Game Review - The Sims Medieval and the Pirates and Nobles expansion

Game Review - The Sims Medieval and the Pirates and Nobles Expansion
Score +5/-10

Overview
Sims Medieval is basically a collection of short stories stretched out by performing repetitive tasks with the characters involved. Once you've played enough of the game, you will probably want to just skip the boring bits you've done a hundred times and cut right to advancing the story. Because some of the stories are actually really decent. It's too bad you have to play the game to see them.
The Pirates and Nobles expansion is worth getting just for the stories, which are quite good. If you are getting Sims Medieval already, it doesn't cost that much more.
+ Graphics: The world is sort of cartoony, but the heads and faces of the characters are really very good when grossly exaggerated facial expressions don't distort them into caricatures.
- Bugs: There are very annoying bugs or oversights on game mechanics, such as not enough feedback on why marriage isn't happening, or too many sims in the area, continually preventing you from talking to someone or using an item. Most of the time, the only thing you can do is to just keep clicking and trying over and over again until something works.
++- Roleplaying: The "quests" are basically short stories of out-of-the-ordinary events that happen to ordinary people. Like stopping the invasion of an evil wizard. Often what you do is pretty generic, like cooking or talking to people or buying something from a store. But just as often the quest is resolved with what is unique to the profession, like a priest giving sermons and blessings, or a blacksmith crafting special gear. Some of the stories are really rather good (if you like the level of seriousness or the type of humour), so playing through the stories isn't as bad as it sounds. A lot of critical action is "off screen" or just relayed to you in text to read, (such as your character disappearing from gameplay for several minutes because they are "hunting in the woods") and that can feel really unsatisfying.
- Roleplaying: Beyond the stories, there is no depth and no point to playing the heroes. For example, you increase the skill of your blacksmith so that they can craft legendary weapons and armor, but none of that is really important in gameplay. Often, whether a warrior hero has access to a boring sword or an epic sword matters very little because the quests aren't designed to really have any failure result or dependence on anything other than the heroes involved. For most of the quests, character development does not matter, which means there is a pointlessness to roleplaying.
-- Game Mechanics are Stupid: Quest performance has almost nothing to do with your skill or even the skill of your heroes. The individual quests are generally ludicrously easy. What you need to do to get the best performance (Platinum-level) is basically wait for the performance bar to reach Platinum. In short, wasting time gets you better performance. The short and very easy quests are therefore actually the hardest to get the best performance because you have to space out doing the quest steps so that you don't accidentally finish the quest before the quest performance meter is at Platinum.
- Game Slowdown: The more you play a kingdom, the more characters get added to it, either leftovers from a quest, or children of AI sims. All sims are constantly doing something whether on-screen or not, so the longer you play a kingdom, the more system load is generated. For this reason, if you have a weaker computer (not just the graphics card, but CPU), you might want to restart your kingdom when it gets overloaded, or just load a previous save so that you don't have to completely restart everything such as furnishing hero homes or levelling up heroes.
+- Outfits are quite broad in style. Some have crossover potential and some professions, such as the monarch, have a good array of choices. However, for many heroes there are only a couple of choices that are specific to their profession. A lot of clothes choices are generic, and better for professions with no iconic look, such as merchants. Because of this mix of circumstances and no usage constraints in random generation, using the random generation button often produces horrible results. Using default heroes would typically give you a reasonable iconic outfit, but you can't edit the rest of the hero (hair, head, body shape, traits).
+--- Home and Hero Decorating: Initially it is fun to decorate the home of your hero or dress them in various outfits, once that novelty wears off, there is very little to recommend it. You can unlock more items and outfits, but the effort required (playing through kingdom goals and getting achievements) is all out of proportion for what you get in return. You can change colours, but there are only so many actual clothes and furnishings to get.
For furniture and household items, even if there weren't a lot of furnishing choices, how the game plays conflicts with what to buy since there are very few pieces that give you a good game effect (stat bonus) so inevitably player will (for example) get that one particular bed that provides the best and fastest rest for your character; or the one style of oven or cookpot/chimney. Because that's the only one with the best bonus. Finally, you need to play the various kingdom ambitions to unlock more clothing and furnishings -- this in turn means that you are constantly starting from zero. Every time you start a kingdom, the old one, including all the work put into playing, acquiring money, and decorating, gets erased and you start all over again.
Minor decorative items appropriate to an area are actually NOT desirable to get, especially for heroes with small homes. Initially they cost money with you do not have. Also, they take up space which could be better used to fit other things. At the same time, they would have been nice to add for more ambiance.
Because the reward-to-effort ratio is extremely low considering the amount of effort required to unlock everything you can furnish homes and dress heroes with, we recommend you get some cheat mods and play the sandbox "An Eternal Kingdom" unlimited free play. You get access to the same quests/stories, and you can continually add to your kingdom so that you don't have to restart anything. Doing in this way also gives you a better sense of history and cumulative achievement for your kingdom. You get access to the same quests.
You *can* still sort-of do this with one of the kingdom ambitions, but without a cheat mod, you have to play through them all plus get various achievements just to unlock all outfits and furnishings. Also, you cannot earn Achievements during free sandbox play -- only before you have quit a Kingdom Ambition. Instead, I recommend you short-cut by getting a cheat to unlock everything, then focus on the quests/stories.

