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Viewing enemy allegiances with Merlin's spy magic |
Sun Tzu urges the wise ruler to pursue knowledge of the enemy's disposition and means before striking, and outlines the requirements for an effective spy network as the only real way, but Arthur has divination on his side. Before doing anything else, I cast Merlin's "see" magic on all fifteen of my rivals - this momentarily teleports you into their own castles, where you can view their treasuries, their war rooms, and even their round tables, to see their economies, their allegiances, and military muster.
As with most things in Excalibur, this is a bit cumbersome to use to the full extent, especially viewing allegiances which are idiosyncratically presented as an array of fifteen crowns, each representing the king's disposition toward each other one based on how far left or right on the screen they appear. Thankfully, I don't really need to know the full web of allegiances as much as I need to know who hates me and who has the means to hurt me.
You're also on the clock. While you gather intelligence, your rivals plan and eventually act!
For comparison - I have at this point 52 crops, and my army has 18 men-at-arms - not nearly enough to fight off any invaders.
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I'm going to spend a lot of time looking at this screen. |
I increase my conscription rate and check the news.
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This is one of my least favorite things about Excalibur. |
I must revise an earlier claim about how wealth accumulates - each second, the kingdom accumulates a "wealth second" for each point of allocated kingdom wealth (i.e. what remains of crops after taxes). After accumulating 3600 wealth seconds (a "wealth hour" if you will), you gain 1-3 crops randomly, which is reflected by an immediate wealth increase. At 1 wealth, it will take an hour to gain anything. At 60 wealth, it will take one minute.
For now I maintain 30 wealth, dumping growth into taxes and conscription to ward off invasion, until I hit 45 men-at-arms, at which point I favor compound wealth accumulation. Tributes start to come in - when they do, I lower taxes to accelerate growth further, but raise them back as the tributes end (which of course the game does not bother to notify you when they do). I regularly check the news, occasionally check on my enemies with Merlin, and also check on my own knights at the round table.
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Sir Lucas seems unhappy. |
Knights act as units in Excalibur. Each will have a company of men-at-arms proportional to their personal prestige, which can be replaced, but if a knight himself dies in battle, he is gone forever. More will come to Camelot at preset intervals, but there are only fourteen in total.
A knight's loyalty is measured by their distance to the round table, and you risk rebellion if unhappy knights are left to their own devices. In theory you can buy more loyalty with gifts or honors, but in practice I've never seen this make a difference, and handing out prestige could alter the allocated ratio of men-at-arms in ways that you don't want.
The novella describes the knights' personalities and skills, and I reckon their battle competence hierarchy goes something like this:
- Galahad - An unmatched strong fighter who doesn't care for gifts. Other knights distrust him.
- Lancelot - A strong fighter who likes honor, and dislikes gold.
- Lucas - A strong fighter who likes honor. Unsociable.
- Percivale - A peasant by birth. Strong and likes money, but dislikes honor.
- Gawain - A good fighter. Likes money.
- Tristran - Moderately good.
- Sremmus - Competent, likes gold. Amiable but uncharismatic.
- Drofwarc - Average fighting skills, huge appetite.
- Kay - Arthur's brother. Loyal, unremarkable.
- Nosnikta - Adequate fighting skills. Likes honor.
- Lamerok - A poor fighter with a big horse that intimidates enemies.
- Bedivere - Not very good.
- Bors - A lover, not a fighter. Dislikes honor.
- Mordred - A charismatic scoundrel, but an incompetent fighter. Likes gold.
As my kingdom grows, I try to keep the knights happy with their preferred boons, but as I mentioned, I can't even tell if this does anything. Mordred, I ban almost immediately upon his arrival - why even waste men-at-arms under his useless herald?
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Gawain, Nosnikta, and Lamerok are drifting. |
I eventually banned Nosnikta as well, preferring to throw him out than let him squander a promotion with his mediocrity, and tried in vain to bring back Gawain and Lamerok by plying them with gold. Bedivere got the boot later.
