Lords of the Realm 3

by Vivendi Universal

Product Features

• Strategy game of medieval conquest
• Manage an empire in real-time
• Three in-depth levels of play
• Advanced 3-D engine renders impeccable battle scenes
• for 1 to 8 players using LAN or Internet connection

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B000083JXT
• Item Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Media: CD-ROM
• Release Date: March 16, 2004
• Average Customer Review: 1.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (93 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #24,219 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

Lords of the Realm III is a real-time strategy game of historic medieval conquest that spans castle building, siege, politics, religion, and conquest. The game is set in the Middle Ages, between 850 AD and 1350 AD, and features authentic castle designs and characters. Various scenarios and campaigns encompass the British Isles, Germany, France, Normandy, Brittany, Flanders and Denmark. Extending the medieval world beyond combat, Lords of the Realm III takes into account the powerful clergy and merchant classes of the time which are important factions in the player's quest to become King.

Product Description

Lords of the Realm III is a real-time strategy game that combines all elements of medieval European life into an in-depth strategy game. Your goal is no less complete conquest, using everything from castles to religion as a tool! Multiplayer gaming for 8 through a LAN or Internet connection

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

153 of 156 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Horrible waste of time/money, previous reviews disappeared, March 27, 2004

By 

Keith Tokash "twigles" (Laguna Niguel, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lords of the Realm 3 (CD-ROM)

I don't know what is going on. I wrote a review for this game yesterday and checked to see if it was up today and there are now zero reviews! There were about 2 dozen 1-star reviews and a smattering of 4-5 star reviews from ppl who hadn't played the game yet but were sure it would rock. Amazon are you caving to vendors now?

Anyway, here is my review...again.

This game is a complete ripoff. LOTR2 is one of my favorite games of all time; if it ran on win2k I'd still play it (tip: it runs on XP in compatibility mode). LOTR3 is nothing like it. In fact they seemed to take everything good about LOTR2 out and replace it with ... nothing. Specifics:

1) Terrible documentation!!! The booklet that came with the game is completely insufficient and online/on cd docs are almost identical to the printed one. This is a recurring theme in my review. You are basically sitting there looking at stuff you can't click on wondering what to do.
2) All micro-management of resources is gone. You assign a peasant to a parcel of land and then ignore it completely as he makes food automatically. Same goes for soldiers and money. No ability to change what type of soldiers or food. Or maybe there is but there is NO DOCUMENTATION!!!
3) You can't conquer pieces or territory anymore. You can only devastate them and you have to take out the main castle and then you get all of the territories at once. This took a large part of the strategy out of the game.
4) Hiring mercs is a gamble because you only see their title like "siege engineer" and a tiny piece of info, which didn't include the cost of hiring them. Maybe there is a way to find this info, but there is NO DOCUMENTATION!!!
5) You can't upgrade the castles except in your main province. Read that line again. They took out one of the most fun aspects.
6) Upgrading your main castle is a crap shoot since you have the option to downgrade, but still pay money to do so. So you have a level 5 castle and can buy and build a level 2 castle thinking you are getting an upgrade. The in-game descriptions of the castles consist of the castle name (ie "strong stone castle") and a really small picture - nothing else. NO DOCUMENTATION!!!
7) You upgrade castles by saving money and buying the upgrade. After about 30 real-world minutes of saving someone steals my money every time. I have no idea how or how to stop them because there is ... (boy I'm getting tired of typing this) NO DOCUMENTATION.
8) During battle scenes you can't zoom in or out which makes it difficult to manuever your forces or even tell what troop types you are facing. The graphics are not that good despite being *very* hardware intensive (more on that coming up).
9) The graphics are *very* hardware intensive (told ya ;-)). "Recommended" specs are 1.5GHz, 256RAM and if you use ATI, a Radeon 8500 or later. I have a 2200+ CPU (clock speed ~1800MHz), 512MB DDR 400 RAM, and a Radeon 9700 Pro. During sieges I got to watch arrows fly at my troops *frame-by-frame*. That was with 2 enemy units vs 3-5 of mine, not a massive battle at all.
10) After allying myself with another county I accidentally clicked on that county while controlling my army. I was automatically at war despite being 2 counties away and immediately clicking somewhere else. Lame.
11) Sieges. The crowning achievement of LOTR2. They suck in LOTR3. Instead of attacking the front of a castle where the defenders are massed, I went around the side. The defenders didn't reposition themselves. So I climb the walls, get all my guys on top of the wall and they ... mill around randomly. They almost completely ignore my commands, and the worst part... I CAN'T TARGET THE DEFENDERS! So I sit there gaping while 2-3 archers (not 2-3 units of archers) mow down my 3 units who are standing right next to them. I repeated this experiment several times with same results.
12) Attacking an army on the field is lame. If you set up two units to attack one unit from different angles, both your units just bee-line right for the center of the enemy unit anyway. Not anything like the cool tricks you could play with the Total War series. No usage of terrain or weather or anything.