• A good list of mods can be found on ModTheSims. The specific one you want is to Unlock All Achievements.
• There are good console cheats for The Sims Medieval to get on with the game once you're tired of game mechanics and just want to play through the stories. 

Sims Medieval - Layouts - Tavern

This is a sample starting Tavern (using the Furnished option) that grants the +25/- Nicely Decorated buff.

A music box is on the end table moved from the upstairs room down to the main floor, upper right corner. A lot of performances depend on Focus, so the Decoration buff is important to raise.

Sims Medieval - Layouts - Wizard's Tower

This is a sample starting Wizard's Tower ground floor (using the Furnished option) that grants the +25/- Nicely Decorated buff and centralizes many services in the entrance.
Meditation is unlikely to succeed here as the order causes the sim to move to a clearing to begin. Because of the tight space and clutter, the sim might not be able to find that open space to begin Meditation.
As usual we have included a music box, this one at one end of the stone dining table.

The fireplace can be changed to an oven later as long-lasting food is useful for a Wizard. A Wizard can Meditate in lieu of sleeping and can do so just about anywhere, so being able to store food for picnics can extend the "operation range" and duration of a wizard whereas all other professions need to sleep (or use a Crafthole) potion.



Since the Wizard already has the best Archive and Crafting Table, the Healer next door will not need to upgrade these items and can just wander over. However, since neither activity uses Focus, this is not really necessary.

The only workstation we didn't want to squeeze in was the Forge. A Wizard should have their own forge as you might end up competing with the Blacksmith, and being even briefly unable to access the forge to Heat the item being forged can use it to cool into the blue zone and count as a "mistake".

Sims Medieval - Layouts - Market

This is a sample starting Market (using the Unfurnished option) that grants the +25/- Nicely Decorated buff.

Proximity to Environment items appears to be a factor in determining what kind of buff is granted. In this particular starting layout, we have placed the market as close as possible to the path to the Village. A Merchant standing next to the Blue Tent (where they always stand, and it is the tent they move to when a sale is made) can get a +25/- Nicely Decorated buff.
If they walk a little outside this area past the Blue tent, that buff disappears because it is now too far from enough Environment influencers.

We have a music box on the dining table nearest to the Blue Tent. AI Sims like to keep that device playing, and when it is not, they frequently all race for it and you will see some frustrated sims because the device is "not accessible" (i.e., some other sim is already in line to use it).






