed to set aside some time and play through the Beta today and it's looking absolutely fantastic. Kingdoms and Castles was already a wonderful game but now it just has so much more depth to it, giving you a great many more hours of building - without making it too complicated.
For the Beta, it's currently Steam-only until it's finished and then it will be up as a normal update for other stores. If you wish to try it on Steam simply right click the game and go to Properties, hit the Beta tab and select "next-version-preview".
You can find Kingdoms and Castles on Steam, GOG and itch.io.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
That must be the second big update out after I thought the game to be abandoned. Sometimes I cannot really fathom how those indie devs manage to survive. Unless they do it besides their day job (which would also account for the long time between updates).
Looks like at least it started that way. What I can quickly see that they have grown only slightly and added one person since. That's pretty much all I got from the news update where they talk about the progress over the years: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/569480/view/3103539804169980543
I have had this in my wishlist for quite a while, but based on the reviews it hasn't been ready enough. It looks like that progress is clearly going right direction and latest update will even add more playtime.
That must be the second big update out after I thought the game to be abandoned. Sometimes I cannot really fathom how those indie devs manage to survive. Unless they do it besides their day job (which would also account for the long time between updates).
Looks like at least it started that way. What I can quickly see that they have grown only slightly and added one person since. That's pretty much all I got from the news update where they talk about the progress over the years: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/569480/view/3103539804169980543
I have had this in my wishlist for quite a while, but based on the reviews it hasn't been ready enough. It looks like that progress is clearly going right direction and latest update will even add more playtime.
With the next-version-preview branch (this AI kingdoms update basically), I squeezed out another 5 hours of play time over two days. I've played a total of 26 hours. Don't really feel like there's much left to do, so I probably wont play again unless another update lands, but I also don't mind as I think the time I did have in the game was quite pleasant.
Even though there's not much play time to be had overall at the moment, I think you should still consider picking it up. It's relaxing, it's a good few hours of fun, and it's not expensive.
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