Majesty: the Fantasy Kingdom Sim is a curious RTS. It certainly has all the genre conventions. There is a build queue and a tech tree, micromanagement and resource management, and for the most part the game plays out like a conventional RTS. You explore the map, exploit your sources of wealth, expand your base and exterminate your enemies.
Majesty’s major break with the standard RTS formula is the player has no direct control of individual units. You do not command and conquer in this game; you cajole and hope for the best.
Although you may rule, the heroes roaming your kingdom are not yours to command, being more private military contractors than servants of the realm. Instead of directing them hither and thither through royal edict, you provide heroes with monetary incentives to attack or move. Perhaps a 200 gold reward for the brave explorer who will venture to that undiscovered land over yonder, perhaps a 300 gold bounty on the head of the troll rampaging at the marketplace.
The unpredictability in this game, which may delight as much as frustrate, lies in the fact the heroes may not take you up on your offer, deciding instead to return home for a lie-down or do a spot of shopping. They display individual behavior that can be both charming and aggravating. Groan at the Warrior scarpering away at the first sign of danger; gape at the Paladin valiantly standing her ground despite being surrounded by foes; chuckle at the enemy Rogue who eagerly destroys his own guild for your gold.
Similarly, playing Majesty on a modern machine may involve equal amounts of delight and unpredictable frustration. While getting this quirky game is relatively easy these days as it’s available on multiple digital distribution services and playing it is mostly an enjoyable experience, you may have to get past some technical issues first.
The main problems plaguing the Steam version include freezes and frequent crashes-to-desktop. There are various folk remedies to get the game to behave itself. Deleting or replacing the Bink video player did nothing for me. Upgrading to the latest nVidia graphics driver or reverting to a much older graphics driver had little effect. I didn’t bother deleting the music but apparently it works for some.
The workaround that worked in my case was setting the CPU affinity to a single core. To do this in Windows XP, Alt+Tab out of Majesty once it’s running (be sure to Alt+Tab after bypassing the opening videos or the game will crash), hit Ctrl+Alt+Tab to bring up Windows Task Manager, switch to the Process tab, right-click on Maj.exe (or MajX.exe if you’re playing Northern Expansion), select the “Set Affinity…” option then set the CPU affinity to a single core.
The game still crashes on rare occasion even with this fix so I’d strongly recommend enabling the Auto-Save option.
