Just Purchased This Game And Looking For Friends

[Woody]

Hello Grand Ages Community, Irecently just purchased this game and was wondering if anyone would like to help me out by playing muiltiplayer or Showing me some cool tips and tricks

[Dray Prescot]

Do a lot of exploration,i.e. explore everywhere that supply from your cities will allow, and when you build a new city or take control of an old one, explore any new territory. Try to build new cities/acquire old ones that expand the area you can explore.

If you play the Cam[paign Game, you will have a very long list of tasks to accomplish, but you only learn what the next one is when you finish the old one. The Campaign Game is designed to teach you how to play the game.

Also you want to eventually have the ability to produce all 20 goods, so keep in mind what resources (if any) are required to produce them, particularly when founding new cities and taking control of old cities.

Also try to arrange to have production chains in the same city. There are two special and important cases: one requires 4 of the 5 production slots in a city and the last one requires all 5 of the industry/production slots in one city. Most of the rest only require 2 or 3 of the industrial slots to reach the final product. Some items produce directly from their required resource and only need one industrial slot in a city.

You need to learn how to place new cities when starting them in order to draw in the various resources on the map in the general area. Ideally you want to place new Cities so that they can draw on several different resources.

Make sure you have good production of the goods needed to build new buildings/industries, and make sure to keep your people properly supplied with food, this will help keep your cities happy, your reputation good, and make money selling things to them. There are 20 items that can be produced and you can only produce up to 5 in one city.

You have to have a high reputation in a city and spend a lot of money to take over an existing city, and the more cities you already have, the more expensive taking the next one (peacefully) will be.

[Dray Prescot]

I should said that I have not played Grand Ages Medieval since late 2015 or early 2016.

I am not certain about this, but I suspect that GAM overheated my brand new video card and caused my brand new SSD to fail by being overheated, so I have hardly played it since then. I bought a new GeForce 960 video card and a Kingston 480 GB SSD in August 2015. I was short on SATA connections on my mother board so I bought a expansion card that I could mount the SSD on plus get two SATA connectors as well. Unfortunately the Video card is so large that it not only used the video card slot, it also blocked an expansion slot on my mother board. That video card has 2 fans on it to keep it cool. My problem was that the expansion card holding my brand new SSD was two slots over, i.e. pretty close to the video card. Back then I did NOT know how to monitor temperatures of my video card or the SSD. Anyway, about 6 weeks after I got GAM, I was still playing a LOT of GAM and then my SSD failed completely, when it was less than 3 months old on my computer. Luckily for me Kingston replaced it for free.

Since then I have not played GAM much more and have moved on to many other games (Polaris Sector, Master of Orion, Stellaris, Civilization VI, Galactic Civilizations 3, Railway Empire Beta, Railway Empire (release version), even some Rise of Venice for the 2nd time, etc). As you can see I prefer 4x games, and I hate Real Time Strategy (RTS) games. If I can not pause the game and still look at things and give orders will it is paused, I will NOT play that game.

I am not too interested in GAM any more and I NEVER played it multiplayer. I just happened to look at the discussions for it, to see what was happening in GAM, and saw your message and replied to it.

I have played a lot of Patrician 3, Patrician 4, Port Royal 3 and Rise of Venice (hundreds and hundreds of hours) that also came from Kalypso and/or Gaming Minds before GAM, and I am still playing some Railway Empire from them. My only complaint about those games was that the AI players did not play like a human player, so they were not much competition in trying to develope a trading empire in those games. (this comment does not apply to Railway Empires)

[Woody]

Would You Like to Add me and maybe we can play something else besides GAM?

[Dray Prescot]

I only play Solitaire and do not play multiplayer in any games, nothing personal about you or anyone else. Right now I am about to give Interstellar Tansport Company a try, and I am only one mission away from finishing off Aven Colony. Over the Long Term my favorite games that I always come back to are Galactic Civilizations and Sid's Civilization, which I have been playing for a very long time (since they first came out).

Every now and then I think about trying to finish off the Campaign Game in GAM, but I doubt that I ever will. The economic system and trading mechanics are just too limited (and the combat system is very limited), i.e. Patrician 4, Port Royale 3, and Rise of Venice are better, and I want something better than them, not worse. Have you ever tried any of those games? They are much better build a Trade Empire type of games than GAM.

In my current (more than 2 and a half year old, i.e. early 2016) Campaign Game, I am about 4 or 5 years into the game, with about 10 or 11 cities ranging from Crete to the Baltic Sea, including Stockholm on the North side of the Baltic.

[JohnNav]

Great game (Better then Patrician 4, and Rise of Venice) About equal to Port Royale 3,

[Dray Prescot]

Rise of Venice is pretty good. But the rewards for doing tasks for the 10 houses in the ruling council are so GOOD that it is easy to go from owning one ship to having your family's house on the council very quickly.

In ROV your house is competing with 3 other houses for power. On harder difficulty they start with more than you, but you can expand a lot faster than them by doing task for the other houses on the ruling council. At the start of the game none of those 4 houses are on the ruling council. In ROV unlike P3, P4, and PR3 you do not buy and place businesses on the map of the city, so it is abstracted a little compared to those games, where you do have city maps to build on. In ROV they are just somewhere in the city with no map.

ROV does have family trees (brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, parents, etc) that can run things, particularly ships for your family, and eventually you can marry someone from another house to create even more ties and people doing things. This is a lot more developed area of the game than we have in the other games, including GAM. So in that respect ROV is a better game than all of the others. When your house joins the ruling council, it will be your father rather than you who sits on it, and later your father-in-law as well.

However, in ROV, you are restricted in what goods (out of the 20) you can buy and sell at the start of the game, and you gain addittional goods to buy/sell in several steps as you and your house grow larger. And those later goods are usually the more profitable ones to be trading, if you can trade them.

GAM does not have as much in the naval combat area as those other games, but it adds land combat, that those games do not have, except for standing up to sieges by nearby jealous (of wealthy cities) lords.

In all of these games, the economic and production side are very similar, there are 20 goods to buy, sell, and produce, and individual cities can only produce 5 of those goods. Also many goods are part of production chains, e.g. you need wool to produce cloth, and then furs and cloth to produce clothing.

In all of these games the GMs have developed a lot of scripted tasks that you can take, e.g. someone wants to throw a big wedding for a son or daughter and wants you to bring in a LOT of various goods by a certain date for that wedding, in return for a big reward. These tasks are a major part of a campaign game, but can also occur in non campaign games. There are also things like famines, plagues, fires, etc. Keeping the church happy is often important too. Dealing with pirates is a major part of most of these games, eventually you can reach the size of capturing pirate dens (ports/bases) and not just pirate ships and pirate convoys. Pirates are not an important part of GAM, it is more of a land based trading game, with a heavy political side in the campaign game tasks. Also in these games you can/will marry at some point and who you marry can be important.

Learning what goods to buy or not buy at what prices at various places and where to sell them, and then being able to produce them yourself is an important part of the economic side of these games.

It is often very useful for you to develope good production of the goods needed to build industries and other things in the various cities

GAM has more of a technology tree than those other games, but even in GAM it is a fairly limited side of the game.

Railway Empires is what Gaming Minds and Kalypso are spending most of their time on right now, and the Railroads make it a somewhat different type of game, but it is worth giving a try.