Since the Merchant can make both money and levels quite quickly, it is not necessary to upgrade the Decoration buff to the +40/- level quickly, but we should do so early in a Kingdom for the same reason we aimed for Beautifully Decorated in the Throne Room: It benefits other heroes. The central location of the Markets; the availability of space; and the easy access to cash as the Merchant means we can put various profession-related structures (such as a stage for Bard performances) in the same area to benefit from the Decoration buff. A sample layout is below.



Not all furnishings are vital here for the Nicely Decorated buff almost everywhere in the market square, although at least two items of Environment 7+ are a necessary condition. We have also tucked in a desk for the Bard behind the red tent, and a mirror left over from the earlier layout.

Sims Medieval - Layouts - Throne Room

This is a sample starting Throne Room (using the Unfurnished §12,500 option) that grants the +40/- Beautifully Decorated buff in the main room. The upper floors are completely empty. The side rooms are very spartan, as shown. Basically, it encourages all AI sims to stay in the throne room for convenience if nothing else.

Although we could probably have optimized it even further cost-wise, we still wanted an essentially functional and somewhat reasonable starting throne room.



The marble table to the left of the throne doubles as serving table and guest table. The servant prepares food in the kitchen to the left, and since there isn't any table in there, he typically brings it out and tries to lay it on the marble table. Alternatively, the Monarch can grab food and drink from the Larder and Keg and sit down immediately.

Once more funds become available, we might expand the kitchen properly and move all dining there if the Throne Room starts to become too busy with sims. For the moment, this is basically the only room in the castle. Guests can help themselves to food and drink, or entertain themselves listening to the NPC Bard that frequently comes here. Also, we choose high-Entertainment furnishings for the dining table and chairs, so that helped us get the Beautifully Decorated buff. Even the Larder adds an Entertainment bonus.

Key to getting the +40/- Beautifully Decorated buff with our starting funds was getting a good Environment score for our simoles spent, which is why we went with wall lights. Floor torches were slightly cheaper but we wanted to save as much floor space as possible.
Getting past +25/- Nicely Decorated required 2-3 items rated at Environment 7+, no matter how many Environment points were already in the room from other objects. Hence, we squeezed in one sculpture and one painting.

The Monarch has just one indoor Responsibility that requires Focus: Writing a Treaty of Ongoing Peace. The only other Responsibility that uses Focus is Hunting a Great Bear, and that is outdoors and obviously would not benefit from the Throne Room's focus bonus.
However, having a high Focus also increases your quest performance. Since you can spend a lot of time in the castle, staying in the Throne Room while having very high Focus can build your quest performance even if you have severely neglected your current quest; at the least, it can mitigate the penalty by slowing it down.
Having a high Focus in the Throne Room also helps other heroes such as the Bard (performing for money) and Spy (pickpocketing).

Notice the music box on the marble dining table. Sims very frequently beeline for it to turn it on, which provides not only a Listening to Music buff but also an Entertained buff. The radius of the Listening to Music buff is quite small, so we have placed it quite close to the centre of activity.



This very spare kitchen can be expanded later once we can get more furnishings for the Throne room and move the dining activity here. For convenience, however, we will probably still want a keg in the Throne Room for a quick drink to boost Focus. We could run to the kitchen, but every time you move into an area where the bonus for Decoration changes, the bonus completely disappears for a while. The same applies when you place or remove furnishings and trigger a change in the Decoration bonus calculated by the game.

The Servant in the castle randomly prepares various types of meals -- even with the possibility of whale meat as an ingredient. For this reason, we got the FrostStone Larder right away. Typically you can call for one meal, and when it arrives, call for another immediately. Eat one, stash the rest in the Larder just in case you come back to the castle at an odd hour and the Servant cannot be called.



What used to be the strategy room and office has now become the bedroom / ready room. We got a really good bed and left upgrading the bathtub and mirror for later. The mirror could also be moved to the main Throne Room for quickly Gussying Up.

Once the Spy becomes available, we will probably ignore their spy quarters and instead move them to a room upstairs simply to shorten travel time and to take advantage of the castle's kitchen and larder. The Monarch would have to pay for all furnishings, however, and a good bed can be pretty costly.