Majesty 2: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim Preview

The editors at GameSpy have cranked out a short but reasonably enthusiastic preview of Paradox's upcoming Majesty sequel.
What makes Majesty 2 interesting -- and not a little bit frustrating -- is that spending money is all that the player / king is allowed to do. All of the citizens are completely free-willed and will run about the kingdom pursuing their own unique agendas. Adventurers will band together in taverns and go out to explore the countryside, kill monsters and raid their lairs in order to get gold, level up and buy new equipment with which to do it all over again. Players can only set down and remove "bounty flags" on the map that offer rewards to adventurers for doing things like exploring, killing particular monsters, guarding another NPC or fine them for straying into forbidden zones.

What makes this fun has been watching my little kingdom go through its paces and seeing adventurers band together to take down a really big monster for the 1,000 gold-piece price I've placed on its head. It gets frustrating when a warrior who's managed to level his way to 10 heads into an area under-equipped for what awaits him. It's bizarrely therapeutic to yell at said warrior for not purchasing the right stuff when I've dumped the last 10 minutes of taxes into improving the marketplace to get adventurers ready for just this adventure. It's nice to see that misplaced spending priorities and wasteful pork aren't limited to my wallet and the U.S. government.