Nearly 75 minutes in, nobody had attacked yet. My kingdom was approaching its size limit with 109/128 crops, and then something happened.
My first tithes! I checked the news - King Pellinore had taken beating after beating over the past few months and finally abdicated to me for protection.
I left Camelot for the first time to visit my new vassal, whose domain lies just to the northwest. And then,
The crown started flashing. This means you're being attacked, but Excalibur can't be bothered to tell you WHO is attacking you, and if you have vassals, then you won't know if they are attacking you, or if they are attacking one of them. The only way to know is to return to Camelot, and, sigh, check the news. Hope the news queue didn't get too big while you were out, or you'll be reading a lot of it.
It's Cheldric - who I should note was neutral and whose disposition toward me hadn't worsened - and he's attacking me.
I have Merlin cast a plague on his army.
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Plague is expensive. He won't be back for awhile. |
Then I wait.
After almost three ingame minutes, he arrives.
12 against 57. Pathetic! I challenge. He runs.
Post-victory, I learn that King Royns is moving on my vassal Pellinore.
So once again I leave Camelot and take all of my knights with me to Pellinore, where I lower taxes and increase tithes.
And I wait.
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Hold on, you're not Royns! |
We fight for real.
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Holding in a "smile" formation |
Unlike Eastern Front, combat is realtime, and not fixed to a grid. The one-button interface works pretty well here despite its primitiveness; select a knight and drag the cursor to where you want him to go, and he'll march there in a straight line. Pathing is impossible, so you need to do a lot of babysitting.
Each knight serves as a single unit stack, with a number of men-at-arms allocated to each knight based on prestige. In theory, more knights are better, as each knight (plus Arthur) contributes to your soldier count, but there are drawbacks to going all-out. The more knights you have, the smaller each one's accompaniment will be, and they'll break (or die!) sooner for it. Having to constantly query every knight's muster strength is exhausting, too, and you risk getting your knights killed if you don't know which ones are depleted and need to be disengaged, and because knights can't cross each other's bounding boxes, it is very difficult to coordinate and commit 100% of your muster strength when it's spread out among so many of them.
The AI also loves sending its king - typically the strongest unit - out ahead of the pack to fight Arthur in a duel. That's great news for you if you want to win the fight quickly, but not so great news if you're hoping to cripple them. A defeated king will retreat relatively unscathed. Not Arthur, of course - a defeated Arthur means checkmate.
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Victory, but I only killed three of their men-at-arms. |
We leave Pellinore's domain, and the crown icon is still flashing. That means trouble, so we rush back to Camelot to check on the news. Apart from some campaigning that I don't really care about, we learn:
- Horsa raided Camelot eight weeks ago.
- Lot abdicated to me seven weeks ago.
- Garwin is weakening.
- Royns ended his attack on Pellinore six weeks ago.
- Garwin attacked Pellinore five weeks ago, and was repelled one week ago (I know, I was there!).
- Idres is about to abdicate.
Some weeks later, I'm under attack again.
- Royns returned with pillage from Pellinore seven weeks ago.
- Royns pays me tribute.
- Horsa returned with pillage from Camelot five weeks ago.
- Horsa offers me my own stolen wealth as tribute. Cheeky.
- Royns campaigned on Pellinore again three weeks ago.
So, I gather the knights and go back to Pellinore's domain, and am almost immediately attacked.
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Unhorsing a knight with the smile formation |
Defending a vassal is almost ideal, because you defend not only with your own muster, but you also receive a bonus knight with all of the vassal's men-at-arms assigned to him in one megastack of death. The vassal stack does tend to deplete its combat strength quickly, but not before dealing some major damage, and I want to take out some of Royns' knights.
However, I am forced to withdraw, as Arthur himself soon fights to the last man - himself - and if he dies, that's it.
We regroup and fight again.
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3x speedup |
Victory is Arthur's, though I lost far more men-at-arms than Royns did. We began 78 to 25, we end 33 to 11, and among our dead is Lamerok but won't miss him too much.
