The Last Day of the King

The Last Day of the King is another “simulation game” from Rutibex, who later created Potomac, which I happened to review earlier. That game tasked you to survive 10 weeks (a timeframe picked for a wholly arbitrary reason) as a prostitute in 19th century Detroit, and was mainly notable for how utterly broken it was. This game instead puts you in the shoes of Charles I, the King of England who was executed by Cromwell in 1649. You are supposed to make it till 1650, thus proving you could do better than the historical king did, and are allowed to start in any year from 1625 to 1649. I admit I was mainly looking forward to see whether and how its systems would fail again, and in that regard, I can’t say I was disappointed.

Storyline



The spelling is not always this bad, but obvious typos are still quite frequent.

There’s the premise, obviously, and then there are the “random events” like above, which are no such thing at all, always being strictly pre-determined. On one hand, I suppose it’s nice that they are all drawn from the actual history, and so playing the game through for all 25 years from 1625 to 1650 does expose you to a range of events you may not have heard about (like the details of 17th century taxation such as ship money), or forgotten the exact dates of (like say, the attempt to establish Maryland.) On the other hand, though, they only vaguely tell you the costs and benefits (so that one decision can suddenly add ~500,000, or even a million, to your debt) and they are ridiculously discrete, to an often laughable extent. For instance, if you refuse to send troops and help France crush the Huguenot rebellion in 1626, don’t expect to hear about it again: moreover, if you refuse to help and refuse the diplomatic marriage to Princess of France offered in 1625, at the very start of the game (before you even get to look in the menu to see the stats it would affect), France will likely be so pissed off they’ll attack you with a full army at the end of every year until you make up the relations with them, even though one might’ve thought that same rebellion they couldn’t handle on their own would’ve kept them preoccupied.

Similarly, Cromwell’s rebellion will happen right on cue, regardless of what the Parliament actually thinks of you: I’ve had highly positive relations with it, at ~190 points, and yet they still attempted to pass the Triennial Act and the follow-up act next year: you can potentially endure one (see below) but having both passed will effectively overthrow you, so fight you must. I ended up having to fight three battles in 1641 that wore me down, so I reloaded, raised the army cap significantly, and asked the Parliament to provide me with all the soldiers and supplies I needed to crush their own rebellion later in the year – a decision they readily agreed to. Moreover, I fought the Parliament twice, in both 1641 and 1642 (even though I supposedly became an absolute monarch with no Parliament after defeating them the first time), and it’s the same army both times, complete with Cromwell apparently rising back from the dead.

Once you get through that, though, literally no story event happens for the next 8 years, as the creator apparently didn’t bother to think through any event that might’ve happened in victorious Charles I’s England. Thus, you just pass years and battle bankers (unless you miraculously managed to balance the budget by that point) until the game ends. (Though if you try to actually start the game in any year in the 1640’s, it’ll be unwinnable: the Parliament will demand your resignation before you can do anything, and unless you employ a “cheat” evaluation mode, waging war on them will pit level 1 army against the full might of Cromwell.) In all, there was some effort put in, but the game disappoints due to its unwillingness to go off the historical script, even when the player’s conduct would have practically demanded it. Oh, and winning literally just gives you a single-line “Congratulations, you have beaten history!” message, before you are thrown back to the menu screen and its artwork of your King getting executed.

Aesthetics (art, design and sound)



Get ready to see that really often.

The historical portrayal of that execution is actually used twice – on the menu screen, and as the Game Over screen, where it’s a colour image complete with your hapless King’s last words. Otherwise, though, the game has the map of UK at the time as its main decision-making screen, while the battles use slightly different map images, of the kind you can see above, where tokens represent enemy troops. It’s actually a rather nice and immersive take on the traditional front-view battle interface. They are certainly more immersive then the colour RTP portraits used for all the recurring characters (Prime Minister, Accountant, Bishop, etc.), which also never change throughout the game, including the eternally youthful female ambassadors from Spain and Scotland, whereas Potomac stuck to more authentic portraits/photographs. It also had better music, though what’s used here is decent enough.

