Woo hoo! One of my old favorites!!!

[Don Corleone]

Ever since I started playing MTW 3 years ago, I've been becoming more and more interested in Medieval European history. This also kinda tickled a memory out of a game I used to be wickedly addicted to 10 years ago: Castles 2: Siege and Conquest. It's set in the power grab left after Charles II died and the Capetian dynasty ended (to be replaced eventually by the Valois sub-dynasty). Well, I finally found it, out in Abandonia (abandonware). I'm totally psyched, cause now I can go back and review the timeline (versus what I've learned here) and the customizable castles were always cool too. Will let you know how my return to old Bretagne (which techinally is Britain, right?) goes.

[Xiahou]

Wow, that brings me back... I never played Castles2, but I owned and enjoyed its predecessor "Castles"- which I also see is listed as abandonware.

Did you ever play Stronghold? That can be had now for less than $10 and was a pretty good castle building game. I also tried Stronghold2, but I couldnt really get into it as much as the first.

[GiantMonkeyMan]

Castles!!!! now thats a name that brings back memories... mainly annoying music and amazingly fun gameplay :laugh4: i'll have to download it just to see how funny it is... i bet i won't get off it for at least a few days :juggle2:

[Blodrast]

heh, Don, you must have skipped a few of the threads that periodically occur around the Arena, where people get nostalgic and reminisce on their old flames... That's one of my all-time favourites as well, and I take care to put it in any such list. I still have it on my harddisk as we speak - heck, I even have it at work, even though I don't have access to a windows machine anymore.

For some reason, I've always preferred playing with the Albion or the Valois (I guess strategical position). Also, the AI is wickedly good on higher difficulty levels. I remember having read a document which explained in really high detail how the AI works at various difficulty levels, the factors that affect its decisions, etc.
I don't remember about that document - where I got it from. It might have been a .doc or .txt among the files of the game, look carefully. Or maybe it was from dlh ? I dunno anymore, it's been so long.

I've also always loved the events - there's a LOT of them, and they have a very nice decent branching factor, so they're not too repetitive. Sure, they don't make much of a difference in the end, most of the time, but they're still nice :) Not to mention the damn cool animation sequences :)

I spent many hours building custom citadels - I still have my own saved models (you know you can save them, right ?)

It's really challenging to win a non-military victory at higher difficulty...

It's a gem of a game, imo, and it'll always be a favourite :2thumbsup:

edit: oh yeah, one more thing: strange as it may sound, I usually play games without sound/music. In this case, I always make an exception - the "medieval" music kicks ass, and I never get bored of it :)

[Don Corleone]

Hey Blodrast,

I actually don't venture into the Arena very often. I try to stay out for the sake of my marriage... hearing about cool new (or old) games makes me want to go get a new one, and Mrs. Corleone has very little patience for me when she sees me installing anything these days. I actually got the first 10% of a lecture for WillMaker until she stopped to take a breath and explained to her what it was.

Anyway, I love that game. I had it for the Mac (my old LCIII), and I'm afraid that the quality of that version was way above the DOS version. Something about the code makes my mouse go screwy with it, and you need the mouse to play the game, so I'm going to have to try to do some jurry-rigging. Does anybody know how to force your computer to reboot in MS-DOS mode?

BTW, I played the game for 2 years, and I think I can count on one hand the number of times I played as Albion, and once each only for Anjou, Aragon and Burgundy. I was a dedicated Valois, not knowing that they eventually one, just because their starting position was so much better than everyone elses.

Also, does anybody know if the counties used in the Castles Game are accurate? I've always wanted an accurate map of French counties in the middle ages, but I've seen 5 different versions floating around, usually way too cluttered with other information as well so as to be unreadable. No departments, no provinces, just counties and principal city within the county?

[Don Corleone]

Doesn't look like my mouse is going to work. Looks like I'm out of luck. :no:

[Blodrast]

Hey Don,



I actually don't venture into the Arena very often. I try to stay out for the sake of my marriage... hearing about cool new (or old) games makes me want to go get a new one, and Mrs. Corleone has very little patience for me when she sees me installing anything these days. I actually got the first 10% of a lecture for WillMaker until she stopped to take a breath and explained to her what it was.

I can certainly relate to that - had looots of problems with my wife because of that. I was kinda exaggerating, though, I admit it.

Anyway. Afaik, you can use the keyboard for lots of stuff (shortcuts), including planning for the next month (i.e., gather wood/gold/etc), but I can't remember if you can use the keyboard for absolutely _everything_. I know I use the keyboard quite a lot, but, of course, some things are easier with the mouse, so I never bothered to try if you can, for example, invade by using only your keyboard.

I don't know how accurate the map is, sorry.

I like Valois, as well, but somehow I always had the feeling they were backstabbing buggers, so sometimes I played Albion :)

Yes, you can boot in something like DOS mode, however, I'm not sure that will be necessary. There are several things you can try (sorry if you've already tried them):

1. Try fiddling with the properties of the executable (right-click on castles2.exe, and play with those options). In particular, try the Compatibility stuff (try run in Win95 compatibility mode, and whatever other modes there may be available).

2. You can choose a few of the options you are given at boot time, if you press F5 or F8 (I always forget which is which, you want to try safe mode, command prompt, etc.)

3. DosBox ! dunno how good it is, or even if it's what you need, but you might wanna give it a try. Haven't had the time to play with it yet.
http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/

4. Finally, if you're really determined about this, you can try this:
http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp/t1008756318
Look for Nathan's post, he explains how to install DOS on a separate partition, even after you've installed winxp. The usual stuff applies, be careful if you mess with your MBR, etc, etc, don't kill me if you mess something up :)

Well, hope this helps a bit, but I really think you should be able to play it under xp without difficulties. I don't run xp, but I've configured it and played it under xp without much fuss a while ago. Don't remember which flavor of xp it was, or what I had to do, unfortunately, but I've played a lot of old games, most of which I had to tweak to run under windows (tweak = just play with their compatibility options).

Good luck ! :)

[professorspatula]

I remember this game - it featured little video clips which were pretty rubbish but at the time impressed everyone I showed them to. The Bishop in the game was as troublesome as the Pope in MTW! More so even.

I think the TW series could take a leaf out of Castles book when it comes to agents. Rather than have the tedious task of moving and looking after loads of individual agent units and forgetting about them, you could have a number of points dedicated to performing assassination/sabotage/spying tasks etc depending on the facilities you empire owns etc. You could select tasks that take a certain amount of time and points, limiting you to just a few options, rather than being able to abuse the game and send ten assassins out to kill off an entire faction's royal lineage in a turn.

Castle building was great fun too.

I saw the original Castles game boxed and in good condition in my local charity shop a couple of months back. No doubt a bit of a collectors item if it's your cup of tea. I never did bother buying it. I think it ended up being sent to another shop, and after that - the bin!

[Blodrast]

heh, I agree about the clips - they are nothing impressive, far from it.
But like you said, at the time it was pretty damn cool, not to mention that for me it was the first game that had in-game "movies" that I'd seen...
Moreover, what I liked about it (besides the fact that you could of course get rid of the clips) was that they seemed to be about the right duration - short enough not to annoy you after you've seen them a few times and they lost their novelty.

[Martok]

Ah yes, that was a fun game. My best friend from high school had Castles II on the computer in his dad's office, and we'd often go down there after class (he lived right across the street from the school) and play for a couple hours. It was particularly bad if I stayed over on a weekend, as we would spend way too much time down in the basement playing that game. His mom had to make us come upstairs, lest we forget to eat! :laugh4: Good times, good times....