I actually feel bad for downrating this game. It has some fine ideas and concepts and would most certainly keep you very entertained past the two hour steam refund mark.

The problem is, that it doesn't keep you going much past that point. You suddenly find that you've built everything you can. Every building, every troop type, every resource generator. All you can do is to repeat the process over and over again until the map is full of cities. You engage in repetetive trade routes with the same scant few resources that can be obtained anywhere in the map (fine wine from my Scottish vinyards, anyone?)

And when the map is full you have to endure the even more tiresome process of either wooing or conquering enemy cities to your faction. A process that take so long per city that the very thought of taking over the whole world is a truly frightening concept.

In short...allow me give you the experience of playing this game. Consider it a free demo:

Pick up a book you know to be good. Perhaps you read it before or it comes higly recommended by someone you trust. Read chapter One. Don't worry...I don't mind waiting. Just let me know when you're done...

Ah, hello again! Did you enjoy that? Good! I'm glad to hear it. Now go on and read Chapter Two and come back here for the next step...

Welcome back! You must be pretty invested now. A new world to explore and characters to follow on glorious adventures. So exciting! Well, don't let me keep you...you go right ahead and read Chapter Two...yes, Chapter Two, that's what I said. Yes, I know you already read it, but just go read it again, it'll be fun! Oh...and when you're finished, you'll need to read Chapter Two again. And then follow that up with Chapter Two. I trust you'll be able to work out the next step from there...

And that's it. You set up your early game, full of possibilities and exploration as you set your flag down and make your mark on the local area. You move into your mid game - consolidating your power and expanding your reach. And then you stay there. There is no end game. No top tier production buildings requring many cities to work together. No distant technological research that needs a concerted effort to reach. No Development of agents, espionage, religion, enhanced diplomacy or advanced troop types. Nope. You just carry on playing the mid-game until you lose interest and start again. And you start again another 6-7 times until eventually the frustrating realisation comes in that you've spent hours doing something you don't even enjoy, so you come here and write a big 'MEH' review to save others from the boredom.

TLDR - Absolutely fantastic game for an hour or so until it completely runs out of ideas and content. Consider waiting for a lot of DLC/expansion content before purchase...or a very generous Steam sale deal.

Grand Ages Medieval for me sums up the modern games industry, a base product designed to accomodate the many DLC's that will no doubt follow. Even on the main screen clicking on additional content takes you to a window with included button that helpfuly states 'go to shop', even though there is no DLC to buy just yet. Even so I decided to give the game a try and I am unhappy to report that my impressions from the many let's play videos were correct. GAM is quite simply the bare bones of what could eventually become an excellent game. It is at the moment an extremely shallow offering with little to no depth, in which you engage in the mind numbing process of tweak the trade route with an economy system that already needs a patch.

But what about the other side of the game, surely it can't just be trade? Well people, I am sorry to say that the combat system is even more shallow than the trade system, and those of you expecting a Total War type mini-game will be sorely disappointed. Quite simply you send your units against the enemy units and may the largest army win, there is no battlefield strategy at all.

It is to the credit of the developers that they have made a game so lacking in depth somewhat enjoyable if you approach it in the right way, which is why I think it will only get better with time and lots of money spent on DLC's. Unfortunately I am not prepared to spend what could amount to hundreds of pounds on a single game, and if you take my advice hold off on buying it for a couple of years. By that time there will maybe be a GOTY edition out with all the DLC's included. Not recommended as it stands.

Edited after 14 hours play to point out a few problems:

Trader Ai is as dumb as your average rock. Balanced or production settings, doesn't matter. Trader will still cart stuff around that are not needed while leaving needed goods stockpiled and gathering dust. Major rework of Trader Ai needed.

Production costs too high, quite often outstripping the value of the goods produced. This means that all production needs to be micromanaged or you end up with a crippled economy and spiraling debt.

Troop upkeep way too high which means that a human player can never match the Ai in numbers. Again, adds to spiraling debt.

Bands of animal that gather in huge numbers and appear to be more intelligent than most humans, seemingly calling out to each other from miles away to come and join the fight. I cannot stress enough just how much of a nerf these animals need. Same for the bandits.

