So this past weekend Steam had a sale going for the games of publisher Paradox Interactive. Among these games was the King Arthur series. I knew nothing about the games going in but the screenshots and videos made the series seem similar to Total War so I decided to give the games a shot. Several days later the first game in the series had finished downloading.

The game is fun. It mixes RPG elements with Total War gameplay. It lacks the complexity of the Total War games as far as strategic depth is concerned, but it has its interesting RPG elements that somewhat make up for it. My biggest hitch is the performance. I have a computer vastly superior to the recommended specs, and I'm able to play Empire Total War at 40-60 fps. This game looks much worse than that one yet during heated battles the framerate can drop as low as the low 20's. It's not a massive issue due to the genre of the game, but I'm worried that if the first game runs this poorly, how will my computer handle the second game, released only earlier this year?

Of note, I tried changing the settings around to improve performance but there was virtually no difference between medium and high settings. I gained a massive 1 frame per second. It's a shame that this game is hampered by both that issue and by a bug that crashes the game to the desktop at the start of battles once every couple of hours. The game keeps something like 10 autosaves for you, but I don't get why they save at the end of a battle instead of the beginning. There is a major difficulty issue in this game where you are often given quests to defeat certain enemies whose power you don't know before the battle begins. A large portion of the time these battles end up being way over your head and you end up getting slaughtered. Of course the game saves directly after the battle, meaning you have to load the save before the end of your last turn if you want to survive. And it is very important that you do load if a hero falls as upgrading heroes takes a lot of time and losing any hero and all of the artifacts he holds can be a devastating blow to your empire.

All these weird quirks aside, I'm enjoying the game. It doesn't seem super long and the core campaign is RPG like enough that you wouldn't really want to replay it other than to choose the opposite side of the morality scale. Compare this to something like the Total War games which can be played over and over with different results every time, and it does feel a bit limiting. I hear, though, that the DLC which was included in the collection I got is more strategic and less RPG like so I'm interested in trying that out once I finish the main campaign.

So has anyone else tried this game? I know Paradox games are something of an acquired taste but I feel this is one of their better efforts and is something that can be understood without too much effort assuming you are familiar with this type of game already. Anyone have any tips or any tricks for improving performance?