I’ve been playing a little the 1650 and 2950 and I decided to try the KS. Right now we’ve played 9 turns and I start to get some impressions:
What I like:
Random id numbers for artifacts.
NPC that can be recruited.
New encounters. I like having to try an answer without knowing what will happen.
More experienced players are playing this scenario.
What I don’t like:
Too much money. It’s insane everybody improving towns to cities everywhere. The economy factor is not existent here.
I think some of the KS good things could be merged with 1650 scenario, like random id artifacts numbers, NPC or new encounters. However I understand that 1650 is already tested and balanced and some changes could break this balance.
In my first game of KS the market spiked crazily in the early game as we all worked on building our treasuries up. As Arnor I felt like I had more gold than I knew what to do with. Prices of commodities soared to meet our vast reserves. They eventually returned to more “normal” levels but at the time I was impressed by how much gold was available in the KS economies.
In my subsequent games of KS, I and my teammates recalled early on that money can be exchanged for goods and services. In games like that mounts and steel zero out for extended periods. Huge armies are recruited. Pop centers burn. Markets crash. Treasuries bottom out everywhere.
So I guess I’d say it depends on how your teams are playing. It’s possible to see a lot of gold floating around in KS. It’s also possible to see that gold turned early on into large cavalry armies which are tough on treasuries and bring the market down overall.
I have seen KS nations go bankrupt due to large armies. I had a lot of gold early and the prices were ridiculous but before turn 10 I have had deficits of 40k+ I think it depends when the game starts too… In winter there are a few nations with low productions.
I’d agree, you can have ridiculous economies, but having run many a Grudge team now my experience is that if you use that gold wisely you can have a big impact that just watching the numbers go up. The tax base is much higher than most games and some nations, Southrons for example have both PCs and southern weather to tweak it even more.
We’ve balanced the game a little btw so we’ll see how the latest game goes here…
