I am still in the early moments of Lionheart: King’s Crusade. I am reviewing it for Gameshark, so I’ll leave any expansive comments on its quality for there once I am sure how I feel about it. Like Neocore’s last game, King Arthur: The Role Playing Wargame, it makes some interesting design decisions in the battle mode that I am not entirely comfortable with, but it is otherwise a major step forward for the developer.

One interesting decision they have made is to try to model the Crusader army as a bunch of factions that you as King Richard can court or ignore. Each of the four factions (France, the Holy Roman Empire, the Templars and the Pope) present you with battle plans that serve their own interests and whichever one you choose to support earns you a little favor. You can then spend this favor on bonuses and support from that group (hero units, special powers, morale improvements, etc.)

Anyone who has read about Richard’s crusade knows that this is not much of an approximation of how things went down in the Holy Land. Richard kicked some butt in Cyprus, had to deal with a bunch of people who wanted to become King of Jerusalem and spent some time getting dissed by the French. The politics of the the Crusade was not about how to get people to like him as much as it was getting people to stop screwing up what he was trying to do.

The entropy of alliances is hard to model in games. Here in this medieval conflict, the Christian rulers all had an incentive to cooperate but also had their own agendas that often collided and led to bad feelings. Richard may have been the greatest soldier king in Europe, but he wasn’t the boss. Lionheart makes him the hero, of course, following on centuries of tapestries and stories and folk tales. But the politics is largely reduced to a shopping spree; you accumulate favor more than you diminish it. You have complete control of the battlefield. No snooty king or uppity knight is going to do anything to steal your glory.

Given the state of the AI in a AAA game like Civilization, I certainly don’t expect Neocore to surprise me with political machinations or a Pope who feels like a pope. I might have to wait for Crusader Kings 2 to get anything near this and even there, I expect more soap opera stuff than diplomatic drama.

But I do want an historical game that demonstrates the fragility of these alliances. Romance of the Three Kingdoms comes closest; heroes can be lured from one side or another, captured and converted or killed. But even here there isn’t much sense that the heroes have their own desires beyond being pushed toward an enemy. Maybe I am asking for too much, but this is really the diplomatic game holy grail.

More on Lionheart later.