Requires: Any 256 Color Macintosh, 2MB free RAM, 6 MB Hard Drive space for minimum install, 16 MB for full, System 6.07 or higher.
Protection: Manual based
 
There are not many computer game developers who would manage to find some way to adapt Alexander Korda’s The Private Lives of Henry VIII to the pixelated screen. After all, Charles Laughton doesn’t look nearly so virile after he has been JPEG compressed via Quicktime. Even more surprising is to see Sergei Eisenstein’s sweeping battle sequences from Alexander Nevsky scrolling by at a mere ten frames per second, about the going rate of Quicktime on a war-horse IIci. While the images may not look as good as they do on the big screen they were designed for, the fifteen odd movie clips from those two films which come with Interplay’s newest Macintosh offering, Castles: Siege and Conquest, add a special something to what is already a very, very good game.
The King Is Dead. The player is a Lord in 14th century France who, with the recent death of King Charles of Bretagne, seeks to be the next to sit upon the throne. Only the Pope can appoint you king, while at the same time you must compete with several other enterprising lords who have their eyes set on the same seat of power you do. You must show yourself to be a brilliant leader while not offending the sensibilities of the most holy one, and then perhaps you can fill King Charles’ gold slippers.
More than anything else, Castles is a game of balance. The tasks you can perform are divided into three categories: administrative, military, and political. The key to being a successful lord, and hopefully a successful king, is to balance these three disciplines. As the exquisitely written and quite interesting manual states numerous times, you won’t win Castles by brute force alone, though it sure will help.
The player starts out with a single territory on a map of more than twenty which bears more than a passing resemblance to computerized Risk. Attacks can be made on neighboring territories which will at first be easy pickings. Soon, however, almost all the territories on the map will be taken by one lord or another, and conquering a territory and adding it to one’s realm quickly becomes significantly more difficult. At the same time, the player must watch out for the neighboring lords who may have their eye set on the player’s own land.
 
As the name of the game might imply, the key to defense of your territories are the castles you build thereon. You can either choose from the more than ten prefabricated fortresses the game comes with, or use the detailed castle designing tools provided. Designing an effective castle which provides strong defense and protection for your troops while being aesthetically pleasing is no easy task.
Of course, castles aren’t built out of thin air, which is where the natural resources associated with the various areas of the countryside come into play. Each of the different territories has one of four resources associated with it: foodstuffs, iron, timber, or gold. The administration tasks are those which extract the various commodities from the countryside. You can choose to mine one or two different resources at one time, but if your empire doesn’t have all the different resources, you’ll have to trade with neighboring provinces to obtain them, or, at great expense, obtain them on the black market. For instance, just to build a castle, another administrative task, the lord must have one grain, three timber, one iron, and two gold.
The second set of tasks are military, which are fairly self explanatory, including the options to attack or sabotage neighboring territories, as well as the ever-vital army recruitment process. But, like building castles, troops don’t work for free. Hiring soldiers costs one gold and one iron, archers costs one gold and one timber, while the more powerful knights cost one grain, one iron, and one gold. And once the troops are in your hire, they still require periodic payment and feeding or they’ll leave. A good lord is never caught without any gold when payday comes around. The military tasks also include the construction of various castle-attacking devices, such as ballistas, catapults, and siege towers.
Combat itself is carried out on a close-up section of a given territory, on a particular spot chosen by the defender. This is where the castle can become particularly vital, since they give the defender a much greater chance of success. However, if the aggressors have some anti-castle weaponry, they might still have a chance. The player acts as a general during combat, instructing the troops when to stand, when to engage in melee fighting, when to destroy the enemy, or, if necessary, when to retreat. Success in battle is in turn dependent on not only the quantity of troops on either side, but also of the different morales of the opposing peoples.
The morale of your troops is determined by the “happiness” level of your people. Here, the political tasks come in, one of which is simply called “Happiness.” Spending one gold, one timber, and one grain on this task is sure to boost the morale of your troops. Winning battles is also good for their psyche. Other political functions include sending merchants or diplomats to try to reach temporary agreements with your opponents, as well as spies and scouts who are invaluable tools to use before actually engaging your enemies in combat. After all, if they have ten knights and you just a pair of archers, you might want to hold back your aggressive tendencies a little longer.
The above just begins to give an indication of the importance of balance and cooperation between the various tasks in Castles. On top of all this is a clever time passing system. Different tasks will take different amounts of time, and different jobs each have progress bars on the left half of the screen. Jobs will require less time as your empire becomes more experienced or your sources more numerous. Keep in mind, however, that your opponents are performing their tasks in the same time frame you are, and at any moment they may have the necessary happiness level to thoroughly destroy your army.
In addition to the strategic, tactical, and design aspects of Castles, there are also various “plots” which keep popping and asking you to do something for starving refugees or rebels who have run out of supplies. These story-lines act as interesting subplots and typically take place in lands outside the strategic map area, but are nonetheless important to giving the player the edge he or she will need to beat the computer. Often, handling these situations in specific ways will enable the player to come out ahead.
Castles the game is a work of beauty, and it has an equally elegant, intuitive interface to accompany it. Originally available on the PC, the interface as well as the graphics were completely overhauled for the Macintosh version. One of the great aspects of the interface is that there are so many ways to perform a given action. For instance, if you want to mine iron in one of your provinces you can: click and hold on the territory, from which a pop-up menu will appear; click on the iron icon below your task bars, from which a similar pop-up will spring; click on the administrative task icon, from which another pop-up menu will spring, this one allowing you to choose any administrative task that is appropriate to the selected territory; and lastly nearly every command can be accessed from the menu bar. Unlike some other PC game companies who create slipshod Macintosh ports of their popular games, Castles represents a very large overhaul of the game, as well as demonstrating that the programmer clearly understands the concept of Macintosh interface standards.
Quirks. Unfortunately, Castles was designed, it seems, to be run only on Macintosh Quadras or better. The game is not actually doing any fancy texture-mapping or high speed animation that would beg for a 68040, yet the entire game is almost unbearably slow when played on a IIci. It’s hard to believe that the AI for the game, though remarkably well done, is slowing the game down that much. It seems, rather, that graphical routines that could have been written to work a lot faster simply were not, perhaps because Macplay now assumes that most users have Quadras of some sort.
The only other problem with the game is that it is accompanied by an old-fashioned look-it-up-in-the-manual-every-time-you-play copy protection scheme. Actually, the game is nice enough to let you play for a few minutes before it pops the question on you.
The 256 color graphics, slow though they may be, are themselves are quite beautiful. Finely detailed and richly colored, even the miniature men who build your castle have a lot of personality to them. And the final touch of the scenes from The Private Lives of Henry VIII and Alexander Nevsky add the extra little something which makes Castles all the better.
Love Live The King. Castles offers an extremely comprehensive simulation of how life may have been for lords Middle Ages, including strategic, tactical, and architectural aspects which are all woven together beautifully and seamlessly. Though users of older Macintoshes may find the game frustratingly slow, Castles is by far one of the best Macintosh games to come down the pike in some time. In nearly every respect, Castles: Siege and Conquest is perfect computer entertainment.
