This leads to a pattern of building momentum followed by rapid expansion. Crashing the economy of nearby rivals before flooding their markets with your cheap goods isn’t just possible: it’s one of the only ways you can expand your territory.įor a strategy game that funnels everything through the lens of economics, Grand Ages is disappointing because it over-complicates the management process. Supply lines, not armies, are your primary weapons. You get your metals from one place, your coal from another, use both to forge tools in a third, and then sell them to the highest bidder in your best port. The limited capabilities of any given town incentivizes cooperation on a massive scale. Small settlements have limited capabilities, so to spur economic growth, you lash cities together with roads and keep them alive with an army of traders to keep the money flowing.
To accomplish this, you need to first manage and optimize smaller regions and townships. You begin the game as a merchant, but your goal is far more ambitious: to bring the entirety of Europe under your control. Grand Ages Medieval looks good when it showcases detailed models of towns and buildings. Grand Ages attempts to build itself on an intricate web of economic systems, but it reduces the nuance of finance and politics into convoluted trade networks and one-dimensional diplomacy. What I played, however, was possibly the dullest iteration of this. I was excited to see a game try to focus on more subtle definitions of power. I knew that the game focused on economic and diplomatic power and even went so far as to discourage military intervention beyond basic self-defense. I knew this was what Grand Ages offered going in.
I called on my army only a handful of times, and even then, they were an absolute last resort. For the most part, my conquest was peaceful. After some 200 years, countless expansions, and political jockeying, I had everything from the British Isles to the western Ottoman Empire in my grasp. The air was still when I finally took over Europe.
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