Great Houses of Calderia can provide a great time managing your medieval city with lots of options provided.
Real-Time Simulator games have always been a well-established, properly settled game genre for people who both want to create a setting where they are the leader or just want to roleplay in general. The developers tend to give the full immersion of being as close to real life as possible and try their best to actually give the feeling that the game you are playing can be your world with your own merits and rules. Great Houses of Calderia can also deliver these feelings with detailed gameplay and a never-ending cycle of making your city worth living.
Great Houses of Calderia starts with, as we would expect, creating your own house with perks, location, mindset, and a head of your nation- or, rather, the house. The creation starts with choosing a mindset, such as being defensive, focusing on happiness, or being barbarian. Happiness is something we will touch on later, but for now, these perks let you settle in with which way you want to be focusing on while making your house better than others.
After choosing your mindset, coat of arms, the head of the house, and the place you want to settle in is provided. It is important to note that, depending on your mindset, it’s best to choose the latter options accordingly, such as if you are running for the pacifist or neutral ground, it’s best to employ the least dangerous people in the house.
At the beginning of the game, it asks whether you want to take a tutorial to understand what the Great Houses of Calderia are about. Although the title itself is no different than any other strategy and city-managing games, you might want to take a tour around your vicinity, people, and mostly the workforce, because it will come in handy in times of both good and bad.
The tutorial starts with giving a heads-up about who does what and how to manage your workload in the city properly. Farmers have a big role due to their harvesting capabilities and providing food to everyone. Therefore, it’s always best to keep at least a few people working on the agricultural side of the business.
Of course, you want to have an overseer who deals with certain businesses to keep them in date. While you choose the head of your house at the beginning, other house members can be assigned to different roles, such as taking care of the army, trade business, or diplomacy. Returning to the tutorial, it continues with teaching you how to give proper responses to people in need and how to turn happiness.
Happiness is one of the main factors of the Great Houses of Calderia as it keeps both the production rate and the serenity in check, and it allows residences to populate even more. Happiness can be reached through gaining better relations with other houses, doing business that has a positive outcome, such as trading, and keeping wages well enough for workers.
Great Houses of Calderia may sound like any other real-time simulator and management game, and the medieval setting could be considered the same as other games in the market.
However, the Great Houses of Calderia have their charm with the overall map design and well-structured rival and ally houses. In a sort of way, it welcomes new players to the genre as it can be the important decision between someone new being interested in the series and usual players being fond of the
As much as you have to keep life in balance in your own house and city, you also need to keep a nice relationship between the neighboring houses on the border and your main governor. Despite being completely free of your own, as a house, you need to pay a certain amount of taxes to your governor from time to time, and it happens weekly. Although a cavalry visits the center of the area, there seems to be no loss in your Gold count whatsoever. Talking about gold, there are very crucial raw resources that you need to keep track of to maintain your population count and happiness as well.
All the resources are somewhat tied to your workforce, and it is completely related to how you treat your workforce. Such grapes, despite being only fruit, can be used to make wines, and exporting wine is a huge way of profiting and getting your name out to the whole Calderia region. Therefore, getting farmers to do both crops and wine will hugely affect your economy, and it will draw attention, leading to more investment in your house and earning more gold.
Gold can be used in many ways, but the most important bit is funding your military, allowing the parliament to set up events to boost morale, or build certain buildings to expand businesses or defensive capabilities. Buildings, especially, have their own story when it comes to creating them because they require not only gold but also resources such as crops and mining too.
So, to build, you need to keep a stable amount of resources by hand. Keep in mind that while making new events or adding a new building, some of the business sectors are halted until they are done, such as when you try to build a fortress or a city wall, every single action gets halted until it is upgraded or established.
Let’s talk about the personality traits of members because they usually play a big role in choosing the right person for the right job. When you click on a member, their traits, personalities, and even family tree appear. According to each one’s personality, it’s easy to assume their usual behavior when they are brought up for certain jobs, and once you attach them to the fitting role, you get extensive rewards or higher payouts from resource gathering.
For example, by bringing a mathematical genius to deal with fees and taxes, they will know how to balance the ins and outs; meanwhile, bringing a pacifist to deal with harvest and crops, they will opt for the best solution for farmers and their regional payouts for each work they do.
House members are not only workers, though. They seem to encounter random events, have proper marriages, create friendships, and even have nemeses with each other. All of them affect their morale, personality, and traits in each ways, especially random events.
They seem to occur, well, randomly, but the outcome of the matter is always random, and you are never sure if you have made the right decision or not. The options do let you know what to expect if you were to choose certain options.
But even if it seems totally a reasonable option for a person to do it, the game has other ideas to let you know that sometimes you have to play rough or opt for the odd option instead. For example, while you are visiting another house as a house leader, random occurrences of fabrics and dresses appear.
In order to talk about how well your fabric business is booming around your region, you kindly talk about how we can forward some test fabrics to let our neighbors know about our craftsmen. This ultimately backfires as the other house thinks we are pitying him, but in reality, we just wanted to do business without being too explicit about it.
Let’s talk about the graphics, sound, and overall looks of the Great Houses of Calderia. The map is not too detailed and doesn’t draw anything bad to the eyes. The map design is very good if you are thinking of going to different buildings. This means there is a lot of replay value to this title, and with different save files, you are allowed to keep track of two different playthroughs. The soundtrack is a bit of a mixed bag. It is, of course, a game with a medieval setting, but hearing some ambient music that does not fit in the game at all was confusing.
The rest of the soundtrack, with flutes and cellos, was great, and I found it to be very fitting. The controls are the same as any other city planning game. There is a mouse to click on important bits, and clicking and dragging shows the rest of the map. The scroll wheel allows you to zoom in and out.
And you do not need a keyboard except for writing down your custom stuff, such as names and foundations you conquer. UI is a bit squished, but the fonts and the color scheme are not hard on the eyes, so you can pinpoint what is good for your current build and what is not, certainly, a good option for an upcoming battle.
Overall, the Great Houses of Calderia give you many options to create your unique house with lots of possibilities for different outcomes. There isn’t a linear way to build up on your land; with the rules and plans you have chosen, you can build a community that will last for centuries and maybe even add other houses to its boundaries as well.
With its friendly approach to newcomers, it allows slow build-up with tools provided, and for the usual players of this genre, they won’t feel too far from home, and maybe spend hundreds of hours on end to get their house to be the one that stands out in the whole region.