Gameplay

You are supposed to be in a precarious position – all it takes to fail is to lose any battle, or to have the Royal Authority meter (which is invisible and cannot be seen in the actual game) dip below 100 points, as the opening text explains. In practice, however, Royal Authority can only be lost from the “random events”, and is never regained. The game becomes easy once you recognize this, as that means you can avoid worrying about all the other stats, and focus on building up your army above all else. Sure, I tried playing “honestly” at first: I began from the start, and already, the debt was at 1,6 million pounds, while the available gold was at 10,000, and the income was at a zero (these starting conditions are identical regardless of the year you start the game in). I was also immediately hit with an event, which wasn’t random – the offer by King of France to have Charles marry his daughter, in exchange for relaxing restrictions on Catholics, which your Protestant Church or the Parliament obviously aren’t hot on. The problem, of course, is that you do not get to see the state of your current relations with any of the three before making a decision, as it’s literally the first thing you get in the game. I tried right-clicking anywhere, hoping it might let me see the status of those, but it simply rejected the offer. I did get to see the list of all the options, though, which is just as labyrinthine and unpredictable as it was in Potomac. It would probably be easier to just run through this list of options in order:



* Assets – the equivalent to Inventory, literally divided into the same Items Assets, Weapons, Armours, and Key Items sections you would see in any other VX/MV-era game.
* Parliament – can be called to session to levy new taxes, resupply troops, etc. You can also disband them or declare war on them yourself, but that’s basically pointless, especially since it’ll already happen in 1641/1642 regardless.
* Economy – calls up Minister of Finance, who asks whether or not “we should invest in the economy.” That is as far as the economic management here goes – you don’t get to decide which sector of it to invest in, or do many other quite basic things. The investment itself is hilariously random, being closer to a casino then anything else – once I invested 4000, then, much later 30,000, and had the economy improve by zero. Another time I invested 200 or so, and had it improve by 20 (as in, 20 gold worth of annual income.)
* Accountant – the option that should really be the first in the list, since he’s the guy who actually tells you how well your economy, domestic relations (Parliament, Church, the Poor and the Nobles), foreign relations (see below) and army are faring, so making a decision without consulting him first is inadvisable, at least at first.
* Scotland/Ireland/France/Spain – each option calls up the respective country’s ambassador, whereas you are allowed to engage in diplomacy (extract tribute, give gift, or engage in diplomatic marriage), trade (embargo, import duty or trade deal) or war (launch a full-scale invasion, a small skirmish, or attempt to strike an alliance).
* Options – the unaltered default list of MV options, with such hilariously orphaned commands as “Always Dash”.
* Tactics – the equivalent to the “Skills” menu. You always start at Level 1, when the only available tactic is to “Call Reenforcments”, which consumes 5 Supplies (equivalent to MP, out of Lvl.1 maximum of 41), and brings some () fresh troops, which function as your HP and of which you have 200 at the start.
* Army Managment – has a whole 6 options: Drills (doesn’t cost anything, lets you increase any of the stats by an amount varying from 0 to ~25), Recruit Soldiers (does not actually give you troops – instead you spend money to directly convert it to experience and level up, increasing the troop/supplies cap), Draft Soldiers (similar to above, except that instead of money, it taxes the goodwill of the poor), Hire Mercenary Cohort (spend a chunk of money to get a weak additional troop fighting alongside you), Levy Supplies (replenishes supplies by a semi-random amount for free), Medical and Rest (restores your troop count by a semi-random amount for free).
* Alms – brings up “Alms Minsiter” who asks whether or not you should give additional relief to the poor. Doing so gives you the hilarious message “The poor has been reduced by <amount given>” and causes the “Poverty” meter to become positive, often by really dangerous-looking amounts, when one would assume negative poverty should be a good thing.
* Army Status – indistinguishable from your own, and are just renamed MV stats.
* Bank – allows you to either Pay Off Debt or Take a Loan.
* Church – lets you give a donation to them to improve the “Religious Tensions” meter.
* Save/End Year/Game End – self-explanatory.

