Cheers to the new beginning!
Kingdoms Reborn is a Real-Time Strategy game developed and published by Earthshine, which entered early access on Steam in November 2020. You play as a ruler who must expand your kingdom while gathering resources, dealing with neighbouring nations, and making luxuries to keep your citizens happy.
There are five playable factions:
- The western European-styled Duchies, who research items on the Tech Trees 5% faster.
- The Arabic-styled Emirates, who don't have to spend as much money to import or export resources, but gather wood at half the speed of the other factions.
- The Norsemen, who are resistant to the cold and can gather more wood per tree.
- The Japanese-styled Shogunates, who produce luxury items quicker.
- The Aztec-styled Tlatoa, who consume less food, but have higher trading fees.
This game contains examples of:
- After the End: Every playthrough begins with a text blurb saying that a big freeze wiped out most of civilisation, so everyone has to start again from the dark ages.
- Humongous Mecha: One of the last military units the Shogunate can unlock is a mobile suit.
- Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: There are seven difficulty levels, and each increases how many goods citizens consume. It starts off with the standard easy, normal, and hard, then goes into brutal, emperor, immortal, and deity.
- I'm a Humanitarian: If a lot of your citizens die of starvation in a short span of time, you'll unlock the cannibalism card. Equipping it to the townhall causes people to turn into pork when they die and allows you to kill and eat foreigners, but it has a huge penalty for your town's happiness.
- Procedural Generation: You have to generate a map before starting a new game. You can choose the size, temperature, moisture, sea level, and mountain density, but the shapes of the landmasses and their provinces' resources are decided by the seed, which can be any combination of numbers and/or letters.
- Tech Tree: Citizens constantly generate science points. These can be used to unlock items on the Tech Tree (which mostly contains buildings) and Upgrades Tree (Exactly What It Says on the Tin).
- Winter of Starvation: Crops are harvested in the autumn, and trees stop producing fruit in the winter. If you don't have enough food supplies, your citizens will start starving to death, and if you don't have enough fuel, they'll freeze.
- You Require More Vespene Gas: Resources are split into four categories. "Needs" includes food, fuel, and tools, which your citizens need to stay alive and do work. Luxuries are required to upgrade houses, which increases their capacity. Construction items are used for building. Finally, the "other" category contains resources that are used to make things in the other categories.