Resources: Two problems here. First there are only 20 of them which is a very low number for any kind of trading and economy sim. Secondly, they are the same all over the map instead of being region specific so there is no real reason to explore far and wide in search of those rare resources.

Combat system is just bad. Rock, Paper, Scissors affair that can drag on for hours if there are enough troops on either side and boils down to blob vs blob.

Game as a whole lacks meaningful content. This is supposed to be a sim of medieval life at a city state level yet all you do is trade and take over a few neutral states. Don't even try to take over Ai controled major factions because they will have more troops than you, more cities than you and the ability to produce new units out of thin air while your bank balance crumbles, at which point the entirety of your army will give up and go home, even mid fight. These developers need to look at a few games from the past such as the guild series etc. and take a few hints.

Tutorial campaign needs an overhaul so that it actually teaches you how to play and doesn't screw itself over by, for instance, telling you to send mercs against shield using bandits. For those that don't know mercs use polearms which are apparently pretty useless against shields. Maybe someone should send a message to the past to let Alexander know that his pike phalanx is actually crap, who knew? A simple change here such as putting those bandits on horses would alleviate that problem.

Map being huge is made pointless by scouts on speed and by enemies / animals that can see you coming from 50 miles away and rush to engage you in battle. It is also made pointless by archers that apparently have space-age bows that can fire and hit from miles away.

Game needs a x10 speed option instead of having to hold down the spacebar all the time.

Chronicle is not very useful as it stands. Events should come up as a clickable icon at the top of the screen when they happen. If the icon is not clicked on then it should vanish after a certain time to avoid screen clutter.

Ai cheating needs to be severely toned down and should only be there at all on higher levels. Normal level should be a level playing field.

I could go on but that lot gives you some indication of the state of the game. Peace all.

Pro. Building an empire. Thats nice. A bit like Civ. Settlers, new town, new goods and more trade.

Con. The only thing I feel is bad about it this far is just the trading part. It has a pretty steep learning curve and the automated trading seems to give mixed results.

This game is a niche within a niche, designed to appeal to a very specific type of strategy game fan. Basically, if you ever played another game from this same developer (Patrician 4, Port Royale 3, or Rise of Venice) and found yourself wishing that you could have a bigger role in building the actual world and not just trading in it, this game is everything you've ever wanted.

That's what this game ultimately is---a combination of a Civ-style empire builder (in real time) with 4X elements and the same trading simulation you know and love and have probably been playing since the days of Ascaron (from which studio Gaming Minds' people came, kind of like how Obsidian's full of Black Isle refugees and how Firaxis is Sid Meier's old Microprose team reincarnated.)

Once you know that, you can start taking this game on its own merits, and there's a lot here if you want to deep dive into it. In theory, you could just produce all 20 of the game's commodities in four cities total and be completely self-sufficient, and that's a perfectly valid goal to set for yourself in freeplay, if an utterly limited way to do things. Where the game shines is in how those resources interact. Gone are the days from Patrician 4 where you constantly asked yourself "why are the mills that make clothing nowhere near the places that manufacture their essential raw material? Why would anyone want to make something that relies on shipping something in from 1500 miles away in a cog?" It makes game sense (profits proportional to effort required) but it's wildly unrealistic.

Now you can plan your economy based on what the land provides. Make towns in meadows that serve as your nation's breadbasket, sending food to that mountain outpost that makes your metal goods. Butter up your AI rival by creating a town that makes a ridiculous amount of money trading them what they need, and use diplomacy to keep from having to go to war. Or master those economy mechanics to support a military, but note that realism is in place here---large standing armies just weren't part of this game's time period.

If you geek out on this genre (and check my Steam library---I geek out HARD on this genre), this is the game you've been waiting for, the culmination of everything a trade simulation and empire-type game can be.

But that comes with a warning---this game has a "mixed" Steam rating for a reason. It is absolutely, positively not for everyone. If you weren't blown away by the previous efforts from Gaming Minds, this will not make any new converts. I recommend this game, but only to people who are ready to embrace what it has to offer.