All of this is just me looking over the options, before I’ve made a decision on what to do. I first attempted to just try paying off a bit of the debt and strike trade deals with the other countries, which gave me a bit more annual income. Then, however, the debt increased by a fair bit due to interest, and the bankers sent a whole bunch of knights after me, which you can see in the screen above, obviously defeating my Lvl.1 army. Afterwards, I decided to just approach the game the same way as in Potomac, and drill troops’ defence until it gets past 100. This made them completely unkillable with any conventional attacks for the rest of the game. However, it turned out that the Looting, All Out Attack and Raize Countryside skills ignore defence (and even Tactical Defense doesn’t seem to help much), so I modified my plan by first raising the defence past 100, then spending 8000 gold to quickly go up in level and gain both a lot more troop capacity, and the group-targeting All Out Attack skill, then used Medical to fill up my new troop cap. Then, the combat just had me use All Out Attack three times, and every single battle with Bankers’ Knights (who "abolish feudalism and impose capitalism on UK" if they do win) went the same way until I got even more powerful Raise Countryside skill that basically insta-killed everyone on turn 1, with the occasional exception of Rebel Knights who have resistance to it. I didn’t bother to engage in most other battles much, especially since they were often easier.

It’s actually a shame the combat can be made so laughably easy, because the developer did try to make it engaging. In that battle, for instance, each country’s knights have a differing skill and their arrangement kinda supports each other: Rebel Knights can do Looting and French Knights All Out Attack, so they are the key targets as the only ones capable to hurt a 100+ defence army. Spanish Knights raise everyone else’s Attack with Inspiring Speech and Scottish Knights are the most resilient ones, but compensate for that by wasting turns through applying largely useless Outwit debuff on you. Enemy’s Crossbowmen can Mark your troops, Camps inflict Raise Countryside and agility-reducing Ruin Roads, and Commanders can put your forces to sleep through Free Liquor. Cromwell, being the boss he is, can actually mess you up a lot through the Propaganda skill that inflicts Confusion (I lost the first time I battled him after propaganda-afflicted Charles I’s army managed to score a critical hit on itself and never recovered from that) as well as disable your abilities through Censorship (not sure how it affects something like All Out Attack, or Winter Quarters buff, but OK.) It’s a lot more fun then what the battles in Potomac looked like, but both get broken through overpowered training equally easily.

Essentially, you can completely stop worrying about your debt levels once you've buffed your defence/attack past 100 and your army's level cap several times in a row through Recruit/Draft soldiers and don’t forget to heal/resupply during the year. You’ll get 7000 loot every time you defeat bankers’ army, which is nowhere near enough to try paying them off, but is great for keeping your domestic/foreign relations with everyone positive, so that you don’t have to tediously waste time swatting away their armies at the end of the year. Once Parliament gets a bunch of cash, it’ll fully restore and resupply your army without question. With all that taken care of, you can just skip turns, battle, and respond to random events in a way that won’t drain your Royal Authority. By the time I finished the game, the Crown was 160 billion in debt, and it meant absolutely nothing. To be fair, I think it’s possible to try paying off the debt early on, through the combination of exhorting tribute from the other countries (then giving them a gift of ~1000 to tide them over – a pittance compared to the 30-70,000 you can extract from them) and having Parliament raise taxes (just don’t forget to give them a pittance of their own first.) However, I’m not really sure if I see the point.

Conclusion

In all, The Last Day of the King is an interesting attempt to make the strategy/management genre work with the engine never intended to support it. Unfortunately, the core gameplay is shallow and unbalanced, undoing both the authenticity the rest of the game intends to create, and the last semblance of challenge. It’s an issue that largely stems from lack of playtesting, and doesn’t really seem related to the engine’s limitations. After all, Reigns (which likely served as an inspiration for this game) managed to be a lot more compelling with mere four stats and binary choices, while the recent Realpolitiks was made in an engine with the proper support of strategy games, yet was lambasted for some very similar design shortcomings. Thus, there’s a potential we may see a compelling development of the ideas present here and in Potomac, someday, somehow.