Knights and Merchants - The Peasants Rebellion

Strategy games like the Age of Empires or Warcraft series rely on the combat aspect as the main attraction, which means that everything revolves around your ability to build an army and defeat your enemy. However, this also means that you have to move fast and there's no time to simply kick back and build a profitable city, especially since there are not too many buildings that produce anything other than soldiers.

Knights and Merchants – The Peasants Rebellion is exactly the opposite, mainly due to the fact that the action evolves rather slowly and most of the game is spent making sure that you have the proper resources and the manpower to sustain your settlement. The actual soldiers can only be trained after your settlement is up and running at full potential, making it very difficult for you to emphasize on military strength from the beginning.

In the beginning, you start off with a warehouse full of wood, stone, food and various other resources, as well as a couple of serfs and builders. As you might suspect, the builders are the ones that can be used to erect new buildings, but they cannot do so without the serfs, since they bring the resources to the building site. Over the course of the game, many other professions are required in order to make proper use of the environment, such as carpenters, butchers and fishermen.

Naturally, all the work you do is in order to gain enough resources to build an army and defeat your enemies. To do so, you must manufacture weapons, armors and train the soldiers themselves, after which you have to choose what kind of warriors you want to use. Hence, you can choose between fighters like the crossbowman, barbarian, pikeman and vagabond, all of which come with different abilities and they are effective against a certain type of enemy unit.

However, there are some annoyances that might make the experience a bit more difficult to enjoy, although none of them are that bad. Thus, the very slow pace at which the game progresses may prove to be a problem for some, especially when it comes to the buildings, since you must wait for the serfs to deliver the materials and the builders to raise the structure, which usually takes a bit of time. The pathfinding is a bit weird as well, in the sense that units need a few moments to think about how to proceed whenever they happen to meet on the map.

In the end, Knights and Merchants – The Peasants Rebellion is definitely a fun game, as long as you are not in a hurry and you can spare a few hours to raise a 30 people army. The variety of buildings, professions and warriors certainly gives you plenty to think about, especially since the right decisions can turn the tide of the matches.