Warrior Kings: Battles

My spreadsheet instincts lit up the moment I understood what Warrior Kings: Battles actually does with its tech tree, because almost no other RTS before or since has handled faction identity this way. You do not pick a side at the lobby screen. You start as a generic peasant kingdom and your build order IS your allegiance. Construct a church early and you are sliding toward the armoured, faith-driven Imperials, whose priests and inquisitors call down Acts of God and whose heavy infantry can anchor a defensive line. Plant a maypole instead and the Pagan path opens: demon summons, Arch Druids who conjure elemental beasts, a Wicker Man that burns sacrifices to call forth Abaddon. Take a guildhall and you drift toward the Renaissance, a gunpowder faction built around riflemen, cannons, mortars, and rocket launchers, trading magic entirely for science. There are also two hybrid sub-paths, Imperial-Renaissance and Pagan-Renaissance, each with their own exclusive units like Dragoon cavalry or a legion of undead. The result is that in any multiplayer game, neither player knows what army they will face until the mid-game. That single design decision gives the skirmish and Valhalla modes replay value that most contemporaries never approached. The economy deserves a paragraph because it is genuinely unusual and the source of most early frustration. Three resources: food, materials, and gold. None of them land in your stockpile until a cart physically hauls them to your warehouse. Military units consume food proportional to army size, so fielding an oversized force bleeds your stores until units start taking damage from starvation. Every farm you build opens food-support slots, but also reduces per-farm output as the total army grows, which creates a tight feedback loop between expansion and attrition that most RTS players will not have seen outside of a Paradox title. Getting up the tech tree is slow. The campaign maps across 22 provinces all end the same way, destroy the opponent manor, with no carry-over of troops or research between missions, which is the main legitimate complaint against the game and one early reviewers flagged hard. The campaign is best understood as a long tutorial that unlocks generals and maps for skirmish, not a story experience. Where the game genuinely holds up in 2024 is the AI general system. The skirmish AI builds a functioning economy, manages unit formations, probes your perimeter for weak points, and uses AI diplomacy to play factions against each other. You can fight up to seven opponents simultaneously, and there is an editor to create custom generals with specific personalities and strategic tendencies. Unit variety is also wide: cavalry, war elephants, spies, supply wagons, catapults, golems, succubi, bishops that heal in the field. Formation and terrain matter more than they do in most RTS of this era. The Valhalla mode, which removes the economy entirely and tasks you with capturing and holding flag points with a pre-selected army, is a genuinely fast-paced side mode that strips the game to pure tactics. The honest caveats are significant. The developer went bankrupt, meaning pathfinding bugs will never be patched. Zoomed-in unit models are blocky by any standard. The in-game tutorial is largely passive, a multimedia demonstration rather than an interactive lesson, and the manual does more teaching than the game itself. The Steam user community is tiny, making multiplayer against humans a long-shot proposition. A small modding scene on Nexus and ModDB exists and covers rebalancing and new units, which helps longevity, but the game is still fundamentally a relic that requires patience and willingness to read documentation before it opens up. If you want a handholding onboarding flow, this is the wrong purchase. If you are the kind of player who runs the same skirmish map four times to test different alignment paths and takes notes on AI general behaviour, this will give you more than its bargain-bin price suggests.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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