(I haven't mentioned multiplayer, since I'm exclusively a singleplayer gamer. Bear that in mind as well.)

Unfortunately this game is not grand, and very hardly medieval. The ads videos are misleading. You basically play as somebody capable of founding new cities and going to war, but only if you can manage your traders. You hire traders, buy them carts and figure out the best route to assign them. Then you tweak it for efficiency and profit. Then you make another city. Then it's round and round with traders and cities and no army. Eventually after a long enough grind, and assuming that you haven't been conquered after hours of monotony, you can get some soldiers. Then you go through the mind numbing conquering of a city. Because your new city has suffered under the siege, your soldiers who pull all their supplies from the city can't move, since there's no supplies. It takes forever to get enough supplies to the city because each city can only produce a maximum of 5 products.

To make it worse, the company promised patches, dlc and updates in 2015. Without any updates, they dropped the game support and abandoned their promises.

Just stay away for now... it needs some serious patching in terms of balancing and content. The game feels empty, a bit boring and simplistic. Imagine a Civ 5 with the biggest world imaginable and basically 8 opponents and a few citystates and no need for expansion because 4-5 strategically placed production centers can just aswell produce everything unlimited as could 40-50 cities. There just aint no need for a massive empire nor does it help to have one other than have it. Population is strictly based on your production buildings. Which means if you build 100 in 1 city its just aswell as building 1 each in 100 cities...well no its far superior in 1 city since the logistics are not really shining in this one here...

Its a shame, really, i wanted it to be amazing...i loved how they sold it but damn it fell short of what was promised. Its like this: Imagine the book of lord of the rings only a little shortened to lets say 50 pages for the entire trilogy. Thats how i feel about the overly simplistic approach. There is so much missing... it feels literally empty. Nothing is going on ever... a few carts, a few scouts, a few treasures and super human speed for units.

All i can say to the developers is: PLZ PLZ give this game more content and balancing patches otherwise...waste of time and money...

I must say, that given the reviews I did expect much worse from the game. Instead, while the learning curves is not super easy, and it might be a little limited on variety after a while, it's actually a pretty nice game.
It's a bit of an economy manager and a grand strategy game in one, but to be honest it's pretty pleasant to play. A lot of reviews mention the need for micromanagement, but I managed to automate most of the functions (merchants and caravans) that keep my kingdom rich and balanced. AI looks fairly active and intelligent, production is interesting, development is simple but pleasant.
The UI is not beautiful, but it didn't take me too long to learn how to use it, and it does its job well enough.
I would agree that the full price might be a bit too high for the amount of available contents, but beside that, I did enjoy it. Might not end up being a GOTY for me, but it gets a 70/100 from me.

no.

With a few very minor changes this could actually be a good game.

But there hasn't been any updates. It was just released and dropped.

It is barebone and there hasn't been too much thought put into it.

Could have been a fun game. Instead it left a sour taste.

Pros? Multiplayer is working fine.

Cons? Resources are the same across the entire map, no reason to expand or trade. Steep learning curve, gets repetitive really quickly.

This is not a ruler game. More like a merchant game with the power to find and destroy cities. Which is fine by me since I like economic sim too.

The game starts off fun. Having to plan where to place cities, what they produce and how to connect them. But shortly after it becomes way too repetitive. Build groups of 3 or 4 inter-depentent cities and link them. Over and over.

Once you run out free space, things get worse. Treaties with AI cost you a percent of what you have. You can have a few hundred k or hundreds of millions, doesn't matter. It will cost you in proportion to your treasury. By the end of the game, I paid a hundred million to get one neutral city (more like a village) to join me. I can field a world ending army with that kind of money.

Money is a surprisingly useless resource in the game. Treaties like I said cost you in proportion to your treasury so you might be better off poor. I can't buy more resource than I can produce. I can have a gazillion gold in my treasury but to kick start a new city I am limited by the resource output of my other cities.

The only thing it can do is field a bigger army since the cost is fixed. I think the dev meant the end game to be all military. But if I want to play a military game I would have played TW. Battles in this game is like auto resolve mode but you get to watch the numbers drop.