Observations about this (great) mod

[Mr Sneeze]

Hello everybody,

I'm a veteran total war player: spent a lot of time on Shogun 2, and even more time on Medieval 2 + mods (stainless steel, broken crescent, divide and conquer). And now I've just discovered this mod, the Last Kingdom.

I must say that this mod is great: the atmosphere is incredible, and the tension is real. There is a real feel of total war and desolation, and one has to fight to survive.

After a few hours of game, I have a few observations :
- there are some minor bugs: if we load a save made in the first turns, the game easily crashes (but that's ok, it doesn't crash after we've played enough turns)
- some diplomatic windows (with Dane faction) are not finished (but here again, not a real problem)
- difficulty balance: it seems that playing with Denmark for instance should make a very easy campain (being allied with the Vikings + very strong starting position, far from the chaos of Britain) ; conversely, playing any faction in Britain is quite a challenge: ennemies are everywhere, and Vikings and Danes are very strong.

I've played as Gwynedd, and I find that it's very hard to raise large armies and have a strong economy running, as compared to the base Medieval 2 game, or other mods. In itself, this is actually great for the gameplay experience: it is hard and strategic just to survive.

But that leads me to my observation: is economy somehow broken in this mod? or at least, it seems to be built in a way that changes the classical Medieval 2 approach of consolidating your economy in order to recruit troops.
It seems to me that buildings give very little bonuses : they cost a lot but don't improve income by much at all.
Also, small villages with very few buildings bring almost as much income as big cities with many buildings built. It feels that random villages bring too much income for what they are, but that cities don't bring enough income for what they are.

It almost seems like a waste of ressources to build buildings then?? The investments are too much for the benefits.

Looting can be very profitable though. But here also, I've observed some weird things: even after looting a city AND destroying all the buildings in it, the income doesn't fall too much. Again, it seems that the buildings are somehow irrelevant.


So to me, it seems that the game should be approached differently: economy is not so important, but going for raids and looting seems like the way to go in order to survive.

What is your opinion on all that? Do you have similar conclusions? How do you approach this mod strategically speaking?

[Member of the Shieldwall]

I also think this mod is pretty awesome. Kind of unstable, but awesome.

The only complaint I have about the gameplay is the independent chieftains. I'm fine with them having enormous land armies, because they aren't bothering me, but at sea, their giant fleets are literally everywhere, and they're cooperating to get me . I guess this will be less of a problem if you add more factions to the map, but in the meantime, it'd be nice if you could tone them down a little bit somehow.

[Member of the Shieldwall]

I realized after making these posts that I'd been playing the Reforged version. The Wrath of the Norsemen version is actually rock solid. Haven't had a single crash.

It's not quite as hardcore as Reforged, but it's still fairly challenging. It took me 60 turns in my Vestfold campaign, and going into the files to change the music type to match Hordaland's, but now I'm happily cruising along the coast of northern England while listening to Wardruna, and I just looted and burned Lindisfarne to the ground and sent the money back to Norway to build a bigger wall in case if those suspicious Swedes try to start something. So, I'm very happy . Good work, modders