What is Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim?

Majesty is an excellent real time strategy game with a twist: you cannot control any character at all! You only get to control the buildings... where to build and what they produce.  You may hire heroes in exchange for gold pieces.  But expanding your kingdom is good, because the more heroes you produce, the more income you get, since they often go out of town to kill monsters and this brings gold pieces back to your kingdom.  You can build marketplaces and outposts to sell healing potions, which generate even more revenue.

In Majesty, you can place bounties anywhere on the map for heroes to explore, or on a monster's head for them to attack, but it is completely up to the heroes to decide if it's worth the trip or not :P Every time you play a map, it has a slightly different outcome due to how each character has their own attitude and ambitions, so no game is exactly the same.  It may seem frustrating to play Majesty on a big map for over an hour only to realize you cannot win, because your heroes are bunch of lazy couch potatoes, but in reality, it makes the game unpredictable and that adds to the fun!

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The rebirth of MacPlay is a joyous event United Developers acquired the long-beloved label and is pulling out all the stops to return it to its former glory. With Majesty, the MacPlay brand certainly maintains its tradition of excellence, although the game’s style of play is not for everybody.

Majesty casts you in the role of a young sovereign who has just inherited the throne of the faraway fantasy kingdom of Ardania. You are charged with completing 19 quests to rid your land of evil and secure your right to rule. The game is a curious cross between city-building simulation and real-time strategy. As in a real-time strategy game, you must create a settlement and raise an army. As in city-building, you have no direct control over the world you create and must react to the needs of your simulated subjects while urging them to do your bidding.

Gameplay seems fairly straightforward at first: You build structures, which in turn produce computer-controlled heroes — your subjects — each with unique goals and abilities. You entice your heroes to act (destroy a foe or explore the land) by placing reward flags around your kingdom. The flags, which represent a heroic quest, confer gold on the hero who collects them. This method of indirectly controlling your units, while a novel approach, may frustrate some players. Thankfully, magical guilds offer spells for your use. Some spells heal your forces and others attack your foes, but none of them come cheap.

Each hero thinks for itself — creating complex interactions between the characters, monsters, and other game elements. Some monsters are friendly, while others attack anything in sight. Many kinds of heroes, not all of them human, populate your realm, each with vastly different abilities. The secret to success in Majesty lies in learning these largely undocumented interactions and using them to your benefit.

The detailed game world is depicted in vivid color using prerendered sprite technology (2D-plus) that creates faux 3D effects. The good news is that you don’t need a monster 3D card to enjoy them; the bad news is that 3D cards won’t help, and the beautiful graphics may tax older processors. You also can’t rotate your view of the kingdom, which often makes it impossible to employ direct spells against foes hiding behind a building’s north face.

Once you tire of the 19 supplied quests, you can play online, either cooperatively or competitively, with up to three others via the free GameRanger service... The read-me file promises the availability of downloadable quests, but we found only PC versions. United Developers says it’s working with Cyberlore (the developer of the game) on a Mac conversion; however, nothing was definite at press time.

Majesty is a unique game that blends two genres fairly successfully. While this approach won’t appeal to everyone, those patient enough to learn the game’s intricacies will find the experience fit for a king.

Pizor, Rich. (April 2001). Majesty. MacAddict. (pg. 62).

See also: Majesty 2: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim

Download Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 8.6 up to Mac OS 9.2

Compatibility notes

Architecture: PPC (233 MHz or faster)

At least 50 MB of free RAM (recommended 66 MB)

Mac OS 8.6 - Mac OS 9.2.2

Note: Plays well under SheepShaver.  Also, if you run this under Mac OS X, it plays fine all the way up to Mac OS X 10.4.11 in Classic mode.

 

 

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver