Imperial Throne
(This was a really early playthrough, so I don’t know if there’s been updates from the Sept 4th version I downloaded and played)
TADS strategy game, where you’re a ruler making decisions for their kingdom. Diplomacy, war, taxation, and construction are all under your purview, although military conquest and defence is what you’ll likely be focusing on the most. That aspect is a bit like Risk, where you have a certain number of troops in each region you can move around, and also generals you can assign to a region which makes those troops more effective. When you try to attack an enemy region, your closest neighbouring region will automatically attack.
Some helpful commands if you want to try this: COMMAND tells you a list of common commands (the game doesn’t give you too much instruction). X EMPIRE and X DEPLOYMENTS are both good overview commands for the military.
This made me think about two very different types of kingdom management games I’d played before. Reigns was a kingdom management game with a more narrative spin, where decisions were represented as a set of cards you draw through, and you only have a binary choice for each decision. Characters come to you with problems to preside over. Then there’s something like Civilization, a strategy game series where you get a whole bunch of information and stats menus to pore through, and a lot of different decisions you can make at any point, with a lot of granularity and fine control. Ostensibly you’re a specific historical figure, but really you’re a god puppeting troops around and zooming from one side of your kingdom to the other; there are units to control and figureheads of other civilizations to negotiate with, but no sense of real, living breathing people. Beyond the combat, Imperial Throne is a bit more on the Reigns end of decision making, though there is a bit of a sense of omniscience to things (and Reigns, thinking about it, did have a set of four surfaced stats that were quite important). You’ll get reports of different things happening (say: a new play comes out, a temple burns down, your northernmost region gets attacked, a princess in another kingdom gets married) but only ever through your one advisor in the room which you can never leave, and any action you take seems to push time forward. You don’t have to react to each narrative event immediately, but it’s certainly a good idea to react to some of them at least.
But this is a parser game, and you don’t get told what actions you can take in response to any of these events, and so I did find myself unable to figure out what I could do for some of them, and fumbling for the right wording for others. The game is very open ended, with an explicit instruction to just try commands out. There’s one region early on with a certain resource which the game very obviously wanted me to extract, but I struggled to find the right actions it wanted (Gold. Found the region with gold, obviously game wanted me to get it. But took a bit to find the commands to get it). There’s also a lot of characters that the game seems to want me to do something with (warriors distinguishing themselves on the battlefield, named characters popping up in events), and there’s a HIRE command for example, but the game wanted me to choose what job to hire them for, and I couldn’t figure out any jobs the game would accept. So there’s a bit more fumbling around here than in a more convention-based parser game.
It does soon becomes evident that this is a bit more of a series of narrative events than an attempt at a deep strategy simulation. You can’t (and aren’t expected to) track budgets, or resources, or really ever get a precise idea of how your kingdom is doing (there’s no culture or happiness or budget stats); it’s just through the narrative events that you find out what’s happening. I did wish at times to know, for example, what my list of current allies were, but that didn’t seem possible. There’s a lot of names and regions, so I found myself scrolling up quite a bit to find the name of something referred to earlier, because they might just get referenced that one time.
Still, I did really quite enjoy just seeing what new events popped up and poking around figuring out what commands it accepted for quite a while. There’s a neat variety and sense of range to the events, and a fun sense of putting out fires and gradually feeling like you’re advancing your empire in the right direction.
Eventually, after conquering a couple neighboring kingdoms (which took a number of somewhat repetitive ATTACK turns) I was left with two remaining enemy regions: tribesmen to the north which was actually several tribes, and another enemy which specialized in pikemen which apparently my basic troops lost to (unit type hadn’t really come up before that). Both enemies were a bit annoying to attack, and I’d grown tired of all the repetitive fighting anyhow but there didn’t really seem to be any diplomatic solutions with those two either. I limped to an ending with some rebels knocking on the steps of my capital, but thankfully the game ended before that, with me having reached my twilight years as a ruler having expanded my empire. I assume I hit a turn limit.
The freedom of the parser led to occasional frustration; your advisor could perhaps just tell you some options for each of the events? I don’t know if having to guess the right actions added that much to the experience, though I could see how coming up with the right action might be cool in a few cases. I did also feel like I wanted to pull up more information at times. I think for a parser game, skewing even more narrative would made sense, but a more strategy-intensive game could also be interesting. This didn’t fully nail down the mix between the two, though I did think it was interesting to see it tried within a parser. I did mostly enjoy my time with this, up until the endgame when I was tired of constantly pushing troops outwards, and it didn’t seem like there was too much else I could be doing at that point. In the end, reacting to the narrative events felt fun throughout, while managing the troops wore thin.