The Game Archeologist: Majesty, the 2000-era RTS [x kingdom management hybrid] that flipped the script on the MMO concept

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Love Majesty. It’s such a different and unique take on an RTS. The hands-off approach to unit management has a nice side effect in that it doesn’t require a heavy focus on APM and micromanagement to be good at it.

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OP

It really does flip the script on the standard RTS formula and allows for a completely different play-style than most RTS games.

But to be fair, many of the mid to late game campaign maps do require extensive micromanagement.

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Yeah, “micromanagement” wasn’t really the right choice of word, and I never beat a lot of the more difficult SP scenarios anyway, so I can’t really say that I’m GOOD good at it. I just appreciate that it doesn’t make you deal with managing the positioning of individual units, which is something that usually overwhelms me pretty quickly in traditional RTSes when things start to scale up.

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8 wouldn’t say it’s hands off, it’s just indirect. Babysitting wizards or the warrior that decided to fight the world is a big part of the game.

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I briefly played it. It was fun.

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This is still a fun game to play, I’ve had several copies over the years. The sequel is absolute garbage unfortunately. It plays more like sim city than an RTS. There’s a good balance of scenarios to play, and many are quite fun. There are several very difficult end game scenarios I’ve never managed to beat.

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So back when I first played Majesty as a kid, I actually looked up a guide for the some of the end game scenarios. I was able to clear all the “advanced” scenarios and some of the expert scenarios, but I was making seemingly zero progress on several of the expert campaign maps.

This was with knowing the game mechanics and “OP” approaches relatively well. The game does have a more exploratory approach to balance that isn’t immediately clear and is mandatory for harder maps.

The approach to beating some of the expert maps was extremely convoluted. Basically a fully structured build order and a lot of luck on top. I am not sure how the author of the guide even discovered the solutions. For most of the expert campaign maps that was I stuck with, I wasn’t able to find alternative approaches. Even to this day I am curious if there are viable alternative approaches.

I also agree that there is a lot of variety and fun to the scenarios. They are very different and a spin to the core gameplay formula (much more so than many classical RTSs from that period).

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I’ve played through everything with cheats, and the last missions of the expansion were crazy with effectively immortal heroes.

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Wow thanks again for always bringing attention to these hidden gems! I’m definitely gonna give it a whirl later this week ❤️

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I can strongly recommend Majesty, it’s been updated to support modern resolutions and modding. The in-direct control model is still relatively novel and satisfying, even a quarter of as century later (the original Majesty was released in 2000).

I’ve been meaning to give the spiritual successor, Lessaria, a try. It has good reviews and the first impression video that I watched made it seem compelling. It does seem to lack a sandbox mode, this was critical for making the original Majesty a “game for all time”.

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