Summary: This game is actually *less advanced* than LOTR2 in a lot of ways. The only advancement I saw was in graphics, which were sub-standard anyway. If you cherish LOTR2 like I do, AVOID THIS GAME!

As for you amazon.com, I check my reviews periodically. I'm saving this one in a text file and I will upload it as needed from different accounts and IPs if you erase it again.

59 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars I was dissappointed., May 11, 2004

By 

B. GOODWIN "dragon678" (LIMA, OHIO United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lords of the Realm 3 (CD-ROM)

This game was on my top 10 wish list for games I wanted. I could not wait for it to come out. Now that I have it, how dissappointing it was.

When I first got Lords of the Realms 2, I played it the first day for 15 staight hours. It was my first taste of real time strategy and started my conversion from puzzle games to RTS and FPS games. With Realms 3, it took all of the good things from Realms 2 and got rid of them. You can no longer control the resources you collect like rock, trees, and your food. You now place a vassal on a vacant plot and you get either gold or food. Thats it. You also can't raise an army. The only way you can get an army is to place a Knight on a vacant plot or buy mercanaries. But if you don't own enough land, you can only have so many Knights or you will not have enough money or farms. If you are short on farms, your army will abandon you. The longer your Knight is on the board, the more men he will collect, but it takes a very long time to collect a very small amount of men. You used to be able to control your lands easier and make your city grow, then raise an army. But not now.

The most irritating thing is fighting. If you go to an enemies lands and take out his farm, if you don't leave an army back, they will instantly place another vassal for a farm. Even if you take out their castle, you still can't take over their land until you do more damage to their land.

The next irritating thing is the armies. You can kill all of the enemies armies which leaves his plot open. He will then place another Knight to replace his beaten Knight and then attack you and somehow he has an army twice your size. I beat one enemies Knights completely 3 straight times and he still came back with 2 large armies and force me from his land. Not sure how that happened as I went through every Knight of the Realm and never found a large army once. When an army takes damage, their color changes. When they get to red, they are discouraged and they disband during the fight. So how he can keep coming back is beyond me becasue your army needs time to heal.

And the last irritating thing is the battles. It seems like every time I go to the battle screen, another army attacks my lands. That is because there is no pause in the game when try to fight the battles yourself. If you let the computer do it for you, you lose alot more than you should plus you don't get to play the game. There needs to be a pause during battles so you can enjoy the game more. You also can't build siege weapons. You have buy siege mercanaries. Not cooll at all.

The games doesn't totally suck. It is challenging (although very repititious) and the graphics are pretty good (although I haven't been able to see the intro movie or any other cutscenes even thought I downloaded the patch. not sure whats up with that), but that is about it.

If they plan on making another, they better go back to what worked for Realms 2 & 3 and incorporate it in Realms 4, otherwise this franchise is dead if it isn't already.

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Not even value for money at $20. It's just not fun., March 19, 2004

By 

Athol Kay (Bristol, CT USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Lords of the Realm 3 (CD-ROM)

LOTR2 was a classic game. LOTR3 should have expanded on the things that made LOTR2 good, but strangely removes all the interesting bits in managing your lands, and leaves you with kind of a weaker version of a "Total War" title.

Everything happens in real time, which means armies *crawl* across the global map far to slowly. This would have been better handled as a turn based element. Not fun.

Individual parcels of land don't seem to be anymore valuable than any other parecls of land. You don't seem to get invovled into that "damn I really need that mine/deposit/wood". No choke points on the maps either. Not fun.

Actual battles are frenzied, quick, and extremely hard to control. Calvary types can get arcoss the battle maps faster than I can even select my troops and get them into some sort of logical order. Not fun.

There are many possible formations and stances for individual troops, but no logical formations for groupings of more than one troop type. I.e. if you select a troop of archers and a troop of pikemen for instance and tell them to march to a location, they march off as if the others didn't exist. That means the faster moving archers arrive first and get wasted by melee types, then the pikes arrive, who engage the enemy melee types, but get mowed down by the enemy archers. Lightly armored ranged troops should fall in behind melee troops. Other games have been doing this for years now. Whats the problem? Not fun.

Not too much point trying flanking with calvary either. The lighter faster troops arrive first, so you may as well just plough straight into them. My battle tactics have simply been to pause the game, select all troops, and direct them all to attack en mass at the center of the enemies ranks. Mindless. Not fun.

Attacking castles is painful. You can't seige them as in LOTR2, you just attack with your current troops straight away. Troops scale the walls etc, but this combat seems buggy and confusing. Units appear to get get trapped up on the walls, and no quick capture the flag to end battles. LOTR2 is *much* better in this aspect.

No skirmish mode. Yep. NO SKIRMISH MODE. Not fun.

I'd suggest looking around for "Kohan Immortal Sovereigns", or a "Total War" game over this one.