I don’t mean to be rude, but it’s worth noting that Monarch Monarch isn’t really a “tactics” game in the sense most would be familiar with. Actually, pretty much all the Lord Monarch series is doing its own peculiar thing that doesn’t directly map to any of the major strategy game milestones.
briefly: The Lord Monarch titles are semi-automated real-time strategy games where the player spends relatively little time constructing units, building settlements and directing combat and instead focuses on designating areas to expand to, managing inevitably-temporary alliances and adjusting tax rate + game speed. I suppose it’s a bit like The Settlers and some others in that sense, but you do have the ability to give orders to individual units, and by far the most common type of scenario is “you control one of four kingdoms, annihilate all opposition”. Despite appearances, they actually play somewhat closer to puzzle games in terms of how you should approach optimizing each individual map, and there’s also a ‘leader’ unit that has to used very thoughtfully due to risk/reward of moving them away from the capital. “Easy to learn and difficult to master” probably applies here more than most single-player strategy games.
actually, the HG101 article sums it up pretty well: Lord Monarch – Hardcore Gaming 101
As it notes, the major gameplay changes in “Monamona”/MONA² are the addition of a tutorial mode and a z-axis. The latter means that some maps feature elevators, which you probably haven’t seen in a 90s RTSFancy Realtime SLG before.
Not trying to dissuade anyone, but actually playing it can be a little jarring if you aren’t one of those people who downloaded and were somewhat baffled by the freeware Windows 95 version of the original back in the day (also wow this halfway works in modern Windows). Any iteration of the game you can get your hands on and run is worth checking out if you’re curious.
Ive been playing the sega Genesis fan-trans off and on for a few months here is my summary of that game:
Since then Id like to add that the real challenge is economizing your actions to create a run away spread of your kingdom. While some scenarios can be won be being clever most are won by having higher raw production rates leading to the ability to sustain direct fighting longer than your opponent.
The init command sets a default behavior for new units. If you want to give specific orders you can click on a unit and click on a tile and select a command or just select a tile and assign everyone to do the same thing on the same tile. Then once you set a command you can set the follow up to: wait, continue or auto. Continue has them doing the thing forever, auto they just fuck off and do what ever and wait has them stand around.
Keep in mind if you send someone into danger it prompts you “is this ok?” and if you auto assign all the units into danger youll have to confirm every unit (which sucks).
i was just coming here to post that! this is the psx version, which is imo somewhat inferior to the saturn (some visual issues, unnecessarily elongated dungeon path, superfluous though largely hidden or unobtrusive lore stuff) but it’s sure as fuck preferable to the remake and i’m excited to have a better version to recommend to people. there is an in-progress translation patch for the saturn but i don’t recommend playing the current version which has heavily redacted and truncated text. still, a good day for maniacs highly recommend this game
highly recommend this game
