Lords and Villeins: The Great Houses Review

Eagle-eyed readers of my Lords and Villeins review would have seen in the first screenshot I had the DLC The Great Houses installed. Originally, GameGrin was asked to review just the DLC, but the irritating attempts from the base game gate-keeping its additional content — outside of the new world map, AI-driven families growing their community alongside yours, and the annual prompt of the king/queen demanding payment — I had enough material to cover two articles.

Understandably, add-ons are usually accessible in the middle/end-game… by Merlin’s beard, why was it taking so long to appear? I could have found the Holy Grail faster than it took me to pave a merchant road to my first allied city, I thought at the time. Nevertheless, after taking a break from it, I’ve come back with a more patient attitude and a new game where my city, Funkytown, is located in a marsh far north of everyone else.

The DLC expands (quite literally) outside of the main city you start with, allowing you to increase your borders, deploy specific vocational families into roles outside the city for regional resources, and employ the army to protect those vital resources, as well as inevitably going to war with the other families when they get sick of you. The AI-driven families on the map can be befriended or slaughtered, which sounds good on paper but lacks any personality at all, merely being another hindrance in the mid-game.

With a robust regiment and the ability to travel to the other families, you can either raid their lands for spoils or completely invade their city in conquest through turn-based combat. However, they can do the same to you at any time, which leads to a weird and only one-time event when I was in combat… out of my 15 hours of gameplay.

After I sent a custom delivery of parsnips and stones to a family I wanted to befriend, I was attacked by a regiment of footmen against my peasant hunters who were in the crossfire. I lost (obviously) and I loaded the most recent save to find the regiment had disappeared, and the rival family was still in my good graces.

The turn-based combat of the game is pretty good, to say the least, as it's similar to early JRPG gameplay from the nineties, but what I found a lot more fun was micromanaging the equipment of my regiments. Starting my first army with the newest armour and arms from the caravans, then later buying better quality items from allied cities for raw iron and copper ores just hit me right in my strategy-loving soul.

The new economic mechanics in The Great Houses allow the player (and the rival families) to develop merchant roads, connecting trade routes. A complete road yields a new type of caravan with experienced items or ones that are hard to get without an artisan in your city. Resources like manuscripts and building materials are given a new use with custom deliveries you make to appease or befriend the other families, as well as the royal family, for favour and money.

A lot of the issues I have with the base game still apply in the DLC: too slow in the beginning, people die for no reason — like a farmer’s daughter succumbing to starvation while in prison (though the guards were feeding her so I have to employ her father as a member of the clergy to prevent him from starting a rebellion), no creative mode. But that’s it. The Great Houses doesn’t add any issues or minus anything good about the game but rather amplifies its better qualities.

However, there are questions regarding immersion in the game. Like: if there are caravans travelling to and from my city, why are there no roads on the map? And if there are roads, why do I have to make a merchant road to other cities, as well as the royal city? They are small plot holes, but it feels like the developers force the player to pave their own roads so as to make them pick and choose which basic AI family they want to ally with. In my opinion, the developer could have just kept the roads but had a system where cities would supply you with rarer items if you had a good reputation with them and charge you more dosh if you didn’t.

While the DLC is designed to turn the city you made in the base game into a living, breathing megacity, you can eventually make a city-state and remove yourself symbolically from the kingdom by (kind of) becoming an early federation. You can still have the royals as a head-of-state while promoting the hand-picked council and clergy to be the main contributors of the city and prosper without succumbing to conflict from the other families.

Either way, you’ll have all the power to make a move to the town that’s right for you.