I’ve been playing a little bit of Majesty Gold HD. For being from fucking 25 years ago, honestly that game still holds up really well. It has a lot of personality for a goofy little rts/management game, what’s compelling about it though is that there are a lot of missions with different constraints and objectives and they can be pretty challenging - especially if you try to get a better time.

You have a surprisingly robust set of tools to try and get your little guys to do what you want, and the pace of the game keeps the player actively putting out fires while executing their strategy. I like that, now that I’m playing it as an adult, I can identify different builds for choosing between mutually-exclusive guilds or figuring out what build-order will work based on how aggressive the map is. There is a surprising depth to the game.

It also has some really great unit barks and sounds in general, very silly, but easily differentiated and memorable, which is great because they’re an important part of staying on top of things. e.g. Hearing a tax collector cry out as his coins spill is a clear and immediate indication that you have a hole in your security, or hearing a series of heroes yelling about how they’re running away lets you know that a significant threat has been encountered.

It’s disappointing there haven’t been many good successors to this game. The sequel is pretty widely panned with good reason. I’m aware of The Leviathan’s Fantasy, (which apparently has recently fully released? I don’t know what a release means anymore,) but at least when I was looking at it it was only partially translated and had some significant jank. I’ll probably give it a try now though. There’s also a demo out now of Crown of Greed, which looks to be a fairly faithful remake of Majesty. There’s only one demo mission now, but it felt pretty much like classic Majesty with a couple more advanced features (like flags that you can set a minimum number of heroes to rally to before they try a bounty) - not quite as much personality to it and with middling voice work though.

I think this is a pretty sick style of game and would probably work well for a lot of colony sim fans or people who like RTS campaigns. Honestly maybe the future of RTS games is less e-sport and more management hybrid. One can dream.

Still playing Dominions, but two of my games are hopefully going to wrap up soon, one I decided I’m just vibing in, and the other is still really fun. A really big tournament is coming up on Lucid’s server (369 entrants at time of writing) and I’m stoked because the first round might be really small games and have a lot of noobs to roll. Also very likely to just get rolled, but I feel pretty good about a couple of my builds at this point and I can tune at least one to be rush-focused pretty easy.