The cursor is still flashing after this victory, so we return to Camelot and check the news. Now Balduf campaigns on me! Meanwhile, Idres, under repeated siege by Colgrin, has become my vassal, but I cannot protect him now.
I crank up the conscription rate, but not the taxes. Tithes and tributes will make up the difference.
Soon Balduf arrives.
More events unfold during the wait:
- Horsa attacks vassal Pellinore.
- Colgrin returns from Idres.
- Augusel weakens.
- Balduf offers tribute.
I return to Pellinore with all of my knights and increase the conscription rate there, but Horsa never shows. And I return to an 18-week backlog of news.
- Sater attacked Camelot while I was away.
- Sater weakens.
- Hoel weakens.
- Hengist offers tribute.
- Horsa offers tribute.
- Augusel becomes Uryen's vassal.
- Hoel, Penda, and Colgrin become my vassals.
Soon the alarm flashes again. Horsa is attacking Penda, and Sater, who backstabbed me weeks ago, has become my vassal.
So I visit Penda, and barely have time to up his tithes before Horsa attacks.
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They break and run very soon. |
This loop continues for some time. My battles generally go well for me, but I often return to find Camelot has been raided in my absence. Or I find a vassal has been attacked while I was out defending another vassal. Prestige is starting to slip, multiple vassals get attacked at once, and some of them defect to Uryens costing me even more prestige.
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A chaotic battle to defend my newest vassal Sater |
I attempt to raid my weaker neighbor Horsa, going alone without any knights in the hopes of luring out his liege Uryens so that I might be able to pick off a few of his knights. This is the strategy that won me the game before - I goaded him into a series of brief fights, and eventually I returned to Camelot to find Uryens had switched allegiance to me making me king of all Britain. No such luck this time - Horsa just isn't weak enough to be beaten so easily.
Oh well - I bumped off a several of Horsa's men-at-arms and only lost three of my own. I can just replace them at Camelot and come back to finish the job, right?
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Oh. Oh crap. |
So I ran, I returned to Camelot, found my prestige was in the toilet, and then discovered something even worse!
All but one vassal had left me, but that's not the bad part. The bad part is that because I had been funding my army with vassal tithes that aren't coming in any more, the treasure chest is now empty and my army's experience got reset to zero! The army can tolerate downsizing, but apparently if even one man-at-arms misses a payday, then the entire reserve disbands and are quickly replaced with non-union scabs.
And with that final injury, I ragequit.
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"Take it back, you watery bint." |
GAB rating: Bad
Excalibur is an ambitious game with a lot of unrealized potential. Crawford himself recognized this - even in the manual of the released commercial product, after boasting of the program's complexity and design, almost apologetically acknowledges its shortcomings. There are far too many jury-rigged sections of this design, places where two structures intersected clumsily, and I was forced to mate them by brute force, he laments. Moreover, this game is not as well playtested as it should be. Indeed, for each well-realized feature, there is another one in search of a purpose. The 15 kings all have unique personality traits, including aggression, nastiness, cowardice, and avarice, but without any meaningful diplomacy options it hardly matters. The round table display is a cool visual device that concisely tracks your knight's loyalties and friendships, but all it ever did was show me who I need to banish or at least not leave unattended, and could have been cut without any impact.
But the real issues of Excalibur aren't in the things left undone, but in its friction points.
I mentioned already that the one-button interface often feels obtuse and obtrusive, and I compared it to Eastern Front's streamlined UI, but the real triumph of the one-button Atari joystick interface must be Dan/Danielle Bunten's M.U.L.E.
Here, the joystick interface is a necessity to make four-player simultaneous action work, and absolutely everything is idiosyncratically built around it. At no point does one feel there would be an improvement by typing numbers on the keyboard or using it to select options. Even better, all of the information you need to make your decisions is right there on the screen when you need it! No need to bother Merlin fifteen times to find out who your enemies are, and especially no need to read 50+ weeks of old news to piece together the current geopolitical landscape after a year of campaigning.
Seven Cities of Gold also put the one-button joystick interface to better use. It isn't 100% idiosyncratic, and the game isn't flawless, but Bunten uses a joystick-driven UI when it's appropriate to rather than an uncomfortable compromise and it works all the better for it.
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This has more data than Excalibur's treasure room and less confusion. |
Some of the bigger problems have solutions that were right there and wouldn't have required any abandonment of Crawford's vision of a fully immersive interface. Instead of making the player read news in the war room, news that might be obsolete by the time you see it, why not just color-code all of the kingdoms on the map itself to indicate status? This is already partially implemented, but requires you to cycle through each kingdom with the joystick and query them individually, and still doesn't show you important information like who each a vassal's liege is, or which enemies are attacking you and where.
Or then there's the massive issue that although the game is kind enough to give you a flashing warning when you are under attack, this won't tell you where you are under attack. Consequently it seems pointless to try to actively defend any of your vassals unless it's the endgame, you have only one sovereign enemy, and therefore can't be sneak-attacked on your home base while you're out in the field. This could have been solved by simply giving you an on-screen message with that information - surely Camelot has a page relay system for this very reason, right? There's even a space at the bottom of the screen where such messages could have been placed.
This did not come up in my final playthrough, but war seems... almost pointless? You can never defeat an enemy king, only destroy his knights and men-at-arms, and if your army clearly outclasses his, then he'll cower in the safety of his keep while you run around burning his crops. Scribe says this is key to victory, but that wasn't my own experience; I found that eventually the pillaging stops and your target may have become your rival's vassal. In the event that the enemy counter-attacks, victory simply makes them retreat into the castle as the pillaging begins anew, but his crops will come back, and any knights you lost in combat won't. Crawford wanted to underemphasize war, but he didn't give us much else in the way of paths to victory!
And then there's the simple fact that you can spend a lot of time waiting. Pillaging brings the game to a pause for fourteen seconds every single time you do it, and a complete raid can involve up to sixteen pillagings. And if you're playing passively, which the game seems to really want to encourage, then you spend a lot of time in the castle waiting. Waiting for your economy to grow. Waiting for your rivals to go on campaign. Waiting for an inbound enemy to arrive so you can fight. Waiting for him to get distracted and leave. Waiting on the field of battle for his knights to approach yours. I waited an hour and fifteen minutes in this session before anything interesting even happened - and that's partly on me for not taking the opportunity to do interesting feats myself, but the game doesn't do much to encourage adventurousness.
I'm not sorry for trying. We can see links to our next game, Balance of Power, and even see how ideas that originated in the underdeveloped Gossip metamorphosed into it. Kingly personality traits like "nastiness" and "aggression" come back again as traits of the modern day nuclear powers. We see might beget prestige, which enhances your sway among minor powers, but aggressive warring can earn you an evil reputation. We see relations between kings, and relations between knights, which has a direct analog to Crawford's unrealized intent to have relations between Balance of Power's non-superpower nations. We see a nearly unprecedented scope of design; few games of 1983 can boast of having a large and dynamic world like Excalibur's, though we'd already start seeing comparable ones in 1984 and 1985, like Lords of Midnight and the aforementioned Seven Cities of Gold. We see authorial intent and vision behind every facet of this design; it looks, feels, and plays like a Crawford game of the era even when it might have been advisable to compromise on the vision for the sake of playability. Of particular note is Microprose's Sword of the Samurai, which would follow Excalibur's macro-design very closely, even implementing arcade minigames that Crawford had wished to include but couldn't find the time or space for.
In isolation, though, Excalibur is among my most disliked games out of all that I've ever retrospected, and I found it confusing, boring, and frustrating, from the opening moments of wondering what's going on, to the final moments of wondering why I lost everything.
In 1984, Chris Crawford would be laid off from Atari in the wake of their industrial collapse, and would work with Mindscape as a freelance developer and become one of the first for both the nascent Macintosh computer system and Microsoft's competing graphical operating system dubbed Windows. Needless to say, the Crawfordian one-button joystick interface was soon to be history.